Google Is Selling Fake Products - WAN Show July 11, 2025

Summary

Podcast Summary: The WAN Show – "Google Is Selling Fake Products" (July 11, 2025)

Release Date: July 12, 2025

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1. Introduction and Main Topic: Google's AI Overviews Selling Fake Products

In this episode, Linus and Luke dive into the controversial practices of Google's AI overviews, which have been criticized for promoting misleading and sometimes non-existent products. Linus introduces the topic with a strong stance against the quality of AI-generated content.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [02:01]: "They are battling against crappy AI by exposing how Google's AI overviews push misleading, overly salesy product information."

2. House Press Report on Google's AI Practices

House Press, an air purifier review site, released an in-depth report titled "Beware of the Google AI Salesman and Its Cronies." The report highlights how Google's AI overviews often rely on manufacturer PR and sponsored reviews, omitting major criticisms and sometimes inventing fake pros and cons. This has led to significant traffic drops for independent websites while AI-generated content on platforms like Reddit surged.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [04:52]: "Despite its marketing, it has received criticism for its poor performance, with some tests showing it to be the worst purifier we've ever tested."

3. Discussion: Is This the Lowest Point in Internet History for Product Research?

Linus and Luke debate whether the current state of online product research, dominated by AI-generated summaries, represents the lowest point in Internet history. Luke argues that modern consumers have more access to information than ever, but the quality and reliability are diminishing due to AI interventions.

Notable Quote:

Luke Lafreniere [06:10]: "If you want to be, like, properly armed and informed about what's happening with the trillions of dollars behind the things hitting your eyeballs these days, you should definitely check out House Press's article."

4. Microsoft's AI-Driven Layoffs and Mental Health Implications

The conversation shifts to recent layoffs at Microsoft, where 9,000 employees were let go as the company invests heavily in AI. CEO Satya Nadella mentioned that 20-30% of Microsoft's code is now generated by AI, signaling a continued push towards automation despite workforce reductions.

Additionally, Matt Turnbull from Xbox Game Studio responded to the layoffs by suggesting that AI tools could help individuals cope with job loss and mental health struggles. His LinkedIn post, however, faced backlash and was subsequently deleted.

Notable Quotes:

Matt Turnbull: "No AI tool is a replacement for your voice or your lived experience. But at a time when mental energy is scarce, these tools can help you get unstuck faster, calmer, and with more clarity."

Linus Sebastian [19:22]: "It feels healthier than regular social media."

5. Lime Day Sales Event and Exclusive Deals

Lime Day, the show's annual sales event, was a significant focus in this episode. Linus showcased various deals, including a new "Not a Hot Dog" T-shirt with a humorous reference to Costco's infamous hot dog price. The event featured discounts on products like insulated water bottles, gaming peripherals, backpacks, and screwdriver sets.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [21:51]: "We've pushed for many years to keep our shirts at $20. Despite recent tariffs pushing prices up, we're bringing them back no matter the cost."

6. LTT Labs: Battery Testing and System Tray Seconds Impact

Luke presents LTT Labs' investigation into whether displaying seconds in the system tray affects battery life. Initial tests across various devices indicated a slight decrease in battery duration when seconds are displayed, but results remain inconclusive due to high variability in battery testing.

Notable Quote:

Luke Lafreniere [35:06]: "Displaying desktop, that's it. We're going to keep doing more of this type of stuff."

7. Nvidia's RTX 5050 Launch Without Reviews

The hosts discuss Nvidia's recent release of the RTX 5050 GPU, which launched quietly without traditional review embargoes. Priced similarly to its predecessor, the RTX 3050, the new card boasts increased clock speeds but otherwise mirrors its predecessor's specifications. They express frustration over the lack of third-party reviews at launch, leaving consumers without solid data to assess the card's value.

Notable Quote:

Luke Lafreniere [47:56]: "We're going to keep testing them. It's frustrating."

8. AI's Influence on Content Consumption and the Review Landscape

Linus and Luke explore the growing reliance on AI-generated summaries for product information, raising concerns about the diminishing role of independent reviews and human expertise. They argue that while AI can aid in information dissemination, it often prioritizes manufacturer narratives over unbiased evaluations.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [51:22]: "A lot of enthusiasts don't have or never worked retail. They buy based on brand trust rather than detailed reviews."

9. Security Concerns: Thieves Exploiting POS Terminals for Refunds

The hosts highlight a worrying trend where thieves in Toronto have exploited point-of-sale (POS) terminals to issue fraudulent refunds, resulting in significant financial losses for small businesses. They emphasize the importance of securing POS systems with administrative passwords and proper user permissions to prevent such breaches.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [81:37]: "This is just meant to be kind of a PSA. If you run a small business, make sure you have your administration password set up on your POS terminal."

10. FTC's "Click to Cancel" Rule Blocked by Appeals Court

An appeals court has struck down the FTC's "Click to Cancel" rule, which aimed to make subscription cancellations as effortless as sign-ups. The court criticized the FTC for skipping essential rulemaking procedures and failing to consider public comments, leading to the dismissal of the entire rule.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [83:34]: "It's blatantly brazenly anti-consumer and pro-big business and recurring revenue dark pattern bullshit."

11. Google's Gemini AI and Third-Party App Interactions

Google's implementation of its Gemini AI engine to interact with third-party apps like WhatsApp has raised privacy and security concerns. Despite user settings to block such interactions, data collection continues for up to 72 hours. The hosts criticize Google's inadequate measures to protect user data and emphasize the need for stronger privacy controls.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [112:22]: "This is crazy. Let me, let me make sure we get you guys an update on this next week."

12. Conclusion: Reflections and Personal Insights

Throughout the episode, Linus shares personal updates, including dealing with new braces that are affecting his speech. The hosts maintain a lighthearted tone despite the serious topics discussed, underscoring the blend of personal and professional content typical of The WAN Show.

Notable Quote:

Linus Sebastian [115:23]: "I told them the bite block is this. It keeps me from closing my mouth all the way."

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Discussion Questions:

1. Is this the lowest point in Internet history for trying to research and purchase products?
2. How far along do you think we are in the journey to true artificial general intelligence?

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Final Notes:

The episode provides a comprehensive look at the current challenges and changes in the tech landscape, from AI's impact on product reviews and mental health support to security vulnerabilities in POS systems and regulatory setbacks affecting consumer rights. Linus and Luke effectively blend critical analysis with personal anecdotes, offering listeners both information and relatability.

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

And welcome to the WAN Show. We're gonna have a great show lined up for you guys this week. We will be talking about Google's AI overview, apparently selling people products that in many cases are garbage and in some cases don't even exist, which is pretty awkward, if I do say so myself. In other awkward AI news. Are you depressed? Just use AI so you can feel better. Are you. Are you kidding me right now? What else we got going on this week?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thieves are giving themselves refunds using POS terminals. That's very cool. Also, some of you asked and some of us answered. The labs did a thing. There was a Reddit article about if displaying seconds in your system tray uses battery or not. And we checked it out. It's not fully conclusive because we didn't. We haven't. Battery testing is weird. We'll talk about it later, okay?

[Linus Sebastian]

Gary, dress. You're so good at it. You say it there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Boom.

[Linus Sebastian]

The show is brought to you today by HRA Vessi and Squarespace. Of course, our rap partner is dbrand, our chair partner is Secretlab, and our laptop partner is Dell.

[Dan]

Why do I bother?

[Linus Sebastian]

What's there?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What's the. Oh, Google. Can we go through this?

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's jump right into our headline topic. Google's AI overviews are selling you garbage. I mean, we all knew that AI kind of sucked, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Didn't you want me to do this?

[Linus Sebastian]

I got this, okay? I got this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right?

[Linus Sebastian]

I can't resist House Fresh, who we've actually talked about like four, five times on WAN show now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, they're awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're an air purifier review site that. You know, I never thought I'd care this much about an air purifier review site, but they do a great job and they are fighting the good fight in the war against crappy AI. And they published an in depth report exposing how Google's AI overviews push misleading, overly salesy product info. Do you have something to say?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I just. Sorry, I need a drink of water. I. I just started to. You know, I just. I just. I just. Yeah, I'm good.

