DLSS 5 Is Great - WAN Show March 20, 2026

Summary

WAN Show Podcast Summary – March 20, 2026

Episode Title: DLSS 5 Is Great
Podcast: The WAN Show (Linus Tech Tips)
Hosts: Linus, Luke
Special Guest: Riley Murloc
Date: March 21, 2026

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Episode Overview

This week’s WAN Show delivers a broad sweep through the latest in tech, focused especially on Nvidia’s headline-grabbing DLSS 5 graphics technology, with a passionate discussion featuring guest Riley Murloc. The hosts also touch on cracked Windows Recall, Apple’s surprisingly good and affordable MacBook Neo, PlayStation 3 updates, Plex’s new paywall, and much more. Memorable banter and classic LTT inside jokes abound as they reflect—with skepticism, excitement, and plenty of memes—on the industry’s direction.

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Headline Topic: Nvidia DLSS 5 – From Breakthrough to Backlash

Segment begins: 03:02
Main discussion: 06:33 – 46:09

What is DLSS 5?

• Nvidia unveiled DLSS 5 at GTC 2026, hailing it as their biggest graphics breakthrough since ray tracing’s debut in 2018.
• Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) asserted it's not simply a filter, but "generative control at the geometry level" rather than post-processing at the frame level ([04:26]).
• Initial tech demos led to a flood of memes and AI “slop filter” criticism, with even brands like Domino's UK jumping in.

Open Disagreement: Is DLSS 5 a "Filter" or Something Deeper?

• Daniel Owen’s investigative video found Nvidia’s conflicting statements:
  • Jacob Freeman (Nvidia) says DLSS 5 is trained end-to-end for scene semantics but, using only rendered 2D frames plus motion vectors ([04:27]).
  • Critics claim it's essentially “yassifying” faces and settings.
• Riley: “I view that as a filter. ...it does not have access to the underlying facts of the game world. It’s a 2D frame that’s being fed into a model and outputting an altered image.” ([15:17])
• Linus: The value question is whether we care about games as simulation, or just visual fidelity ([08:27]).

Does DLSS 5 “Improve” Games?

• Riley: Raises the artistic/simulation vs. visual appeal debate: “Do we care about games as a simulation or do we just want our games to look as pretty as possible?” ([07:53])
• Luke: Worries about realism-for-realism's-sake ruining art direction.
  • “Better graphics aren’t always better... If you made graphics better, I’d probably think it was worse.” ([12:26])
• Linus: Points out the diverse wants within the gaming community, e.g., realistic remasters excite some, but photorealistic Mario is “not desirable.”
  • “Every single gamer is going to want completely different things.” ([08:27])
• Question of creative control: Is Nvidia steering too much, pushing an AI-driven homogenized "look"?

Artistic Intent vs. “AI Slop”—Where to Draw the Line?

• Riley: The DLSS 5 “slop” look represents a generic, median blandness that undercuts creative extremes ([38:07]).
• Linus: Compares it to AI novels—often visually immersive, but not artistically engaging.
  • “Lowest common denominator people are going to turn those filters on. I guarantee it.” ([41:10])

Community & Industry Concerns

• Game devs may be given some controls (e.g., intensity sliders, masking characters)—but worries remain about undermining artistry and simulation.
• Luke: Fears the push by a near-monopoly (Nvidia) will impact creative direction far more than if this tech was indie or open source ([19:07]).
• Labor & industry: DLSS 5 could let studios cut traditional artistic jobs, leading to more “slop” from fewer developers ([22:46]), though it could also help under-resourced projects.

Notable Quotes:

• “If Riley wanted his Snorlax to have fur... I don’t care if there’s a slop tool.” – Linus ([18:27])
• “This is not just upscaling. It’s changing what is being displayed to you.” – Riley ([34:27])
• “Nvidia’s weight as a player in the industry and their ability to set the course for game development is a major concern.” – Linus ([30:11])
• “Overreaction on both sides... Gamers overreact?” – Riley ([27:00])
• “It’s our corporate overlords... going to hire fewer developers and artists in order to create more slop for us to consume.” – Linus ([22:46])

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Timestamps – Key DLSS 5 Moments:

• [03:02] – Intro to DLSS 5 news
• [06:33] – Riley joins for passionate debate
• [11:28] – Discussion on artistic intent and environmental realism
• [18:27] – On mods, player agency, and creative vision
• [25:13] – Dev controls, backlash critique
• [38:07] – AI slop/homogenization
• [41:10] – “Lowest common denominator” filter use prediction
• [44:08] – Would users want “Yassify” filters?
• [45:09] – Content/output vs. how it’s made

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Other Major Topics

Windows Recall Cracked—The Privacy Headache

[01:28]; 100:36

• Windows Recall database cracked repeatedly, now exposes users’ full activity logs in plain text.
• Linus:
  • “Enormous problem. Just because Luke opts in and all our chat logs are on his system does not mean I am comfortable with that happening.” ([101:46])
• Opt-in by default, but with copilot’s market ambitions, the risk to everyone is huge.

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Apple MacBook Neo—Surprisingly Good Budget Mac

[118:27]

• Live first impressions: $600, great rigidity, milled aluminum top, highly repairable ([119:13]).
• Linus: “This is going to destroy the ‘I need a laptop for my kid or grandma’ market.” ([128:54])
• Keyboard and trackpad feel "premium" despite budget price.
• Mac as console: For supported titles, it's viable for most basic/generic computing.

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PlayStation 3 Gets a 2026 Firmware Update

[83:37]

• Update after almost 20 years, believed to be anti-jailbreak and Blu-ray key renewal.
• Hosts reflect on impermanence—how hardware now sits at the mercy of manufacturers for ongoing functionality ([95:31]).

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Plex Paywall Controversy

[145:14]

• Plex now enforces paywall for remote streaming on more devices.
• Lifetime Plex Pass owners are still in the clear, but standard users have to pay.
• Frustrations over frequent bugs, declining free feature set, and the hassle of finding alternate solutions ([147:53]).

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Gaming & Linux Challenge

[46:36; 62:05]

• Ongoing Linux vs. Windows challenge: Steam gaming on Linux is “solid," with Mint and Kubuntu praised for reliability ([61:10]).
• Strong sentiment against Windows' user-hostile behaviors and forced integrations.
• “It has been so refreshing not being bothered... no, I do not want Edge as my default browser.” ([64:54])

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Google Search AI Rewrites Headlines

[105:15]

• Google’s AI now rewrites article headlines in search/news, sometimes drastically changing the meaning.
• Concern about “endorsements”—e.g., Verge’s critical article on AI tools reworded to sound positive ([106:08]).
• Linus:
  • “I don’t think it almost sounds like an endorsement. I think it sounds like an endorsement of the functionality of the product.” ([107:03])

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Facebook's (Meta) New Creator Program

[134:21]

• Facebook offering guaranteed monthly pay to court TikTok/YouTube creators.
• Linus skeptical:
  • “I have about this much faith in their ability to build a creator monetizing system as powerful as YouTube’s.”
• Broader worries about YouTube’s own directional drift and the fate of the “Library of Alexandria of the Internet.” ([140:00])

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Other Quick Hits & Memorable Moments

• Steve Wozniak liked the LTT Core Master remote video—hosts are visibly thrilled ([111:17]).
  • “This is the coolest thing I’ve watched in ages.” – Steve Wozniak (Reported by Linus, [111:29])
• Reddit’s alleged astroturfing on child safety laws ([203:39]).
• Physical media comeback – Surprising demand for Blu-rays and game rentals ([84:13]).
• Canada housing & immigration rants ([186:03]).
• TrueNAS open source worries, open vs. closed source debate ([115:15]).
• Bizarre Steam games and digital slop economies—a recurring subtheme.

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Notable Quotes & Banter

• “What if the company making the game… cares about their art?” – Luke ([16:36])
• “Better graphics aren’t always better... putting all creative control into your GPU’s vibe check is…” – Luke ([13:17])
• “They’re boiling me, I’m a frog, and they’re boiling me.” – Linus, on Chrome UI/feature creep ([232:57])
• “At what point does nickel and diming the core feature drive those users straight to Jellyfin?” – (on Plex, [145:14])

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Quick Reference: Important Timestamps

• 03:02 – DLSS 5 segment starts
• 06:33 – Riley joins for DLSS debate
• 46:09 – DLSS wrap-up, segues to Linux challenge
• 83:37 – PlayStation 3 update discussion
• 100:36 – Windows Recall cracked update
• 118:27 – MacBook Neo live hands-on
• 128:54 – Verdict on the $600 MacBook Neo
• 145:14 – Plex paywall controversy
• 162:30 – Sponsors, Zero Bounce/AMD
• 207:22 – Move to After Dark/listener Q&A

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Episode Tone

As always, lively, sometimes irreverent, but passionate about tech’s impact:

• Linus: Analytical but playful, always quick to push back against hype and defend user empowerment/choice.
• Luke: Sober, gamer-art-sympathetic, worries about monocultures and industry direction.
• Riley: Earnest, philosophical, always pushing the Big Question (“But what do games mean?”).
• Audience: Chatty, questioning, and at times meme-filled, as Linus and Luke bounce off submissions throughout.

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Final Thoughts

A must-listen episode for anyone interested in next-gen graphics, AI’s impact on gaming/art, and a sneak peek into the future of platforms both open and proprietary. Lots of skepticism about corporate priorities, but also glimmers of hope in passionate creators, robust open source, and consumer-empowering hardware—plus, a good dose of memes and rants for classic WAN Show flavor.

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For full context and deep dives, see timestamps above to focus replay or VOD viewing!

Transcript

[A]

What is up, everyone? Happy Friday and welcome to the WAN show. Boy, do we ever have a great show lined up for you guys this week. And I don't often get to say that just completely unironically. I get to have my first hands on experience with the MacBook Neo, which I haven't touched yet, but I see they left on set for me to check out. Why I assume that that's there. I'm actually legitimately super excited for that.

[B]

Yeah, I was hoping you knew. They told me to bring it.

[A]

There's the big DLSS5 news this week. We'll be talking through that. We've also got a special guest who will be joining us for that segment. The one, the only, Mr. Riley Murloc.

[C]

They're coming.

[A]

No, you don't come in yet.

[C]

Later.

[A]

Later. Stay there.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

Just to stay there. What else do we have for topics this week? Got some big updates.

[B]

Murloc.

[A]

It's an inside joke.

[B]

You often do that. You do that?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Oh, nice.

[A]

I actually don't remember the exact origin of Riley Murloc. Did I misspeak or. It was. No, no. Yeah. No, no. It was. It was a Warcraft reference. I just don't remember why.

[C]

Stay on topic, Linus.

[A]

Thanks, Riley. What else we got this week?

[B]

Windows Recall was cracked again, which is so exciting for me personally. I really like that. I think that's really good. I think that's good for everybody. Genuinely. I'm actually not even memeing. Also, what else happened?

[A]

You know what? I was going through the topics and I noticed it's kind of a good news. WAN show. Is it kind of accidentally? Yeah. Yeah. Find another good one. Find another good one. He's gonna find one. He's gonna find one. Wait for it.

[B]

What is a lot of really weird topics. Well, that's not a good topic.

[A]

I highlighted a good one.

[B]

Steve Wozniak saw the LTT Core Master remote video and liked it.

[A]

How cool is that?

[B]

That's awesome. I heard that we, like, knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew him or something. I didn't know he saw the video. Oh, I saw his quote. I'm not gonna say it.

[A]

The show is brought to you today by Vessi Factor Meals, zero Bounce and AMD alongside of course, our partner dbrand, our laptop partner, Razer, and our chair partner, also Razer, whose logo I so. Whoops. Covered up. There you go. That's better. Sorry, Razer got that fixed for you. I should have cut it off.

[B]

So

[A]

let's jump right into Our headline topic today, which is of course DLSS5. Now, Riley, I'm going to invite you on in just a moment here. No, sit down. In a moment. In a moment. I'm gonna go through the doc and then Riley specifically, like with all the aggressiveness of that uncle that you see every once in a while but appreciate hearing from, just invited himself to come in and talk about this on the show because he has a take to share with the world and TechLinked was not enough to contain his take. So we're gonna talk about it on WAN show. But first, let's get through this. During the keynote of Nvidia's GTC event on Monday, CEO Jensen Huang unveiled Nvidia's DLSS5, calling it this is a direct quote, the company's most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real time ray tracing in 2018. While Nvidia says that the tech infuses pixels with photorealistic lighting and materials, many observers have criticized the handful of demos, saying that DLSS seems like nothing more than an AI slop filter. What do people call it? Yassifying faces?

[B]

I think so.

[A]

Is that the term? Yeah, I love it. Anyway, the demos spawned a tidal wave of DLSS5 memes, which escaped containment to the point where Domino's Pizza in the UK joined in. And I have a hyperlink to this, so I feel like it's, it's important for me to click it. Solid. Thank you. Thank you, Domino's. That is legitimately helpful and advances the conversation. Nvidia quickly pinned a comment on one of the demo videos, clarifying that it is not a filter, and in a Q and A following the keynote, Jensen called these critiques direct quote completely wrong, saying it's not post processing at the frame level, it is generative control at the geometry level. This seems to conflict with answers provided by Nvidia's Jacob Freeman to questions that he was sent by YouTuber Daniel Owen. Good old Jacob Jacob confirmed that DLSS5 only takes the rendered 2D frame plus motion vectors as input. Owen specifically asks if the model is actually aware of things like 3D geometry, 3D depth, etc. And Freeman replies, saying DLSS5 again, quote is trained end to end to understand complex scene semantics. Nvidia says DLSS5 will launch this fall. They revealed the live demos were running on two RTX 5090s on one to run the game, the other to run DLSS5. And while some press has reported that Nvidia does have a version of the tech running on a single GPU. It is unclear at launch what kind of GPU it will have to be in order to run DLSS5 and also like, you know, a game and stuff. Riley, come on on and let's talk about DLSS5.

[C]

You want me or not? I'm crashing.

[A]

He's in. He's in here. The one and only Riley Murloc, everyone.

[C]

You had no idea I was coming to be here.

[A]

I totally knew you were coming. You invited yourself here. Oh, my God, he's holding the mic. Dan, please have his mic off right now.

[B]

It's fine.

[A]

Just, you know, Hi, everyone. I'm happy to join the show.

[B]

So much worse.

[C]

That feels nice.

[A]

So much.

[C]

Sounds good actually, because it's a good mic.

[A]

All right, Riley, so hit us with the. Hit us with the take that you really. That you were so desperate to bring to the wedding show.

[C]

Why do I give my take first? I thought, what about your take?

[A]

No, no, I wanted to hear yours.

[C]

Well, I think that. So I added in this stuff about who's saying what.

[A]

Hello, you're talking.

[C]

Okay. I added in this stuff about. I mean, Daniel Owen posted this video, I think yesterday or the day before. And that was just very interesting because I think the main, the main, the key problem in a lot of this is the definition of the word filter. But also, as I wrote in the discussion question, I think that this issue illustrates a fundamental divide or it brings up a fundamental question, like, do we care about games?

[D]

I like it.

[C]

You're both like, looking at me like this.

[A]

This is fun. Well, I want to hear your take. Yeah, for sure.

[C]

But like, I need, I feel like I need to move farther back so that it's more. Do we care about games as like a simulation or do we just want our games to be. To look as pretty as possible? Like, is there some value to the, the nature of the game as a, like, hard fought technical achievement simulating a universe, or are we looking just for pretty games? You know, I think that

[A]

there's.

[C]

That there's more too.

[A]

Well, I mean, my initial response to that is that gamers are not a monolithic entity. Right? So any question even sort of start. Even. Any question that even starts with do gamers want? Is already going to create fragmentation within the community for sure. Because every single gamer is going to want completely different things. And even speaking for myself, the things that I want out of one game are not necessarily the things that I want out of another game, for sure. When I fire up my Nintendo Switch, I actually don't want to See every pore on Mario's giant Chris Pratt voiced nose. That's not desirable to me for that cinematic universe, so to speak.

[C]

The Mario nipples shot was enough. We didn't need any more of that.

[A]

Exactly. But on the other hand, if I were to think back to a game that I played that I felt really immersed in a realistic world, and this is a deep cut, but Freelancer was a game that I really enjoyed back in the early 2000s and it was about exploring the known universe. If you told me that there was a mod pack, like a texture pack, asset pack that could take that game and I could replay that game in photorealistic quality and all I needed was like a modern gpu, yeah, I'd be really excited about that. And then I think you've got a subset of those people that are really excited to experience their game with a fresh shiny coat of paint on it that are going to go, oh, what? So we used AI to achieve that. Who the fuck cares? Bring it on for sure. And so you've got many different camps. I probably haven't even scratched the surface of all the different perspectives you could have on it, but I felt, I feel like you had a little bit more you were gonna expand on after I answered your question.

[C]

No, I mean that's all super, super interesting. I think that that is a core part of the issue here is that like, some people just want pretty games and other people are like really, really concerned about the, like how it's being achieved and how it's being presented. I mean, I know that you wanted to talk about Nvidia putting this forward as DLSS5.

[A]

Let's get to that later. Okay, fine, let's get to that one later.

[C]

Okay, sure, sure. I think for me, like, obviously there's the initial reaction of like the look because like the environments. I think it. I think anyone who's being honest can look at the DLSS5 on versus off demos and recognize that in many cases it's making the environments look really good. It's making them look like a photo taken.

[A]

That is, that is an under discussed aspect of this point. I think people are really focused on the characters. And that makes sense because, you know, if you were to tell. If you were to ask me what do I love about one of my favorite games, Final Fantasy 6, what do I love about it? I don't love the quality of the Overworld. Okay. It doesn't look great graphically, but I love the characters. And so if you were gonna go and you were gonna make the Overworld look way more realistic. Okay, okay, maybe a pixel art sprite game is a bad example, but in general, if you're gonna make an environment look more realistic, more true to life, but you're going to mess with a character that, like, I connected with in some way, that's going to offend me, that's going to affect me a lot more than if you made like a. Like the vine that Tarzan is swinging on look way more viney.

[B]

I think that's my biggest problem with it is that, like, better graphics aren't always better, in my opinion. And we're talking about art styles and things like that. And a lot of the styles in the video, in the, like, announcement video are pretty. They're all trying to go for, like, decently high realism in some cases, 100% realism. Like the football club one.

[A]

Yeah. Or like, if you're playing like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle or something like that. And you told me, yeah, I can make this more realistic. I'd be like, the whole. The whole shtick of this game is that you are indie and you're in an Indiana Jones film.

[B]

But there are a ton of games where if you made the graphics better, I'd probably think it was worse. And putting all of the creative control of that into your GPUs vibe check

[A]

is how to Train youn Dragon. Hidden World is actually a film example of that that I found kind of unsettling to watch because I've got these cartoon characters walking around in environments that look so photorealistic that I actually found it kind of immersion breaking.

[D]

I think.

[B]

I think the insane success of Pocopia is a good example of this, actually. It's like, not a. Like this. This is not. We're not pushing graphic engines to run this game. You know, this is. This is not crushing your 50 90. But people love the game.

[C]

I think this is. I think this is what I'm hearing you guys talk about the look of the game a lot and how pretty it is. And this is why I wanted to bring up the discussion point of, like, do we care at all that we're making the frame that we're served prettier? But. But it is essentially. And like, you know, to come back to the filter thing. Yeah, it's essentially I view that as a filter. A lot of people, a lot of, like, more graphically, technically, technically oriented people. I feel like people who know a lot of technical details about graphics are seeing people call it a slop filter and are like, it's not a filter. It's obviously not a filter, but I think what people on the other side are. There's two definitions. There's two operative definitions of the word filter going on here. I think there's the filter of, like, Instagram, where it's basically the photo and you're overlaying, essentially. Yeah, you're. You're changing some color information, but it's the same image. And then. But I think a lot of people who are calling this an AI slot filter are thinking of a filter as something that does not have access to the underlying facts of the game world. It doesn't know the data that is being input by the developers. It doesn't know the complete shape of those 3D objects that it sees. It's a 2D frame that is being fed into a model and it's outputting

[A]

an image that is altered. So it's altered, which is what we mean by filtering.

[C]

There is one particular example that Daniel Owen does a lot in his video. I encourage you guys to watch Daniel Owen's video. It's super interesting.

[A]

Yeah, Dan, maybe you could throw that in the chat for us.

[C]

Yeah, it's linked.

[A]

In the doc,

[C]

the side of the guy's head in Starfield has no hair. And then in the DLSS5 on version, there's hair there. So it's like changing. And this is why it's so interesting to me, because I'm like, we're no longer simulating the world in that point. At that point.

[A]

Luke, can you bring. Can you bring that back? Patokia, can you bring that back up for me for a second? Okay, so the first thing that I thought when I was looking at. At this, you know, you brought this up. And I went, yeah, what a clear example of an art style where I wouldn't want my Snorlax to be covered in photorealistic fur and. And look like an actual, you know, like, weird fat cat thing lying in the middle of the path. Okay. I would put it. Put it. Yeah, I want to. That's exactly where I was going to go with this. Put that away.

[C]

Give me. Gross Snorlax.

[B]

Put it away.

[C]

Get it out of here.

[A]

Here's an alternate take. What if my worldview and my preference is not the be all and end all.

[B]

Well, it's. It's the what if the company making the game.

[A]

Well, hold on, hold on. Well, is it because. Because the. I mean, look, every. Every. Every game. I shouldn't say every game with a nude mod, because some of them, they clearly meant for people to Put them in. But every game that has a nude mod. Right. They didn't necessarily intend for them to be X rated. Clearly. And yet no. Gamers have ultimately decided, by and large over the course of gaming history that they're in charge of how they play their game. If they want to play the mission the way that the game developer intended, then that's by all means their right. And if they want to completely not play the mission and play a completely different, different style, that's there. There's, there's more genres.

[B]

I think that's still a problem with the LSS5 though.

[A]

Well, hold on, hold on. I'm going somewhere with this. There's more genres of playing the game a way that it wasn't intended by the developer. Then there are ways that the developer intended to play the game. Right. Like you talk about, like speedrunning or, you know, you know, not losing health or, you know, whatever challenges people might set for themselves. Right, exactly. So with that in mind, if I decided whether it was through a meticulously handcrafted mod pack or whether it was through a slop filter, that I, I as a gamer didn't care about the artist's original vision of the game and I wanted to run it some way that I feel like running it. I don't feel that way. I don't want my Snorlax to have fur. But if Riley wanted his Snorlax to have fur and there was some AI slop tool available to him that let him do that, or, you know, enlarge Tifa's boobs or whatever, then I don't go.

[C]

I don't think people are taking issue with this type of thing existing.

[A]

Oh, I think a lot of people are.

[C]

Well, sure, but, but I think I'm actually with Riley. I think that really, I think that that isn't the existence. You might have a lot of people saying, oh, that shouldn't exist or whatever. But I think that the massive outcry, the nature of this particular backlash is more related to the fact that Nvidia is doing it. And Nvidia isn't just some company. Yes, they have 95% market share of gaming GPUs.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

And they have in the, in the past, many times, you know, what do you call it?

[A]

They talk all the time to play ball.

[B]

Yes, they talk all the time. But how they set the direction for gaming graphics. They have spent a lot of the last months bragging about how they are the ones that effectively invented modern computer graphics. Yeah, like this. This is what they're saying. So if they're pushing DLSS5 and they're talking about how they're working with developers and well, publishers and the companies, not as much the developers, but still right now, like this is them trying to push a market direction. This isn't them. This isn't like I'm agreeing with what you're saying. We were going to say effectively the same thing. I don't, if, if someone, if some random company was like this tool exists, I think there'd be some people being like, huh, that's dumb and not really caring. But the fact that it's DLSS5, it's Nvidia. Yeah, Nvidia kind of sets the, sets the tone, sets the messaging and often sets the direction that's concerning.

[C]

I just want to, I want to get in there though that I like to the point of like, to the point that some people might be okay with a tool like this existing. Like, I think that if it came out that some indie dev made a, made a version of this that you could like throw into Optiscaler or whatever or like use it with one of the open source tools and people started doing that, I think that it might grow and people might start using it and it's like, okay, you know, there's still probably a lot heavy pushback against AI, but I think that if it's giving you like such a big boost and especially in some games that don't have the resources to dump into like heavy graphics, like maybe, maybe that would be. There's a. I'm saying the thing in itself is it's problematic because of the whole AI connection, but it's not a crazy idea.

[A]

So to the point that you just made, I think that's, that's one of those, that's one of those ones where depending on who you talk to, you'll hear it spun a completely different way. So the way you just spun it was if you can dramatically improve the fidelity of a game where they didn't have the resources to make it look really good, you know, that's an argument. If I were to give the other side of that argument coin, it would be this is just a way of enabling either a game devs to be lazy and if you have that take, go yourself because that's, that's like not valid. Relax or be more realistically publishers and studios to employ fewer game developers and fewer artists to make their games. Which is realistically what we're talking about. Like yes, any industry is going to have a handful of Just like lazy people who don't feel like doing their jobs. But when you look at the kind of attrition that the game development industry has gone through over the last as long as it's existed, it's been a difficult industry to be part of. I think for you to point at the individual workers who are working on these games and say, oh, this is just a tool to enable them to be lazy is just such a brain dead take that. I just, I can't really entertain a conversation with you. So the other side of that coin then would be. So on the one side you go, oh, if this could be a tool, that's the positive take. This could be a tool for enabling better visual fidelity in games that otherwise wouldn't have had the resources for it. Other side of that take is our corporate overlords who already launch a wildly successful game and then proceed to lay off half the team are going to have even more at their disposal to hire few developers and artists in order to create more slop for us to consume. How do we reconcile those? Because both are true.

[C]

I and I. I have to say now, I have to say now that like we have talked a lot about how it increased like it does. DLSS5 does increase the realism of the, the image. Like in one image it looks like a video game and in the next image it looks like, well, a more realistic video game. It looks, it looks more, more realistic. But I would say that it goes past like if on one side of the spectrum it's like fake video game look and on the other side of the spectrum it's photorealism, like it looks like real life. DLSS5 goes way past that into hyper real look like the contrast is high, the saturation is high, the lighting is very global.

[A]

Like HDR kind of. Yeah, yeah.

[C]

It's a screen space type of effect. So it only has access to what is on screen. So it can't simulate. I mean the engine is supposed to be simulating the lighting in the same way. But you can see in these demos, I don't think we've shown a demo on screen yet, but I'm sure everyone's seen him a million times by now. You can see in the demos that the, the lighting is made much. It's just the sir, there's so much more lighting everywhere. It's like they took this like big giant studio light and put it in front of the person. And I think that that is something that is very, very concerning from both an artistic intent perspective. Because what happened to Simulating things. What happened to giving developers tools in order to, like, they want to light a scene a certain way and they will have tools. But from the artistic perspective and also from the simulation perspective, like, we're just. It doesn't look good to me. It looks like a slop.

[B]

Can I show. Do we want to show this on screen?

[A]

Hold on. First on the characters. Yeah, yeah, sure. I do want to address that. Nvidia has said let's take this for what it is. It is Nvidia's marketing for a technology that they wish the industry to adopt because it will make gamers and the entire industry more dependent on their products they sell. So let's take this for what it is. But Nvidia has said that game developers will have the tools to control how DLSS5 is implemented within their game. So how do we reconcile that and everything else that we've talked about so far?

[C]

Well, we have. So we have details about what those controls will be actually in the. In Daniel Owens video. I don't think there's a screenshot, but I looked at it. I watched the video. Good video. Go watch the video. He's just reiterating, actually things that Nvidia has put in their press releases. They'll. Developers have access to the intensity of effect of the effect. So they'll be kind of like a slider. They can turn it up and down. They'll be able to mask off areas of this. Of the scene, of the frame. So they're like, this character, I don't want it to enhance this character. I don't want it to enhance that thing over there.

[A]

Right.

[C]

And they will have some controls of, like, color grading. So, like, they'll be able to say,

[A]

all right, literal filter.

[C]

Boost this. Yeah, like filter type stuff.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

But they won't be able to, like, customize it beyond that in terms of, like, oh, do it in this style. I mean, maybe they. I'm saying right now, that's what they. The controls sound like it's coming out in the fall. There's still time. And I think, to be fair, I think the backlash to this is overblown for something that is not out yet. Like, and I don't want to say, because I've said many times, I've criticized it many times already on TechLinked now here. But I do think that this was a massive overreaction. And there are people on the anti DLSS5 side that are, like, losing their minds in a way that does not behoove them. So we have to Keep in mind that it is coming out in the fall. They're going to be developing it more. We don't have the hardware requirements.

[A]

I have a quick question for you, Riley. Yeah. Are you new?

[C]

I know, I'm sorry, I'm supposed to be.

[A]

Sorry. Game.

[C]

I know.

[A]

Did you say gamers overreacted?

[C]

Well, hold on. I might have overreacted when I said that I do play video games.

[A]

We've got a couple more discussion topics on this or discussion questions. One from Avians is actually, let's do the one from lefor first. I became a subscriber just to send this says lefor. Wow. Nobody seems to be mentioning that this technology could go the other way. I could take a realistic game and you know, Maybe not with DLSS 5, but DLSS 6.9. Say, for instance, I could take a realistic game and make it look like a cartoon. And they didn't say, oh, I think, you know, that would be really cool. I would enjoy that. But the implication, given that they're already kind of looking at this and going, here's a tool, here's what it does today, here's what it could do tomorrow, would seem to suggest to me that they could be excited about a functionality like that. What if you could play Cartoon Freelancer and Photorealistic Pokemon Again, I don't think anyone would have.

[C]

I mean, beyond all the concerns about AI like default concerns. Yeah, copyright in general, all that stuff. I don't think anyone would have. I don't think anyone has a problem with the fundamental idea of a gamer choosing to, you know, basically run a mod on. On their game. You know, I don't think anyone is. Is super, super concerned about that. I think they are concerned about A Nvidia pushing this and B pushing this as DLSS5. Like it's not. They're not saying this is a feature of DLSS5.

[B]

Mm.

[C]

They're saying this is DLSS5. There's like, it went from upscaling to, you know, they were changing like denoising. There was like ray reconstruction and stuff. And now the DLSS5 is this whole suite of features. And instead of saying hey, we are.

[A]

We.

[C]

We made upscaling even better or something more multi frame gen or whatever. We're saying we took multi frame gen and put it onto the first frame. So now all of the frames are genuine. It's like, is that DLSS5 at that point? I wish they called it something else.

[A]

I mean, I guess my biggest question right now to your point about the overreaction, because I actually, I see the overreaction both ways. On the one hand, I actually see people's reaction as a completely justified reaction given, again, Nvidia's weight in the industry. Like, I've been. I've been more trying to moderate the conversation rather than necessarily present my own take up till now.

[C]

Do it. Hot take.

[A]

I see it as, as. As a. As a somewhat reasonable reaction in it, looking at sort of the industry dynamics around job loss and constrained resources in game development at the same time that the gaming industry is overall making more money than ever. I see these as actually like fundamental, huge, enormous problems. And Nvidia's weight as a player in the industry and their ability to set the course for game development is a major concern.

[C]

Oh, absolutely.

[A]

However, over on the other side, I go, yeah, but how is any of this a surprise? Nvidia telegraphed this ages ago. Right. They literally, when they got up on stage and announced, was it. Was it 50 series or was it. I think it was 50 series. They. They talked about neural rendering.

[C]

Oh, sure, yeah.

[A]

What did we think that meant?

[C]

Well, this is interesting.

[B]

This.

[C]

Well, at the point, at the time, it meant neural rendering of like, textures, like having discrete elements within this fully simulated rendered world that use machine learning or generative AI even to help you, like, generate textures and stuff. I know that that's a core.

[A]

That was not my interpretation at all.

[C]

Okay, well, that was the demo that they did when they first mentioned, like, neural rendering. I mean, they had the faces last year.

[A]

Maybe this was me just like skipping a step, but like, what I interpreted that as. As. Remember that Ms. Paint demo that Nvidia did, like, must be like 10 years ago now. Do you remember the one, Luke, where they had like an Ms. Paint grade drawing and then basically.

[B]

Blaster. Sorry, the paint blaster thing.

[A]

Paint blaster.

[B]

No, we're talking about different things. Cool.

[A]

So they had like this Ms. Paint grade, like doodle, and then basically like AI did.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And it turned it into like a photorealistic scene.

[C]

Yeah, there's been a bunch of demos of that. Like Nvidia had one. A few, like even before ChatGPT and

[A]

all that, Nvidia has been like crystal clear for. For years now. That the path to. To better. And I say better with huge quotation marks here because, you know, back to Mario, you know, more realistic does not necessarily mean better. But I think from Nvidia's point of view, if you want to sell more graphics cards, right? More photorealistic, more true to life, more true to. Not even in just the visual sense, but also the simulation sense, more true to life in the. In the physics and the visuals of the scene is. Is better from Nvidia's standpoint. And so it's been pretty clear to me that they have been saying for years now the only path to better because Moore's law is dead. Moore's law is dead and buried. Is going to be alternatives to traditional rasterized rendering. And obviously the future drum that they keep beating is that it's going to be generative AI.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so to me, it was just pretty obvious that that was what we were going to get. We were going to get developers going. Here's the texture in the game will functionally just be a white. A blue. A blue piece of paper that just has ocean written on it.

[C]

I think that. I think that to your point, the reaction is a bit overblown, given that it's like this is obvious. Like this is an obvious endpoint for. For AI and the way that hardware has been going, I think that the reaction is so strong because, you know, again, Nvidia called it DLSS5. But also to the other thing you said earlier, which is that the state of the industry right now, like, it just doesn't feel good. This very much feels like a you will own nothing and be happy situation, where it's like, yeah, okay, our hardware can't really run games anymore and you can't even buy it actually, because everything's so expensive.

[A]

Hold on. But hold on, don't worry.

[C]

Use AI.

[A]

I gotta jump in there to give

[C]

yourself psychosis and think that it's good graphics.

[A]

Okay, but I gotta jump in there for a second because I just two weeks ago played Cyberpunk 2077 on a 3060 and was some of the detail that I was seeing upscaled using dlss? Yes, but I very much owned that gpu and it very much rendered that game in a way that made me happier than if it didn't have dlss.

[C]

Yeah, but you're talking about just upscaling.

[A]

Yeah, but we're talking about.

[C]

This isn't just upscaling, it's changing what is being displayed to you.

[A]

Well, part of what DLSS5 is going to do is also going to be upscaling. It's an entire suite of features.

[C]

I don't think it even needs to upscale anymore. It's just replacing the whole frame.

[A]

But I guess what my question is is if it' using hardware that I have in my computer, how is it you'll own nothing and be happy Because I definitely still own that 3060 and it's not bothering me.

[B]

The software.

[A]

I might not own the software. I'm. I mean, that ship sailed years ago.

[C]

This is a good, this is an interesting point.

[B]

No, like, like, you will still need side of it.

[C]

You'll still need. Well, and yeah, we're going towards a situation where hardware, you can't afford hardware, so everything is going to be a cloud subscription, basically. But.

[A]

Well, okay, that, that will. The fact that it's running on two 5090s right now is, Is a cause for concern.

[C]

Sure.

[A]

But I guess.

[C]

But we're assuming that they'll get it running on a single GPU and then, yeah, you'll be running it on your hardware still.

[A]

I'm operating in good faith for now until I see anything otherwise. That Nvidia actually does intend for this to operate on hardware that I own. And up until now, I mean, I was really impressed. I think the 3060 runs Cyberpunk better today than it ever did. And I thought that was really cool. It was part of. No, it was, it was longer than a couple of weeks ago. It was when we did the Brazil PC because that was, that was what our. Like, pretty good Brazil, because they might

[B]

be putting those back into production and stuff like that. What I'm saying is, what if. What if. You have to. Yeah, someone in chat's getting what I'm putting down.

[A]

Give her in.

[B]

What if. What I'm saying is, what if you have to subscribe to a certain level of dlss?

[A]

And that's where we could be running into serious trouble. Because if Nvidia gets us hooked on the, hooked on the, the sweets and

[B]

yeah, I mean, the first character replace that they do, There's like, every comment on Reddit is like, oh, my God. The first thing that they show is they give her like plumper lips and stuff like that. It's like, okay, that's. I mean, that's another weird thing. Like when I was talking earlier about you're putting artistic control into like a hardware company's hands is like.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You're also putting like beauty standards into like Jensen's hands.

[A]

Well, you're putting it into the, the AI model that Nvidia engineers create trained on whatever data is going into it. I mean, and there's so much, there's so much mystery meat that goes into training these AI models.

[C]

I think that the, the, the fact that so much of the criticism was based around the AI slop look is very, very interesting to me because there is An AI slop look.

[B]

Yeah. Like, and it feels like it.

[A]

And.

[C]

And it's funny because once the AI. Once the filter goes off, I'm looking at it again. It's like, if you gave me that. That. That photo and was like, this is a real guy. And it's like a very stylish. That one's very obvious, but, like, the Leon one.

[A]

The Leon one for me, like, stay there.

[C]

It's like if you. If you told me, okay, this is a moody still from a movie I'm working on, and this is a guy.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Like, okay, I could believe that's a guy. This one doesn't look too bad, but I think that the lighting is very low and there's a. There's a lot of things in its favor. I think in general, the AI slop look is. People are having an issue with it because it represents the homogenized. Mean that it's like, yes, it's the average of all images.

[B]

Totally.

[C]

And the extremes that make visuals and aesthetics and at this point and all kinds of human expression interesting. It is.

[A]

Looks like Brendan Fraser a little bit.

[B]

One of my things is like, this. This feels like.

[A]

I mean, if we could. Okay, if we could make every man look more like Brendan Fraser, though.

[C]

Yeah, I would do that immediately.

[A]

Hear me out, Hear me out.

[B]

This. This to me feels like cool video game. And this. Hold on. Cool video game. B movie immediately.

[C]

Yes, yes.

[B]

Like, it. It's. And I completely agree with your. Like.

[C]

But the hair looks so good. The hair looks realistic. But I mean, what. What. Okay, now I'm flipping. I'm on the other side. What can we expect. What can we expect from games other than just at. At best B movie graphics, you know, like, looking like a realistic B movie.

[B]

No, I think. I think there's a lot like. Like this one as well. I had this feeling here as well. This feel or this feels like cool video game, and then it catches up and now this feels like a different game.

[C]

See, I feel like this example feels especially egregious because I. I'm not a Resident Evil fan. Maybe. Maybe like, you know, I'm just not familiar with it as much. But I feel like the. The raw image looked pretty bad. Like, I. And I'm sorry. Like, that looks. That looks like a ps, you know, some three game.

[A]

Maybe. Okay. I think that's probably your nostalgia glasses. The PS3 did not look okay.

[C]

I didn't have a PS3, so I wouldn't know.

[A]

But.

[C]

But it looks kind of bad. And then it looks like too Good. It looks like hyper real to the point where it's like, are we supposed to be, you know, I don't know.

[A]

Here's the bottom line, which I think is. Is gonna be kind of scary and uncomfortable for people.

[C]

It's gonna happen anyway.

[A]

The people having this conversation, the people who are. Who are open to. To. To. To discussing it, are ultimately not going to be the ones who. Or the people who care enough to talk about it are not going to be the ones that are dictating the direction this goes.

[C]

For sure.

[A]

Like, I read an AI slop novel and every night, immediately my brain turns off. I just can't. And a lot of gamers, if you're a discerning games as art hippie who loves the game for the sake of the game, you're going to play an AI slop game with an AI slop filter on it, and you're going to have the same gut reaction where your brain's going to turn off and you're just going to disengage from it.

[D]

However,

[A]

lowest common denominator. People are going to turn those filters on.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I guarantee it.

[C]

For sure. And I fully expect in five to 10 years, like, if anyone finds this clip or any of the other discussions about this, they're going to be like, what were they freaking out about? That's so quaint. So quaint that they were so worried about that. Because everybody is going to be using AI filters on everything. I know that that's where we're going. And you're going to be able to play as spongebob or Optimus prime and whatever you want at any time. But I think we'll have lost something in the same way that we have lost something by hooking crazily into social media instead of, like, being more present in the physical world.

[A]

I actually think that. Sorry, it doesn't change your overall point, which was really good. I'm actually pivoting a little bit. I don't. I think game devs would actually draw the line at Nvidia, creating a tool that allows you to substitute the main character for spongebob or Optimus prime, because then they wouldn't be able to sell as many skins. Can you. Yeah. Can you imagine Tim Sweeney's tweet if he couldn't sell, like, Peter Griffin skins for Fortnite anymore? Because people could just put their own Peter Griffin model into the game. I don't know.

[C]

He'd probably be. I feel like he's super behind this. And also that. I mean, I don't want to put

[A]

words in Tim Sweeney's mouth because you never know what's going to come out of it. So there's just no point guessing.

[C]

I do want to say that. One thing I haven't said is that it is gen. I feel like from a technical perspective, it genuinely is impressive that this is apparently running in real time on 250 90s, on 259s. Just the image model and just 1 5090.

[B]

But I mean, the scenes are pretty simple.

[C]

They are. It's true.

[B]

It's a lot of static.

[C]

And in the soccer demo in particular,

[A]

like crazy motion is not. You're talking about this without showing anybody, Luke.

[C]

I mean, they're not really going to show it. You have to go like frame by frame in that one period and comma, go frame by frame on YouTube. Fun fact, but yeah, the. The soccer ball gets warped out of existence and at one point his arm disappears because he's moving fast.

[A]

The fabric of his shirt is a mess with DLSS5 on.

[B]

There's also some other fabric issues. And this is one of my problems too is I think a lot of people are going to turn this on or it's just going to be on by default. And a ton of people never touch settings on anything. And then they won't necessarily know and it's just going to suck.

[C]

And babies are going to grow up playing Call of Duty with this on.

[B]

Imagine, imagine those babies as adults don't even know how soccer balls work. They'll think they just do that.

[C]

They'll be looking at the screens and they look at the rewell and they're like, gross. Yeah, where's the filter?

[A]

Where's the shimmer?

[B]

Reality sucks. Yeah, reality's terrible.

[A]

Anyway, Avions has a question for our discussion. Questions? Would you be fine with users watching your old content with an AI Yassify mode or AI Yassify filter? And I guess I. I don't care

[B]

if YouTube did that automatically. I'd be annoyed. That's the argument, in my opinion. With 95% market share and this being on by default for a lot of people and Nvidia trying to push the direction of gaming and stuff like that. It's. It's being put onto people. That's the core problem, in my opinion. If you, if you have a browser add on that, that makes me look like the thumbnail for wan show. I don't actually personally care at all. Whatever, dude.

[C]

Dan, get on it.

[B]

But. But if YouTube is like, no, this is just how it works now. Yeah, that's weird.

[C]

I have a similar. I feel like they wrote in their question, I mean, why. But still, I think.

[A]

Yeah, I think it's a matter of time, by the way. I mean, look at, look at YouTube storage and bandwidth costs. If they could serve 360p video and just count on that, everyone's gonna have an NPU in their client device. Like, you know they're gonna do it.

[C]

We know that. So that's bad, right? Like, we don't want that. But like, I think, I think this is why it's so interesting to me is like, are there people out there who seem to only care about the output and as long as the output is pretty, according to like their. Whatever. You know, the lack of taste that they have where they're like the high contrast pretty girl like it. You know, no offense, people who like high contrast pretty girls. That's your preference. But I feel like, I feel like we're losing something because I think that I. We should have real pretty girls with low contrast.

[A]

I like my women. Like, I like my displays high contrast and pretty.

[C]

Oh, gosh. Okay, I think I have to go now.

[A]

So that's like, you're the first thing you send on Twitter or Tinder. What's your contrast ratio? What an opening line.

[C]

Can you turn the saturation up?

[A]

All right, thanks, Riley. This was great. Thank you for joining us. Have a wonderful weekend.

[C]

Hey, thanks for having me.

[A]

I'm not your mother. I didn't. Nope. What? Okay. Yes, I think we can make it work.

[C]

Bye.

[B]

Bye.

[A]

All right,

[B]

Very cool.

[D]

Wow.

[A]

Should we. I was just reminded of the thing that I wanted to talk about as part of our next topic Linux Challenge update.

[B]

Oh, okay.

[A]

Obviously you guys are going to get a lot of this stuff in video 2 part 2, whatever it is, we're calling it out. Yeah, I don't even know what the exact sort of ordering of all the various video things is going to be at this point, but I had. I think I'm. I think I'm. I'm 99.9% sure I'm allowed to disclose where I was. I was in Japan visiting Sony.

[B]

Okay. If that's all you say, I'm sure it's fine.

[A]

Well, no, that's not always fine, but I'm. I'm like very sure that Sony said it's okay that I was to say that I was in Japan visiting Sony. I was there for something exciting. I think that's probably implied because I would not go all the way to Japan for something that's not Exciting. But anyway, long story short, I needed to output an HDR video and I needed something that I had licensing for. So I used that test footage from our ARRI shoot back when we borrowed that camera to make a short circuit for like an ARRI Cinema camera. And I realized I went to plug in my laptop and I went, oh, shit, I'm on Linux right now. This was cool on Kubuntu with the AMD drivers. So I make no. I make no promises for anything other than that getting HDR working was as simple as boop apply. And then there was like a slider that honestly kind of limited my ability to get the best possible output. Don't worry about those details. Getting it working, looking HDR af was that easy.

[B]

Yeah. As far as my understanding goes. Because Kubuntu, whatever, is kde, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So kde, as a bunch of people have said in Full Point Chat, has HDR support. The reason why I initially cringed is some of them don't like. I think Cinnamon doesn't, which is one of the big criticisms that people put on that. I just don't really watch HDR stuff, so I don't really care.

[A]

So. So that was really cool.

[B]

I'm not sure.

[A]

And then this is another one. This is another one that's really cool. There have been so many aspects of this challenge where I've gone into it

[B]

going, yeah, no, it doesn't.

[A]

Oh, my gosh, that is going to be a major challenge. Like, for instance, you know, I'm running on a random laptop. And I really do mean random laptop. This came out like a week ago. It uses Strix Halo, so super obscure

[B]

hardware, always a problem.

[A]

Yeah, like using hardware that nobody. The number of times I've had people ask me over the years, remember I used to work at a computer store. I've had a lot of people ask me, what motherboard should I buy? My answer?

[B]

The most common one almost always is

[A]

whatever your socket is, however many DIMM slots you want, whatever form factor you want, whichever one is selling the most, because that's the one that the company is going to have out there being tested by end users in as many edge cases as possible. And it's the one that they're going to have the most people shrieking at them if it's broken. So you buy that one and you'll probably be fine. I did the opposite of that. I'm using the laptop that nobody is using. So you're asking for trouble in those situations. So I assumed that things like getting my keyboard backlighting working properly at all the various levels of brightness that it's supposed to work at might be a problem. I assumed that having my built in display brightness slider working would be a problem. Not only does it work, but is that not the darkest freaking built in display slider that you've ever seen?

[B]

You can still see the screen isn't actually black.

[A]

The granularity of the control is so good compared to Windows. And the miracle of Linux is that somebody did that. Somebody was like, you know what? Screens don't go dark enough. That's pretty up and fixed it.

[B]

They were probably that mad about it too.

[A]

How cool is that?

[B]

Yeah, that's cool.

[A]

And then, and then, and then you go to do. You go to do some basic thing and it blows up.

[B]

What's one of the things you did that it blew up on?

[A]

Hold on, hold on. Oh yeah, Yeah. I couldn't get an Xbox controller paired to it. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't get an Xbox controller paired to it. I've had some wifi that's interesting.

[B]

Sorry.

[A]

I've had some WI FI connectivity issues, but I'm gonna blame that on AMD's piece of garbage MediaTek Wi Fi chip partnership. Because I've had a lot of WI FI issues on Strix Halo laptops, on Windows as well. But yeah, I could. So I could get my. I had a ghillie kit. I brought two controllers with me on the trip. I brought a ghillie kit because I knew that I could use it with both the Switch and the computer. And then I also brought an Xbox controller so that I could play two player games on the computer. So Yvonne and I tried this new co op dungeon crawler game while we were on the plane. It was. It was cool.

[B]

What's it called? I saw that important. I was just curious.

[A]

I'll know in a second because I'm just firing up Steam. But anyway, I assumed I would be able to pair wirelessly the ghillicit to either the switch or the computer and then the. The Xbox One to the. To the computer. So I could do either two players there or we could have lots of players on the Switch too. No matter what I did was not able to Bluetooth pair that Xbox controller. Now, in fairness, I haven't looked super deep into it yet, so there, there probably is a solution somewhere. But I was on a plane. I didn't want to pay $30 for Internet so I didn't have the solution at hand. So I just had to plug in One controller. And then I was able to pair the Gillikit over Bluetooth. My earphones over Bluetooth. No problems. The Bluetooth works, just not with an Xbox controller. We were playing bravery and greed.

[B]

Okay. I haven't heard of that.

[A]

Yeah, it's pretty fun. The tutorial is one of those. One of those game tutorials where they go, okay, here's how to do this. Now here's how to do this. Now here's how to do this. And here's how to do this. And here's how to do this. And here's how to do this. Okay, go. And the difficulty is just like you need to be able to do all of those things immediately. It's kind of like a roguelite. Anyway, it's fine.

[B]

I see. I was, I was. And it's, it's recorded because I was streaming, but I, I got a controller to pair instantly. But it wasn't, it was like the. It was one of the ones from one of the roundups. You guys did like a Fly Digi or Fly Digi. Something.

[A]

Yeah. Okay.

[B]

I don't remember what it was, but that means that it had the dongle.

[A]

Oh, yeah, Crystal.

[B]

I plugged the dongle and it worked right away.

[A]

Crystal. Well, yeah, that would though.

[B]

Yeah, I know, I know. I'm just.

[A]

Crystal asked, does your touchscreen work? Yep. Like the, the number of things, the touchscreen workings.

[B]

Pretty cool.

[A]

That's pretty wild, right?

[B]

It's pretty cool.

[A]

And then it. And then it just like. And then it just like falls on its face on like the simplest thing. It's only the most common PC connected controller in the world.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I couldn't, I couldn't connect it.

[B]

Like, okay, yeah, one of the

[D]

does.

[B]

How does it connect? Does Windows have some like, Microsoft crap and the Linux just doesn't have it by default?

[A]

No, it uses Bluetooth. I mean, they do, but also I could just pair it to my phone if I wanted. Yeah, like, it totally works. And like I can, I can connect on SteamOS.

[B]

Yeah. Rest assured says Xbox uses the X input stuff from Windows and there has to be a translation layer added. That should be after it connects, though, to map the controller or something, wouldn't it be?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Xbox controllers work fine on Mac OS and iOS as well. Like, it's a thing. So you might be thinking of some of the older Xbox controllers that were proprietary only for their wireless modern Xbox controllers. You can just connect them as Bluetooth. I do believe they do show up as Xinput, but for Steam games in particular, Steam will handle any kind of Xinput translation that you might need on whatever it is that you're doing. And the fact that it wouldn't pair at all. I'm not talking about. I got it paired. Yeah. And then the inputs were weird. It would not pair, which makes me

[B]

think it's not Xinput. But yeah, I. I have some, some. Oh, right. One of my like custom challenges that I'm probably gonna end up doing. I might have already said this, I'm not sure, but I'm planning. I actually really like Cinnamon. I'm pretty comfortable with Cinnamon, but having been using Mint on my laptop, which I'm pointing here because my bag is here with my laptop in it. Cinnamon feels better on Mint. And I'm wondering if I should probably just use kde, which is what people expect you to use when you're running Casheos. So I'm going to try to live swap out my desktop environments.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

I've tried that one and just see how that goes.

[A]

I tried the removal part.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'm going to see how that goes. I think that'll be interesting to do. Something that I did do was I decided that I wanted to continue my like 5 or 6 years long adventure of trying to 100% Assassin's Creed Odyssey. My, my knees have been feeling a little bit better. So I was doing the treadmill walking thing and I was like, I want to try to play a game using a controller while treadmill walking because that might be easier. And I tried to install what is even called now, Ubisoft Connect.

[A]

Yeah, whatever it's called. Uplay. Yeah, I just call it uplay.

[B]

Sure. Okay.

[A]

It only says uplay.

[B]

I had a little bit of a hard time figuring out how to do it because I was searching for uplay stuff and then realized that I was calling it the wrong thing. But sure, yeah, uplay. And it was no problem to get uplay installed. Ubisoft Connect, whatever it is, it was no real problem to install the game. I clicked play it, didn't launch. I went off to go do other things. I haven't continued to try to troubleshoot. I gave it literally zero minutes of troubleshooting. It just didn't work immediately. That is the first thing at all that hasn't worked immediately.

[A]

Mind Paradox says I have one laptop running Linux that won't connect to an Xbox controller. The other running the same flavor of Linux will. No clue why. It probably comes down to the Bluetooth hardware and just some kind of weird edge case.

[B]

Another Thing is that I have put also zero time into this, but I have noticed there isn't enough of a symptom that I could like screen record it and prove it to anyone. My brain's just detecting freaking ghosts or something. I don't know. But the computer just starts to kind of feel weird and then if I restart it, it's fine. So instead of sleeping my computer at night, I've just started shutting it down and then I just turn it on in the morning. But if I sleep it at night and wake it back up, it just feels weird. And I don't have a bad, I don't have a good explanation for this. I don't know, it just feels odd. It feels like it's like maybe kind of slow or like, I don't know, but not slow enough that it like makes a ton of like I can't record it and show it to you. But it maybe I'm like, maybe the menu opens a couple frames slower than it normally would or something like my brain can tell something's happening. I restart the computer. I'm like, ah, okay. It's, it's like perfect now. But it is no problem if I just shut the computer down at night because it will for sure be fine for a whole day. So like, if I just shut the computer down instead of sleeping, it. It's no problem.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

I tried just leaving it on over the night instead of sleeping to figure out if it was sleep.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

No.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

It was not just sleep. It has to be something to do with time.

[A]

My onboard audio stopped working randomly.

[B]

That's weird.

[A]

Yeah. And you know what's funny is I have that in my open questions here. Onboard audio not working on my laptop. When did this happen? I feel like it was working at some point. Or was it like I'm like gaslit about my onboard audio and I looked just now and it is showing up. So I almost wasn't able.

[B]

Have you been updating?