[Linus Sebastian]

In their testing, they showed that AI overviews often rely on manufacturer pr, product listings and sponsored reviews. They omit major criticisms and will even hallucinate fake pros and cons. They've even recommended products that simply don't exist. Independent websites, including ones that Google itself has promoted, have seen massive traffic drop offs to nearly 80% in some cases. Meanwhile, AI's Reddit traffic. Meanwhile, Reddit's traffic from Google surged 990% between 2023 and 2025. Here are some AI overview Are you okay?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm good. I'm sorry about that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here are some AI overview examples from the article.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm just very into this.

[Linus Sebastian]

When asked about an infamously poorly reviewed air purifier, Google's AI overview had a super salesy take on it. The molecule Air Mini plus is generally considered a worthwhile purchase for its unique technology and effectiveness in removing pollutants. It's particularly appealing for those concerned what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, sorry, inside joke.

[Linus Sebastian]

Inside joke for those concerned about viruses, bacteria and other small particles that HEPA filters might miss. According to fathercraft.com while some reviewers find it expensive, others find the benefits like peace of mind and its ability to destroy pollutants outweigh the cost. The Air Mini offers the same filtering power as the Air Mini plus, but without the particle filter, auto protect mode and particle sensor and HomeKit integration, says FatherCraft.com but it's not incapable of listing cons such as when specifically asked for a good reason and not to buy the air purifier. So in this case it said a major drawback is its limited ability to remove particulate matter from the air. I mean, that seems like a major consideration when you're buying an air purifier, does it not?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The entire point of the entire product.

[Linus Sebastian]

Despite its marketing, it has received criticism for its poor performance, with some tests showing it to be the worst purifier we've ever tested. Okay, and even if that's not a solution, it often hallucinates cons. It's reliance on UV light for disinfection which is ineffective and potentially harmful. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. This is wild man. Housepress provides many examples in their full article which you can find on their site, which is titled Beware of the Google AI Salesman and Its Cronies. And we have given you guys only a small surface sampling, a taste, you might say, of everything that they've delved into in their topics. So you should definitely Dan, do you want to go ahead and drop the link to the House Fresh article into all the various chats? You should definitely go check it out and give it a good read. Our discussion question on this one is is this the lowest point in Internet history for trying to research and purchase products?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The no. But I think the reason why it's a no is really annoying because at one time you basically couldn't.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I mean like during the recent era, modern.

[Luke Lafreniere]

History, then I think absolutely yes, but, like, at a certain point in time, there basically was no product info on. On the Internet. I mean, when was very, very little. When I first started using the Internet, there was very little product info online. You couldn't actually buy things online.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, all right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is what I'm saying. It's. It's. It's kind of a lame answer. So the realistic answer, if we look at modern Internet, is that, yes, this is, in my opinion, the worst time and in my opinion, again, to keep pumping these guys. If you want to be, like, you know, properly armed and informed about what's happening with the trillions of dollars behind the things hitting your eyeballs these days, you. It's. It's a good read. You should, like, legitimately go check it out.

[Linus Sebastian]

It makes you a more educated consumer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes. Which is, like, all we can really.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hope for at this point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So check it out. Share it to your friends. Do stuff like that. It's.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I got this, man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's well written, well researched.

[Linus Sebastian]

Even with how much I know, I still find myself scrolling through the AI overview and, like, if I don't stop and think. Wait, this is horse, right? If I don't stop and think about it, I'm like, oh, I mean, it sounds plausible enough. That's the thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's the biggest problem. Mm.

[Linus Sebastian]

You.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think we might as well just take a short break and acknowledge the elephant in my mouth. I got braces.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. But that's not actually why.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not the real problem. I was. I was planning to not have to say that much today, but I think there's just kind of no way that we can get around this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, I can do the topics.

[Linus Sebastian]

I got this. Can you see? Can you see?

[Luke Lafreniere]

This show is so normal.

[Linus Sebastian]

Can they see it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, they can definitely see it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I had a few different options. There was traditional braces, Invisalign, and then they had these, like, 3D printed braces, and I was like, I don't know, like, 3D printed braces. That sounds kind of cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sounds cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

They are a little more expensive than Invisalign, actually. So I didn't, like, save money, but they're apparently faster. And after the initial time putting them on, there's apparently just, like, less around with, like, taking off and remounting brackets and, like, getting adjustments from week to week. Theoretically, from my understanding, my very basic understanding, they have these templates that they put on so that they get the bracket in exactly the right spot so that you just hook up all the wires, and then over time, they put stronger and stronger wires, obviously, just like you would with normal train tracks. And it just rips everything around to where it's supposed to be. Just, you know, whatever. I'm going to need a little bit of disking because I have some crowding in my bottom teeth that is pretty. Pretty rancid. And I was just like, you know, I don't know. 3D printing is cool. Yeah, I'm gonna do that one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So what my ortho didn't tell me is that because my. My bottom teeth are so misaligned, it's hard to kind of see that. Basically, it's like the braces being on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There now makes it actually harder.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So some of the brackets on the bottom of the. Are up so high that my top teeth could slice them off if I bit down too hard. So they didn't tell me that that was going to be part of this system. And if they had, I probably would have gone with something else because, as you guys may or may not have noticed, I cannot make S sounds. And the reason for it is these. These bite blocks behind my two front teeth on the top that prevent me from biting down so far that it slices off the bottom brackets. There's a gap between them so that I can floss between the teeth.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I can't feel.

[Dan]

Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Cause I was thinking. I was like, I think I can make an S sound without closing my mouth, but I understand now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, well, fine. Tongue again. I can't. I can't feel.

[Dan]

Do you want some tissue paper? We could jam in there.

[Linus Sebastian]

I want nothing of your help. You mocked me once. Never mocked me again. Or whatever the Princess Bride quote is. I don't know. I'm okay. I'm fine. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in some pain. I just got them on yesterday morning.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So there's, like, the torque, and I've.

[Linus Sebastian]

Still had to work. So, honestly, the teeth aching has never bothered me that much. Like, I've had orthodontic work done before. That's not the worst part right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't actually mind my braces that much when I had them.

[Linus Sebastian]

The worst part for me has been that I've had to work the last couple of days, and I literally talk for a living.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it's taking extra effort to try to enunciate in a way that anyone can actually understand what the bloody hell it is that I'm saying. It really doesn't Help that. The video I hosted today right before wan show was on Lossless Scaling someone's God hates me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's all time rough. I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

So it's taken extra effort to enunciate. And with the brand new braces on my teeth, they're ripping up my gums like. Like more er. When I have to try harder to do things. And I don't know what it is, but I think these might be sharper than like the regular metal brackets. I don't know, maybe they're not. Maybe it's just because I'm not like used to them yet. Last time I got train tracks on, I had had like an appliance already in my mouth, so I'd had a wire already, so. So it probably toughened up the inside of my mouth a little bit before I got them on. So it's not really an apples to apples comparison. Not to mention that it was 20 years ago anyway. Yes, Cyrobane is correct. The true cruelty is that the word lisp is spelled with an S. There's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A bunch of stuff like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, like Asperger's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Isn't it? Like the fear of long words is a really long word or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is it really? So. All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. The fear of long words is like incredibly long.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can't even say it. It's. It's this. We can share my screen.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, that's fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hippopotamonstress, Quipida aliophobia or something like that. Man, that's really also known as cespropetilophobia. The name is ironically long, making it a bit of a joke for those who experience the phobia. Imagine having a fear of longboards. I think we've gotten soft as a Society. Dyslexic Stoner 240 in floatplane chat says we are not soft.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, I was gonna say I think we've soft as the society is hilarious.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's no way that. That's right. Plo da Ploda says the fear of palindromes is a palindrome. No, I think it is abiophobia. There's no way. It can't be. Is that real?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Fear of palindromes can't be a real thing, though. That's probably just a thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A lot of these sound.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a humorous unofficial term that ironically refers to the fear of words, phrases or numbers that read the same backward and forward. That's not real. We live in a society.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Stop it. Somebody said say narcissist I won't.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll have to. Later. I'll explain later. I find that disrespectful because I stole it from you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I stole your opportunity.