[A]

I don't think I've updated since then.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

I almost wasn't able to do WAN show last week because if I had had to use my onboard audio with my mic, like just with my, my IMs with the built in inline mic, I wouldn't have had a working audio device because it just was not working. Oh. But because the RODE microphone that I bought had an audio device on it, I was able to use that. And then. So I was really confused by that at the time because. Because I thought it was working. And then now I'm looking at it right now and I do have an audio device. Is it actually outputting anything, though?

[B]

Someone asked, is it a really slow memory leak? I don't know. I open. The extent of the work I did on it was I opened B top and it didn't look like it.

[A]

Oh, this is not working. So I have our stream there, but not functioning. I have our stream on. I can see levels.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh, wait, wait.

[B]

What is that, a mic?

[A]

What? Oh, no, no, it is from that. It just. It happened that the levels were jumping in time with me talking right now.

[B]

It really was. That was super weird. I know you guys couldn't see that it did literally exactly track his voice.

[C]

Yeah, that was.

[A]

That was really trippy. It seemed like I was like, what's happening right now? This makes no sense. No. So theoretically I have levels, but I am not getting. I'm not getting any kind of output. And again, like, you know, to its credit, the, the function keys mute and everything, all that works perfectly. I just am not getting any, any audio output.

[B]

Also, on the, on the mint side of things, on my laptop, just still no issues at all. It's been completely rock solid. At this point in time, if I was going to recommend somebody a distro. I've been. I've been enjoying. No, I know. I've been enjoying Cashy. It's been a fun experience. I would still do mine.

[A]

Men.

[B]

Like, if. It's just so much easier. The, like, level of difficulty stepping into it is just so low. And I'm sure people just like, last time will get pissed at me and I just. I don't care. It's. It's so much easier. I showed. I was showing Mint to Emma and she was like, oh, yeah, this all just like, makes sense. And it's like, yeah, yeah.

[A]

It's funny, I've been told a lot of times by various members of our audience that intuitive design is not a thing and. No, no, it is, it is.

[B]

Mint feels pretty intuitive, especially an older school Windows user. Like, most of Emma's Windows experience is like XP Vista.

[A]

And sometimes intuitiveness is context dependent.

[B]

Relative. Yeah.

[A]

Yes. And so, you know, I think that came up when I was talking about the intuitiveness of something on iOS where someone was like, that's intuitive to some people. And I'm like, well, it's not iOS users, because here's all the other ways that iOS does this and it's not that way. So that's not what intuitive means. Why don't we jump into. Sony?

[B]

Oh, sorry. One quick last thing. I would bring Up.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

But Mint has been like sleeping super effectively on the laptop. The battery usage seems lower than Windows was. It's actually really great. Something that I'm right now pretty confident is going to survive through this challenge is my laptop being on Mint. It's actually just been better. And like my argument the last time I tried this, which was a long time ago, switching a work computer over was that Linux got in my way too much.

[A]

Even Teams has been pretty solid for me.

[B]

Teams was weird for me for some reason. I. Well, okay. I ended up figuring it out. My. I think Teams is just a bad program.

[A]

Really. Tell us how you really feel.

[B]

And the like web app teams for Linux thing, I don't think it's really like worse. It's just still Teams, which is like, just still a problem. I don't think it's really like the open source project that's the problem. It's just Teams.

[A]

Why are you gonna keep attacking teams? We just, we just dropped 300 live viewers, Luke. Teams, fans. No, I'm kidding. It's a recording glitch.

[B]

Sorry. I'm not gonna stop complaining about Teams, but crap, what was I gonna say? Yeah, no, it. It has gotten in my way a lot less than Windows is now. So it's actually switched. I think it would actually be for me at least a productivity reduction. That's funny to go to Windows.

[A]

I wrote a whole paragraph that's basically this. I think the general conclusion for me is that I could switch, but I won't. Part of the problem. And this is a midway conclusion. This is not the final conclusion. Yeah, but it's where I'm sitting right now. And I think that a big part of what makes switching difficult is your perspective. If you want Linux to be a replacement for your Windows PC, then you may end up disappointed. But if you think of Linux, and I mean from a gaming perspective, as more of a console, where you start with what is compatible with my console and you play that, then you may be ready if you can have that perspective. But I don't buy many consoles and I don't do the bulk of my gaming on them. And if you want the broadest compatibility, Windows is still king. Especially if there's a social element to your gaming and your group wants to play something that is not Linux pilled with. All that said, this is the paragraph I wanted to read. I don't think I can go back to vanilla Windows anymore either. Yeah, it has been so refreshing to not be bothered a single time over the last month to reaffirm once again that no, I in fact do not want Edge as my default browser.

[B]

So. Nice. So I think it's been oddly like calm.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like I actually think I'm more relaxed.

[A]

Like this is just. I fired up my computer before the show and it just had all my stuff on it that I was doing.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And nothing else.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Well, I had that Kubuntu Live boot thing but someone gave me the command to fix that. I just haven't put it in a terminal yet.

[B]

But that's the other thing too is if something like that happens I believe that I can fix it. And it might be work to fix it, but I believe that I can fix it. So if I care enough, I'll go do it and it will probably stay fixed. And with Windows, that's a big one. If I remove Recall or I say no to OneDrive or I do whatever, they're going to find some way Windows is going to update, do something. It's going to worm its way back

[A]

in the second half 26 and I

[B]

feel like I'm constantly under attack.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Where with Linux it's like.

[A]

I mean it's, you know, it's kind of a piece of sometimes but I'd

[B]

rather work on my.

[A]

But it could get. It's gonna get better.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I think that's the big one.

[B]

Windows is the.

[A]

Windows can be a piece of sometimes and it's constantly getting worse. And Linux can be a piece of sometimes and it's constantly getting better and it's constantly getting better and it has

[B]

gotten so much better than since the last time we tried. Holy crap. The updating experience on Mint is like amazing. The updating experience on. On cache is also actually extremely easy. And I really like watching the little Pac man thing go across. It's very fun. It feels very like Windows XP Defrag in cache. When you update you. Well in many. You can do it many different ways but Pac man, the like package installer and you can update with it and stuff like that. It shows a little yellow C that goes across and eats the like dashes as it like progress bars and I just, I just like stuff like that.

[A]

Oh. Some people are saying don't leave us hanging on the game. I did say it. Bravery and greed. Yeah, we haven't played a ton of it yet. We've played like an hour. But it was, it was fun what we played. It's a little. It's a little hardcore gamery for Yvonne. Like even I was having trouble. Oh my God. I started playing God of War. Man, how many hours am I into it? Okay, so I would say that I'm five hours into it because I have five hours of play time. I am maybe one hour into this game.

[B]

Did a redo stuff because it's so hard. Oh, interesting.

[A]

I've never played a God of War game, so.

[B]

Oh, no, it's very different.

[A]

So the combat is not, you know, press light attack, heavy attack block. It's like, okay, well, you could be in two completely different fighting modes, with your AX and without your ax. And depending which opponent you're playing against, you may want to be using the AX or not using the ax. And when you're using the axe, here's all of your special button press combinations that you might want to use. Don't forget, you need to time your blocks exactly perfectly. Here's your button to swivel around and face the other way immediately. And when you have your axe, don't forget, you can throw your axe. But also, here's all the other ways that you can contort your hands in order to. By the way, you have to fight, like, four things at once, and they don't, like, wait around for you to be ready. I'm not playing on the hardest difficulty because I thought that would be crazy. I'm playing on the, like, just like, give me a challenge difficulty. And it is absolutely kicking my ass. So, yeah, I.

[B]

You play on a controller?

[A]

Yeah. Are you not supposed to? I mean.

[B]

No, you are. That game really sold me on, like, weapon feel in video games.

[A]

Oh, really?

[B]

AX is probably one of the, like, best feeling weapons. And like, especially when you're playing with a controller and the sound mixed with the haptics and everything, it just feels meaty when you throw it and you catch it again, it's like, oh, I have my. My, my bro back. Like, it just. I don't know, it felt great.

[A]

Well, I'm, you know, an hour into it. Okay, I've made a little more than

[B]

an hour into the field.

[A]

I've made a little more than an hour of progress. Basically, I'm at the point now where I'm figuring out that, okay, I will need to use every single move in this tech tree. Not only I will need to use them, but I will need to be muscle memory familiar with them, which I'm still deciding if I can commit to in current year for a video game or if I just need to ratchet down the difficulty. So we'll see how it goes. Anyway, I've been playing it exclusively on Linux.

[B]

You want to know what's kind of funny.

[A]

Imagine playing a PlayStation game on Linux. Seriously though, if you told me 10 years ago.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

That I'd be like, come on.

[B]

Yeah, for sure. That is wild.

[A]

That's crazy. That's.

[B]

And it's not like some crazy. Well, it kind of is, but it's not some crazy like emulation thing. Like you're not emulating a PS1 in order to play it.

[A]

Yeah, it's a, it's a very. It's a current ish. God of War game that runs on current generation console. I know. It came out in 2018. Stop it. What I mean is that it's not a PlayStation 1 game.

[B]

I hear you.

[A]

It's not something that you can just emulate on a potato. Yeah, it's a, it's a beautiful looking game and it's just flipping. Running on Kabun 2 on my laptop. Strix Halo is so cool, dude. Yeah, like it's so cool.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I cannot, Yes. I cannot love Strix Halo hard enough and hate how much it costs more.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And. Oh, sorry, you were going to say something.

[B]

I have way less. I. I've just been covering. Okay, so slate Spire 2. I haven't really looked into it but there's no like windowed mode and normally if you see me play windowed mode, I usually play it.

[A]

That's right, because you're busy playing that instead of actually readying up in the lobby. Yes, yes, I'm familiar with your stuff.

[B]

Usually I play it in like a very, very small window and that's style

[A]

over top of the chat box where we're all telling you to ready up. Yes, yes, I've seen that.

[B]

That was unintentional. My bad. But usually it'll just sit on like a side monitor.

[A]

Yes, he's that guy.

[B]

Mr. No, I did it literally once. I'm sorry but sits on a side monitor and I'll often just ignore it. It'll be very common that I'll finish a run and it'll be like, oh, your run time was like 40 hours. Because I just didn't play it and satisfy 2 is full screen. So I just, I'm just like, well okay, I. This is my like oh, I have five minutes, I'll throw some cards and then ignore this for eight hours game. And that actually like I these days I just put stuff on top of it.

[A]

Is there a weird hacky way to run full screen games? There's gotta be.

[B]

Probably. I just haven't bothered. But it's been interesting that like, you know Salespire 2's out. I'm gonna play that instead of slice bar one. But my overall playing of Slay the Spire, if you look at Steam Hours, has like plummeted because I'm just not

[A]

even contributing to the concurrence.

[B]

Yeah, it's.

[A]

It's not as people like you that are the reason that it didn't be.

[B]

Maybe, to be honest,

[A]

they were that close to Silksong and couldn't do it because of this man.

[B]

Yep. Yep. The worst example of that was I went. I think this was when I used to have to leave my computer on for work reasons all the time. And I think I went on one of those, like I went to Taiwan and then took a week off trips and came back and it was still running. Nice. Like. Oh crap.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh, right. Holy crap. We really should have called out CW a lot earlier. I actually meant to do it right at the beginning of the show because there is so much going on with Creator Warehouse Ltd store right now. This week we launched our system error collection. Luke, do you want to bring up the site?

[B]

Yeah. Apparently other people have it. Maybe I tried too early and they updated it, or maybe my system's just being weird, but other people have it windowed mode. I don't know. Anyway, sorry, which one? System error. Yep, there's no link. I'll just go to the site.

[A]

I believe in you. The first item in this collection is the Error Message hoodie, which is inspired by all the inventive ways that your computer itself.

[B]

This is very swag, isn't it? It's very swaggy.

[A]

Is that cool or what?

[B]

It looks sick.

[A]

Freakin love it. You got the little dinosaur with the cacti. You got the 404 error. Like, oh, what a cool. Like if you know, you know, hoodie that just also just looks really cool. And if you don't know, then it just looks like a cool hoodie. We've got the chrome dinosaur, an overheating

[C]

PC

[A]

Willy, our Whale Land mascot. Did we name him Willy? Oh man. I mean, I guess that makes sense. And a very mentally stable cat all packed into one slightly chaotic design. Plus it's printed on a 100% cotton French Terry hoodie, so it's actually comfortable enough for everyday wear. Isn't that awesome? Freaking love it. The next item in the collection is the Just Rage Quit T shirt. This design is our take on that 90s era assistant. You know the one. But ours is a little more unhinged. We. We had to really craft the copy for this one so that it didn't sound like go kill your.

[B]

That would be an AI.

[A]

Yeah. So we ended up with just Rage quit to make it more computery gamery. Finally. Not last but least, we have our boot up toaster T shirt. This one's a reference to that old PC you had when your siblings called dibs on the nice one. The one that sounds like an airplane taking off but struggles to open a web browser like always. It's printed on our classic shadow blank tees. And you can shop the entire system error collection at LMG gg.

[B]

I always like the little twirl one, this one because I. I think it's really cool that you can like actually really see the fabric. And now they're doing that.

[A]

Now you can really.

[B]

That's also cool.

[A]

I love our blank T shirts. The team does such a great job. Yeah. But wait, there's more. What? The tax write off sale is back. It's tax season, baby. So we went through our warehouse and pulled out a bunch of stuff that has been taken up space and needs to be written off. That includes mystery screwdrivers, mystery shirts, mystery tall shirts.

[C]

Whoa.

[A]

Get a deal on tall T shirts.

[B]

Actually just do that.

[A]

We also have used but like new bags. We have mystery water bottles. We've got some of those retro monitor pet caves that we found in a corner somewhere. Those have been actually really popular. So take advantage of this sale. And yeah, some of these things are discounted probably a little more than they should be.

[B]

What the $120 off. $150?

[A]

Yeah, don't worry about that. It's only a Thunderbolt 3 dock. So it's an older Thunderbolt dock in here twice. But it checks out. I was about to clear it.

[B]

Okay. They cost the same.

[A]

Yeah. Some of these are discounted a lot. You can think of the sale as kind of like the buying ram without mortgaging. Your house sale says my copy here. Okay, sure. You can shop the sale at LMG GG slash tax write off 2026. We got the onesie in there. We got the washed crew neck. It's tax write off season, baby.

[D]

Screen.

[A]

So we've got a few screensaver party shirts in various sizes. Some of these, not every size is going to be available. So make sure you guys are checking quick and getting your hands on.

[B]

Yeah, I was trying to. I was trying to. There was a good stuff. Let me see if I can find it.

[A]

Oh, right. And as always, now's a great time to place an order because you can also Send a checkout message. Do you want to show them how to do it? Just add something to cart.

[B]

It is in stock. What the.

[A]

Oh, yeah. That's a really nice shirt.

[B]

Did this get restocked, like today?

[A]

It has like a nice stretchy fabric and it has a little lanyard thing in the pocket so you can put your ID card on it and stuff.

[B]

Yeah, I wanted something that. Because the stretchy fabric. Yeah, I wanted something that was comfortable but a little bit sharper, just for when I need to wear that. And I was shopping around the store and I was gonna grab one of these and I thought XO was sold out, but apparently it's not.

[A]

Well, throw it in the cart.

[B]

Oh, no, it's this. This is the US Store.

[A]

Right? Well, throw it in the cart and show people how to send a checkout message. There you go. In the cart. You'll see this interface when we're live. It's the best way to send a message into the show. We believe that throwing money at random streamers, I mean, if you want to do it, that's cool. But if you throw it at us, you should get high quality merchandise in return. So go ahead, place your order. Your message will go to producer Dan, who will reply to it. Or pop it up. There we go down there. Kind of like that. Or who will curate it for me and Luke to respond to. So, Dan, do you have a few comms for us to respond to?

[D]

I do.

[A]

Oh, you do. My goodness.

[D]

We've got people are into the sales

[A]

people placing orders today.

[D]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

Global store sell out of Excel. That makes sense.

[D]

Hi, lld, a couple questions about the Whale Land vip. If I fly to bc, will the custom PC include component boxes so I can disassemble and ship it home? Also, can VIP and bring your own computer plus sit together because that's the plus ones.

[A]

Oh, that's those. Wow, those are really good questions. Those are good questions. I don't think it includes all the boxes, but I believe we could accommodate taking the GPU out at least because the systems are shipped to us. So, like, I think we're partnered with Starforge on them, so they're shipped to us. They obviously got here, so they should be safe to ship. The case box is included. Oh. Oh, look at that. Hobbs is in the chat. Of course he is. Says Starforge handles the shipping. There you go. So there you go. Starforge apparently gets the systems back from us, make sure they're good, and then reships them.

[B]

That's pretty sick.

[A]

Apparently that's how it worked in the past, at least.

[B]

I think that's cool.

[A]

As for a VIP and a BYOC plus sitting together, I don't know. I don't know. I think you might have to contact support on that one and they'd have to, they'd have to get back to you.

[B]

Possible like if support, I don't know, it might be possible for you to sit on. On the end.

[A]

VIPs also get twice as much space. So realistically, if you put like a non whale ticket, if you were just willing to have your space and put another person in it, I couldn't see us saying no. I don't know. That would seem pretty true power though and stuff. I think we'd probably be okay.

[B]

We could probably figure something out. But just check.

[A]

Yeah, definitely check with the Whale land team. Okay, Mr. Dan,

[D]

I got another one here. Then. I just got a couple of kittens. Any advice on how to organize my setup to make it safer for them and more reliable for me?

[A]

Oh boy, do I ever have the thing for you. Boop boop boop boop boop. Gear Magnetic Cable Management. See this? This is your life today. This is your life with all your cables out of reach of your cat. Seriously, aesthetics is one reason to have all the cables up off the floor and like, like channeled up the leg of your desk and like carefully tucked into everything. Pets, pets and babies. That's the other big one. They are so much less tempted to play with them and chew on them when they're just all. All managed. And when you do it magnetically, the it's. It's not better. It doesn't look better than using little plastic zip ties or doing whatever it was that you were doing already. And it's really expensive. So how could I possibly sell the solution? Because when you do it with magnets, it will stay done. That's the difference. As soon as you go to change something, when you used little plastic zip ties or whatever, you go, oh crap. Okay, I'm cable. You're not going to redo it. You're going to be able to motivate yourself to do it one time. And if you do it with magnets one time, then when you go to change something, there's no excuse. You just. And you're good to go. I will say I love it.

[B]

With the move back in, I haven't re cable managed everything. And when I put my desk into like omega standing mode, because not only is it standing, but it's also standing while I'm Standing on a tall.

[A]

Oh, right. On your treadmill.

[B]

Yeah. So it's like super tall. All the cables were dangling and Eva walked in the room and was just like, okay, nice. It does kind of suck. But I'm not starting from zero because the pads are still there.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

So it won't be as bad this time.

[A]

Nope, it won't.

[B]

It'll still take a bit, but it won't be as bad.

[A]

Yep. Girasoul actually has another great suggestion that could save you some money. You could use just a couple of the larger MCM's to attach your baby to the wall. That will keep them away from all the dangling wires that actually you could use that on a cat as well. I figure if you have four of them, you just do one for each leg and then they shouldn't be able to go anywhere.

[D]

Yeah. Extra large for the tail.

[A]

Not actually pet or childcare advice.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Are cats magnetic? No. No, they're not. But you'd use the arch and you'd kind of pin down the leg with it. Is sort of what we were thinking here. Kidding, kidding, kidding, kidding. Kitty kittying. Don't worry about it. The point is we're doing another topic now. Let's talk about. Ooh, Sony issuing an Update for the PlayStation 3 nearly 20 years post launch.

[B]

Whoa.

[A]

That's right. Update 4.93 just hit on a console that launched in November of 2006. The patch notes just say improves system performance. The same vague wording that was used for the last three updates. But it is believed that the real purpose is almost certainly anti jailbreak measures. And a Bluetooth key, Bluetooth Blu Ray key encryption key renewal. Which is especially relevant now that Netflix on PS3 has been discontinued, leaving physical media as one of the few remaining use cases for owning the console. Aside of retro game, aside from retro

[B]

gaming, I have to say I'm going to interject for a second. I understand the market trend for physical media is that it's going down. I think it's a lot of it is because there isn't really as many options anymore and oh, kind of two things here and I have never seen so many people go to places like Willow Video. A like used media store. Mostly games to buy physical like DVDs, Blu Rays, stuff like that. That place has been bumping the last two times I've gone in there. There's been like six to eight other customers. It's a small store and most of them are buying like Blu Rays. It's been kind of interesting.

[A]

Do you think Blu Rays are going to become trendy like vinyl records.

[B]

I don't think it's, hey, this is old school trendy. I think because some people are renting. We walked through their Blu Ray rental section and there was whole rows of movies that were just gone fully rented out. I think people are just really tired of online subscription stuff and it's like fascinating, kind of really expensive and it might be easier to budget like, oh, we can go rent a Blu Ray for not that much money then I am guaranteed spending however much it is now every single month on like Netflix and maybe also Disney and also maybe Amazon and also maybe whatever all the other ones are. And it's, it's, it's really interesting.

[A]

How much do they charge to rent a Blu Ray?

[B]

I'm not sure.

[A]

Off the top of my head, I can't imagine. I don't think very much. Movie rental rates DVD and Blu Ray new releases $4 for a one night rental. Where else can you get a night out for five bucks? I'm saying $4 for the Blu Ray and then a buck for make it yourself popcorn at home.

[B]

You know what's not really all that

[A]

funny out but it's, you know, is

[B]

flipping through movies and Netflix. You and I have watched people in the last couple weeks have actually a lot of fun doing Shifting through the Shelf in Willow.

[A]

I actually hate both solutions for digital media management. And when I say both solutions, what I'm talking about is Netflix, which algorithmically serves you stuff that they think you'll like based on your past behavior, which in my account is a mess because I'll use it here at work just to put on things that are going to look nice on a tv. And also mine was the catch all before they had profiles for all the various members of our family. So my recommendations mean absolutely nothing. I hate that Netflix doesn't tell you any kind of either critic consensus or audience consensus evaluation of the quality of this media before you start watching it. I can't deal with that. Flip side Plex, which includes both critic consensus and Rotten Tomatoes audience consensus as well as IMDb ratings or at least I have mine configured to do that also sucks. On the one hand, on Netflix I don't want to commit to anything because I have absolutely no way of knowing if it's hot garbage. Bring back dislike buttons on absolutely everything with Marques on this. And then when it comes to Plex, I'll see something that catches my eye in this like smorgasbord of too many options and I'll go Oh, that actually looks like something I would enjoy. And then I'll get deterred. I'll get deterred by someone else. Hated it. And what is really stupid about that is there's movies that I love, like, just. I'm sorry, this is going to be an unpopular opinion. I love Major Pain. You know what do. Is it politically correct today? I mean, it's a. Wayans, brother. Wayans. Wayans. Whatever. It's. It. No, let's. Let's put it that way. Did critics think that this was a quality film? No. Do even most audience members. Okay, most. Yes. But that's realistically only going to be fans of this sort of. Like, I. I'd have to. Is this a cult? Is this a culty music movie? It's gotta be. There's. There's no way.

[B]

You see clips from it, like all the time. It's in memes all the time. Do you. It's. Oh, yeah, it's in tons of memes.

[A]

I don't come across.

[B]

It's in memes for sure. Yeah.

[A]

I have almost never come across it in memes. But anyway, look, I love this movie, but this is a movie that if it wasn't one of the nine vhs that my friend owned, you know, like, you remember how we used to select a movie is you were. You were at a friend's house for the evening and they would have like a dozen movies and you'd watch one of them. It would be obviously one that they've seen, you know, 10 times because it's one of the few movies they own, but you've never seen it. You watch it together. Like, that's how I ended up watching Basketball because it was one of the, like, handful of movies that Kenny. Kenny Alaprandini owned. And I was at his house that night and Shout Out. Shout out Kenny, by the way, I know he watches LTT because he messages me every once in a while. So. How you doing, Kenny? And that's pro. I mean, that's probably another movie that's like, probably not especially well critically rated. Yeah, it's got 40%, it's got a rotten score and even a 74% audience score. I would say consider not, you know, that great. I actually don't know if that's a good movie. I haven't watched it since I was a teenager, so, I mean, either Major Pain. I have.

[B]

It was.

[A]

And it holds up. I freaking love it.

[B]

Still no idea if basketball does, but it was a. To quote chat. It was a banger when we were in high School, like, I don't know. I also want to point this out. This was crazy to me. I saw this too, and these were very actively being rented out.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[B]

10 bucks for a week for a Nintendo Switch or PS5 game.

[A]

You can beat a lot of games in a week.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Especially if you have a week off.

[B]

Again, whole rows missing, fully rented out.

[A]

Like, let's go, Willow Video.

[B]

That. That type of stuff. Renting games, renting movies, buying Blu Rays is actually kind of popping right now, which is very interesting. I've, like. I don't know if I've told this story on the show, but one of the reasons why I've called out Willow a few times is back in the day at a restaurant that is now closed, which adds a little bit of more ominous tone to the story. I was sitting there eating with somebody, and a couple tables away, I recognized the owner of Willow sitting there talking to someone who looked like probably a CPA of some kind with papers all over the place, talking about how times were tough. This was. This was a long time ago.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And I was like, damn, that's been my favorite store since I was, like, a tiny child. I hope it doesn't close. And that's when I kind of decided to lock in and just like, I'm only gonna buy gaming stuff from them.

[A]

Right.

[B]

That was in that moment was when I did that. And now I've extended that to other stores as well that are like, you know, I only go to the one gas station. Different things like that.

[A]

Oh, I tried to. Okay, sorry. Finish your story.

[B]

You should. You should. I mean, you don't buy gas that often, but.

[A]

Nope.

[B]

Which is cool. But I don't think, like, I still love going there, and now I just go there because it's freaking awesome. But I don't know if they, like, need that anymore. It is. I would. Back in that era, I would go in there and I'd maybe be the only person in there or there'd be somebody else.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Lately, man, it's just been popping off, which is awesome.

[A]

I think that's super. So cool, dude. I tried so hard to shop at a Canadian chain yesterday, and it, like, completely didn't work. I needed three what I consider to be reasonably basic things. I needed a long 2 millimeter Allen key. Like, not one of the ones that's on the little folding thing and not an interchangeable bit one, because obviously I have my own tools for that. I needed a long one because. Because it had to go. It had to go through the, like, Axle into the differential on an RC car. It had to go all the way through this thing in order to detach it. So I needed one of those. I needed some brake cleaner and I needed some like clear lithium grease. Okay. Relatively basic. Okay. A little bit. It's not a two by four. Right. So I tried to get all three of those things at Rona and we struck out on all three. And I had a super helpful sales associate. They told me after that they knew the channel. So they were like, like super duper helping me try to find all these things. We couldn't get any of them. Rona's no longer Canadian. Since when?

[B]

They got bought out by somebody.

[A]

When the heck was that? Well, whatever. I tried to go to Home Hardware, who I know is definitely Canadian. They were closed because they apparently operate on bankers hours. So I had to go to Home Depot.

[B]

They really do.

[A]

And they had, they had all three of the things. Rona got bought by private equity.

[B]

Yeah, Sycamore Partners, US based private equity firm.

[A]

Oh, 2023.

[B]

Home Hardware, however, is a private hundred percent Canadian owned and operated company structured as a dealer owned cooperative. And it has more than a thousand locations. The only problem is it's never open. They just don't really feel like being open a lot of the time.

[A]

They actually, for how big their stores are, they have a shocking selection.

[B]

Like I needed Hardware is usually like a small store in like kind of strip mall style situations.

[A]

Yeah, I, I needed some, I needed some random like gas fitting or something. And I had. Actually this was before I even like cared about going to smaller stores at all. And I, I, so I had already struck out at I think Canadian Tire, Home Depot and Rona. And I was like, oh yeah, Home Hardware. Okay, Maybe because I needed it for that weekend for a barbecue, I needed this like random gas fitting of some sort. Right? Because the barbecue I bought at Costco used a US interface instead of the like one that was more standard in Canada or something like that. Even though I bought it at Canadian Costco. Anyway, the point is Home Hardware had it. They had one unit in stock. And I was like, how do you have this? And they're like, I don't know. We try to have the right stuff. Like, okay, you know what, it doesn't matter why you have it. I'll take it. It was like $13 or whatever for one stupid thing. But I was happy to have it because I was able to make borgers. All right, why don't we. Oh wait, no, I'm not done talking about the PlayStation 3 update yet. I want to talk about the scary part of Sony providing firmware updates on a 20 year old console. On the one hand, that's pretty cool, right? For them to update the, the Blu Ray encryption key and all that. On the other hand, what the, what if they hadn't. What if Sony someday doesn't exist? To update, to update the firmware of this. How much does it suck that not only today, the things we're getting today are at the mercy of the manufacturer to allow them to continue to function. But already we're reaching end of life probably. I mean, there's no way they continue doing this forever, right? It's been 20 years. We're already reaching the point where pretty basic. They did pretty old. Yeah, that's cool. But pretty old stuff is purely at the mercy of the manufacturer who made it 20 years ago for it to continue to function in the way that they said it would. I just wanted to share that little awful thought.

[B]

Yeah, I don't, I don't know how it works, but somebody said it would only affect new releases on Blu Ray, which is not as bad. Yeah, but it still sucks.

[A]

Not great.

[B]

Yep, yep.

[A]

Like I, I mean my, my VHS player doesn't care when my VHS came out. No, it will. Just read it now. It won't run a dvhs, mind you. Okay. Like there are, you know, we have standards people. Literally, we have standards. DVHS is a standard.

[B]

I knew, I knew it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need, we need Riley's like thing that he was doing.

[A]

Thanks, Dan. That was actually pretty good. All right. Oh, float plane announcement. Yes, we should do that. What's going on on Floatplane this week? Early access. Early access time. We have opinions about tech. Like, is open source always better than closed source software? Is piracy. Okay, you've probably developed some thoughts on these subjects, but do you share the same opinion as the LTT writers? Do they share the same opinions as each other? Find out on Floatplane. Early access right now. Save Kablamo. You're welcome. What else do we have going on on Floatplane right now? Oh, wait, I'm supposed to explain the video further. We gave the writers a statement. They have to say how much they agree or disagree with it, then defend their position. And they can change their position after listening to their peers show interesting and science stuff. You can also check out the nine questions that we cut from the main release. Boop. Right now. Because it was going to be too long. I mean, we knew we were filming extra when we went into it. So. So we, we cut some of them. All right. Sponsors one and two. The show is brought to you today by Vessi. They say April showers bring May flowers, but what about March flowers? They just bring a chance to upgrade your wardrobe with a shiny new pair of Vessi shoes. And their weekend neo is perfect for woodland wandering, everyday adventures and slushy cityscapes. They'll keep your socks nice and dry because Vessi claims their patented Dymatex material makes their shoes 100% waterproof. And oh, this is cool. Thanks to an influx of requests guests, Vessi has done something awesome and added half sizes to their roster of shoes. Every pair comes with a one year warranty alongside 30 day hassle free returns. And you may have even seen some Vessi shoes pop up in our videos. That's because several members. I shouldn't even say several. Many members of our teams have taken to wearing Vessis themselves. Get 15% off your weekend [e-mail] Wan show and you get wow, free shipping, a year warranty and 30 day hassle free returns. What could go wrong? Not wet feet, that's for sure. The show is also brought to you by Factor Meals. We are moving headfirst into spring, which means more sunlight and more activities can also be easy to default to the drive thru @mcgoblins, which is about as good for your health as a hearty kick to the shin. But with our sponsor Factor Meals, you can have a meal that fits your health goals in just a couple of minutes. There are options for every diet from high protein to meals for the calorie, smart individual. And there's no refined sugars, no artificial sweeteners, just a bunch of beautiful vegetables, lean and clean meats all made with whole food ingredients. And if it sounds like I'm talking about frozen dinners, no, Factor Meals are fresh, never frozen. So as things get busy and it starts getting tempting to cut corners to save time, don't let what you put put in your belly be one of those shortcuts. Head to factor meals.com when 50 off and use code when 50 off to get 50% off and free breakfast for a year. Eat like a pro this month with Factor New subscribers only varies by plan. One free breakfast item per box for one year while subscription is active. Did I do that? I do the voice pretty good.

[B]

It was pretty good. I. I was. Yeah, I tried.

[A]

I tried to do it pretty good. Do you want pick a topic for us?

[B]

Yeah, I do. I really do do. You've picked too many topics today. I'M frustrated about it. I'm pissed.

[A]

Really sorry. You did three. I think we've only talked about three.

[B]

I wasn't even certain that you were the only one that picked them. I just went with it. Anyways, what I'm actually pissed about is Windows Recall existing and I'm happy that this happened Windows Recall was cracked Again Security researcher Alex Hagenau or Zytax Most on Twitter yeah, on Twitter or other things that have handles Their most recent dive into testing recalls vulnerabilities led to an update to Total Recall, the extraction tool that Alex developed to find the initial vulnerabilities back in 2024 that exposed everything being stored in an unencrypted SQLite database.

[A]

Sick.

[B]

Sick. For those unfamiliar with Windows Recall, it's packed into Copilot plus to take regular screenshots of your screen and then stores it locally so that you can ask AI about what you've looked at in the past. It's limited to specific Windows 11 systems, as it requires an NPU to support it. The feature originally was defaulted to enabled.

[A]

Now it's opt in, which is a big improvement. Yes, but still an enormous problem. Because just because Luke opts in and all of our chat logs on his system are he has opted into storing does not mean that I am comfortable with that happening. Especially if that were to be compromised at some point. I mean, I would never say anything in a chat to Luke that would be potentially compromised, so I wouldn't care if he enabled Windows Recall. However, just in case he were to ever talk to someone who used, let's say, colorful analogies, for instance, it might be better if he didn't enable it.

[B]

Yeah, supposedly Windows has redesigned the entire recall architecture to use virtual base security. However, cybersecurity Kevin Beaumont, also known as Gossie the Dog, you missed the word

[A]

expert in there, but yes, cybersecurity expert.

[B]

My bad. Yep, on various platforms, probably. Twitter confirmed that you can just read the database in plain text, further adding it contains all manner of fields which aren't publicly disclosed for tracking the user's activity.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

Cool. One of the most dangerous parts is that using the tool doesn't trigger any antivirus or EDR alert either, and can be used as a standard user process. Microsoft may already be ahead of these concerns, though. Sure. As a recent Windows Central article, everything can be broken. Everything that exists can be broken into, its security can be cracked, etc.

[A]

Or may eventually be able to be like maybe today we don't have the means to open that lock.

[B]

Yeah, we'll get there someday somebody will be curious and interested enough to or

[A]

have enough money to fit or to buy the solution. We're talking and when we're talking about something like Recall, when we're talking about something as juicy as all of the user activity on a system, like there's state level actors, guys who have functionally infinite resources to put into this.

[B]

When the whole laptop saga was going on.

[A]

Which one?

[B]

Biden's son Hunter Biden's laptop.

[A]

Oh gosh.

[B]

How much would someone have paid oh yeah, Recall on his laptop. Anything like it's, it's, it's too much of like Anyways, Microsoft may have already been ahead of these concerns. As a recent Windows Central article from January 30 pointed out, Windows recall is another AI experience that I'm told is

[A]

under review, stating that their sources claims Microsoft believes its current iteration has failed. I didn't actually I read that article and I don't believe that that article. I don't believe that that statement from Microsoft referred to that there are technical problems in the database being stored in plain text. I read that as Microsoft understands that it has a PR problem.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

That was my interpretation of that statement from Microsoft. So I'm not going to give them credit for this. Sorry.

[B]

And neither of my computers running Linux have this at all. All which is so cool. And I don't think we honestly have a ton more to say about that. Good job, Alex. Good job, Kevin.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Hell yeah. Google Search.

[A]

Oh, you want to do this one?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay, let's do it.

[B]

Google Search is replacing headlines and they're using AI to do it because of course the Verge experimented experienced their own headline which was in quotes. I used the Cheat on everything AI tool and it didn't help me cheat on anything and it was changed to just cheat on everything AI2 I'm assuming that's supposed to be tool.

[A]

No, I think. Is it actually two I'll double, I'll double check.

[B]

The Verge pointed out that the change title almost sounds like they're endorsing the product. I agree.

[A]

Oh, it was tool. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. Okay. So Cheat on everything AI Tool. I I don't even think it almost. It just absolutely does. The Verge pointed out that the change title almost sounds like they're endorsing a product. I think it just makes them actually sound like they're endorsing a product which they did not recommend. Cheat on Everything AI Tool.

[A]

Yeah, that sounds like, that sounds like, like an affirmative.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Statement of the tools real functionality, especially

[B]

from a place like the Verge. It makes them sound like they're saying there is a tool that allows you to cheat on everything.

[A]

Especially because I'm looking.

[B]

That's crazy.

[A]

I'm looking at the, at the Verge's article here. Cheat on Everything AI tool. Yeah, it's. I, Yeah, I actually. This is going to be one of those ones I actually disagree with, Mr. Hollister. I think that, I think that, I think that you're. I think in trying to present a neutral viewpoint on this, which. Good on you. Good job. That's your job. Yeah. As a, as a, as a journalist. Right. That's. That you did the right thing. But I think in doing that, you're almost underselling. How egregious is.

[B]

That is crazy.

[A]

I don't think it almost sounds like an endorsement. I think it sounds like, if not a. Like, you know, Billy Mays here with the Cheat on everything AI tool. I think at the very least it sounds like an endorsement of the functionality of the product. And it very clearly isn't because your original headline very clearly says it didn't help me cheat on anything. Yikes.

[B]

Is so bad for two various very obvious reasons that people have already thought about, I'm sure. But there's the. By changing your title, they might make it less clickable, which would encourage people to just read the AI summary provided by Google and not click onto your site. And also in this specific case, it's a, it's a negative title about AI, which they changed into a positive or arguably, but I don't think so neutral title about AI. As a company who's pushing really hard for AI stuff, there's like two pronged. Definitely bad. This isn't apparently the first time Google earlier this year was also changing headlines in the Google News tab using AI as well. And the Verge reported several times where it could give the wrong impression to what the article actually is, including one example where the headline was changed to the complete opposite of what the story actually was, which I think is arguably close to what just happened. The title was apparently US Reverses Foreign Drone Band Ban was what an article was changed to when it was just an update on the foreign drone banned, not a reversal. Wow. Some comments on the article point out a great point, such as how is this even useful for Google?

[A]

Well, you have to assume that Google is. I know, I. Nope, I disagree. I see how this is very useful for Google. Yeah, Google is optimizing for click through and wants to keep you in their ecosystem. I think Cheat on Everything AI tool from the Verge is something I would be more likely to click on versus I used the Cheat on Everything AI tool and it didn't help me cheat on anything because the original headline tells me all that I need to know that there are AI cheating tools that are useless. I have no interest in AI cheating, so I don't need to know which specific one it is. So I don't really care. I don't need to click on it. Whereas the Cheat on Everything AI tool, if it, if it works, I might be more, I might be more interested. Like I, I guess I'd be more interested in finding one that works if I cared at all, than finding one that didn't work and just hearing like a snarky, you know, anti AI cheating article. You know what I mean?

[B]

One of the things I pointed out my two arguments earlier, but another one of the things with Google in general is they are primarily interested in retention in their things so they can serve you ads and everything else.

[A]

So they claim on YouTube that they care about satisfaction and not just retention. But to me it feels like a

[B]

really hard time believing that.

[A]

It feels like what is satisfaction if not staying retention?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so I think that that has become a little bit perverted over the years that focus on satisfaction has. Because retention can be such a powerful proxy for satisfaction. I think that I think they've lost their way a little bit. And this would be a perfect example because yeah, I'd be way more likely to click on US Reverses foreign drone ban and I'd be, if I was an interested party, way more likely to click on the Cheat on Everything AI tool than update on this band that already exists. And this thing didn't help me cheat on anything. So in terms of just generating click through and engagement with my with Google search results in the Google News feed. Yeah, 100% I can understand why they're doing this.

[B]

Yeah, brutal.

[A]

Don't do that anymore, Google. Like you're gonna listen. What else we got? How about. Do you want some good news? Yeah, yeah, let's do some good news. Steve Wozniak actually.

[B]

No, that's really exciting. Do that one.

[A]

Steve Wozniak saw the LTT Core Master remote video and liked it. Someone on Discord said they they know Steve Wozniak and they sent the Core Master remote video to him. Steve responded saying, this is the coolest thing I've watched in ages. This part isn't in my notes, but he also said I haven't finished watching the whole thing yet. I guess he's probably a pretty Busy dude. But hey, I appreciate, I appreciate him watching at least part of it. And I also appreciate him bringing the Core Master remote into the world. It is truly the sort of thing that could only be spawned by a big brain engineering type who cannot fathom that other not equally big brained people will not be able to fathom this. It. Dude, this thing. Did you watch this video?

[B]

Yep.

[A]

This thing is so.

[B]

It's awesome.

[A]

Cool and totally still works even though it was released in I believe 1987. It's been a while since I like reviewed the, the script with Jordan and actually like used the thing with Pankrat so I could get a little detail like a year wrong. But. Oh, here it is in action. I love this intro. I'm just like going around using this like literally almost 40 year old remote. How wild is that to wrap your brain around?

[B]

And it works great.

[A]

And I'm controlling RGB strips and modern monitors and TVs and stuff with it.

[B]

It's so cool. I'm not going to lie. I kind of wanted one after I watched the video like unironically as a cool, useful piece of tech at home. Not like, oh, I have this weird archaic thing. I was just like, oh, it's actually just kind of nice. It's pretty sweet.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's really cool. And the, the deeper you get into it, the cooler it is. It's. It's. It's really cool. Oh, this is a. Anyway, so I just. I, I don't know, man. I thought that was pretty cool. So the communication channels are now open. I would, I would love it if we could do something with the was one day. I'm not making any promises. So maybe, I mean maybe. Who knows. I'm not going to make any promises and I'm not going to put any words in his mouth because I haven't even corresponded with him directly yet. It's. So far it's been my people talking to his people and a message passed along. Yeah, but I just, I just, I

[B]

just going through like doing like a history of was his projects would be. So it'll probably have to be a few videos, but it would be.

[A]

Yeah. I was gonna say that sounds like an entire channel. Luke.

[B]

Yeah, it's awesome.

[A]

It's a great pitch. It might be beyond the scope of what we might, what we might do.

[B]

Luke. Me? No, he's gonna have to ship me around the world when he comes to visit. Let's contrast that. Unless there's more you have to add.

[D]

Sure.

[B]

Wait what was I gonna. What was I gonna say?

[A]

I don't know.

[B]

I don't remember. Is True NAS going closed Source? Last week TrueNAS updated the GitHub repository with a deprecation notice stating that the repo is no longer actively maintained and have been moved to an internal infrastructure. Immediately people were confused and frustrated asking what this meant for truenas, especially since lots of people either self host their own data or even run companies infrastructure and data on TrueNAS. TrueNAS CTO made a blog post to clear up any confusion stating the following why we did It Colon we had a growing problem with bad actors forking Truenas, selling closed source commercial derivatives under their own brands and ignoring GPL and other licensing obligations. No attribution, no contribution back to the project, no support for the community or the engineering effort that built what they're reselling. What? This does not mean we are not paywalling existing free features. Period. If it's a free today, it stays free. He then followed up with more clarification on a Reddit post saying the bottom line is the open source bits of Truenas will remain open Source. They are GPLv3 after all. The build system is another matter. It's currently changing fairly radically internally now around for a variety of reasons which some of which are related to our signing infrastructure for secure boot, etc. Interesting. Many users understand the change and why it's being done, but are still not happy mainly for the sake of transparency.

[A]

So our discussion question here is is the world trending more toward open source or closed source? I mean, I don't think we have to discuss that for too long. I think overall we're trending towards open source.

[B]

There is some cruddy stuff going on right now, but usually it's a pretty good ecosystem.

[A]

Yeah, I mean any trend has, you know, dips. I think overall the world is, is, is headed that way.

[B]

I agree. I mean we're, there's a, there's a deep seek. Is there not a deep seek thing coming?

[A]

I've heard rumblings a deep Seek thing.

[B]

The, the last thing that like temporarily crashed the American AI market was deep seek releasing them an open source model.

[A]

Right.

[B]

That like was pretty beast and I have heard through grapevines that they there's like another one coming.

[A]

Oh, like an AI thing?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, a new model.

[A]

Oh, I thought you were going to say like, like an open source NAS operating system. I was like really? Because I think Truenas is still the. I think it's still the one. Even though there are aspects of it that they are.

[B]

No, no, no. Deepseek is anticipated to release its next generation DeepSeek V4 model around the mid February to April 2026 timeline.

[A]

Oh, okay. The other question here was, does this affect Hexos at all being built on Truenas investment disclosure in Hexos? No, it doesn't. Hexos has another investment partner, Truenas X Systems. So this does not impact their ability to make Hexos awesome and continue to be built on TR as and all of that good stuff. So I'm actually, I was, I was quite relieved to hear that. That will not be a problem because that's the first thing. That's the first email I sent when I saw this news. I was like, hey, John, is this gonna be a problem?

[B]

Yeah, I was, I was pretty confident wouldn't just because I knew that though.

[A]

Yeah, he's like, nope, no, it's all gonna be good. All gonna be good. Hey, speaking of things that are all gonna be good, I don't know if it's all gonna be good, but I want to try. I want, I want to touch the MacBook Neo. I haven't actually, I haven't seen one in person yet. So I, I did my video on the Apple unveiling event. 6 core CPU, 5 core GPU, 13 inch liquid retina. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, can you imagine if I told you, you know, back when you were dailying that Asus Bamboo laptop, that you'd be able to buy a $600 US laptop with a 2408 by 1506 pixel display? I mean, the first thing you would have said was what the are those numbers for a display resolution?

[B]

Probably.

[A]

And then the second thing you would have done said after you did the math is, damn, that's some fine pixels per inch here. Yeah, it's only got 8 gigs of RAM, 256 gigs of storage.

[B]

But guys, honestly, at that time I was even cheaper. And I might have wondered if I could just get one in a lower resolution considering the screen size.

[A]

600.

[D]

Freaking fine.

[B]

Don't drop it now.

[A]

Yeah, okay.

[B]

Such a chaotic way.

[A]

That's your laptop charger.

[B]

Pretty wild.

[A]

I mean it only has like, I think it was like a 37 watt hour battery or something like that. Doesn't even have a huge battery. Don't quote me on that.

[B]

LOL. 8 gigs of RAM. Yeah. Dude, what you're doing on here is not that complicated. Yeah, and it's 600 bucks. 500 if you get the education one.

[A]

Look at this, look at this. This was apparently, according to iFixit, Apple's most repairable MacBook ever. It turns out Apple can just put screws in the damn thing so that we can just unscrew them and then just take the bottom off.

[B]

It's nice that it's so repairable because the education stuff.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

If this ends up in schools, it's going to get beat on.

[A]

Now I actually saw that Framework's CEO Investment Disclosure Framework CEO did like a reaction to Apple's repairability versus Framework. I suspect I haven't actually watched it. I suspect, you know. Yeah, it's, it's not a Framework Neurof. No, but the way that an organization like a school is going to repair a laptop is not at the like, individual component level. It's like, can they swap in a new main board? Like the entire, you know, thing. Is it, is it possible at all? Can they get the bloody thing open? Compared to do they need like a, you know, a heat gun or whatever to take apart the glue?

[B]

So, yeah, making TVs. Did you message him about that?

[A]

I mean, I messaged him about it, but I wouldn't be able to tell you anything about his response.

[B]

Good enough.

[A]

And like, oh man, the rigidity. Feel it.

[B]

That looks. I saw, I saw you feel. Feels premium.

[A]

Like. Yeah. It's not milled out of a single piece of aluminum.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because they've got, they got screws on the bottom. They just, it just like pops off. So it's not like they, you know, it's not like a super premium body, you know, like they used to do.

[B]

There are, are a lot more expensive laptops I've done that to that have just hinge feels good. I heard the close and knew it was nice.

[A]

Whoa.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Did you, did you did the hair raise on the back of your neck,

[D]

Dan, when you heard that sound? I'm glad I'm not on, on camera.

[A]

Did you get the tingles? Did you get the tingles?

[D]

That was nice.

[A]

Dude. The bezel isn't even that big.

[B]

No.

[A]

Like, no. Okay, I'm going to try the keyboard.

[B]

As far as I've heard, it's just the same keyboard, so it should be good. But we'll see. He didn't immediately.

[A]

Hold on, I'm. I'm entering the password. I'm entering the password. I'm not trying to use it yet. I'm not trying to. Oh, man. You know what though, dude, wait, I think I, I think I might have said a wrong thing. The bottom's a separate piece, but the Top does seem to be unibody. Holy crap, Dude. I think. I think that. I think that. I think this. Am I missing something? Yeah. Bottom is stamped, but I think the upper. The upper piece is. Is milled out of a single piece of aluminum.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

What? For $600?

[B]

Is it online? Are you on Wi Fi for $600? Luke, are you on WI fi?

[A]

No, I'm not on WI fi right now. No. Network lmg. I can. I can connect.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Whoa.

[B]

Go to Monkey type.

[C]

Wait.

[A]

Shut up. W. Collarini says it's injection molded aluminum, Right. Because it's using a bunch of recycled aluminum.

[B]

That's crazy, dude.

[A]

That is freaking nuts. Yeah. Current year suck says. Yeah. It's not cnc. It feels like it could be.

[B]

It feels really good.

[A]

It feels like it could be. Like. I do not detect any difference in the rigidity of this chassis and in the deck flex of this chassis. That makes me feel like I'm missing out on anything for it not being unibody.

[B]

Monkey type.

[A]

Okay, hold on. I need just like. What the bloody heck? At pages. That's right.

[B]

Oh, no. I was just saying go to the website. Monkey Type. It's a. It's like a typing test.

[A]

Oh, sure. Okay.

[B]

It's just really easy. I don't know. It's what I use when I'm usually using keyboards. You don't know what to type and then this gives you like an objective. I don't care what speed you come up with.

[A]

Yeah, for sure. Oh. I was about to say, well, hey, I should just plug into HDMI and then everyone can just watch along with me. Yeah.

[B]

Do you have a. I might.

[A]

That is a downside. I have a dongle. See who can get their dongle first.

[B]

I just gave up.

[D]

All right.

[A]

I don't go anywhere without one anymore.

[B]

Dan also went and grabbed one for the. Everyone that could see that.

[A]

Dongle Life. Dongle Life boys allow accessory to connect.

[B]

I mean, we don't have to show people.

[A]

Why not? We're having a live experience here. It's an experience. Oh, right. I gotta make sure I plug into the USB 3. 1. I think it's actually the back one.

[B]

Is it indicated?

[A]

Yeah. Software use other port for display.

[B]

That's not bad.

[A]

That's pretty. That's actually a pretty seamless experience as far as intuitive. One might say this kind of. This kind of software that only one of them supports display, but at least they're using software to make it a somewhat palatable experience for the user.

[D]

Good luck getting it to work. With my system here.

[A]

Oh really? Is that going to be a problem

[D]

if you can output 1080 and it not be pretend 1080.

[A]

I hate that on Mac.

[D]

Mac is pretty bad for it. Windows Now, Windows 11 also bad for it. It actually really depends on the system. I think Nvidia in particular works a little bit better. AMD seems to really struggle with it. Just checking here for you.

[A]

Yeah, we ran into that when we were doing a game stream a little while ago too. I think it was intel and.

[D]

That's right.

[A]

Was it AMD that was having the trouble though?

[D]

It's not. I can't remember.

[A]

I think it was AMD that we were having trouble with where it was

[D]

like 1920 by 1200. I am getting.

[A]

It was outputting at 1920 by 1080 but it was actually a 4K signal or something like that. That was like, like 4 to 1 or something. It was ridiculous. So yeah, I tried 1920 by 1200. Are you getting it?

[D]

I'm seeing it, but I'm not getting it into my system here. Okay, give me a second.

[A]

That was. Nah, I'm over it.

[B]

Okay. It looks pretty smooth.

[A]

Damn. You jinxed me.

[B]

Okay, new keyboard you're not used to.

[A]

Yeah. For a brand new keyboard, I'll take 98 words per minute with 96% accuracy. Thank you very much. Very.

[B]

And you were. I think the. The meta on Monkey type is not to go back and correct. And you were going back and correcting. So you can see your speed going because you were going back.

[A]

I guess that's.

[B]

So you probably even would have been a little fat. There's the. I think the 101 was your like true speed or whatever.

[A]

Or is that raw? Is 100.

[B]

100 raw input was 101.

[A]

Yeah. So 101 words per minute on a freaking keyboard I've never touched before.

[B]

Like literally basically first typing other than the password, man. So I take it keyboard feels pretty good?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, she good.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

Just like not cheesy, stupid regular old function keys. Like I know nothing about. Fine.

[B]

Mac os. It has Steam on it.

[A]

Trackpad's fine. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Labs has been at this already. This is not the.

[B]

No, I know. Labs has been after it. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

There's Steam for Mac OS I picked it up from.

[B]

That's why I brought it because it was in the lab. How much stuff is like not much. Yeah. Okay.

[A]

But like, you know, there's games like here. Just like on Linux, it has a little Mac pilled filter that you can apply to It.

[B]

That's a few.

[A]

So on the Labs account, we got Baldur's Gate 3. You know, quality game that people enjoy.

[B]

I heard it's pretty good.

[A]

Control, ultimate edition, Counter Strike 2, Cuphead, Cyberpunk, Dota Factorio, Hitman, World of Assassination, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider, Sid Meier's Civilization 6.

[B]

Hey, that's. It's pretty good at this point.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

7. Never will be, but it is.

[A]

Back to the perspective adjustment. If you think of your Mac as a console, then, you know, and you just go with whatever game your Mac happens to run, then you could. You could find stuff to play. Man, that's high DPI. Freaking screen. $600. This is gonna completely destroy the, like, I need a laptop for my kid or my grandma market. I would just.

[B]

Honestly, like, I would just buy this build quality wise, no question. It seems like it's just a good. Like a. Actually kind of great, great. Like, what the heck?

[A]

At this price, it's unrealistic.

[B]

Basically, if you can keep your tabs under control. So you're not going to use more than the 8 gigs of RAM. Yeah, it's going to be fine.

[A]

Yeah. Unreal. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I'm not plugged back in, Dan.

[B]

It's actually super impressive.

[A]

This is all you need to know.