[Linus Sebastian]

You bathtird.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bath turd. Sorry, I don't understand.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, you did a caddyshack and it was you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, next topic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's get on to our next topic here. What do you want to talk about? Are you depressed? Just use AI to feel better. Last week, Microsoft laid off about 9,000 employees across several departments with a huge reason for this reduction. Coming back to the classic AI, it seems like whether it's jobs being lost to AI or it's, you know, employees managing to work with it more efficiently or them just wanting to make more investments in hardware, whatever it is. CEO Satya Nadella said that about 20 to 30% of the company's code is currently being generated by AI and there's no plan to slow down on investing billions into it. And I guess that comes at the cost of some of the humans that work there, which is honestly kind of old news at this point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's new this week is that Matt Turnbull, an executive producer at Xbox Game Studio publishing, stated on LinkedIn that while this is a challenging time for many people, there is a solution using AI to help get over it. This is in direct response to people losing their jobs, he included.

[Luke Lafreniere]

LinkedIn is a horrifying place.

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll get to that. Including examples in his post of what you could ask an AI like I'm struggling with imposter syndrome after being laid off. Can you help me reframe this experience in a way that reminds me what I'm good at? He then ended his message with no AI tool is a replacement for your voice or your lived experience. But at a time when mental energy is scarce, these tools can help you get unstuck faster, calmer, and with more clarity. There were even more examples of ideas or prompts to give AI tools, but the post was deleted due to how it was received. Discussion question While the time. Okay, actually no, first discussion question. LinkedIn as a social media platform.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like the worst thing in the world. I hate it so much.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm gonna go on my LinkedIn.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If it was like basically just a professional resume platform that you could message people on, sure. But honestly, the fact that there's public posts at all I find really weird and I often find them to be so incredibly like corporate self serving and so incredibly fake. I just, yeah, I, I don't, I don't like it. Sammy says LinkedIn is just people self glazing and other people approving yourself glaze.

[Linus Sebastian]

So it's a circle jerk. A jerk in a circle.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But everyone in the circle is also at least partially wearing suits.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's got to be a genre. Probably.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Somebody'S into it. Somebody somewhere.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Okay, so that wasn't much of a discussion topic. That's fine. We can move on from that. While the timing of this post couldn't have been any worse, ignoring that, can you see yourself ever turning to an AI chatbot for assistance?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like therapeutic assistance? Because I use chatbots for assistance all the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. Therapeutic assistance.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I don't think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I'm going to prevent. I'm going to prevent. I'm going to present a contrarian take here. Both my own and someone else's. Elijah put in here. To be honest, I've 100% used AI messaging tools to help through temporary tough times. I don't think they're a replacement for real therapy or whatever the person might actually need. But if someone can identify that what they're going through is very temporary. Needs a quick ranting, buddy. I could totally see this being a real thing people would do. To be clear, there's no endorsement there, but seeing that this could be a thing that people would do, I think is valuable for us to at least have a broader perspective, even if it's not something that we would do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Personally, I'm not saying you shouldn't.

[Linus Sebastian]

And what I will say is that that short period of time that I spent on that social media platform, that was all AI participants. Honestly, it felt healthier than regular social media.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh. I mean, that's. That bar is in the core of the earth, sure. But low. It has no factor.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, basically there was. It was nothing but positive energy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And social media is nothing but negative energy.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wouldn't say it's nothing but.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Depends on the category of social media.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it is very problematic, energy wise. I think we can agree on that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Arguable. To say that even when it's positive, it's positive in a way that drives you to continue using it, which will inevitably push you towards a negative.

[Linus Sebastian]

You could make that argument.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

Lime Day. We gotta sell.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's Lime Day. It's. It's. It's Lime Day. I can't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are you saying Slime day? I'm not. I'm not aware of what slime day is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Stop.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it like a Stop. Nickelodeon reference?

[Dan]

Try it to be.

[Linus Sebastian]

Today. Lime day occurred. There you go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That worked.

[Linus Sebastian]

Lime Day is our annual sales event where we squeeze our margins to bring you some really sweet deals, including our brand new not a hot dog T shirt that we dropped today. It's available here. I'll switch to the loot cam. It's available. You'll have to turn around a bit more. It's available for a limited time at a discounted lime day price for just $19.99 on both sites. So that is $19.99 CAD on the global site and $20 US on the US site. We are also introducing a brand new colorway in olive since y' all sold the sky blue version out so quick. Oh, Artie's writing in the doc. You should probably explain the story. So it's a hot dog, right? And in the mustard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, the front isn't anything.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's eyes and a kneef and he.

[Linus Sebastian]

Holds a little knife. It's cute. And then on the back the mustard says I'll kill you on the super cute hot dog. Did you notice that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't actually see that part. I really like the shirt though.

[Linus Sebastian]

It says I'll kill you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh. Written on the hot dog.

[Linus Sebastian]

So the reference. The reference is I have pushed for many years to keep our shirts at $20. It was only recently with tariffs on the ones that are going into the US that pushed them like making it impossible for us to keep them at US$20 without losing our shirts. Haha. Get it. Anyway, we're bringing it back no matter the cost. And the reference here is that the Costco founder told the then CEO of the hot dog in the Costco food court, if you change the price of the hot dog from $1.50 for a hot dog in a soda, which like today is insane. Insane. He said I'll kill you. And so this shirt, it's 20 bucks. It's lime day. It's an I'll kill you hot dog. And it's adorable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's great.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's great too. I think the team did an absolutely bang up job of. Of putting together this shirt. I think we really, we really went. We really went for extra points by printing it on both sides for our cheapest shirt. That costs more, by the way. And if you haven't seen any of our other lime day deals, we have quite a few. Do you want to bring up the site?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can save $15 on our iconic insulated water. Stop.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can save.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just click shop now. Okay. Shop. There's a shop now there. Click the shop.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You don't have to click that painful anywhere on here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, you weren't doing that either. Look, you can save $15 on our iconic insulated water bottle. Perfect for the summer to keep your drinks cold. You can get a free Are you gonna like scroll down and look at any of the deals? He's doing great, huh?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We should probably. Anyways, no worries.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can get a free Razer Deathadder Essential when you buy any desk pad. Just add both of them to your cart and it'll show up. If you buy a commuter backpack, you can get either a free 8bitdo controller with charging dock or an LTT Ridge wallet. You can snag our new WAN backpack and get either a Free Corsair Thunderbolt 3 Dock if you're in the US or a free COR K7010 keyless keyboard if you are anywhere else. You can also get one of five exclusive Lime Day mystery screwdrivers and save US$20 in the US and $30 Canadian anywhere else. And if you buy a precision screwdriver and bit set bundle, you can get a free Jerryrig everything knife. Lots of great deals this year. And in traditional WAN show fashion, I'm unleashing some brand new deals right now for you. Right here we're doing $10 off the stubby screwdriver we're doing. Where are they? It's over here. I'm stuck. I dropped a thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You pronounce your s's better when you yell them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thank you. Just so you know, we're doing $20 off our cargo pants. We're doing US$20 off of the off site laptop bag in the US and $30 off on the global site. And last but not least, the MCM Magnetic Cable Management Starter Solution. We are giving you guys our best deal yet. Only US$10 on the US site and 14 Canadian dollars on the global site. So that's about the same. Plus you get 30% off individual MCM component packs so you can build off of that starter kit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

But lime day is scheduled to end on Monday so make sure you shop at these discounted prices while you still can. At LMG GG Lime, it's also a great time for you guys to leave a merch message. I hate that we call them that merch message. I got this Dan. Should we show the people how they work? All you got to do is add an item to your cart on ltcstore.com whenever we're live you will see a little box pop up to leave a merch message. It'll Go to producer Dan, who will reply to it or who will pop it up on the bottom. A little something like, oop, there you go. Like that. Or who might even curate it for me and Luke to respond to. Dan, do you want to show the people how a merch message works?

[Dan]

Sure, let's. Let's start with a normal one. How about that? Love the show. Never been around during a live stream for the group. What has been the most simple yet stressful thing you have ever had to do for a sponsor?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, wow. Simple, yet stressful. I feel like you did that on purpose.

[Dan]

No, the rest of them are on purpose. This is an easier one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You don't. You don't. Technically, you don't have to read the message. Technically, Dan has to read the message. You just have to not repeat it back to them.