[B]

I've heard. I know we.

[A]

This is all you need to know. The fact that he couldn't resist touching it. It's a Mac. Yeah, I don't think that's ever happened before.

[B]

That's a pretty good point.

[A]

He wanted to touch it and play with it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I've never seen that.

[B]

Yeah, I don't think I have either. I didn't do that, like, consciously. I was just like, oh, that's interesting. And wanted to, like, check it out.

[A]

Yep. I knew you wouldn't be doing it consciously. You just. I put it there and you couldn't help it. You were like, this can't be as good as he's making it sound. I'm gonna touch it.

[B]

No, I was pretty sold when you had me do the flexing. I was like, are you kidding me? On a $600 laptop? That's insane. I know.

[A]

I mean, your brain, like, you just. You couldn't help it. Yeah.

[B]

You just.

[A]

You had to touch it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You have to experience it for yourself.

[B]

I still don't. Like, I. I tried to open up like a menu or something, and a bunch of emojis came up. Like, I still have no idea how Mac OS works. Mac OS and me just. Just do this. But it's not actually Mac OS's fault. Like it, it seems like it's really intuitive for a lot of people. I just, I'm just so not used to it.

[A]

There's a lot of things that also people who use Mac OS just wish they would change.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like one of the ones that drove me absolutely knocking futs during my last switch to Mac was the the natural scrolling versus inverse scrolling direction. Apple's logic is that if you like it one way for your trackpad, you also like it this. I know, it's crazy. If you like it one way for your trackpad, you also like it the same way for your mouse wheel. So when you change that toggle in Mac os, they're bound. So every time I switch between using a trackpad where I like natural scrolling and using a mouse where I like literal directional scrolling, I had to change it. I think there's a little app that you have. Yeah. So just like anything on Mac os, there's someone built an app to fix it because Apple can't be bothered. But it would really just be better if Apple just like decoupled those things in the menu because a mouse and a trackpad are not in fact the same thing. So how about we not treat them as the same thing? That'd be great. Anyway, there are things about macOS that are actually just pants on head stupid. But there's also things that are very intuitive to people to whom they're intuitive.

[D]

What's interesting is this laptop has come back as 1920 by 1260 P. So maybe there was just something that wasn't cromulent with the dock, but okay. Be interesting to see.

[A]

Andre B asks Linus how is that different than Linux and someone built something to fix a problem they had that Apple is a multi trillion dollar company. That's the problem I hate.

[B]

One of my least. And I understand this is like I'm gonna be biased here, I fully understand that. But one of my least favorite takes.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Is when like I'll point at like Google or Microsoft or Discord. Like I'll make fun of teams and people will be like floatplane has bugs. Like dude.

[A]

Yeah. But like,

[B]

like the scale is so

[A]

the team that works on emojis on teams is almost certainly larger than the entire floatplane team. So we don't even want to hear it.

[B]

Yeah. It's just like man, you gotta understand the scale of certain things and you

[A]

gotta understand the importance of the work that they're doing. Floatplanes work is incredibly important to us and our legion of Dedicated people who support us on Floatplane. Thank you guys very, very much.

[B]

And the other creators on Full Plane.

[A]

But realistically, if Floatplane, you know, had something suboptimal, we're talking about tens of thousands of users and accessing a service that is not critical to them, like, getting their work done for the most part.

[B]

The, like, economy of a huge part of the world.

[A]

Yeah. Relies on people using teams efficiently and effectively. Like. Like. We're not. We're not talking about. We're not talking about parallel software efforts here.

[D]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh, I love. I love it when people make an effort to make an analogy. And I appreciate. I appreciate their effort. I appreciate their sacrifice.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

All right, why don't we jump into Facebook launching a new monetization program to attract popular creators from TikTok and YouTube. Well, this is the first time hearing of it, so how popular could they possibly be? No, I'm just kidding. Facebook has launched creator fast track, paying established creators guaranteed monthly income for three months to start posting reels on the platform.

[B]

By the way, your company has heard of this. You just haven't.

[A]

Right. $1,000 a month for creators with a hundred thousand plus followers on TikTok, YouTube or Instagram, and $3,000 a month for those over a million. Content doesn't need to be exclusive to Facebook, and old catalog content qualifies. After three months, the guaranteed pay stops, but creators keep access to Facebook's content monetization tools and get an ongoing reach boost. Facebook paid out nearly $3 billion to creators in 2025, a 35% increase year over year. So here's my problem with this. Obviously, I. I'd be surprised if we don't sign up for this because. Yeah, I'll take Meta's free money, thank you very much. Put that in, you know, the fund to pay people with, or, you know, beautify the office or do whatever the crap else it is that we're doing around here with our money. Wait, I agree. This is Linus's only poison. You think I don't read the things you type in chat?

[B]

I meant to type position.

[A]

Oh, it is clearly. Oh, okay. It is critical to the world that we get our float plane videos. What do you mean? Says one of our floatplane viewers.

[B]

And I said, I agree. This is only Linus's position.

[A]

Okay, I get it, all right? I get it.

[B]

But I accidentally typed poison.

[A]

What are you talking about my poison in here for?

[B]

Yeah, I know.

[A]

Why is floatplane conspiring?

[B]

I was just joking. And then I just completely typoed a whole word and made it very confusing.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

So obviously I'll take Meta's free money, I'm sure. Yeah, that'll help to fund various endeavors around here that we, that we do. But I have about this much faith in their ability to build a creator monetizing system that is as powerful as what YouTube has done. For me, the bigger question is will YouTube continue to degrade in quality and eventually meet Facebook where they are making Facebook competitive? Because Facebook has tried to compete in creator monetization before. They had, they had a whole program they like, they were like, we're launching video. And then it turned out a lot of the stats for their engagement with that was actually very fake.

[B]

And although the whole TV industry and especially newsprint industry is legitimately fake.

[A]

Yeah. And how are they doing these days?

[B]

Yeah, that's fair.

[A]

So. So Facebook did that whole push and then completely abandoned video creators and then

[B]

didn't the same thing happen with live streaming?

[A]

So here's my issue. Facebook is YouTube, for all of their warts, has been shockingly consistent. They have never altered the deal on the payout for VOD content. And while they didn't really have to, they created a reasonable program for shorts as well that shares that shares revenue with the creators who create on their platform and who give their platform any value. I don't think that Facebook really understands the value of original human crafted content. Facebook seems to be perfectly happy to simply maximize engagement with any slop garbage on their platforms. And that fundamental inability to understand what makes YouTube valuable, what makes YouTubers interesting for people to engage with, and the fact that Facebook has tried to court creators before and utterly failed because they just altered the deal and bailed gives me zero faith that they understand what it is that people value about a platform like YouTube and that they will be consistent and will be able to support this over the very long term that it's going to take to build that trust. I just don't buy it. However, YouTube also seems to be shifting their priorities and I'm not sure if YouTube fully understands the value of what they created over the last 20 years anymore either.

[B]

Really worried about that.

[A]

I'm getting pretty worried about it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What was I gonna. What was I gonna say?

[B]

I don't want to lose my thing, man.

[A]

Yeah, I mean it's. Overall, I think YouTube has been a pretty good. It's been a pretty good gig, hasn't it?

[B]

I don't even.

[A]

And it's been pretty great to use as a user.

[B]

I was gonna say both sides like, as.

[A]

As it's all about stacking W's. Yeah. The more wins. It's been a win for sponsors and advertisers. It's been a win for the creator economy. It's been a win for viewers. I think overall, YouTube makes more money on ads. Yeah.

[B]

Like, it's clearly winning for them.

[A]

Can we just not get up?

[B]

And you've managed to do so for a really long time.

[A]

Yeah, like, impressively.

[B]

Very. Just keep going.

[A]

Like, say what you will about Susan. Rest in peace. Right. Like, clearly they did a lot right under her leadership. And I'm just. I. I've met Neil a couple times, actually, because he didn't used to be like the CEO big shot. I never got to meet Susan, but I've met Neil a handful of times and he's a super smart dude. I just, I want to see. I don't know, I kind of. I kind of want to chat with him. You know, just have a chat. Like, what are we. Like, what are we doing?

[B]

Careful.

[A]

Yeah. Can we please. Yeah. Can we please be careful?

[B]

It's just, it's like, you know, everyone's driving down the road and, like little normal cars and stuff and they're trying to, like, while all the traffic is go by, just roll a spaceship down the middle. And they've managed to.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

For all of these years.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And now they're screwing around and it's like we watch it. Terrible analogy, but watch it because, like, the potential damage is just so high.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So high. I. I think, like, I. I think you kind of compared it to the Library of Alexandria. Sort of.

[A]

Yeah. Not sort of directly. I believe it's a wonder of the world.

[B]

We are legitimately at risk of losing it. Like, it's actually very important that they like their head on their shoulders.

[A]

I told you that during my. During my vacation, I learned how to strip down an RC car differential.

[B]

You did that off YouTube?

[A]

Of course I did.

[B]

I had to fix my washing machine a while ago. YouTube.

[A]

It's really important.

[B]

Everything I, like, learn these days involves, if not exclusively, YouTube.

[A]

So the Almighty Q asks, what are they doing that's so bad? It's not so bad as much as it is a direction. It smells weird.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

The vibe is off, as the kids might say. They're just. They're. They're doing stuff that's like. It seems to not be aligned with the YouTube identity. It seems to want to be everything to everyone instead of be itself. Like, I like my. I forget why I was talking to my kids about this, for some reason, about. Just like it. Maybe it was to do with, like, their app usage or something like that, but it was just like how. How YouTube is not content to. No, it must have been, Yvonne. How YouTube's not content to be YouTube and they're so focused on how to compete with TikTok and how to compete with traditional media that they're losing track of what made them special in the first place. I don't. I don't want. I was talking to. Yeah, I remember now. I was talking to Yvonne about how you felt the need to remove the YouTube app from your phone

[B]

as, like a deep enjoyer of YouTube.

[A]

Yeah. And how that felt. How it feels like. Like an. Like a bad habit now or. It can feel like a bad habit.

[B]

It's. Yeah, it's. It's not good. To me, it feels like you and I are so deeply rooted in this, so we can smell it already.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Because we're, like, right up in it.

[A]

We live it.

[B]

And I feel like this is maybe a Windows, like, 10 moment. Windows 11 is maybe coming, and we're worried about that. And after Windows 11, as far as we can tell, is just Death Valley. Like, so it's like, I'm worried about where it could go because the vibe, the leanings, the direction is concerning.

[A]

Like, the parallels can't be ignored. Search has been fundamentally broken for years. You're a God search company. How can your search be this bad?

[B]

One of the biggest criticisms right now of Gmail and Drive is it's impossible to find anything. The search companies, two of the search companies, major products, searches like the main complaint, and has gotten actively worse. It feels like, yeah, like, this is bad. It's very concerning. And YouTube is still great and Gmail still pretty cool.

[A]

Still a wonder of the world.

[B]

Drive, it's still like the best experience for a collaborative text editor that I've had.

[A]

Docs. But yes, well, yeah, yep.

[B]

But it's in Drive. Whatever. But it's. It's the trend line. It's doing that.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Maybe, Maybe that. It's. It's only a little down, but it feels like it's down. And that's just like, oh, no. Because this thing is extremely important, so we needed to not go down. Yeah.

[A]

Anyways, speaking of things getting worse, Plex is now enforcing its remote streaming paywall on smart TVs. Starting March 23, users on Samsung, LG, Vizio, PlayStation and Xbox will need either a Plex pass for $6.99 a month or the cheaper remote watch pass $1.99 a month to stream personal media outside their home network. This has been rolling out since late 2025, but smart TVs are the latest devices to get hit. It is important to note that only one person in the relationship needs to pay if the server owner has a Plex Pass, which is still available in a lifetime form, which makes a big difference to me.

[B]

It does, actually.

[A]

When something requires a subscription, I think that's pretty up. But when something can be purchased outright for access forever, that helps a lot. However, when the deal is being altered, that's pretty up. So we're kind of in a. We're kind of in a f ed up sandwich here with some, you know, not up meat in it, if that makes sense. Anyway, an email went out to let people know that this is now starting to be enforced. And our discussion question is Plex built its entire user base on being the free alternative to paid streaming platforms for filthy pirates. At what point does nickel and diming the core feature drive those users straight to something like jellyfin? I mean, I think that point has been happening for an awful long time now. I still use it because I have a lifetime Plex Pass, but there are certain aspects of Plex that are so degraded at this point that they're basically not functional. I mean, here, let's go to the Linus Cam for a second. Here I have my Plex up. My back button is just not working. The app has been so buggy for me lately. My system wide back button works. So that's the magic of Android for you. That's wonderful. But this is something that I only just discovered because I haven't tried to download any media directly to my device lately. So I. Well, it was really broken for years, the download feature, and so I tried to download some stuff for the plane and here's a bunch of stuff that I downloaded. So that's good. It finally works. I was able to. I was able to download something to. To my phone. There you go. Whatever the point is. There you go, there you go. It's working. Okay, so that's cool. Intro, skip. Intro, Skip is working. That's. That's a good Plex feature. Plex Pass feature. But then here's something bad. I'm just going to skip over to the end of this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, we got 12 seconds left. You might have noticed that interface looked kind of crap, right? Pretty crap interface. Just a list of files.

[B]

Sure. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Whereas the Plex app used to support sorting all of Your downloads, like according to the show that they are and the. The episode that they are and stuff. Now, the list of files not only is not sorted in any meaningful way. Did you notice the next file didn't start playing? So. So this is.

[B]

You don't want that coming.

[A]

Yeah, the random, random snippets of the episode just play until it crashes.

[B]

That's odd. Is it just a bug?

[A]

What year is it, Luke? And then it just dumped me back on. It dumped me back on the file list. What year is it that I can't just play back a basic video file on my phone?

[B]

That's a little odd.

[A]

How is it that a company whose entire job is playing video files, that's your. That's actually your job is that there's a video file and it plays on the device that I play it on. I'm not even asking to stream it. You don't have a functioning player that doesn't just bug out when I play a file. It is 2026.

[B]

And it's so wild to me that companies like this. I just looking stuff up and I'm trying to find like actual stats on this, but it sounds like they're. They were like nearing profitability in 2024. They've existed for so long.

[A]

I, I just. I just. I just don't. I don't understand it. At what point do they just throw away whatever code they have and just use vlc? Like, I just. Honestly though, what is for what Plex is.

[B]

I'm a little surprised they bother to have their own player, to be honest.

[A]

Like, I. Yeah, Humanoid says just give you a plain file. Downloadable. That's the, that's the thing. I don't always want just a plain file download because I want to transcode it. So this is transcoded. So to Plex's credit, it managed to do that. Mostly. I think I had about a 5% fail. 5% fail rate. And I couldn't even.

[B]

In regards to what your local phone sees, that could still be a plain file download.

[A]

Oh, well, yeah. So to Plex's credit, they did do the transcode. But yes, that's all I have on my phone is a plain file. And what was really irritating was because it stores the data in a. Within some. Look, I'm not an expert on Android file management because it stores the data within the app, I guess, rather than within the folder structure in a way that is user accessible. I couldn't even open up VLC and then just browse to it. It's not just in your downloads folder, which I don't see any reason why it couldn't just do. Why not? It already has weird limitations where it like only works if you like have that screen open stuff reliably and theoretically it can do it in the background I think. But it like only maybe like sometimes works anyway.

[B]

Weird company though.

[A]

Yeah, weird company. I don't know. I wish I just like.

[B]

I wonder how much money they have.

[A]

I wish them luck to be able

[B]

to have devs and do things.

[A]

Overall, I love, I love the idea of the product and I mostly love what the product mostly is. We've, we've even like we've worked with them. We've done some sponsorship stuff with them in the past. I think Colton's team is in talks about like getting LTT on their like free Plex platform. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Luke, Dan and I used Plex for, for a movie night like not that long ago. Yeah, that was pretty cool. It was something that none of us had a physical copy of or even a not physical copy of. And we wanted to watch Dr. Strangelove and it was just like on Plex and we just watched it and it was a pretty great experience. Worked perfect.

[B]

Yep. Also worked perfect like 10 years ago though.

[A]

No, I don't think Plex had just like movies integrated 10 years ago.

[B]

Oh, that was theirs.

[A]

Yeah, that was theirs.

[B]

I forgot that was there.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was pretty cool. Yeah. Do you ever think you'll switch to jellyfin? Asks Black Raven. I'm just going to have to at some point. I don't. I don't feel like I'm being given a choice. I guess that's the point of that. I was, of what I was trying to say like when I criticize Plex, it's coming from a place of rooting for them. I want them to succeed. I want them to build a great product that I'd be proud to support and proud to use. And you know what? It's much like the way I feel about Windows. I am not anti Microsoft in that way. There's certainly some things Microsoft have done that are hard to support. But I want to love Windows. I want to use. Some of the things about Windows are pretty magic. The fact that I can fire UP software from 25 years ago and just like run it on my computer 25 years ago. If you fired up software from 25 years prior and just expected it to run. Good luck. Good luck, brother. If you wanted to run 1985 software on your Windows XP machine. Come on man. That's what? No, not even. Not 1985. That'd be like 1975. Yeah.

[B]

That's why I'm like, what would software even like?

[A]

Yeah, like, think about that. And sure, not all of it works, but, you know, compatibility mode or, you know, whatever. Right. But you get what I'm talking about here, right? Like, a lot of it does work, and that's remarkable. That's incredible. I could go get my old Anno 1602 disc that I originally played on Windows 98. 98, I think, and I could probably put that in my computer today and have some chance of running it. That's pretty awesome. I like Windows. Or at least I want to. They're just making it really hard.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like really, really, really hard.

[A]

So hard. Getting a raging love for Windows. I think it's leading over here. All right, do you want to pick a topic? No, I don't want to do that.

[B]

What do we want to do? Diggs Open Beta.

[A]

I knew it. I. I called it. I had it open on my screen. I knew it.

[B]

Diggs Open Beta shuts down after just two months blaming AI bot spam. Oh, Diggs shut down its open beta.

[A]

Get him out of here. Get him out of here.

[B]

Exactly two months after launching on January 14th. After AI driven bots and SEO spammers overwhelmed the platform within hours of launch, the team banned tens of thousands of accounts and tried multiple third party tools, but nothing worked. It's worth pointing out that founder Kevin Rose had pitched AI as the fix for moderation headaches back in 2025, saying it would remove the janitorial work. And it ended up becoming the problem. Not. Not it. Not the attempt of it removing controller work. Just AI being the generation of all the garbage. Dig isn't permanently dead. A smaller team is staying on to rebuild, and Rose is returning full time in April. But CEO Justin Mazel admitted that positioning Dig as a Reddit alternative wasn't imaginative enough. Oh boy. We're not 100% certain, but we think that somebody that applied to something, I actually have to be that vague, unfortunately, used not only an AI generated resume, but an AI generated portfolio website. We think that both happened from the same person. Same person. And one of the reasons why is there's like kind of specific wording on the portfolio website that was used in the job posting, like very specific wording.

[A]

Oh, so it's like a. It's like a resume creation tool that you just insert the job posting into and then it out an optimized resume for that job posting.

[B]

And portfolio site, which is the crazy part to me.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

We're not 100% sure.

[A]

This is like. This is a crazy arms race, though. I was reading, you know, those Business Insider articles that end up in your newsfeed every once in a while. I've applied for, I've applied for 500 jobs and haven't gotten a single one. First of all, piece of advice, if you're hoping to get a job, probably the last thing you want is a profile of you and Business Insider saying that 500 other companies already decided I'm not good enough. I. Look, we should, we should talk about. We should talk about challenges.

[B]

Just don't use your real name.

[A]

You might want to anonymize it a little. Send in an AI picture and change the name. But anyway, the point is that, that in a world where people have to apply for 500 jobs and in a world where companies are filtering through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of AI generated resumes and applications, this arms race is only going to make this problem worse, Luke. Because if you had already applied to 499 jobs, what are the odds? And knowing that probably nobody's even going to read it, and sending in an AI built, optimized to be read by an AI resume was maybe a better shot of at least getting a chance to have an interview. Would you consider it?

[B]

Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I definitely.

[C]

I would.

[B]

100%. It's interesting too, because like someone in Full Plane Chat, I lost it. But someone in Full Plane Chat said most companies. Like most companies. Ah, there it is. Sinful Hands said, in fairness, most companies don't even read resumes. It's going through a filter. AI.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[B]

Which is interesting. I don't know if that's true, really. My wager would be that most current job openings are going to be at a company that filters or uses AI review or whatever. Oh, I, I don't think most companies are.

[A]

I see.

[B]

I suspect if you go for smaller

[A]

companies, they probably aren't using it as much.

[B]

Yeah, I, I think it's less likely as you go down the chain and it's more likely as you go up the chain.

[A]

But then a lot of small companies.

[B]

I'm not trying to call your thing out as being wrong. I think it is effectively a correct statement. I just, I, I just in. I'm kind of saying that for people that are applying to jobs to kind of maybe, maybe tune your approach a little bit, if you're applying to a mom and pop shop, just know that it's probably less likely that they are using AI.

[A]

Like maybe put your resume in an envelope and handwrite your name on the envelope. Maybe, you know, maybe the kinds of touches that show.

[B]

And that's not work for Google.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Aside from what you write in the content of your cover letter, show that you understand their vibe and when they're

[B]

getting inundated with very AI feeling resumes.

[A]

Something handmade.

[B]

Tired of. Oh, yeah, okay. This is another AI generated resume. And then they get something that feels real, whether it's handmade or just feels real at all.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like I'm literally wondering at this point if I see a typo in a resume if I'm going to think it's like a good thing.

[A]

I.

[B]

Probably not.

[A]

I hate. But I'm not sure if I disagree with you.

[B]

You know what I'm saying?

[A]

I know. I hate that because not that long ago I would said, really, in the world of spell check, you can't. You can't be bothered to run it through a spell checker. That would have been my, like, you know, I. I'm obviously amping it up a little bit, but. But that would have been my thought. It's like, really, you don't care enough time to typo every word to bother to spell check. Right. Whereas now.

[B]

Don't do that.

[A]

Whereas now I would almost feel like. Because honestly, too perfect. You didn't bother to type it yourself.

[B]

If. Yeah. If someone dumps something on me that is like very obviously AI written and it's supposed to be like about them, it does start to feel weird because it doesn't feel like they're talking to me. You know what I mean? So it's like, okay, I'm now interfacing with the AI representative of you instead of you.

[A]

Yeah. And that literally their agent.

[B]

Yeah. It doesn't feel 100% correct. So I don't know. And this is. You're gonna have to roll this gamble. And I mean, ways of doing resumes has always been a gamble. People have said the one page thing forever. But then there's people that want more information. There's some people that are gonna jump through and only look at your education. There's some people to jump through other stuff. So it's always been a gamble. But this is just another way of kind of looking at it. Is the different size of the company might impact the way that you want to apply to it.

[A]

But yeah.

[B]

Good, good.

[A]

Now let's talk about the way we apply our sponsors to this video. The show is brought to you by Zero Bounce Depending on the business, reaching out to potential clients, partners and customers via email can be a huge part of your marketing strategy. But how good is that strategy if you and your team are sending emails to addresses that just don't work? With Zero Bounce, you get a roster of email validation tools to help you connect with potential customers and community. You can make sure your messages arrive at their destination because, let's face it, that's pretty important for driving things like revenue, user activation, necessary password resets, product updates, and so many other facets of running your business. And you don't want all of those things to just disappear silently into an online voice void. So just punch in an email or use a full list and Zero Bounce will let you know which ones are worth your time and which ones are just costing you money to send. And wan show listeners can save 25% on any bonus credits purchased with code [e-mail] LinusTechTips Seriously, email is an underratedly difficult thing to do as a business, big or small. And tools like Zero Bounce are are pretty. Oh sorry there pretty critical. Yes, you should try Zero Bounce to to to to help him with that.

[D]

This is all in the notes by the way.

[A]

The show is also brought to you by amd. We had a new AMD upgrade go live this week, which you should totally check out out. Nate really, really was channeling the ultimateness of the AMD ultimate tech upgrade. He got a new NAS with a bunch of storage. He 3D printed his own case which worked out about as well as you might expect. There was a bit of jank, but the functionality was superb. He went with an upgrade for his gaming PC including a Ryzen 979800X3D. He also also picked up a giant motor for his mill. He's doing like a DIY or excuse me, router. He's doing a DIY router table with Tynan. He had a whole bunch of really cool stuff and Nate's a super fascinating character. You name something, he's knowledgeable about it. He's into it.

[B]

Sweet.

[A]

He even comes to badminton night. Unlike some people I know. Luke Dan Anyway, if you want a chance to win your video very own 9800x3D, you can enter AMD's latest giveaway at the link in the description. AMD also has a discussion question for us. Have you ever built or upgraded a PC because of a specific game? What game and how did that work out for you?

[B]

I built. I built a new computer for colton for Diablo 3. And he still owes me lunch.

[A]

Wow, that. That was a while ago. Yep. What a deadbeat.

[B]

Still owes me lunch.

[A]

Absolute deadbeat.

[B]

It's an inside joke. He doesn't actually owe me lunch.

[A]

I did not build a computer for it, but I was very jazzed, even though I'd never played Half Life and I didn't really, like, understand all the hype around it because I'd never played it. But people were so hyped that I just got kind of swept along with the hype and excitement. And I was very jazzed that my all in wonder 9600 Pro included a coupon for Half Life 2. You remember that? It was a whole thing where, you know, just Valve Time. Things there were. They partnered with ATI to do free copies of Half Life 2 with GPUs. And then by the time the game actually came out, I had actually upgraded my GPU and never played Half Life 2 on my Owen Wonder 9600 Pro, that included the game. I didn't play Half Life 2 till I had an X x 800 card, I think. Pretty funny, right?

[B]

That is pretty funny.

[A]

Yeah. So, yeah, it didn't work out that great. Classic Valve Time. All right, let's jump into our next topic here. You want to pick one or shall I?

[B]

I will. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

If you don't have one, I have one.

[B]

No, go for it.

[A]

Yeah. All right. This is great. Check this out.

[B]

Yeah. Okay.

[A]

What. Is this fake? This has got to be fake. Initially. Initially. It looks really fake.

[B]

Yes,

[A]

but that looks really real. The reflections look pretty good. You were pretty sure it was fake, right?

[B]

I was so sure it was fake.

[A]

Is this real?

[B]

It's real.

[A]

It's apparently old.

[B]

It predates AI. Yeah, I was like, part of me thought I had seen it before, which is actually why I thought it was fake, not why I thought it was real.

[A]

I actually did not.

[B]

That's why it was.

[A]

I actually did not know this was old. Okay, so, fine. Apparently, this is. This is not news. Walmart does not do this in Canada. The reason that I put it in the doc, though, was I wanted to discuss, like, you know, drone delivery packages, because this has basically been promised since drones first became accessible as a consumer item. Yeah, right. Like, I Bet there's a WAN show from 10 years ago of us being like, oh, man, like, quadcopters. Quadrotors are so cool. I can't wait till they can bring a pizza directly to my bedroom window. And then I just, you know, swipe my Mag stripe card. Because we didn't have tap to pay yet, did we? I don't know, ten years ago.

[D]

Whatever.

[A]

The point is I can't wait to put my mag stripe card in the drone's butt cheeks and then, you know, take my pizza and everything's amazing and futuristic. In terms of solving that problem. Do you feel like we're really any closer to you ordering something off of.

[B]

Not at all. Uber eats or Safe fly Lanes?

[A]

Dude, Walmart.

[B]

I think we're further actually.

[A]

Really?

[B]

I think there's been more laws put in to stop that type of stuff since then than anything that would enable it. I think hearing stories, self promotion of my sick ass, cool ass, dope ass brother. He's a firefighter for city of Vancouver. Hearing some of the stories of like someone will try to get cool fire footage on a drone and the, the blades will melt and they'll just. And the firefighters will have to like retreat and wait. If people are flying drones in because they're like actually really dangerous. Especially when people have the like older, heavier ones. Like it's, it's actually just like not okay. You're in a huge building fire, it's like five stories up and it just comes flying down.

[A]

Even the, the light ones that you don't need like a permit for and all of that. What is it, 250 grams?

[B]

I'm not sure. I don't remember.

[A]

Weight limit.

[B]

The drone that there was a drone that hit a Canadian water bomber and I think it took the water bomber out of Service or something.

[A]

250 grams. Now hold on a second. That doesn't sound like a lot, but that's half a pound. If somebody were to drop a half a pound rock on your head from five stories, you'd be pretty upset.

[B]

And they got helmets and stuff. But like you don't know how big it is. You don't know how much it weighs. You don't know.

[A]

You can't tell that.

[B]

What if something's attached to it to make it way more. What if it's like someone actually trying to be a jerk? You have no idea. Yeah, there was a drone that hit and damaged a water dropping Canadian super scooper and the aircraft was grounded after managing to land safely.

[A]

E Gadget guy says there are problems. It's plastic though. I mean it doesn't matter at that. At that speed.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Wait, what weight is weight? 250 grams of anything hitting you from five stories up doesn't matter at all. Well, it matters a little bit because there's going to Be potentially some give in it.

[B]

Oh.

[A]

But also maybe not. Because if it strikes you like battery first, then there's no give in that.

[B]

There's also like, I mean, if you're flying it through a fire, you might not necessarily be caring too much about the local laws of what you can fly.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And. And it's. And the air resistance, like, it's not. It's not one of those things where it's just like, okay, well what if it was. What if it was half a pound of feather and it's like, well, yeah, because there's air resistance. But just because it's made of plastic doesn't mean that its air resistance is going to be any higher than if it was a rock.

[B]

Once that. Yeah. Once the wings are basically gone. Density plays a role. Yeah, guys, but like these are pretty swirl. Come on.

[A]

Have you seen the size?

[B]

Figure it out.

[A]

Have you seen the size of those drones? They're still just going to frick. Okay, I'll tell you what. Anyone arguing this point right now. Anyone arguing this point. Okay. With hard hats. Okay. Because we're firefighters. If you are willing to stand under a five story building and have us drop a half pound drone onto your head and have it hit you in the head, I'll stand under a five story building and I'll take the rock. Okay. If you think they're not the same thing and you think this is not a big deal, let's go.

[B]

Someone's gonna do this now that, I

[A]

mean, I, I don't think my side of the bed is ever going to matter because they're not going to be in any condition to. Okay. They. They'll survive.

[B]

Yeah. They'll be fine.

[A]

This is a very bad idea.

[B]

The problem is that you don't know that it's that light. It could be anything. The one that I know of that I remember firefighters actually retreating for or. That's what I heard. At least there was multiple of them. And this was quite a few years ago. And they were a lot heavier. A lot heavier. These were like bigger drones.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So it was like actually kind of a problem.

[A]

Like what did a Phantom four way.

[B]

And you know, it was probably. Honestly, it was actually probably.

[A]

Remember these bad boys.

[B]

No. Like this is the era that when these were prime.

[A]

Oh, God. So these were like three pounds.

[B]

Yeah. And I'm thinking about it now. It wouldn't have been five stories up. It would have been a lot higher because it's above.

[A]

That would have killed a man.

[B]

It's above the building.

[A]

Yep. Even the half pound ones, though, like, none of this matters because getting hit by a half pound one is not good.

[B]

Yeah, I'm not saying it's good, but I'm saying when it's this era when everybody's running around with phantom fours and

[A]

there was, like, no regulation, it's like,

[B]

not actually five stories up. It's like, probably seven or eight because it's trying to actually see the whole building from above, which I'm realizing now, like, it gets pretty sketch. Yeah, let me see if I can find it.

[A]

All right.

[B]

I think the primary problem is the water bombers. Apparently, unauthorized drone flights have repeatedly forced firefighters in British Columbia to halt aerial firefighting operations, causing dangerous delays to primarily wildfires.

[A]

That's nuts, people.

[B]

Because it can hurt the planes.

[A]

People are so stupid.

[B]

Crazy, man.

[A]

Like, it's just. It's shocking how stupid people can be sometimes. Let's see, what do I want to try to segue this into? Oh, this is a good one. Co founder of Google, Sergey Brin Biden has spent so far $45 million to fight the California billionaire tax. At what point would it be more cost effective to just pay your taxes? Like, seriously, though, I pay my taxes. Why? Why is this a fight? Why does this have to be a fight? $45 million. Now, in fairness to Mr. Brin, it is estimated that he would owe upwards of $12 billion in taxes, given his net worth of $247 billion. But also, like, I don't know, dude. I.

[B]

Apparently he changed his address to try to avoid it.

[A]

Yeah. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, also co founder of Google, also contributed over $3 million to this. Meanwhile, Jensen Huang, uncharacteristically going with the popular thing to say here, has reportedly told Bloomberg that he is perfectly fine with the tax. I don't actually know the details of the billionaire tax. Do you know much about California's proposed tax?

[B]

Not in that bracket, brother. Also not in that country. Nor that state. I have no idea.

[A]

I'm not in any of those things either.

[B]

Sounds like a good thing.

[A]

It's interesting.

[B]

Screw them.

[A]

Well, here's the thing. It only works if everyone works together to tax the ultra wealthy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because the ultra wealthy are literally the most portable people on the planet and most influential. Yeah. So they can. They can just. Well, it's the portability that matters, for everyone to work together on making sure that they're taxed. Because as soon as you tell them, yeah, we're going to tax you, they can just leave.

[B]

Like he apparently did.

[A]

And there are actually economic Problems with all of the rich people just leaving. No, it's not as simple as well,

[B]

who's going to create the jobs now?

[A]

Like that whole argument is phenomenally stupid. But also the well, there's not going to be any impact because everyone will just pull together and will and everything will be exactly as fine as it was before is also not true. As usual. The truth lies somewhere in between. It is good for the economy to have business leaders. That, that is, that is true. But no, we're not completely dependent on them either. So let's see, let's have a Look here. A 1 off 5% tax. So 5% one time. And it's a, it's a tough thing to do. Like I even talked about this in the how does LMG Spend Money Video where if you were to tell me, okay, we're going to give you a tax for 5% of your net worth today. I don't know that I would be liquid enough to sustain regular business operations if it was based on like the, the valuation of like companies that I own equity.

[B]

I think if you're a billionaire, unless you're Gaben, which in that case you'll probably be fine. I suspect you're owning public companies so you might need to reduce your ownership share in order to sell some stock to pay.

[A]

But then that would have a potentially pretty impactful knock on effect if all of a sudden.

[B]

And this is why rich people don't tax. Is that core argument.

[A]

Yeah. Gilmore says I pay way more than 5% of my net worth annually. Way more than 5%. I don't know if you fully understand

[B]

what net worth is taxes he might pay 5%.

[A]

I pay more than 5% of my net worth annually. Could, could you do that easily? I guess you could if you're, if you are. Yeah. If you own nothing and I have.

[B]

I suspect most people could do that easily.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

If you're not a homeowner then you could do it. Yeah. Pretty easy.

[B]

And most people aren't. Let me see, is that true?

[A]

Yeah, I'm not sure if that's true. It depends on which generation you're talking, Luke, because I think baby boomers might, might have a different definition of most people than Gen Z and upcoming Gen Alpha here.

[B]

So the break is above 30, 25 to 29. Only 36% or 36 and a half percent of them own. Down from 44 in 2011.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And 30 to 34 is 52.3 which is down from 59 in 2011.

[A]

My generation already when we were graduating from university or not graduating in my case, we already felt like the door had been closed behind the previous generation and we were like basically left to. Left with the scraps at super inflated prices. And depending on the market you're in, it got a lot worse after that. Hey, the good news in Vancouver is things seem to be not reflected in the pricing necessarily yet, but in terms of the demand in the market, which will hopefully eventually impact pricing, things seem to be, I wouldn't say free fall, but you talk to like realtors, they're like, yeah, it's dire. Oh yeah, like, like nothing's moving.

[B]

People aren't changing the price downwards, but nothing's really moving.

[A]

So as someone who has had to. Who has had to like buy properties before to accommodate business expansion, I have kept a pretty close eye on the commercial real estate market in the Vancouver area. I have never. Oh my God, Colliers, your website is such a piece of crap. Please, for the love of God, just work this one time, please. Oh my God.

[B]

Can you just zoom in that area maybe?

[A]

No, hold on, I'm working on it.

[B]

There you go.

[A]

Just move a little, please. Oh, it moved. Thank God. Okay, here we go.

[B]

That's why I use Linux.

[A]

I have never seen it like this.

[B]

Not only that, that's a lot of places.

[A]

Dude. Dude, this is commercial. Yeah, this is industrial and commercial.

[B]

No, I know. And like I have seen this map before a long time ago and there was like a few dots.

[A]

Even if I look at for sale, that is nuts. And what's really gonna stand out? Hold on a second. Okay, the quad. Dude, it used to be everything was pre sold like a year before they completed new price available. That's a BD building. Oh yeah. BD buildings would have been completely sold out like ages before completion. Do they. They finished the quad months ago. This is down in Campbell Heights which was like the hotness a few years back for development. Okay, but hold on, there's more. Here's that abandoned mall. It's back on the market. You remember the one we've talked about multiple times? Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Is this the haunted one or the other one?

[A]

No, no, that was the hotel.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

For sale by court order. For sale by court order. For sale by court order. For sale by court order. Dude, dude, there is so price reduced.

[B]

Court ordered sale.

[A]

Also here. Someone's already trying to flip a building at the quad. The. The listing above was Beatty's listing. For sale. For sale. For sale. Price reduction. Dude, I have never seen it like this. Price reduction. For sale by Court order. It's happening.

[B]

It's bad.

[A]

It's happening. No, no, but it's bad for landowners, which I'm okay with because. Well, I'm personally. Okay.

[B]

It's just all. I mean, we're also looking at unemployment in Canada at the same time, though.

[A]

Yeah, but we hit 6.9%. Nice.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Nice for sure. Yeah.

[A]

Well, I mean, look, it's the number, Luke. It's not a good thing. I'm just saying it's the number. You can't. We can't not acknowledge the number.

[B]

Nice. I'm just also dying.

[A]

Yeah. But hey, things might get a little more affordable if you are one of the 93% that has a job.

[B]

And if that percentage doesn't go up. Yeah, things have been a little tough in Canada. Anyways, let's talk about something else. I'm getting sad.

[A]

Okay. I can find something better. Oh, yeah. Oh. Video game age ratings are changing in Europe. I just got a headache. No, no, no, this is good.

[B]

No, it's just from the. We're good.

[A]

Starting in June 2026, Pegi is overhauling its rating system so that monetization mechanics that directly determine a game's. Oh. So that monetization mechanics will directly determine a game's age rating. For the first time, Loot boxes and Gacha systems will default to 16 and up. Games with NFTs or unrestricted chat will go to 18 and up. And time limited offers like Battle Passes will land at 12 and up. So EA Sports FC, which currently sits at PEGI 3, could jump to PEGI 16 under the new rules due to ultimate team card packs. PEGI director Dirk Bosmans notes an experimental rule. A game triggered for a PEGI 12 rating for battle passes can lower it to PEGI 7 if they include a hard toggle to disable all spending by default. This is so based.

[B]

Yeah, it's really based.

[A]

I love it.

[B]

Super based.

[A]

Can the EU just like stop being so. Actually, no, I take that back. Can the EU keep being based? And can the North Americans get it together and be equally based or more based? What if we had a basedness competition and everyone could see who can be the most based in terms of regulating bull that shouldn't exist or shouldn't be targeted at kids. How about that?

[B]

Yeah, I like that.

[A]

What an idea.

[B]

One, one note. On the previous topic, some people asked, does Canada have the same underemployment issue that America has? What they mean by that is like people with big cool degrees working in lower end jobs or whatever. There is also, however, a really big problem right now because the unemployment numbers don't sound that great in quite a few countries. But what is also buffering that is that a lot of people are not able to properly claim unemployment because it is more advantageous for them to just like drive Uber eats or do that grocery delivery thing or whatever. The like gig economy jobs.

[A]

Right.

[B]

A lot of those don't get counted as unemployment, but if we're being honest with how much they pay, you're not employed. Yeah. And that doesn't mean that working for yourself does not mean that you like have a job and are bringing in income. But that means that gig economy stuff probably doesn't really count in regards to like you being able to realistically sustain yourself for a super long period of time. So like the real doesn't have a career number, a solid sustainable, going to cover your back, giving you health benefits. Career number is way higher. I, I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if Canada's is like 10 or over. If we're counting all of that. I have no idea. But there's so many different factors in here that aren't being counted.

[A]

Don't forget about all the people who immigrate here and have like super badass credentials back home but can't use them here.

[B]

No, this is what I mean. Oh, you mean that's what I mean by underemployment.

[A]

It. No, no, I know. I just mean I thought you were just talking about that in the context of locally trained people who just are not able to find a job in their trained field. Yeah, yeah. We had like super turbo immigration for probably about the last 10 years. And a lot of, a lot of it was not seemingly thoughtfully done.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Is all I'm going to say.

[B]

Canada lived off immigration. We were a massive country with no population. We lived off immigration. Immigration model was like extremely positively looked at worldwide. People would, other countries would refer to it as the Canada model and how they wanted to adopt or be more like the Canada model.

[A]

And then we just.

[B]

Awesome.

[A]

Made it dumb.

[B]

And then we just went, as you said, turbo mode and didn't adjust housing, didn't adjust infrastructure, didn't really have a plan, just flooded people in as hard as we could. And the structure, not even as hard as we could.

[A]

It was, it was hard for me to like.

[B]

Okay, that's actually a good point.

[A]

I'm gonna bring up.

[B]

I know where he's going.

[A]

I've talked about this story before, but I'm gonna bring out, bring up Mr. Dennis Liao. Okay. He doesn't work here anymore. But I love Dennis.

[B]

He's amazing.

[A]

He's amazing. I enjoyed working with him for all the years that I did. He was a super productive member of our team. And when I use the word productive that has like a icky kind of, you know, HR corporation feel. But when I talk about productive in this context, I mean he's the kind of person that you want in your country because he's going to come in and he's going to work, he's going to contribute to your gdp, he's going to pay taxes. He's, he, he, when he came in,

[B]

he's going to be doing stuff.

[A]

He was young.

[B]

He's a doer.

[A]

He was young. He had training in Canada. He went to bcit. The BC is for British Columbia. Okay. He went to bcit, spoke English, was young, was single, didn't even have a bunch of like, like non working family, you know, baggage to bring with them. And again, I'm using this from like a, like a GDP planning standpoint. We're ignoring the human element. Okay. We're going purely like, like cynical practice strategy hat. Yes.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

He should have been the easiest person in the world. It was very tough to bring in and work for us and it was darn near impossible. And it cost so much money and it took so much time. And that was when we were turbo immigration. And so I looked at it and I just went like, I don't understand so who is coming here? Like, I don't understand this.

[B]

We've had extreme.

[A]

She was coming from Taiwan, a liberal democracy. He wasn't coming from somewhere where like there's a huge like values clash. It just seemed obvious, you know, we've

[B]

had a bunch of people that we've had that are extremely valid to immigrate because of very specific, difficult to get skills that are not findable in Canada or you know, similar stories that have been practically impossible to bring up. It's been really weird. And then, yeah, the immigration door has still been so, so, so open. But again, the biggest problem really was that we just opened, opened the gate immigration wise in a however way. And there was like huge companies springing up in Canada that were like, oh, you want to immigrate to Canada? Pay us a private company a ton of money and we'll work you through the system. And that was like a huge thing in Canada anyways. We didn't adjust up anything to support them. Again, all of that stuff, infrastructure, housing policy, policy, nothing, nothing adjusted. We just immigrated crazy amounts of people.

[A]

Like, make it make sense. Like, I. Like, we. We have the. We have, like, ghost communities that are being, like, completely hollowed out, and then we're just like, okay, yeah, let's bring everyone in and dump them into the same three metropolitan centers.

[B]

Yeah. Which is weird.

[A]

Which is like. Well, like, wait, hold on a second. Like, what are we doing strategically as a nation to. To. To leverage these human resources? Which, again, is not the kind of like. Like. Like icky, you know, resource management that. That, you know, I want to do or that I feel comfortable, you know, even. Even advocating strongly for, but it just felt like. Like. Like I wouldn't say, okay, you know. Yeah, you. You. If you immigrate to Canada, you have to live in, you know, Vernon for. For three years or something like that. Like, I don't. I don't know if that. I don't know know if that would fly. I don't. I don't even. I. I wouldn't ask for that. But on the other hand, you know, we subsidize people's school in certain professions, and then we say, you can earn back your credentials if you work in a remote community, or you do this or you do that. You contribute to the, you know, the greater strategy of, you know, what we're trying to achieve with those professions. So why wouldn't you not necessarily employ a strategy like that for immigration? You bring in trained professionals, and then you kind of go, okay, yeah, and we'll waive all these costs and we'll provide all this subsidy in order to grow in a way that's healthy and structured. Look, I'm coming up with this off the top of my head.

[B]

Medical staff, like, super bad.

[A]

Sure. Like, I don't. I don't actually have a clear plan because it's not actually my job to run the province or the country. I'm just saying, any kind of plan.

[B]

What it is to run Linus town,

[A]

any plan might have been better than no plan. There was no plan, and there seemed to be no plan.

[B]

Adam pointed out this is so hard to talk about because people hear what Linus and Luke are saying and then say, so immigration bad. Yeah, we're not. That's why I prefaced it with, like, our immigration model was so good, and we immigrated a lot of people.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

We just.

[A]

I would literally be the stereotypical immigration hater who married an immigrant. Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

There's a very genuinely common topic on wan Shooting back in the Langley house was that Canada had a lower population than California. We used to talk about that all the time. It's a very common thing for us to bring up. That is no longer true because we immigrated. I think it was at least half a million people a year. As a country of at the time, less than 30 million people. It was crazy. Like, and with. With no plans to support. Supported at all. It was just wild. It was so wild. The. Yeah. Anyways. It was insane. Yeah.

[A]

What do we got here? Oh, this is rough. As reported by Tom's Hardware, the header of Silicon Power's US Online store. So this is a RAM company. Stated a full refund of the original price will be issued if there is a shortage of replacement products. And this seems to be as a direct response to the scarcity of memory in the current market. However, as of now, it just says. SP has recently become aware of discussions regarding our RMA handling procedures. They're claiming that their SOP was not followed and that warranties will continue to be governed by their warranty policy. Oh, okay. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, this is a nothing burger now. Forget it. This should have just been removed. Now that they have adjusted that Adobe has settled their DOJ lawsuit for 150 million. This was a lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice and the FTC over its subscription canceling practices. And I gotta say, their subscription counseling practices. I immediately, my first thought when I saw them was, that's gotta be illegal. Like, do you remember how. I guess it used to work? Maybe they've changed it now. Where once you bought a seat, you couldn't cancel that seat at any time. You had to keep it for the entire year.

[B]

There's, there's, Honestly, there's subscriptions really need a look. Slack kind of works this way, but they're actually pretty. No, slack doesn't work that way. Never mind. I take that back completely. GitHub is probably the easiest example here. You have to buy seats and then you like assign users to the seats. That's so archaic and should be removed. It is clearly just a way to steal money from people. Like, it's, it's actually insane. Anything that works that way is ridiculous. You should assign a license to like a person, an email, whatever.

[A]

And the second they don't need that license anymore, it should be gone.

[B]

It's not a seat that you then put an email in. No, screw that. Which is obviously a way to steal extra money.

[A]

Which is exactly how the Adobe one worked. And as long as we were growing as a company, it never actually impacted us because we never had any empty seats. But then as soon as you had an absence. If you had, even during the time it took when you had to backfill a position, you were paying for a seat that nobody was sitting.

[B]

But here's the thing, and this probably didn't happen. We're a relatively small company. But here's the thing, it creates a weird cycle even when you are growing as a company, where it's really annoying to have to go through and buy a seat and then assign a purse and do all this kind of stuff. So people will just buy bucket. The buy a seat thing has a changeable number of seats, and people will just be like, oh, whatever, just 10. And then they'll slowly fill them over the next couple months. So, like, for a lot of people, it does still cost some money, even if they're just growing.

[A]

The lawsuit started back in 2024 with the US government alleging that the company was burying early termination fees in fine print and behind hyperlinks when customers signed up for Creative Cloud subscriptions. Those fees could hit up to 50% of the remaining subscription term. Yeah, okay, that's right. Which on annual plans could be hundreds of dollars. Ridiculous. On top of hiding the fees, Adobe was also accused of making the cancellation process as painful as possible, routing customers through multiple webpages and phone trees designed to delay and discourage them from actually canceling. This 150 million is split into two halves. 75 million goes to the DOJ as a civil penalty, and the other 75 million goes toward free services for affected customers. Though Adobe hasn't said who qualifies or what exactly they'll get. I'm not expecting anything. Adobe doesn't admit to doing anything wrong. This is so frustrating to me about settlements. I understand the idea behind settling out of court, and that not necessarily meaning that you admit that you're guilty of anything, but if you're paying $150 million and you kind of go, yeah, but I didn't do anything wrong. And also, as part of the deal, you have to change what you're doing. Like, something here isn't adding up. You can't just be like, two plus two does not equal four, right? I had to pay a gigantic penalty and I have to do it a different way. But the thing I did that wasn't wrong. Come on, man. Anyway, as part of the deal, they now have to clearly disclose termination fees and how they're calculated before people sign up. And they have to send reminders before free trials turn into paid plans. Nobody is getting refunds for cancellation fees they already paid. The free services are the Only compensation on the table. Ridiculous. For context on how little this actually hurts Adobe, the company pulled in 6.4 billion in revenue in Q1 of 2026 alone. This settlement is less than three days of revenue. Okay, wonderful. So this is about like median income, Vancouver. Okay, so for 40, let's call it $45,000. If I made 45,000 a year, how much do I make in three days? Let's see if AI can do math. This will be fun.

[D]

Approximately.

[A]

Okay, so this is about like. This is about like, like a couple speeding t. Neat. So they're going to learn absolutely nothing. In the same way that people who get a couple of speeding tickets probably don't take their foot off the accelerator. Okay, cool. Well, that's good.

[B]

Very neat.

[A]

Meta has removed or will remove, excuse me, end to end encryption for private Instagram messages. And this ended up being less of a big deal than I thought, and yet an even bigger deal than I realized. Let's go through the doc first. The feature will stop working after May 8th of 2026. But here's the thing. End to end encryption on Instagram was always opt in and only available in certain regions. First tested in 2021 and formally rolled out in late 2020 2023. Meta says that their reason for killing it is low user adoption. Okay, so on the one hand I was like, okay, so this isn't that big of a deal because most people weren't using it anyway compared. But then I was like, wait, but this is an even bigger deal because what it looks like to me is that Meta is intentionally nuking this. This. Yeah, because they intentionally implemented it in such a way that people wouldn't use it. And then I got even more depressed when I realized that this was a feature that was supported on a platform that a shocking number of people used to message each other. Like, why. Why do you need to message people on Instagram, of all things? It's an app for looking at pictures or moving pictures, as it were. Why do you need to. Why do you. Why would you need to message. Message anybody there? It doesn't matter. I think I do. They had support for encryption and they're like, give it to Meta.

[B]

I think my argument would be that it's. It's not an app for looking at things anymore.

[A]

I know.

[B]

It's an app for sharing to your friends, so you're already in the share window and then you can say words in it. But if you're cool, you don't. You just react to it and then send the Next meme. Ah.

[A]

Anyway, users with existing encrypted chats will get in app notifications to download their messages and media before the May 8 cutoff. Meta has not said whether these encrypted chats will be permanently deleted after the deadline. Meta is pointing users who want encrypted messaging toward WhatsApp, where end to end encryption is on by default for all all messages and calls. Critics have pointed out that this timing lines up with growing legislative pressure around child safety and age verification laws, and with coming EU rules around the application of end to end encryption. Boo. In other news, Samsung has reportedly ceased production of their Galaxy Z Trifold after just three months. They're ending sales, saying that they never intended for the phone to be a mass market product. Evidently they saw the Trifold as a technology showcase to demonstrate Samsung's foldable engineering, not as a revenue generating product. I actually believe that rising costs of core components like DRAM and NAND flash and application processors apparently left virtually no profit margin on the device. So as part of the limited release, the phone was only sold directly through Samsung.com in small batches. Each batch sold out in two to five minutes. They apparently moved around 3,000 units across the first two allotments. I was really expecting this to like be released and I was going to buy one, so that's kind of a bummer. Demand for the phone was apparently so high that it was trading at nearly three times its retail price on the secondary market in South Korea. Samsung's mobile COO said last month the company hasn't decided whether the Trifold will give a sequel, citing manufacturing complexity, but did say that some of its features, like the widescreen aspect ratio, could come to cheaper foldables over time. Oh, I would, you know, it's funny because as a company like Samsung, I would think that I would see this situation and go, oh well, we should just charge three times as much for it and then make more of them and then it would definitely be profitable. Am I missing something here? Because like, I see why musicians, like I see why artists don't just charge three times as much for their concerts because like there's the optics. Like that's something that we actually.

[B]

But I think the 3,000 people that bought the trifold for $3,000 could probably still afford it if it was $5,000. Yeah, like if you bought a $3,000 phone, you probably don't care.

[A]

Yeah. So this is clearly a luxury item. But like we even leaned into, into the, the, the whole concern around pricing for events when we named our LAN Whale Land. We were like, oh, yeah, we're. Well, we're gonna, we're gonna acknowledge that we could charge as much as we wanted for this thing because people are gonna come to it anyway. We'll call it Whale Land and we'll have whale tickets for the people who would pay $5,000 to come. We're gonna make it a good value for them. You're gonna get a computer included in that. Like, we're not actually looking to milk anyone and then. But that revenue will help subsidize it for all the people that we can, like, charge a reasonable price for. But you have to find a balancing act because you don't want to charge so little that you just sell it immediately and people get mad at you. But you don't want to charge so much that people feel like you're overpricing it and making it out of reach for fans, and then they get mad at you. But, like Samsung, what's their concern there? Why do they care? Like, if I. Yeah, if I'm Taylor Swift or whatever, I want to find that balancing act for, you know, my concert ticket so that people are not, you know, upset one way or the other, but they could just have a five thousand dollar phone. Right? Am I missing something here, guys? Evian said Taylor Swift absolutely drags her sad fans over the coals for concert tickets. Not as much as people would pay, though. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

[B]

Which is crazy.