[Dan]

Darn. Luke's right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I mean, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, we'll see what happens.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That doesn't work. Simple yet stressful.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I think some of the most stressful ones have been the ones where they've been like weather dependent and there's a huge, like time crunch. Like I seem to recall there was one that we had to do. I mean, you know what? Sure. Let's go way back to the beginning when we were still working out of the house. Do you remember that shoot for Patriot for their like, man, it was. Was it like a battery bank or something like that where we went out in the woods near my house and we had to get it done that day, but it was raining. But then we like sought under enough tree coverage that like, it was kind of okay, but then it wasn't okay because when we got back to the house, the camera wouldn't turn on anymore because it got water on it. And then I had to kind of disassemble the camera partially and then put it next to. I used a GPU exhaust thing that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Could possibly generate heat and just like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Tried to dry it out overnight.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought it was more than just. I know the GPU exhaust was.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I think I was. I think I was running Furmark on like a 480.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I know, I remember that. But I thought we also had like other heat generating things. Just that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not sure. Yeah, I don't know, but too long.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But. Yeah, I remember that.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it dried out and it worked the next day. And that camera, like got us through the first year and a half of the company carried us for a long time. Yeah. FS 700. Let's go, boys. I mean, it was a simple Thing get the shoot done, but it ended up almost killing our camera. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna say that counts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My example is probably not fair, but going on a hike is simple on the surface.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Highlander was rough and we had sponsors.

[Linus Sebastian]

For it, so there we did. Asus even came with us. Yeah, yeah. Nick's at intel now, I think, but he was. He was with ASUS at the time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Okay, we are on to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Supposed to do a couple merch messages, I think. Oh no, we're not.

[Dan]

Do you have another announcement?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know how things work, dude.

[Dan]

Me neither.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're technically already out of order, I think, so I don't know how much it matters. We could do this float plane announcement.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure, fine. Just do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who is Linus when the cameras are off. Over the last two weeks we've released content to show the day to day behind the life of Linus Gabriel Thabaston. Just circle the video thumbnails with your mouse as you're talking about each of the videos. That was too fun. Okay, what are these? Okay, hold on, hold on, hold on. How does the dynamic of Taryn and Linus actually work? Check out the over 40 minute sit down video with them together. And. But what about LMG staff? Do they remember their first reaction with Linus? See some of the staff's first reaction when he was meeting. When they were meeting. Mr. Tech tips.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then here, I'll show some of them. So Linus sits down with the LMG CEO. That's been a pretty successful exclusive. Oh yeah, okay. No, that was. That was recent.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I love how you started off by really giving him the confidence he needs to like show up on camera by telling him that he was terrible on camera and he is still terrible on camera.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did I do that? That sounds like a thing I would do. Here's. Yeah, this. This is pretty much it. Linus reacts to LMG members share their first meeting with Linus. This was another popular one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I watched that whole thing. That was a banger.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have Linus takes a psychopathy quiz.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The first comment. I don't know if it's the talk out, but the first comment is just. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And finally, I spent the day with Linus in Taiwan. Wow. This one's. This one's newer, so it doesn't have as many views yet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Still brewing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good stuff. Yeah. That was during Computex. Sammy did like. Like a day following me around and documenting it for Float plane.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Okay. What else are we supposed to talk about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Finally We. Never mind. Yeah, go to LMG, GG, Floatplane, or check out our YouTube membership.

[Linus Sebastian]

Today.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Should we talk about the thing Labs did?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, we're apparently also going to be having me take a narcissism quiz.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

And we're going to be doing part two of your first interactions, including Colton and Yvonne. Colton's. I know. Is terrible. I did not make a great first impression on Colton. He knows.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm kind of surprised we're even doing that. I thought that was one of those stories that just goes out back and dies. I didn't think that was something that would return, but. But. Okay. All right, sounds good. Put that back on camera again.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. What are we supposed to be doing right now? Oh, right, the merge messages.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah, there's. There's a couple coming in. Sorry. Let's see. Linus, could you please say she sells seashells by the seashore with your retainer?

[Linus Sebastian]

That's your merch message.

[Dan]

She sells seashells by the seashore. They spent $287. Say the line, Bart.

[Linus Sebastian]

She sells sea salt. She sells. She sells seashell. Shut up. She sells seashells by the seashore.

[Dan]

Nicely done.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

I made it.

[Dan]

Good job.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My goodness, you got there.

[Dan]

Sophisticated Sebastian serves sublime sushi side.

[Linus Sebastian]

You gotta be kidding me. That's another one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is this a new one?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. They didn't spend enough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think there's technically a line for that.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, Luke, you do Sophisticated Sebastian serves sublime sushi sideways. That was pretty good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I missed every word clearly.

[Dan]

That was a little easier to say.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I understood every word clearly.

[Dan]

All right, don't make a habit of sending those in. You're not all gonna get curated. All right, moving on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Looking at some of the other ones you curated. You bastard.

[Dan]

Those ones you don't have to like.

[Linus Sebastian]

You bastard. All right, what else are we talking about today? Luke, you want to do one?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. We can do this. Labs 1. We can do maybe both of the Labs ones if you want.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So, Labs has an article. We saw a Reddit post on the R. Linustechtiff subreddit that wasn't people talking about Creator warehouse. And we were curious and we conducted some testing and gathered one round of data. No concrete results yet since battery testing takes a long time, but we wanted to kind of give people a bit of a sneak peek into this because we were called upon. Can LTT test this claim? So we were like, yeah, we can look into it. We are going to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are we Going to say the claim?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, the claim was that showing the seconds in your taskbar, would system tray clock use more?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you can't see that from here, can you?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I can't. I just wasn't looking at it.

[Linus Sebastian]

When are you going to get your glasses?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I can read that just fine. I just wasn't looking at it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But yeah, having seconds there, does that reduce your battery life? So we poked into it, we have the article up now it's. Does showing seconds in the system tray actually use more power? We lay out the claim, we talk about how we tested it and we show the results. And the results so far?

[Linus Sebastian]

So far, yes. Really? By how much?

[Luke Lafreniere]

So the red bar is seconds hidden, the blue bar is seconds displayed. And this is the duration of battery life per minute on these three different computers. We try to get computers that had. Does this talk about it really much here? But we tried to use like a range of.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah, we have arm.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we have like, like, like an X86 and we have an ARM and we also have like a high performance laptop and more of a like battery life optimized laptop.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes. And in each case on three tests which, and like there's little, there's little flags. Data is not comparable between devices, stuff like that. Also we try to make it pretty clear at the beginning, like this is not conclusive. This is like one test per thing. This is not enough. But we want it to like show as we were working. So we're going to update this post later as we get more data.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's super cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're also. This is just like it says on the chart displaying desktop. That's it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I wonder how many other little things are like this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We are potentially going to look into that. We're gonna see if there's enough and if there's enough, we'll, we'll probably look into it. But battery testing takes forever and there's actually a very high amount of variance.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right. So if you decide to do something like hitting an update server or something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And just like, oh, Windows Defender just decided to go ham randomly or whatever, like I had to restart this computer when I sat down and the fans were just kicked on like 100% for 15 minutes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no idea what it was doing, but it was doing something AI, who knows? So it's, it's, it's not conclusive yet. So far all the testing has shown that. Yeah, it does help. I know that. And it's not in here yet because we want to keep Doing more. But we have run. Lucas was telling me, because he's heading this up, that we have ran one laptop where we did video playback instead of just showing the desktop, and it actually did the opposite, but it did the opposite to a very small degree, where it's probably within margin of error. If I remember correctly, his theory was that just if you're playing a video, there's just so much going on that it effectively doesn't really make a difference, and it's just a margin of an error problem. But that brings even more of a light onto. Hey, battery testing is hard, and there's a lot of variance when it's not a device that does, like, exactly one thing at all points in time. Yeah. So that was cool. This is cool. I think this is sweet. We want to try to be able to do more of this type of stuff. So thank you for the question on Reddit, and hopefully this is an interesting adder to the conversation, and we hope to keep updating it more in the future. This is also a way for us to just, like, kind of play around and get more experience doing things like battery testing, because battery testing is weird. So. Yeah. Anyways, there's also another thing that I wanted to kind of show off. This was actually built quite some time ago, and then for some reason, we didn't expand upon it. I think we didn't have the time at the time or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

I've literally never seen this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought Linus killed this.