[A]

Like, people will pay multiple times her face value on the ticket to go to her concert so she could go higher. That's. That's all I'm trying to say. Ticketmaster intensifies. All right, guys, I think we've just got one more big topic and then we can move into After Dark. Congress is fighting over. Oh, no, let's. I'm going to ignore that one. Reddit users uncover. A Reddit user uncovers who's behind Meta's lobbying for invasive age verification technology. Meta spent a record 26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deploying 86 plus lobbyists across 45 states, which is more than Snapchat, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia combined. Part of that operation involved covertly funding a group called the Digital Childhood Alliance, a coalition presenting itself as a grassroots child safety organization with 140 plus members. Despite coordinating a 20 plus state legislative campaign with confirmed tech funding, the DCA reports an anomalously small amount of gross receipts to the IRS under $25,000. And its website went live fully formed within 24 hours of domain registration. Doesn't really seem like a grassroots organization, does it? Supplementary note, On a common point of confusion, people have been saying online that Meta's lobbying effort cost $2 billion. This apparently is not accurate. The researcher analyzed $2 billion in grants across Arabella Advisors nonprofit, ultimately ruling that pathway out. Bloomberg reported that Meta is one of the funders of the dca, citing three people familiar with the funding. When pressed in a Louisiana Senate hearing, the DCA's own executive director confirmed tech companies provide funding but refused to name them, saying she didn't feel comfortable answering. The legislation that Meta is backing, called the App Store Accountability act, would require Apple and Google to build and maintain airdrop age verification infrastructure at the App Store level. Critics argue this effectively creates a persistent identity layer that is queryable by every installed application. Social media platforms including metazone, would face no equivalent requirements under the same bill. Note that two separate bills are being conflated in some coverage of this Meta's bill. The App Store Accountability act places compliance on app stores like Google and and Apple's App Store, or Google Play and Apple's App Store. A separate bill called the Digital Age Assurance act goes further, requiring device level age collection baked into the operating system itself. Four states have now signed the App Store Accountability act into law. Utah, Texas, Louisiana and Alabama. In Louisiana alone, Meta deployed 12 lobbyists across nine firms for a single bill that passed with no opposing votes. The full Investigation, sourced from IRS 990 filings, Senate lobbying disclosures, state ethics databases, campaign finance records and corporate registries, has been published@tbote project.com and is mirrored on GitHub by the researcher under the handle Upper Up. So this is pretty cool. You guys should go check it out. It's a pretty fascinating look into how

[B]

money buys policy.

[A]

Yeah, and how that policy is not always. It's not always obvious why we don't want it and why it's worth so much money for these companies to have it. Cool.

[B]

Very. Is that the last topic?

[A]

Yeah. Why don't we do some After Dark, shall we? Yeah, let's do it. Well, there was technically Congress is fighting over user generated content liability protections, but I don't know if I want to talk about that right now. Dan. Hit me.

[D]

Sure. Welcome to After Dark. Yeah, I got a few here.

[A]

Nice.

[D]

Hey. Lrld. I guess this was from back when Riley was still here.

[B]

Ah.

[A]

Oh.

[D]

Rest in peace. Question for Luke. I'm a tech lead of a cross functional team.

[A]

That's not really a question.

[D]

My Company just introduced an AI first policy. Still not a question. I personally hate AI and also communicate this to leadership. Any advice? There's a question.

[A]

I'm gonna let you go first on this one, I think. What would you. Okay, actually, let's roleplay.

[C]

Luke,

[A]

I've just had a meeting with Taran and. Hold on. Our new policy is an AI first policy. Oh, you communicate that you hate AI to me clearly from the merch checkout message. The policy hasn't changed. Now what do you do? That wasn't really role playing. I basically just asked his question again.

[B]

I want to flip the script. And what I'd be willing to compromise on is maybe you can just type it out. Because I'm assuming you want me to answer first anyways.

[A]

No, I don't have an.

[B]

I'm very curious.

[A]

I just want to hear your take.

[B]

What you think I would do if you told me to do that.

[A]

Oh, interesting. Okay, well, you're a subversive git, so what you would probably do. Oh, man. What would you do?

[B]

And this is not a recommendation. This is you just saying what you think I would do.

[A]

Yeah. So I think what you would do is you would be really sulky for a little while. I would ask what's wrong? And you would tell me, hey, I don't feel that that issue is resolved at all. You would lay out all of the. All of the things that you presumably have already told me. Because I'm kind of going based on this scenario here. You would say, I really feel strongly we shouldn't do this. And here's the negative outcomes. And I'm assuming I am role playing right now because we don't have an AI first policy. But I'm kind of role playing the person that you're like hardlining, who, like. Yeah, that I'm. Because there are things that I've hardlined. Right. So I'm pretending that I would hardline AI So I would say, look, I really need your support in this. And I feel like what you would probably do is you would do the bare minimum. You would put on a poop eating grin and you would. You would say the script to your subordinates and then when it ultimately. But you wouldn't follow up with them. So you would support. You would pay lip service to the effort and you would support it in that way, but with your body language, it would probably be pretty clear that you don't like it and don't think it's a good idea and you wouldn't enforce that we do it. And Then what you would do is you would wait several months and then you would come back to it and you would say, hey, for all the areas where we've implemented this, how's that going? Probably with a smug look and are we ready to reevaluate this? And you wouldn't probably phrase it quite like that, but you'd basically go, I've thought this is stupid the whole time. And here's the things that it has impacted negatively and are we ready to ditch this yet? Also, you're dumb. I think that's about what you would do.

[B]

So what I would maybe recommend that you do is, Is I, you know, I'd make arguments as to why it might not be a good idea and then try to work on a way that they can agree with you to do it, that they think they are still doing an AI first approach, even though it, like, isn't really try to try to find a way that makes them think that you're complying.

[A]

Yeah, you know, we're not fooled, but

[B]

only like sort of do. And, and not in the way that that story was said, which is probably accurate, but not in that way.

[A]

Yeah. Getting buy in ahead of time is really important to covering your own butt.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because as a, as a lead, as a manager, you're in a really difficult position.

[B]

One sec, I'm curious. I'm curious. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Dan, does that sound accurate? As someone that I technically manage, you can be honest.

[A]

Yeah, I think so.

[B]

Okay, sorry. Not advice.

[A]

So as a lead. Right. Like as a team lead, you're being put in a really difficult position because your job ultimately. Right. Like you're going to have whatever your quarterly KPIs are, and you're going to have, have whatever is your formal job description. But putting that aside, your job is the success of the company. Right. And if this company is not successful, you are ineffective as a, as a

[B]

leader, and sometimes you need to take bets and risks.

[A]

And so you're in a difficult position here because if you are instructed to do something that will ultimately be detrimental to the company, even if it's in your job description, that you need to listen to your direct superior or, you know, whatever. Right, Right. Then you're putting yourself at jeopardy in the longer term. However, if you don't toe the company line, then you are almost certainly putting yourself in jeopardy in the very near term.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And so that's a really tough tightrope to walk.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And so that's why that point that Luke made about getting buy in for whatever your Action is put together a plan for what your AI first implementation looks like and get someone to say that sounds like good AI.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

If you can do a couple small test cases for how it is successful. Make them feel like a success for having the idea.

[B]

Yes. And run it like and find some studies because they exist of like highly dedicated. We only do things through AI groups that have bombed and failed.

[A]

Yeah. Show you put the work in and show you considered it and thought about it and found a better way because everyone likes a better way.

[B]

And then find some hybrid approach that allows people that really hate it to not lean on it too much but can also kind of encourage people to look into it and potentially use it properly and try to build some like workshops or something with your team to show them or work with them to find ways that, that they can use it to benefit them individually. I have found more and more over time. For a while there I was like a lot of people use AI wrong. There is a correct way to use AI and now I think a lot of people use AI wrong. There are correct ways for individual people to find benefits in IT and there are ways that I know of people that I've recommended people use AI in certain ways and they found tons of success in it that are not ways

[A]

that I use it at the end of the day though useful for them. If you want to keep your position, you're going to need to get buy in both up and down the chain. So just like saying yes, yes, yes and then like venting to to your your supporting teams about it is is not going to work for you. And saying no and being an obstruction to instructions filtering down is not going to work for you. You're going to have to find a way to get buy in on both sides. And it's. And there's often easy.

[B]

There is very often a middle and in this scenario I, I suspect there's a middle. I just, yeah, you got to find a thing that fulfills their, you know, and like in as someone who gets spam emails from companies that, that know the positions I have and stuff like that and and gets lots of news fed to me by Google and various other groups because of the positions that I have and whatnot, man, there is a lot of money being spent on trying to tell leaders of companies that they have to do this. So just understand that they're very likely trying to do the right thing.

[A]

A little bit of empathy never hurts

[B]

and are just being taught told by an incredible amount of of different vectors that this is the Right thing to do. So they're trying to do it and add some information to the. To the. To the conversation and come up with an approach that makes them not feel like an idiot. And, you know, okay, we're still. We're still going to explore this potentially more than we did in the past, but we're going to fetter it down a little bit.

[A]

We're going to do it a different way. Better to say do it a different way than. And find a path that's best optimized for our strategic objective. You got a business.

[B]

Talk a little to our team and our goals. It'll be most effective. We'll get the most output, whatever through this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And show test cases where things went poorly. Show test cases where things went well. I found something that can help. Your argument, actually, is if you don't just show a mono story. If you show. Okay, here's a bunch of test cases. Three out of four of these went really poorly. This one did go really well. But, like, the chance of us landing, that is really low. So let's maybe, like, go for. For. For this kind of other thing. Make it look like you actually did look at both sides of the argument. That can also help. And actually do it. I didn't mean make it look like you did actually do it. And then present the whole findings. That can be good.

[D]

A question for Luke as a fellow.

[A]

We got one more. We got one more from. From a professional communicator on our team. Our customer service supervisor, Adam, says, tldr, express your disagreement. Find common ground. Commit to whatever direction you land on. If you end up proven right, you can always come back to the conversation. But once you've committed to a direction, you've got to sell it. You've got to commit to it. You've got to move in that direction. Because if we're not all. All moving in the same direction, if you've got people swimming this way and people swimming that way, you're just gonna end up going in circles.

[B]

Yeah. It also said if you end up proven right, you can gloat then and, like, kind of. But I would just do that to, like, your partner or something.

[A]

Yeah. I wouldn't gloat. I. I left that out of his message on purpose.

[B]

Yeah. Okay.

[A]

Yeah, I know how you mean it, Adam. I know how you mean it.

[B]

But in air quotes. I was in air quote. I was in air quotes.

[A]

Well, they're not air quotes. When you write them down, then they're just quotes.

[B]

I knew what he Meant.

[A]

All right, hit me.

[D]

Dan, a question for Luke. As a fellow fan of deck builders, what kind of things do you want to see more of in the genre?

[B]

I'd like to see different themes. I, I, I've had this idea in my head of like my favorite two like roguelike games in a law like in forever probably are FTL and Slay the Spire one. Currently I still prefer one over two, but they're tuning it, they'll figure it out. I'm, I'm very confident in that. And I, I always was like, man, it would be really cool if there was like, you know, spaceship themed one. And then there's been a couple like FTL style deck builder games that have come out and they just really haven't hit. But pretty much all the deck builders that I've played feel very like RPG coded warriors, wizards, stuff like that. Yeah, like it's, it's all like, yeah, like literally ftl. Ha. Sorry. Slightest fire has like clear your warrior arc. Clear. Warrior archetype. Clear. Rogue archetype type. Clear. Like, I don't know. Sorcerer archetype, like it's just, it's okay, cool.

[A]

So you want classes, like you know, desk, desk jockey, you know, like, like, like low, low mobility but like high intellect but zero magical affinity.

[B]

You know, like I just, I, I

[A]

don't know, I, I always imagine maximum Cheeto consumption stats.

[B]

I always imagined like a Slayer Spire one where it was, it was management of your whole ship but still a deck builder and you would like pull. The idea that I had was that you would pull, you, you had multiple decks that you would pull from a certain amount of cards every turn and they would be four different things and one of them would be for like ship maintenance, one of them would be for offense and one of them would be for something and I thought of it like an energy type system system and blah blah, blah, blah, had all this kind of stuff and then every time that a ship, spaceship, like roguelike deck builder game would come out, which is, that's a lot of qualifications. But there's been a few of them. It's just like, I don't know, I feel like they, they miss the mark and every fight ends up feeling almost exactly the same. It's just like meh. Okay, yeah. Variants is I think what I would say.

[A]

Define deck building please. I thought I'd bring up this illustrative image.

[B]

That's a nice deck. It's a really nice deck.

[A]

But do you like fish decks? You might be a gay fish.

[B]

No, a deck Builder is talking about cards. So generally you would start the the game with like a fixed set of cards, usually very simple, very kind of bad cards actually. And then as you progress through the game you have selection options. You can, you can choose usually choose. Sometimes you get it randomly whatever from card options and build your deck by adding or removing cards from it. Often you want to remove some of those starter cards that you had or any negative cards that you receive and then add good cards to it. And then the reason why it works really well for roguelike is because there is often multiple ways to build the deck and then you have multiple characters and each character has multiple ways to build their. Each individual deck. And, and each, each run ends up being unique because of that, which makes it really fun. So the spire is probably the most well known and in my opinion best like video game deck builder and their board game has got to be one of like the best co op board games I've ever played. It's actually so good. I was expecting it to be like somewhat. It's a video game board game gimmicky and then it's like incredible. So good job.

[D]

Love the when bros, love the gear. What's the best engineering slash bodging video you feel you've done?

[A]

Oh, the best bodging. I'm actually just, I'm just looking through our videos now. I wanna, I want to talk about. Man, we do so much. Dude, we do so much weird stuff. Like, like does anyone even remember the time we cooled a PC with like pond water and let it just, just let it just sit in the sun and grow as much goop as it possibly could. And then we like tested it for like, for microorganisms and stuff.

[B]

Is that the team water video?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I saw a really interesting stat lately.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Which is that that video had really high retention.

[C]

Really?

[A]

It got like no views but it like super low views.

[B]

Got really low views and like crashed the channel for a while.

[A]

Yeah, I thought it was a really good video actually way way above normal.

[B]

It had like actually statistically very high retention.

[A]

Go figure.

[B]

So in like a ton of ways that was a wicked video. And YouTube was just like no, very weird.

[A]

Okay. This is not an all time favorite bodge, but this is definitely a recent favorite bodge. We needed cooling for a threadripper chip and our, our Bruce Chillis chiller decided to give up the ghost. So we just grabbed an ice bucket, put some ice in our nice bucket and then just ran ice water up to was pretty cool. And then for Reasons that we still don't really understand. We put our heads in the ice bucket.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Where did.

[B]

When did I do this too?

[A]

Yeah. I don't know why either of us did it, but we definitely did it.

[B]

Was it only you and me? Well, I think I did it because you did it.

[A]

Plouff did it too.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Yeah. We were all basically being followers, I think.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I can't find it, though.

[B]

That's sometimes just how that works. I think my favorite one is the one that I did. Hooray. When you had me, like, fix that CPU for my own rig upgrade. Yeah, that was awesome. Oh, I don't remember the title. The video.

[A]

The rule was Luke got a sick. A sick cpu, but he had to fix the pins on it.

[B]

Yeah, that was awesome. It was super fun.

[A]

Oh, man. Of course, I go back to it. Of course the playback glitches. Yeah. So Plouffe put his head in it and then grew hair. Oh, wait, it's me. And then. Yeah, we. I don't know. We did that for. Yeah. For reasons. You know, It's a. You never know you're gonna click on an LTT video. You never know what you're gonna get.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh, no. I have an answer. My all time favorite bodge was the time that we bought, like, half a dozen dead motherboards off of ebay and I fixed every one.

[B]

That.

[A]

That was crazy.

[B]

That motherboard you fixed in scraping boards is still on your desk.

[A]

That was crazy.

[B]

Have you seen it?

[A]

I haven't touched it yet. I've been away.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Oh, that's fair.

[A]

That was crazy, though.

[B]

Yeah, that was really cool.

[A]

You can't script that.

[B]

That was one of my favorite videos you guys did in, like, a big chunk of time.

[A]

That was crazy.

[B]

Awesome.

[A]

Okay. All right. Now I'm glad I have a good answer. That was just. Oh, one time, you know, broken motherboard bring back to life. Exciting. Doing it like half dozen times in a row. That's nuts.

[D]

Hi, Linus. Led development question for Linus. What's your most favorite memory from growing up on a farm? Oh, I remember feeding cows, and it always makes me so happy. Thanks for the quality products. Ah,

[A]

well, it wasn't plucking turkeys. It wasn't scooping chicken poo.

[B]

Man.

[A]

I'm not really the outdoorsy type. This may come as a surprise to you. Yeah, don't say yeah. Right. Okay, okay, okay, here's what I've got. I'm gonna go with eating quality double smoked farmer sausage that we know is totally clean of any Kinds of weird, scary hormones or, like, antibiotics or, like, any kind of, like, junk that. That farmer sausage that, like, just, you know, straight from. From pig to table. I don't think I've ever eaten anything that's like. Like a meat thing that says good as, like, a double smoked. Just like, high quality, totally organic everything. Farmer sausage, dude, this is.

[B]

This is not the same thing.

[A]

But don't eat a lot of pig these days. There's. Their high intelligence has sort of made me a little uncomfortable with the whole idea. I didn't, like, know they were that smart back then, but I'm not gonna lie, they can be pretty delicious.

[B]

I'm not gonna remember the place. And that makes me sad because I've been there a long time and I know it's just, like, along the drive. I don't actually know the name or the location, but there's a place when you go camping somewhere in PC, that's a gas station on a. On a reserve, and they have, like, their own smoked jerky that they make like, there. And you can just buy, like, a. A brown bag of it.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

And they just sell it to you by, like, weight or whatever.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

Holy crap. I haven't had that in, like, probably six years. Like, it's been a long time, but, like, whoa, it's really good.

[A]

Crystal says organic is a marketing term, which is totally true, but the context that I used it in was that this pig was fed with, like, kitchen slops. So I consider that organic matter. Yeah, organic matter made up the meat, which I then ate, which makes me organic.

[B]

That actually rings a huge bell.

[A]

Hold on. Please stop saying farmer sausage. Sausage. Why?

[B]

What?

[A]

That's what it's called, isn't it?

[B]

I have no idea.

[A]

Farmer sausage. Is that not a thing? Yeah. Farmer sausage, or mennonite sausage, is a coarsely ground smoked pork sausage traditionally seasoned with salt and pepper, known for its simple, hearty flavor.

[B]

Wait, no way. I think this might be it.

[A]

Oh, stop.

[B]

What?

[A]

Do you find it?

[B]

Someone might have linked. Someone might have just known. What the frick?

[A]

No way.

[B]

Darosh corner store. I think this is actually correct.

[A]

Oh, sick. Hey. Oh, I have to derail the conversation. Let me know when you're ready.

[B]

I'm very. My brain is exploding. But I think that's right. I think it's the Roche corner store.

[A]

Anyways, okay, did anyone else. Dan, Luke. Did anyone else notice this before we started the show? Look how much less room I have for my tabs. What the f is this?

[B]

It is really annoying.

[A]

When did this happen?

[D]

Oh, no, mine says new Chrome available.

[B]

It's been a bit. You know what's super sick? You know why? You know why you're so upset about this?

[A]

Because I've been Firefox pilled.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

For the last few weeks.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Because I barely touched my desktop. So most of my Linux challenge has actually been on Kubuntu and I didn't bother to install another browser because Kubuntu came with Firefox and I signed into it and then I was lazy. So default browsers work, by the way, when they're good. What the heck is that?

[B]

This is one of the reasons why I think I'm going to have a really hard time if I even do going back to Windows, because this type of crap is going to be all over the place.

[A]

Why is this. And this isn't Microsoft, this is Google. But look at. Okay, we're going to go back to it. We're going to go back to it again because this is bad enough. Okay. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I could probably get here, probably get six tabs in here before things get really bad. But okay, we waste all this space. This is all wasted so that you can have buffer for your stupid ask Gemini. What is this? Clearly I don't have room for it here. So get out. Get it out of here. At the very least, collapse it down to just the icon. Because you know you would do that if it was just my tabs. If it was just my precious tabs. Sorry I'm getting all angry, but I just like. Come on, man. Here, I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna right click it. Okay, okay. Okay. Unpinning it is that simple. All right. I'm somewhat calmed down now, but not entirely.

[B]

That's a lot better than I expected.

[A]

It is better than I expected.

[B]

I didn't think it was gonna be unpinnable. That is a lot better than I expected.

[D]

What's the over under on it coming back next time you relaunch Chrome?

[A]

See, that's the issue. They're boiling me.

[D]

Show less trust.

[A]

I'm a frog and they're boiling me.

[B]

Is it on yours?

[D]

No, mine says new Chrome update or new Chrome available.

[B]

I was gonna say update it and see what happens. I suspect mine is updated, but I'll check.

[D]

I have too many tabs open.

[B]

Mine is up to date. Dang, that would have been interesting to try.

[A]

Hit me, Dan.

[D]

Sure thing. I got a merch message earlier that I said to contact support, but it was a bit different. Linus using one of the cables in the car.

[A]

What they said is, hey Dan, I did ask support. They basically he didn't answer me.

[D]

Okay, so. So I was wondering Linus's opinion. Would he use a cable in the car given the temp, temperature, swing, if no wireless Android auto, and also if the black LTD pen and pencil are limited release?

[A]

No, the black pen and pencil were limited stock when we launched them because we knew we had enough of them to launch it, but we knew that we didn't have enough to meet the demand. So we basically were just like, hey, if you want one, make sure you get it right away. But they are coming back eventually and I am hopeful that we will find that those black pens and pencils are going to be so durable out in the field that we might be able to bring back black shaft screwdrivers with a very similar finish. No promises. As for using, I assume you're talking about our true spec cables in the car. A huge part of the reason that we chose the silicone sheathing for the cables was that we wanted something that was UV resistant. And the main use case for a USB cable that needs to be UV resistant was having it in your car, where a lot of the time the sunlight will come in and will degrade the. What is it usually PVC derived cable sleeving. And as for why we didn't do a braided one, I know you didn't ask, but whatever. I'm explaining the whole rationale behind why we ultimately chose silicone. The reason for not doing a braided one is that while they're really nice, while they're really nice, they tend to really get super destroyed once there's any kind of damage to them. And so we, we, we opted for silicone. So look, I'm not going to promise that in a very demanding environment like, like plugging and unplugging sometimes, you know, many times a day and you know, like mine for instance, gets shut in my armrest because that's where the plug is. But I keep my phone in my cup holder and so it just get every time I need to access my armrest. I like mash it. Is it gonna last forever in that application? Like, no. But so far my true spec cable that's in my car is operating perfectly and I'm very happy with it doing that. I've also seen a few reports in reviews for the product and discussion about the product on Reddit where people have said that they were having a lot of issues with their Android auto or their CarPlay prior to getting a true spec Cable and it resolved their issues.

[B]

I've used it in a use case that I've killed a lot of cables in actually, which is Pokemon Go. Walk in. If you're out for a really long time, you're going to need. Need to plug into a battery and

[A]

when you're moving, that's a lot of strain.

[B]

So not only just that, but if I don't feel like sometimes I'll just hold the entire battery and the phone and the cable, plugging it in and everything and whatever, who cares? Sometimes, especially if it's like one of those big fat like 20,000 milliamp hour batteries. Ideally it's in my pocket and then I just have a cable running the whole way. When it's in my pocket, the battery is likely, especially my shorts have these like enormous pockets. The battery is likely to rotate and then it'll torque on the cable while it's my pocket and it'll. It'll break the end. And so far it's one of the longest lasting ones. It shows no issues at all, so no guarantees.

[A]

Your mileage may vary. These are very demanding use cases.

[B]

This is a brutal use case. I expect it to probably break eventually. Part of this is like, I wonder.

[A]

It's still a wear item.

[B]

Yeah. I wonder how long it's going to last. Which is one of the reasons why I'm still doing.

[A]

Let's be realistic. But it's a high quality wear item.

[B]

Yeah. Pogo eats a battery. If you're playing for more than an hour, it's pretty much a requirement. Yeah. And there are, there have been times where I'm out for more than eight. So like. Yeah, some of the like fests or tours or whatever those will like, those are, those are eight plus hour days. So you're going through some batteries. I'm usually bringing multiple.

[A]

Nice.

[D]

Thanks for the big sale. Lld. What is. Sorry, yes.

[B]

Sorry, I'm gonna interrupt you before you keep going.

[A]

Go for it.

[B]

I have seen this news put out everywhere on Pokemon Go stuff and we'll see if people can prove me wrong. But I'm pretty sure it's, it's like very misleading about Pokemon Go. Okay. It's not misleading about what their intentions are, but I think it's misleading about what the reality is. Talking about how Pokemon Go, like Pokemon Go players are mapping out the world through constant AR scanning. I don't know a single person who ever has AR enabled on any level in Pokemon Go. Everyone turns that off.

[A]

Oh, no, I'm pretty sure people do.

[B]

I'm sure. Kids do.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

All of the groups that I've been to, which do include kids and everything, every single person has it turned off. Never use the AR function. Yeah. A art just makes it stupid to catch now everyone turns it off. Yeah, like it's, it's. It definitely happens for sure. But in my opinion, one of the reasons why the original founder got less interested with Pokemon Go, it's because his goal was this whole AR thing and no one ever bought into it. No one cared. It was kind of stupid the whole time. It's the first thing I turn off. AR uses even more battery. Like it's like actually basically everyone turns this off.

[A]

Okay, got it.

[B]

And then they had this thing where it was like, oh, you can scan like do AR scanning of different areas and we'll like do something no one ever did those AR mapping of stops. Do you do that?

[A]

That's what Byron says. Interesting.

[B]

See that's interesting to me because I

[A]

says I always used it lol. Oh, okay.

[B]

I'm certain there are people.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

See, I delete scanning. Stop research every time.

[A]

Yeah, that's Pankratz though. That's like one of the most technical people that you know.

[B]

That is true.

[A]

So that is true that out there.

[B]

But yeah, I think, I think like, I think a lot less people there isn't. I think there's a lot more people that use that play Pokemon Go than people realize. And I think a lot less percentage of those people use AR than people realize. I think both of those things are true.

[A]

Hit me, Dan.

[D]

Thanks for the big sale. Lld, what is the strangest game you have ever played?

[A]

I'm just going to put this here. Here. Not the strangest game I ever played,

[B]

but we've played some weird ones. What was that like rock throwing game or something that we played?

[A]

You're not talking about Disc Jam, are you?

[B]

No, no, no, no, no, no.

[A]

Multiplayer throwing game.

[B]

We played some game where like I feel like you had to throw things at each other. Two big dudes, you had to throw stuff at each other.

[A]

Prisoner Simulator was weird.

[B]

That was weird.

[A]

That wasn't that one though. Drunken Fight Simulator is pretty.

[B]

We were on this kick for a while where we would sort steam by its cheapest games.

[A]

We only did it once, actually.

[B]

I thought we did it more than once.

[A]

No, we should do it again. We should do really fun.

[B]

And we would just buy like $1 games.

[A]

Oh, they were less than a dollar, sir. They were like 30 cents. Yeah, a lot of the time.

[B]

And then play it till it got boring.

[A]

Barrow 2020.