[Linus Sebastian]

I've never seen it before in my life.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's very likely I did because we didn't have the time to, like, actually fully see it through at the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

But check this out. This is awesome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dan Siegel made this. We were. We were trying to play around with learning.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan Siegel. More like Dan Eagle.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is. This is really sick. We were trying to play around with.

[Linus Sebastian]

Way more op than seagulls. They just steal French fries.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I, like, told him I was gonna show this off, and now it's gonna open with you making fun of his last name.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not making fun of his last name. His last name isn't even the bird.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know.

[Linus Sebastian]

You should know how to spell his name. You're his manager.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's pathetic. Oh, my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's like me being, like, Luke. Luke Lasten. Free Air.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I bet you like half this company can't say my last name. And that's okay. That's fine. Took me until, like, grade three to be able to spell it. I don't expect anyone else to Figure it out. It's okay. What was I gonna say? Yeah. So this is, this is cool. This is fun. You can, you can go to the different modes. You can be like, I want to see the noctua. And then it like totally changes what it looks like. I want to see the retro.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Might be a little bit too on the nose. This was a internal thing originally. Solid color. You can see all the different colors. Change the background, build your own and then you can change the different thingamajigs. There are some problems. You'll see the cap.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But again, this is a tech demo, so. Whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think I have that combo at home.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, the one that I set up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Literally that exact combo. One of my kids made it, I think. Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can also do this. You looking? Are you looking?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, I'm looking.

[Luke Lafreniere]

See the little orange ball?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The Ratchet is based on Megaprose, long standing and reliable design. And then you can go back and be like, what about this one? And it's like our bit storage is in collaboration with Mega.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So this came back up into conversation because Dan mentioned like, hey, you guys have the transparent one. Now it would be fun to do an experiment, like trying to mess around with 3D transparencies and stuff like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

So that's super cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. I don't know what we would do with it, but if we could, if we could have like a product select.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no, well, I didn't. Why would it. Whatever. Now some of you have looked at that and gone, oh, well, then it'll definitely be. It's definitely going to be like, like you're going to do customizable screwdrivers. Right. And the answer is, we've always aspired to it. Ever since we did that thing at LTX where you could build your own screwdriver. That was always the goal. But we've never, we've never been able to figure out the logistics of stocking all of the individual pieces and being able to guarantee with any kind of certainty that they're not going to be like out of stock all the time. And also the, the way that it would slow down orders if we had to like put the screwdriver together before we could ship it, especially during high volume times, like Lime day. So it's designed with like a build your own because it's a cool internal tech demo, but we haven't figured out the actual, like boots on the ground logistics of bringing that to life in a real, actual product. So for now, the Versions of the screwdriver we have on the site, those are what we have and we do still aspire to do like a customize your own in any color scheme you want project at some point. But it is not currently on any kind of real roadmap. Yeah, I know, I know. It'll sell well. I can tell you right now though it will not be the same price as the pre done ones. To be like, we will have to carry so much more stock of just like random not assembled screwdriver bits than we would normally have to do now. And the additional touch of like putting them together on our side versus like doing it on mass with just like buckets of parts, like having to go like pick each of the individual ones that go together. Like the, the logistics of it are kind of a nightmare. So it would probably be at least another 10 bucks, probably more like 15 or 20. So make of that what you will. That's just the way it is. Sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We also have some semblance of pricing stuff on the beta and then I don't remember if this is public or not yet. I don't think so. So I'm gonna go play around with it first and check before I announce it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah. I mean, what could go wrong?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're just gonna share my page again? He's gonna do that. You're just gonna wait?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I'm waiting. I'm waiting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's see. Yes. Okay, so it's still in the beta.

[Linus Sebastian]

Branch, but so I can show your screen or.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, you can, but it doesn't show. So eventually we're gonna have it so that like you know, you're on the, you're on the website, you go, I want to look at graphics cards. You add a couple graphics cards to your comparison bag. Sorry, what?

[Linus Sebastian]

You want to look at graphics cards? You must be rich.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah, fair enough. Then you go to your comparison bin, you do the veto.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you need a trigger?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, that's a nice gpu. You want to have some fun?

[Luke Lafreniere]

My goodness. I hear you're. You're wealthy enough to do AI inference. We should hang out. But yeah, in this area there will be an edit price button. Then you can put in your own price and it'll show some comparisons and stuff. Yeah, so that's, that's, that's coming. Don't know exactly when, but it's, it's coming. There's cool stuff going on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool story. Luke Laster Nair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, thanks. I think I've told you this before. Any, anytime anyone's Like, I can tell they're taking down my information. I need to give them my. My last name.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'll say it and immediately start spelling it out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, 100%.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't try to. Really?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. No one can spell Sebastian. They always spell it with an E.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So I'll be like, linus Sebastian. S, E, B, A, S, T, I, A, N. And they're like. And they'll still do it with an E. Sometimes it's like, why did I bother to say these word noises out of my mouth hole.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you ever have your name wrong on, like, sports jerseys?

[Linus Sebastian]

You assumed that I had a sports jersey. Not all of us were, you know, athletes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You didn't play anything?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, not at a high enough level to like, needed my name on the back of the jersey.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I think that's like little kid.

[Linus Sebastian]

Jerseys just are like a jersey. Huh. Okay. Our lived experiences are quite different, sir.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right, nevermind.

[Linus Sebastian]

Have you seen my size?

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're so. I have sports you could play when you're.

[Linus Sebastian]

I could be the coxswain.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You could have played rugby.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I didn't want to get. I don't want to get hurt. And it was cold outside. They did actually ask me if I wanted to be on the rugby team when I was in like grade eight or nine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, you probably actually would have been great because you're fast and you could have played hooker.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which is.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's literally. I still remember Jamie McKinley. If you're out there, you're kind of a hole, but. Or maybe you're not anymore, but you were when you were a teenager. But the one nice thing that he ever said to me, I think, was he told me I should try out for the rugby team. And then I didn't. And then I think we like, barely ever spoke again. Yeah. Because he was kind of a rugby guy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think you would have actually legitimately been really good at that, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Thanks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

Speaking of graphics cards and being a baller, the Nvidia RTX 5050 is a thing Nvidia has announced. The RTX 5050? But where are the reviews? Well, it turns out Nvidia just doesn't feel like seeding GPUs to review outlets. I mean, they're just gonna crap on them anyway. So instead they just quietly launched the card with no review embargo and said, coming second half of July, it's $250 MSRP, which is the same price as the RTX 3050 that it seems to be replacing. And I guess that's good because it has almost the exact same specs. 2563 CUDA cores, 8 gigs of GDDR6, not 6x128 bit memory bus. And the biggest difference is the clock speed going from 1.55 base to 2.31. And of course it's got lots of AI.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are you just happy you found a sound that you could make?

[Linus Sebastian]

We will of course be publishing results.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Tape to tape tonight, and you're gonna be saying, shoot and pass. Sorry, I just had that realization. You have to be a forward so that you're asking for passes all the time. All right, sorry. Keep going.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're not sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

We will be publishing results on LTT Labs once we have a card tested and we will also have a YouTube video. But until then, there will be almost no third party reviews while these cards are up for sale. Meaning people will not have solid data to assess the value of these cards. Yeah, so this is pretty crappy. Our discussion question is, do you ever get tired of trying to be a voice for change in this space since it feels like it's for nothing because absolutely nothing is changing? At the end of the day, I think that there really is. I mean, I've talked about this so many times in the past. I think there's this mistaken perception for a lot of the viewers because they feel so much connection with the publications and the video creators that they engage with. There's this perception that we have this, like this power in the industry or something like that. But at the end of the day, you got to understand that a lot of the, the consequential change that you're observing due to, you know, any video that we might make or one of our fellow creators might make or an article that gets published is because of the actual consequences of that thing, not because of us saying it, if that makes sense. So if the company ultimately agrees, like if a product needs to be recalled due to a safety issue or whatever, then that will get some kind of action. But if the company doesn't agree because they just think, oh, sorry, what they're saying it's like too expensive, but we're making lots of money and we're selling lots of them, so who cares, then they just completely ignore us. And that's the way it's always been and the way that it's always going to be. And so, yeah, it does get tiring. But I think the most tiring part is I think the weight of the expectation from other people. Like I remember particularly during the GPU apocalypse during COVID we took a ton of flack for not taking a stand against the higher pricing. And it's like, I mean we said it's too expensive. What else can we possibly say? Nothing more. Right. And you know, more recently, Nvidia took yet another step towards general hostility toward their customers and especially the press. And we refused to review one of their recent cards. But you know, at the end of the day, we can only hold out for so long because our entire job is making sure that the people who want to know can get educated on the value of these products. So ultimately we're just going to have to go out and buy one and we're just going to have to make the review anyway. And I don't know, man, it just kind of is what it is. They're worth $4 trillion, you know, and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We'Re such a tiny segment. And I don't mean Linus Media Group, I mean gaming.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, they don't even do, I don't think they care at all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then these sub section of gamers who actually watch reviews on the cars that they buy, enthusiasts, it's like we're getting small.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like that's the thing, right? With the 50 50. What percentage of people buying that card do you think are shopping for that card? Because if you're shopping for that card, you're buying like an arc B580 or whatever. Like you're an educated consumer. You're not, you're not going out and buying an add in beef. Excuse me, and add in an RTX.

[Luke Lafreniere]

50, 50 if they are, if they even do look it up basically at all. They're probably just going to Google it, get an AI summary and move on.

[Linus Sebastian]

And they're probably just buying based on the overall brand. Like oh yeah, no, I know GeForce is good. I have $250 or realistically 280 or 290 or whatever by the time it actually makes it to a retail shelf. So I'm going to get the GeForce that fits my price point. I think a lot of enthusiasts don't have never worked retail. I have worked retail. People don't come in with like the concept of FPS per dollar. They come in with how many dollars do I have? And getting the most for it. So in a way it's like the inverse. It's like how many FPS can I get for my dollar as opposed to how many FPS do I want and how many dollars do I need to spend, if that makes sense. So at the end of the day they're just going to walk out with the one that they can afford from the brand that they trust. And Nvidia's install base is so, so strong and so deep. And the products, okay, we can talk about FPS per dollar and we can talk about AI features and all that. Maybe they're not the best value, you know, in this particular game or whatever, but you can't mostly look at the product and go, oh yeah, historically people have had such bad experiences with Nvidia cards, they're probably desperate to get off. They've had some issues with the 50 series launch for sure. But prior, like if you, if you still had a GTX 1080 in your rig right now or a 1060 or whatever, would you be going like, oh yeah, I like hate Nvidia and I want to use something else? No, you would only get that per. You would only make that mindset shift if you were like watching the coverage as Nvidia has in shitified over the generations and like gotten to be less compelling of a value compared to their competitors. It's not like the product in your, in your computer that to their credit they've supported for a very long time with drivers and software.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not like you hate that. So I understand why people just come into the store with their money, with their budget for their new GPU and they just buy whatever it is. And if Nvidia can sell 30 class silicon for 50, 60 class prices these days, they're going to do it but with more AI. So yeah, yeah, it's frustrating. I don't know how to, I don't know how to deal with it. You know, we're going to, we're going to keep doing what we do. We're going to keep testing them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This was, this was linked in full plane chat and I'm pretty sure most people here have seen it. But.

[Linus Sebastian]

What am I looking at?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Revenue.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah, here we go. Gaming. Gaming. Gaming. Wow. Wow. Literally like automotive is making up ground which was like nothing not that long ago. Networking is a bigger business for Nvidia than gaming.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And do you think, do you think gaming includes Switch?

[Linus Sebastian]

Ooh, maybe. Mind you, this is fiscal year. Probably Switch wouldn't be here yet. Oh, maybe it would. Yeah, maybe. Oh yeah, maybe it would. Oh wow. That's unfortunate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They would have sold the components for Switch 2 already.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's very unfortunate. Wow. Operating costs. R D gaming makes less than the total R D budget these days. That's wild. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It makes less than taxes. That's a. Well, no, not quite, but basically the same.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Fiscal year 25. 72.96 of 0.9. This is wild. 72.9 billion. Billion with a B. That's wild, man. Staggering.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. It's pretty nuts. Pretty nuts.

[Linus Sebastian]

I believe cost of revenue is cogs in this case. So I can bring that back up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's gone. Okay, Give me a second.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice, Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't know you could do that multiple times. Cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Very nice.

[Dan]

It also does windows. So if you close the window, it'll open the whole window.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. Cost of revenue is cogs, cost of goods sold. So that's the. That's their. That's their gross margins on top of it. Of course, that gross margins is not like gross profit is not real profit. You have operating costs, see R and D, and you have taxes to pay and everything. But like, damn, that's some nice net profit numbers. This is like after tax. And I wouldn't even. I wouldn't even consider that, like tax is just what you pay for, like money you made. So the actual profit here is 81 1/2 billion dollars on $130 billion of revenue. That is wild. Wow. I can tell you right now we ain't doing Nvidia numbers. And like, we aren't even.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Profitability is crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Trying to think if we ever did. I don't think so. Even when we didn't have like physical goods, even when we were selling purely digital goods and advertising, I don't think we were ever that high. And we were a much, much smaller company. Of course.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's talk about our sponsors, speaking of making money.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

The show is brought to you today by ahrefs. As we step closer and closer to making Skynet a reality, AI continues to evolve the way we interact with the Internet. So that's what he meant when Old MacDonald was saying, AI, AI. O who wrote this? This is garbage. No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's amazing.

[Linus Sebastian]

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[Dan]

Voice, I think people were gonna pay more attention to it to hear you say it wrong.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Honestly, I think so as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was doing my best as a sponsor.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You want people to be lasered in on the content, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

I guess.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So next week we need to make the list worse.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, by next week, it will be mostly fixed. I. I'm going in on Monday and I'm having them rip these bite blocks out because I can't do this. I can't. I can't. I can't feel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are they, like, cemented in place or what's the.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, it's gonna be unpleasant. Yeah, I'm. I'm a little unhappy right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think you have a pretty good reason to be.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, like, to be clear, I'm not mad at anyone other than myself for not sort of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought they didn't tell you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, no, the ortho didn't tell me that they were going to put the bite blocks in, but I probably should have said something right when I realized what they were doing because I. I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

While you're being operated.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. So I did tell them that I talk for a living, and that's a factor. But I told them that two and a half years ago when I first got a quote. So, like. Yeah, they didn't remember that because they told me they didn't want to do it until I got my top wisdom teeth out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. And then.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then I dragged ass on that and I finally did it and I came back. I'm like, okay, I'm ready for braces now. And they're like, oh, it's been a while. So, like, rescanned everything. And I probably didn't mention it again. Bite block is this. It keeps me from closing my mouth all the way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you have those little, like, rubber circle things?

[Linus Sebastian]

They're clear.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Should let. What should get d Ran. Should. Should pay to get you to put different color combinations in or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think clear is a pretty good choice. I mean, the whole reason they're white is so that they're, like, not that noticeable. See?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but it's, like, pretty funny if they're noticeable. Oh, yeah, that's a good point. They're just an ad for the transparent screwdriver. Boom. Got him. That wasn't even me. Let's go. Next topic.

[Dan]

No, let's do some merch messages.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Dan]

And they won't be any more of that. Linus, I'm sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, sorry. You're not sorry at all. Look at you.

[Dan]

Sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not the face of a man who's sorry. Look at him.

[Dan]

I won't apologize.

[Linus Sebastian]

He can't even pretend.