[B]

I think something that turned us off was a bunch of them ended up being just like renamed and repackaged demo projects.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it was like, okay, I want the actual jank.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I want the crap.

[A]

This was itch IO. This was legitimately play through.

[B]

No commentary. There's a video of this.

[A]

I know, right? This was legitimately fun for a few minutes.

[B]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was fun for a little bit.

[A]

Not weird, though.

[B]

Nope. It's just a racing game.

[A]

Yeah. But like, you know. Yeah, pretty. Pretty good.

[B]

But it. It was like, for a game that I think. I think that one cost a dollar.

[A]

Yeah, something like that.

[B]

I got a dollar out of it.

[A]

Definitely. I'm going to. I think you got more than a dollar out of it. I think you were streaming still back then.

[B]

Oh, that makes sense.

[A]

I think that's what motivated us to do it.

[B]

That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

I'm going to go on the.

[B]

The.

[A]

I'm going to go in the store right now and find out how much Barrow 2020 is worth. It is available right now. Barrow. It's no longer called Barrow 2020. It just seems to be called Barrow.

[B]

Just barrow.

[A]

It is 90% off and is 64 Canadian cents to buy. 100% worth. It do endorse for that price. For.

[B]

For that price. I will also. Yeah, apparently there's Barrow.

[A]

No, no, no. There's so many barrels.

[B]

I was going to say. Yeah.

[A]

Barrow is not Barrow 2020. Barrow was in fact released in 2018. Barrow 2020, though, is also 90% off and also 64 cents strong recommend at that price.

[B]

Yeah, they have a. They wouldn't release in 2022. That's called Barrow F22. And it. It looks like it's like formula racing.

[A]

And.

[B]

Yeah, very positive reviews. And it's 64 cents Canadian.

[A]

There you go, guys. Barrow, it's. This is actually. I wasn't gonna say this is the weirdest, but it's now the weirdest when I realize that there have been a dozen Barrow games and almost all of them cost less than an American 50 cent coin.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

They're very cheap.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

It looks like on sale. Not on sale. They're like six, seven bucks. I don't know if I do that.

[A]

Nope.

[B]

But when they're on sale. Yeah.

[A]

Yep. 64 cents. Do it.

[B]

Yep.

[D]

How do you guys decide what topics or ideas are viable for main channel video? And are there video ideas that you regret not pursuing?

[A]

Oh, dude, I regret not pursuing a video idea like every week. Like, it's so often that we'll be like, oh, we should, like, we should do that. And then just the logistics of reconjiggering what everyone is working on can be really challenging. We almost did our MacBook Neo video either a day or two days later because of just prior obligations for other videos that we were working on or had scheduled for release. And I had to pull a fair number of strings in order to get that pushed over the line. As for how we decide on what to do, well, there's the viability, conversation, feasibility, exploration aspect and also just like, how interesting is it to the team, Dan? How many views do we think it's going to get? What is the, the impact on the credibility of our channel? You know, is it good for our brand or bad for our brand? It's a whole kind of rubric. Does it align with a current sponsor project that we need to do or like a current, you know, sponsor idea?

[B]

Like, yeah, it might be that a sponsor needs to show something off and you've got a video idea that's been on the dock for like three years and it's been interesting but you just haven't quite had enough motivation to make it. You know, people like it, but yeah,

[A]

or it's a lot of work and the extra money would actually help to justify it.

[B]

It's a big one. And then that'll kick that idea into the front.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[D]

Message for Linus. How much French do you remember? Are you still able to follow a French discussion?

[A]

Something. I have no idea how bad my grammar was just now. And I know my present pronunciation was terrible, not aided by my braces, but no, it's, it's pretty difficult. The, the, the rapid fire speed at which French people talk was never something that I was able to follow with ease. But if people spoke slowly to me, I was, I was conversational at one point. That was a very long time ago. I like was like 16. So. Yeah.

[D]

Hello. Llnd the Goober.

[A]

He's not a goober. What does goober mean?

[D]

No, no idea. If you've talked about this recently.

[C]

Goober.

[A]

But a peanut. He doesn't look like a peanut.

[D]

It has a different streamer.

[B]

True.

[D]

No idea if you talked about this recently, but motorcycle update video, when excited to see it put together.

[A]

Snacking on a sack of goobers, was he?

[B]

I want to call them goobers forever now, I think.

[A]

Sorry, what was your question, Dan? I wasn't listening.

[B]

I love goobers.

[A]

I was busy discovering that goober meant peanut.

[B]

So rude.

[D]

No idea. If we've talked about this motorcycle. Yeah, there's a lot of motorcycle questions. Maybe we all roll them together.

[A]

I'll message. The last I heard was it's going well. Slight problem with the rear shock. We ordered. It was in storage for so long that the oil leaked out. It's proving to be a problem for warranty because we ordered it so long ago. Don't stress. I'll take care of it. So that was on March 9th. It has since been 11 days. So I will. I will send my classic. Every so often. He's not looking, but that's fine. Every so often a how goes and sending work messages. I'll find out how it goes. You're welcome to send any messages you want. It's free country. Dan. Hit me.

[D]

Let's. Let's group all the motorcycle stuff together.

[B]

What gear do you use?

[A]

What gear do I use?

[B]

Usually you don't.

[A]

Oh, I guess we're the sixth gear.

[B]

We're getting into spring and the motorcycle messages are gonna come back.

[A]

There's so many.

[B]

We didn't get many at all for a long time.

[A]

Well, it's finally time for me to

[B]

ride it in a video. Or. Or is it just that time of year?

[A]

Sammy's been talking about it. He keeps messaging me about when my motorcycle is gonna be done. I think he wants to do a float plane exclusive on it.

[B]

Oh, that makes sense.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I was like, why he rides.

[A]

You will never ride that machine. You're so wrong, E Gadget guy. It doesn't care if you say slash S. You're still wrong. You're wrong. I will. I'm going to. I swear it.

[B]

It doesn't feel like a Sammy thing to ride a motorcycle, but it does feel like a Sammy thing. If a motorcycle, like matches his outfit to, like stand near it and look cool.

[A]

I could see that. Yeah. Yeah.

[D]

Sorry. The ding was because that was a joke. Yeah. So what gear do you use? Did you talk about the gear?

[A]

I use like crappy old Joe rocket gear from when I first got a motorcycle, like, like almost 20 years ago. So let's not get into it. Uh, and I use showy helmets because they fit my head shape really well. Not because I think you should spend that much on a helmet. It's a honestly pretty bad idea. But what you should do is you should buy a helmet that fits you. So like I put on an arai and even though it's like a fancier, like top of the line helmet or whatever, at least was back when I was like, into gear and learning about. Did not Fit my head shape well. So it would have been a very silly thing for me to buy. You should buy something that fits, regardless of the price because you're on a motorcycle, man. You're going pretty fast. You hit your head. How about be less cooked, maybe?

[D]

And I think this is the third one. Wicked deal on the backpack bundle. Surprise. The Thunderbolt dock is in here. Linus, do your kids consider riding a motorcycle?

[A]

Nope.

[B]

That was really fast.

[A]

Actually, you know what? Haven't seen him drive yet. I haven't seen him drive a car. I'd want to see my son drive. He's a pretty responsible person.

[B]

He's never going to watch this. I think with some proper training, he'd be completely fine.

[A]

I think he'd be.

[B]

I'm not encouraging.

[A]

It's not the motorcycle rider that I'm worried about.

[B]

I know.

[A]

I'm not worried about his skills.

[B]

Yep. And I think he's also like. I don't want to say intelligent enough, wise enough to be pretty aware.

[A]

He's a sharp kid.

[B]

Yeah,

[A]

I'd still prefer.

[B]

I'm not promoting or suggesting.

[A]

Yeah, I'd still prefer he didn't yet.

[B]

You will.

[A]

I mean, it's not like a lot of people depend on me, so. Should be fine.

[B]

Not like them.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, they're the next generation, you know, they gotta. They gotta think of all the future people who could be born.

[B]

You've done your, like, factory work. You've output your people.

[A]

Yeah, that's right. Hey, hey, look. How much did you contribute to the birth rate? Not at all. Well, there you go. I mean, at 3, I'm well above national average.

[B]

Isn't national average like super low now? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[D]

I used to always quote, like, white picket fence, 2.3 kids, but I don't think it's that anymore.

[B]

No.

[A]

Good. Lordy.

[D]

I think it's basement suite, 2.3 cats.

[B]

Almost low one.

[A]

I think Canada's birth rate for 2024 was 10.01 per. Oh, actually, so it's actually up a little bit in 2024, but. Sorry, this is live births per thousand people. So the last couple years are actually up a little bit. But overall it's been catastrophic.

[B]

Yeah. Apparently in as wild 2023, it dropped to 1.26.

[D]

I always feel bad for the parents that get 0.26 of a kid.

[A]

What is that, like a leg up to the knee? Like on a good day, like mid thigh maybe.

[D]

It takes practice. Up next.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Yes.

[D]

What is your keyboard setup for gaming at your TV Projector. I find that with my PC. The next room over there's too much keyboard lag. I. I have a USB extension to the projector room with 2 and a half gigs USB.

[A]

I have one of these for when I just need to use the mouse and keyboard. It has a gyro mouse in it. And then the left click is up here on the shoulder and the right click is up here on the other shoulder. It has just enough keys to be like kind of useful. Here's the Windows key. It doesn't have F keys which is really annoying, but it has media keys keys so that's less annoying.

[B]

And then bind the media keys to F keys.

[A]

Maybe never looked into it. And then I have one of these for like if I'm actually gaming or I need to use the computer for a bit.

[B]

RIP Rocket. Right? They're like gone now.

[A]

I don't think so. Are they? What was Roccat was a German computer accessories manufacturer based in Hamburg. No way. When did they shut down? Founded 2006. Defunct 2024.

[B]

They were acquired by Turtle beach in 2019.

[A]

Oh, bummer. All right. Well I'm glad that I bought three of those keyboard mouse combos. When I realized that the whole trend of desk boards was going away.

[B]

I should have got more rocket stuff when they were around. This is the classic problem. But they. They were like the creator of things that definitely not enough people were going to buy but were really cool. Like they made monitor bags for going to lands.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

There was like 12 people that were going to buy that. But it's awesome. It's super cool.

[D]

A lld Always fun to hear your take on musicals. And I have some friends on the Book of Mormon tour. It came through Vancouver a bit ago. Did you catch it? And would you ever do videos on live theater tech?

[A]

Live theater tech is probably not enough overlap with our core audience. I don't think we'd be able to do that. I did not catch the tour, but I have seen it on Broadway. I absolutely love the Book of Mormon. I don't think it's fair that Trey Parker gets to be that talented. And also the. Who did he co write it with? I believe he co wrote it with someone who wrote Book of Mormon. Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Robert Lopez. This is hilarious. The AI overview. This is Google like get it together. Okay, Your summary up here knows what I'm talking about. And your AI overview is like Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from ancient metal plates he found in 1823. Etc. Etc. Etc. Obviously not what I'M talking about. See, your first real search result knows what I'm talking about. Everything else knows what I'm talking about. Anyway,

[D]

hi, from Malaysia. What was your favorite part of the country and do you plan on coming back anytime soon? The badminton scene here is crazy and you should come play a few games.

[A]

Oh, I actually I played in Malaysia when I went there like 10 years ago. That was fun. And yes, I know the badminton scene is crazy. It's also really hot to play there at the same issue that I have when I play in Taiwan is like freaking dying in the heat a lot of the time. It's like in school gyms and stuff like that. And there's no air conditioning, so you just. I. I once sweat all the way through the bottom of my badminton shoes playing in Taipei. That was crazy. You would think it's a completely rubber sole, but it turns out, and this was when I discovered this. It's actually not in the particular shoes I have. There's a little like spot in the bottom where it's just. Just there's like a hole in the. In the rubber and there's like something else. There's like a mesh there. So everywhere I was stepping on the court, I was leaving little spots which I. So I had to retire for the evening because I. It was dangerous. Anyway, yeah, yeah, I love, love to play badminton, but going all the way to Malaysia to play badminton when I live like less than 20 minutes from my own badminton club would be a little unhinged. But I do sometimes like to play when I go on vacation.

[D]

Hi, Linus. We both have worked now for defunct computer shops in the Fraser Valley.

[A]

Nice.

[D]

What is one tech store you were surprised to not make it? And how many do you expect to close?

[A]

With today's cost of parts, I was a little surprised that future shop sold out. It seemed like they were doing fine.

[B]

Totally fine.

[A]

Which was kind of a. Which was kind of a bummer. I'd rather talk about the one store that I'm surprised does still exist. How does Attic still exist? They managed to outlast NCIX with. Oh wait, do they not still exist?

[B]

I've never even heard of Attic.

[A]

ATIC on Broadway?

[B]

Nope. Oh, I never went there. They dude and I went down to Vancouver.

[A]

Most trustable. I think you were. I think the word you were looking for was trustworthy.

[B]

Attic or trusted.

[A]

This is their website. To my knowledge, this has always been their website.

[B]

What's. What's. What's that computer? What are they selling right now?

[A]

No, I think this is like an old.

[B]

Whoa.

[A]

This is just like, old junk that doesn't work. Like, this is. Here's a Lenovo Core i5 desktop. This is a real company that definitely actually exists. The very first time I interacted with them, it was on the advice of Kyle, who I did my Quebec Exchange with and who told me he'd build my first computer for me and show me how to do it. So he was, like, instrumental in me becoming Linus. Tech tips. Shout out Kyle. He was like, yeah, get stuff at NCIX or adic. They're both on the same street, so you can just go to both of them. I bought a hard drive at Attic and I realized upon walking out the door, you know what? I'd rather have the 80 gig one with the 8 meg cache than the 120 gig one with the 2 meg cache. And I walked. Or maybe I went the other way around, I don't know. I walked back in the door and I said, actually, can I exchange it for the other one that I was considering ordering? And they charged me a restocking fee for the brand new thing that I had literally just walked out the door with. And I never shopped with them again. And they somehow still exist. In spite of that approach to customer service. They must do B2B or something because, like, it clearly isn't their website that's gaining the many favors.

[B]

Twitter logo and that Facebook logo. It's been a while for that one. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Software, antivirus. Just, like, completely empty categories on the side of their website.

[B]

Nvidia logo. Scroll down. There you go.

[A]

Nvidia Partner Force. Like, what is their GPU solution center?

[B]

Is that Windows 8?

[A]

Nvidia.

[B]

Is that Windows 8? If you scroll down in the side

[D]

banner,

[A]

I didn't see the Windows. Oh, here. No.

[B]

What is that?

[A]

Is that 10?

[D]

10.

[A]

That's 10.

[B]

That might be 10.

[A]

Do great things with the best Windows ever. Yeah, There you go, baby. Microsoft headsets. Like, this is just Life chat headset price $28. Cash discounted price, regular 2940. Like, seriously, you have a cash discounted price on your web. What? What year is it? These guys are hilarious. Not an endorsement.

[D]

This one's a bit for both of us. Dan, what resource or community would you recommend for an amateur impoverished sound guy? And Luke and Linus, where do you go to find communities for somewhat niche hobbies?

[A]

I mean, I had a really great interaction at the local hobby store when I decided not to buy the replacement differential gasket and differential fluid that I needed online and decided to go Pay extra to go buy something in person. I already did the research to find out what I needed so I could have just ordered it, but I was like, you know what, that's stupid because running an RC shop is a very challenging sort of endeavor that only someone who's really passionate would do. And while I was in there, a handful of other people came in and just like wanted to chat about it. They didn't care that I was a complete noob and I have no idea what I'm doing. And the car that I have on the counter is some piece of crap arma plastic thing from 10 years ago that obviously has not been taken care of. They just like, like want to chat and shoot the breeze and I would. So I'd say going to, going to meetups, going to mom and pop shops that specialize in that stuff, that can be a good place to start. As for the amateur impoverished sound guy bit, no comment there. Dan, you're up.

[D]

Yeah, it really depends on your niche. Generally it is piracy. Learn and then buy what you like and an SM57 is a hundred dollars dollars and you're fine. That's, that's it, you're good. But as for software, there's like dozens of DAWs generally either try a trial or steal them. Learn what you can and then buy the one that you like. If you're making money with it, absolutely buy it. But there's lots of free stuff out there too. Communities are just watch YouTube tutorials. It's a, it's a black art so you will never know how to do it.

[B]

Remember that I have generally found that Reddit is good for information and Reddit is often not good for community.

[D]

So you know how the Linux people are on Reddit. It's like that times 100 for anything audio related.

[B]

So this is sick. And this is true for like a ton of things. People on Reddit are just really mad all the time and if you want to like, like if you, if you go out. We were talking about Pokemon Go earlier so I'm going to use this example again. If you go out to like your local community Pokemon Go event, you're probably going to have a good time and people are probably going to be pretty chill and like be enjoying the game and, and play the game a little bit and then just enjoy nature and walk around a little bit and just do whatever and you go online on the Reddit and it's like just screaming the whole time. It's wild. So I don't know if I can really recommend Reddit these days. And discord is questionable as a community thing, to be completely honest. So it's, it's a little tough online, but I've really enjoyed going to common places. I did a crazy fast this week, went to go get pho at our favorite pho place to break my fast, and I got there a little bit late for the people that I was going to eat lunch with. And they mentioned that they had another person coming. And the, the waitress, I guess, saw me out of the window and was like, is it him? As they were ordering.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

And they were like, yeah. And she's like, okay, well, you guys can order. I know what he's getting. And I was like, I freaking made it, dude. I did it.

[A]

Langley Vietnamese.

[B]

I have one. It's so good and it's so cheap.

[D]

Oh, yeah. One more point. If you want to go into audio engineering specifically, you're gonna have to be pro tools. So get a trial or something. You have to be on pro Tools. Learn pro Tools. Enjoy your blender level thousand page manual on shortcuts. Learn all the shortcuts. You're in for a rough time.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

You think Adobe's bad?

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

Good luck. Okay, up next, as a new dad, I would love to know what the best lesson you learned from your kids.

[B]

Oh, that's a cool question. That's a cool way of framing it.

[A]

Oh, man, that's a hard one to just try to come up with off the spot. Off the spot. Off the top of my head. On the spot. Find the things. Oh, man, I don't know. I mean, I'll just go with the one that I talked to Yvonne about most recently, because I think coming up with the best one is going to be darn near impossible. After doing this for 14 years, I. I would say the most recent one, it was, you know, watch out for the weight of your words. I think a lot of parents talk about their kids not listening to them and that being, you know, detrimental. You know, they don't listen to me. They, you know, they go and do the wrong thing. But the conversation we had very recently was, be careful what you say because they just might listen, they might do it. You've got to be always cognizant of both setting a good example and being aware of the danger of giving poor advice or setting a bad example and also being careful not to guide them too much and sometimes not telling them the path so that they can learn to set their own path. And so we were talking to my son about investment. You know, he has Collected some red pocket money over the years. We pay him for any of the work that he does on the channel, all of the kids. And so he has some money. He doesn't spend. Spend money. He's like the most spendthrift person I know and I know you. He does not spend money. It's crazy. I don't understand it. I. Money burned a hole in my pocket when I was his age. Anyway, we. So we, we were just kind of like advising him a little bit on what he might want to do in terms of. Of investment strategy. And as, as you know, you know, we're not ex. We're not seasoned investors, we're not experts. I actually work a job as opposed to just, you know, coasting off of capital. And so we kind of talked him through it and at the end of it, Yvonne and I were sort of discussing, based on, you know, the decisions that he was making and kind of feeling like, you know, maybe we. Maybe we were almost like too cautionary or like too, Too biased in the way that we presented the information. And that might have like biased him when really what we want him to do is learn at this stage. Because it doesn't matter if he makes any money in his investments right now. It's not really relevant. What's relevant is that he's learning. It doesn't hurt if he makes some money. And it certainly would be relevant if he lost a bunch of it, you know, but just making sure that we have our priorities in straight in terms. Priorities straight in terms of how we're presenting this information. Like, one of the things that I, that I pushed him really hard to do was to read up on the Dutch tulip crisis. And you know, the goal wasn't to like spook him, but it was to make sure that he understands the concept of a bubble before he jumps in right now, you know, not that there's any bubbles right now, but anyway. Sorry, that's something.

[B]

No, that's actually really interesting. I think, like, I feel like I don't have this so much for like individual quotes when I was pretty young, but I'll talk to people now that are still heavily affected and have shaped their lives or have issues with certain problems over individual quotes. One off lines from their parents when they were kids. Like, it's pretty wild. Going back to the previous topic and this is not fair. I have to point that out before I make this point. This is extremely not fair. It's an open community. Every open community can have this type of stuff. I'm not actually Trying to characterize the whole platform in any way. It's just kind of funny and interesting. I don't know if you knew about this, Linus, but this. What the heck?

[A]

Diplomatic, militaristic. What are we even talking about here?

[B]

That's not my screen.

[D]

Offline. Luke.

[A]

Laptop.

[B]

Is it your screen? What?

[D]

Did I do them backwards?

[A]

No.

[D]

Oh, when I was messing with the thing. Give me one second.

[B]

That's from a long time ago. I talked.

[A]

How long was that Sitting in a buffer somewhere?

[D]

Your camera is also frozen. Cancel this.

[B]

No.

[D]

Okay, there you go.

[B]

There we go. Do you know what this. Do you know who this is?

[A]

Maxwell Hill, the first redditor to hit 1 million karma.

[B]

Do you know who that is?

[A]

No. Wait, isn't that Gizain Maxwell, or, like, that's what we think, right?

[B]

No, it is.

[A]

Do we know that for sure?

[B]

As far as my understanding goes, yeah. And, like, a Million Karma. Let's see, let's see, let's check.

[A]

My understanding is it looks extremely, like, 99.9% sus. But I don't think we actually. No, no. Yeah. There's, like, a theory that she used the Reddit platform to aid in her. In. In the elite sort of shaping of public discourse and also to stay abreast of everything that's going on and also for, like, recruitment for Epstein's whatnot. Yeah, I. I. Did you just learn about this?

[B]

No, but I just learned that it might not be real.

[A]

There's. There's a lot of. There's a lot of indication that it appears to be real. So, like, to your credit, if you're gonna believe something that was an Internet hoax, this one seems extremely.

[B]

I did fall for that. I did definitely fall for that.

[A]

This one seems extremely credible, so. Yeah. Does anyone have proof that it isn't her? Nobody here is, like, calling you out for. For, like, falling for it. Like, I'm. I think it's like. We are pretty sure it has it. We're pretty sure it is.

[B]

Conspiracy theory.

[A]

Sugar Snack says not her.

[B]

But what's the.

[A]

Yeah, but what's the. What's the dd. What's. What's the due diligence.

[B]

Apparently, the evidence that it is real is also.

[A]

It's very circumstantial.

[B]

Pretty thin.

[A]

Yeah, but there's.

[B]

I mean, Maxwell and their name, and they disappeared at the same time that they got arrested.

[A]

Yeah,

[B]

but we don't have the. We don't have the, you know, the Epstein emails to prove it. No, no, no, because we have a lot of Epstein's usernames and stuff. Yeah, from that. But we don't have hers.

[A]

We're ready, Dan.

[B]

Interesting. Yeah.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

I don't have much else to say. I thought it was legit. Nah, seems like it's, it's unknown.

[D]

Hey all, would you consider donating to your favorite Linux distribution or bug bounty program if they would work on things that annoy you the most so you wouldn't be able to fully transition to Linux?

[A]

Yeah, I'd consider it. I think that, yeah, I'd consider it. I don't know that most of the things that I would. Man, where's the line between a donation, a contribution though and like expecting an open source developer to just like be your little and fix your little sort of quibbles? I, I, I, I, I like the idea of donating. I don't like the way you've necessarily framed it. Here is, I guess where I'll land on that.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[D]

Hello boys. Excited for the next whale land. Linus, what crazy thing are we planning this time?

[A]

I, I don't know if I, I don't know if we're planning anything crazy. I think It'd be kind. The 8V8 worked. Effort worked perfectly this time. We have some ideas. We have some ideas for how to fix some of the issues that we were having. What we can't.

[B]

Someone owning it makes sense.

[A]

What we can't fix is the human behavior around it. So it'll sit idle and then Luke and I will go over and be like, hey, want to play Halo? Yeah, let's play Halo, bro. And then, and then there will be a line, like a lineup to play the 8v8. And then Luke and I will be like, oh, there's a line. The game's over.

[B]

We should cycle.

[A]

We should cycle out. And then literally no one will even sit down.

[B]

To be fair, it was like a pretty rough experience.

[A]

Yeah, we have some issues to figure

[B]

out if it was a good experience.

[A]

Maybe that'll change.

[B]

Maybe it would have changed it. Yeah.

[D]

Last one I got for you today. I am a low volt technician and have been rocking the OG backpack and screwdriver as my daily. Please, Linus, have there been any low volt upgrades to your house since the last video? Any plans in the future?

[A]

I don't think so. I got my house to the point where I was basically just like, I don't want to, I don't want to touch this anymore. One thing that I did come across is I was having a lot of issues with that whole concept that I had where my one gaming machine would power the gaming in the LAN room, in the theater room and in my office upstairs. I ended up with three separate machines for that. Not because I wanted to but because Windows multi monitor management was really poor. It assigns a permanent forever. You cannot fix this ID, you know the like the 1, 2, 3 like when you press identify it assigns a permanent one that the last time I looked into it there was absolutely no way to fix or override. So what that meant was that for some reason something something hotkeys and going to the primary and not it interfering with potential other inputs because there was also supposed to be the one at my station downstairs was supposed to be a guest one for the kids to put their friends at that didn't have any of my stuff logged in or anything like that. So it hasn't worked out that way. But basically the multi monitor management across the three rooms was really really crappy because I couldn't force it to say this is the primary display and it was just bound to two. And I went as far as even reinstalling Windows and like connecting that one first and that didn't work for some reason that I don't understand. So however Microsoft, Microsoft derives its its identification for which monitor is which was just not fixable to me. E Gadget guy says it can be overridden by unplugging and plugging them in in a certain order. And sometimes it doesn't. No it can't. I trust me, I hiked up and down the stairs of my house more times than I can count trying to do it that way. It did not work for me but I came across this. It's called Monarch, a display switching utility that might make it easier to manage my desktop across multiple locations. So I shared this with myself. Someone posted it on Reddit I think for quick monitor detach and layout switching. So this looks like it might help me finally achieve that which does not change anything about my setup right now but would cause me to run some more low voltage because then I could use my my computer in all those places. I could run another displayport up to the family room as well and then I could just have everything everywhere and then this would be next level. I could finally do the thing I wanted to do with level one text DisplayPort KVMS and I could also have like a SteamOS machine that runs to all those places and then I could just create some automations that will switch all the inputs and then I could have like voice activated things like be like play steamos in the theater, and it could just.

[B]

That'd be sick.

[A]

So that's. That's what I'd like to do next. But I'm. I'm. There's always something.

[B]

As a bit of a callback to that whole Reddit thing. Enigma Blade said I used to mod subreddits with people who modded other subreddits with Maxwell Hill, and they were active in private mod mails and messages after Ghislaine's arrest. Okay, so sounds like probably not a thing.

[A]

Maybe hoax, then.

[B]

Yeah,

[A]

you know what's not a hoax is we will see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.

[B]

That was fast, but bye,

[A]

Sam.