[Dan]

Hey, ldl. I just started my motorcycle course and on my first run of the road, I crashed. I'm fine. It was my first gear only. But did you ever crash while riding? If so how bad was it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I've actually dropped my. Drop my bike. Trying to think. Have I dropped my bike more than once? Like I've dropped my bike stationary at least once. Because how did this end up happening to me so often? Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right. I, I am maintenance averse sometimes. And so I've had, sometimes I've had a couple of instances where I've allowed my stupid bike battery to die over the winter because I didn't buy a battery tender and I would like forget to charge it up once in a while over the winter. So I like killed like two motorcycle batteries before I just bought myself a stupid battery tender. Anyway, long story short, I've had instances where my bike was the only vehicle at home and I needed to go somewhere and I had to start it with a dead battery. And you can do that, but it sucks. So what you do is you go to a hill and then you. Oh yeah. So you push it and then you hop on it and then you try to get enough speed and then you put it in gear and you pop the clutch and like a standard car, like you can, you can jump, jump start it like that. So I had this one time. So the problem with that is that on my street where I used to live, my street was flat and then there was a hill coming from it. So my best shot to start the bike was on the hill. But if I didn't get was game over because I'd have to come back up the hill and it was quite steep. So what I would usually try to do is do a running start on my flat street and try to get it. And there was this one time I tried like half a dozen times and I think, I think like just in the maneuvering of the bike, I probably like, like dropped it a bit, but like, but like kind of like caught it, like got my like hip under it or something. Like it didn't, like it didn't get scratched. The time that I broke off my frame slider was on. Do you know that bridge in like Poco, that's wooden? Yes, he knows the one. So this was shortly after my. This Was shortly after I did my course, actually. And one of the things that they teach you if you do a writing course or if you, you know, read about motorcycle riding at all, I guess, is how to use your brakes, because you got your front brake and you got your back brake. So the front brake has much more braking power because you can preload it a little bit, which shifts the weight of the bike forward, and then you can really squeeze, and it gets more traction with the road because you've got more weight on it. Right. However, the front brake does come with the drawback that if it locks up, you have no steering at all, and you will just go over. So the back brake can be the safer one if you don't want to lose traction. Anyway, I was like, oh, I mean, using the front brake can't be, like, that bad, right? I'm just going to experiment. So I was actually in traffic on that bridge. I was going, like, like, 8 kilometers an hour, like, at the speed of, like, a brisk walk. And I was like, well, what if I just gave it a little squish immediately on the ground? Because it was. Oh, it was raining. So wooden bridge in the rain. I was like, I wonder how bad it will. So I didn't hit the car in front of me when I slid, but the car behind me hit my. The tail of my bike, which is why my, like, license plate holder is broken. And then my frame slider broke off. So nothing dangerous. I was wearing my gear. I was fine. Everyone was fine. I think I had to give the guy a couple bucks to, like, patch up his fender or something. He didn't take it through icbc, though, so it didn't affect my insurance premiums.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, so you fell off your bike and he hit you and you paid?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, it was 100. My fault, dude. I stopped for no reason whatsoever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, you're still supposed to have stopping distance.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was, like, right in front. Yeah, it was my fault.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did he expect you to pay him?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, then that's fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was 100%.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can respect you being like, I'm gonna own this. Here you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was 100%, bro.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You owe me then.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it was my fault.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, sounds good.

[Linus Sebastian]

In response to USA's question, I have to admit, I was not wearing my seatbelt on the motorcycle. So that was the other time in my life that I have been improperly buckled, and for that, I am sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know, I think it goes deeper than that. I think you haven't been buckled many times on your motorcycle. I think you also haven't been buckled.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll never admit it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think you also haven't been buckled on buses.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll never admit it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're gonna have to deal with this.

[Linus Sebastian]

At some point, but it is not this day. Dan, hit me. Sure.

[Dan]

Next up, Linus. Each week you close by saying same bad times, same bad channel. Yet every week the show is late and starts at different times. How do you live with the weight of your lies?

[Linus Sebastian]

That's why I call it a bad time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because the time is wrong and bad and it's the same every week. And also just the bad channel bit is like, haha. It's because, you know, I don't know, self deprecation. Haha. Same bad time, same bad channel. Like I. I told Luke for many years I didn't really understand when show like what the point of it was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You now?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think so. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. But I never used to. I used to be like, it's not really a very good show. Like we don't, we don't really give a detailed synopsis. We like often get things wrong.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a lot of portion is very questionable. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, like, what's the point of this? And I finally figured it out. It's just like hang out bro. Talk about tech time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Especially because like weekly news in the modern era, it just means old.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's just old news, which is not news. We don't even. The end doesn't even stand for news anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Light, potentially inaccurate analysis of old news.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, like we retconned. We retconned that years ago. So like I could never. Yeah, I could never figure out what the point of WAN show was. And I think, I think a big part of it was that I didn't have the time in my life to enjoy WAN show. So for me, WAN show was just work for many, many years. And then Luke and I stopped working together day to day and I started really enjoying WAN show because it was the one time a week that I could like hang out and catch up with him. And then I realized that that was the whole point was I just like the weekly like, you know, talk about tech and decompress and just like kind of, you know, kind of chill. Right. That's what, that's what WAN show is. I forget what the merch message asked. Oh yeah. Bad time, bad channel. Right. So the bad channel was partly poking fun at that. I just like kind of thought lan show is stupid. I didn't really get the point of it. But I think you know, sometimes. Sometimes. Look, I've been doing this many years, but that doesn't mean that I always 100% get it. Like, we had a long debate during writers meeting today where, like, I was going back and forth with one of the writers over whether this concept where we, like, fish around for parts in the warehouse and just, like, build computers was had enough of what I call, like, learning outcomes or if there was. Or if it was too contrived. And like, you know, I obviously, you know, argued a position in this and I took. I said I thought it was too contrived, but that doesn't mean, like, I'm going to stop thinking about it after the fact because, you know, the writer thought that they were right still at the end. We kind of agreed to disagree at the end of the day. But, like, I'll have to keep thinking about it because just because I think something and just because I have all this experience doing this doesn't mean I'm right every time. Not even close. So try anything twice. Right. Is. Is kind of the attitude that we have to have about things and with. In the case of wan. So I don't know, try it thousands of times. Yeah. And then eventually you'll get it right, you know?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then, of course, it's a reference. Right. To. To like, 1960s. I think it is 1960s. Batman.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bat time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Same Bat time, Same Bat Channel with Adam West.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think there's another problem when it comes to YouTube content, which is like, eras. There's some stuff where you might try it and it doesn't do well, but then there might be another. This is really funny. I don't. Did you. So on the sovereign. I don't even have anything to say about that.

[Dan]

I want to get like an N95.

[Linus Sebastian]

With that on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Oh, man. About one more. That's pretty good. Yeah. Go for it. I don't remember what I was saying. Who cares? Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, Dale.

[Dan]

I love the beard. I'm moving to Germany soon. Do you have any tips or advice about moving to another country, having never done it?

[Linus Sebastian]

No. Good luck. Have fun. Be. Maybe start learning the language.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Start doing that ahead of time and commit to actually following through with it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, like, look, Quebec, Canada is one of those places where people either say it's great to travel there or they say it, like, sucks and the people are horrible. And as far as I can tell, the main difference is whether you bothered to try to speak French or not. And I don't even blame them. Oh, yeah. I Guess. Okay, so Quebec is the closest thing to a different country I've ever moved to. They think they're a different country. So I moved there for six or seven weeks. I forget exactly how long it was in, like, a French immersion program. And they're, like, the nicest people in the entire world. If you speak French, you don't have to speak French. Well, you can speak the worst French in the world. And especially in a city like Montreal that's very bilingual, you can walk up and be like, bon dieur. Comment? Toilet? And they'll be like, it's okay, bro. I speak English. And you'll be like, oh, thank God. Where's the bathroom?

[Luke Lafreniere]

But you tried, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

But you. You tried, and they respect that. Whereas if you walk up and you're just like, hey, where's your bathroom? They'll be like, au revoir. That's just the way it is. And I get it, I get it. I understand.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So, yeah, but it's also just like, if you're trying to go to that place, like, yeah. Learn their language. I don't know if you want to be there. Learn how to talk like they do. Seems cool. Do the stuff that they do. Is there. Is there an activity like drinking beer?

[Linus Sebastian]

Did they say it was Germany? I don't know. Eating bratwurst?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can think of a variety of things for journey, for Canada. I know it's stereotypical, but, like, go to a hockey game. Like, do. Do try out stuff that locals do. See how it goes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Canadian bacon said, engross yourself in the culture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, do that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. All right, what's next? Oh, more topics. Sure, we can do topics. Ugh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What? One.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's do Grok.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The was giving its heart out to the crowd. 1. After a Tuesday fix, Grok the AI chatbot by Elon Musk's X AI went on an anti Semitic tirade parroting Nazi talking points, and began referring to itself as Mecca Hitler. To be fair, the bot did have help from the X community. Users asked Grok to choose between Mecca. Users asked Grok to choose between Mecca, Hitler and gigajou and were able to inject extra prompt instructions as hidden text with what looks with tools like parcel tongue to manipulate the bot's behavior. XAI also appeared to temporarily disable Grok's ability to respond via text and deleted a number of posts. Elon said the problem was Grok being too eager to please.

[Linus Sebastian]

I am so tired of us personifying these things. Grok. It does not want to please anything or anyone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Grok's restrictions were too light. That's what that means.

[Linus Sebastian]

GROK is a glorified pattern recognition and regurgitation software. Let's not pretend that it has a personality on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Well, no, it still does. They're just.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Anyways, in other news the next day, Linda Yakarino. Yakarino. Linda Yakarino announced she is stepping down as CEO of X after two years. A successor has not been named at the time of writing. Also on Wednesday, Grok 4 was released during a live stream, which also unveiled a new $300 per month subscription called Super Grok Heavy. Just because they wanted to replace the previous two nicknames, I guess. Finally, on Thursday, AI researcher Jeremy Howard posted a video showing that Grok4first searches X to get Elon Musk's views and opinions before considering other sources and presenting an answer. Wow, I didn't see that. Whoa. That's really interesting, actually. Holy. The discussion question is, how far along do you think we are in the journey to true artificial general intelligence?

[Linus Sebastian]

Lol.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are we still in the infancy of AI? Yeah, maybe it's a toddler giggling as it repeats all the bad words. It hears a saying. We're back to the personification of AI Bit. I think we're a lot further than people trying to sell A.I. would like you to think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, 100.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, a lot further.

[Linus Sebastian]

But there's so much money in it now that they can't stop lying about it because it's a. It would crash.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a very interesting money movement machine right now. And yeah, if it stops moving, the, like, American economy freaks out, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did Linda Y ever have a chance as CEO of Twitter? Like, with how outspoken and polarizing her boss is, the owner of the platform.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What are your metrics?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. Because, like, you, you have. You can't control what Elon does.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, you can't control him taking his other products from his other platforms, just integrating them, and then they're like, spewing hate speech. Like, how do you. You can't control advertisers not wanting to deal with the guy. And, like, the boycotts kind of went away. But I sincerely doubt that a lot of those advertisers that fled the platform are not still recognizing how much of it is, like, bots and garbage. Oh, it's like, I'm sure they're not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Getting ROI on that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm sure the advertising is not covering the cost of what they're doing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There was a lot of. There was a Very considerable amount of bots and garbage before the takeover. But it feels like it's never been worse right now. I think one of the reasons why it feels that way is the monetization of, like, views. So it's all these, like, threads and. Yeah, blah, blah, blah, porn bots. So it's a really crazy platform right now. It always really has been, but especially right now. Yeah, I know, Max. I. I know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. I'm trying to find the bit where Grock was also like. Oh, yeah, okay. No, this is probably too graphic for when.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, the sexual harassment thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think you could bleep all the words.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think let's just stay away from that one. But Gro did more than just become a raging anti Semite.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like a lot more.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, like, these were pretty. These are pretty disturbing things that Grok wrote about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And there's like, way more stuff than that. Yeah, like, way more stuff than that. You gotta. You gotta think how long this was open to the users of X. And you have to imagine the types of things that were on there. I've seen some crazy stuff over the last while, not as most of most of the news cycle that I've seen is about that. The graphic stuff about the CEO. That's what almost everyone I'm seeing is talking about. I hadn't seen this stuff before, and there's a ton of other stuff that I have seen before. It was wild, but, like, we've seen this forever. This isn't really new.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's kind of the first thing that happens with an AI. If you train it on Twitter.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, if you train it on the Internet, to be completely honest, like, if you look at a lot of really early versions of this, they would do this if you didn't put, like, right. Strong bars in front of them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's almost like people are the problem.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's the people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Speaking of butt heads, thieves have been giving themselves refunds with POS terminals. Multiple Toronto area small businesses have lost thousands of dollars as thieves have used the business's point of sales terminals to issue themselves large refunds.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you want me to take this one?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, my tongue's getting pretty sore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Here in Canada, it's pretty common for businesses to hand over a POS terminal to the consumer, to the customer, to complete a transaction. To the point where it's really, really, really weird. And, like, bothers me a lot being in places where they take my card because, like, that should stay with me. It is. I wouldn't Even say pretty common. It is always that they'll hand over the POS terminal. Between two businesses contacted by CTV News, nearly $707,000 was stolen. Police haven't linked the two cases, but say they there was a wave of similar cases around the city. Wow. Interesting. In each case, the terminals haven't had password set for refunds or have used default passwords. A spokesperson for Moneris, one of the leading POS providers, said in an email. When merchants set up their devices, they're prompted to set administrative passwords on the devices. And it is recommended that they also set up user profiles and permissions for things such as refunds. We also always recommend that businesses treat their payment terminals as they would cash, locked away and secure when not in use.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can tell you right now that most of the businesses I walk into around here do not have their POS terminal like locked away and kept somewhere safe. It's just like out on the counter.

[Dan]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I can pretty much guarantee that that is not going to happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

So basically this is just meant to be kind of a psa. If you run a small business, make sure you have your administration password set up on your POS terminal and that it's that you have passwords for giving refunds and all that. We don't want people to get ripped off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, the, like user accounts and passwords I think is good and reasonable. I don't think people are gonna lock these away. That's an insane workflow. Damaging action.

[Linus Sebastian]

Speaking of insanely damaging actions, an appeals court.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can rest. It's okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I got this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right, fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

An appeals court has blocked the FTC's click to cancel rule. The FTC's click to cancel rule, which would have required subscriptions to be just as easy to cancel as they are to sign up for, was struck down by a federal appeals court in the U.S. the court agreed with telecom and industry groups that the FTC skipped essential rulemaking procedures, including failing to properly consider public comments and depriving stakeholders of a fair opportunity to influence the final outcome. While the court noted that the rule wasn't created in bad faith, it found that the FTC's approach was fatally flawed. Citing a rushed process and internal dissent among commissioners, the unanimous opinion stated that the deficiencies caused prejudice to the petitioners and justified scrapping the rule in full, not just in part. In summary, the FTC is now fully staffed by three Republican commissioners after the current administration fired the remaining Democrats earlier this year, a move that violated Supreme Court court precedent. But hey, who cares? About rules anymore. With the GOP in control and industry opposition already entrenched, the rules future looks dead as a doornail. And that's really unfortunate because there's a lot of super predatory stuff that this was poised to eliminate, like gym memberships, for instance, that you need to go in person to cancel. This is just blatantly brazenly anti consumer and pro big business and recurring revenue dark pattern bullshit. And it's one of those things that I just kind of look at and I go like, all right, single issue voters. Well, enjoy it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Way to go. I wasn't sure why this was in the doc, but YouTube addresses AI content demonetization. This seemed like a bit of a nothing topic to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, but I thought it was thought provoking. Okay, so let's go through the facts of it first and then we'll go from there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

YouTube is addressing a spate. Spot. Spate. A spate of articles inaccurately claiming that upcoming train changes to the rip. Rip.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you want me to do it? I can do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, I'm struggling today to. A policy would demonetize. YouTube is addressing.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, I got this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

YouTube is addressing. Addressing a content claiming that upcoming changes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not specifically or exclusively AI content.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, hold on. I think we really do need to start at the beginning, though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure, go for it.

[Linus Sebastian]

YouTube is addressing a spate of articles that have inaccurately claimed that upcoming changes to the repetitious content policy would demonetize all AI content. Starting next week, spammy content, AI assisted or not, is the true target of this update. Not specifically or exclusively AI content. Posts from Team YouTube and the YouTube Insider are clarifying that July 15th will bring a minor update to their existing partner program. Monetization policies meant to help the platform better identify when content is mass produced or repetitive, which viewers often consider spam and which was already ineligible for monetization. So the reason that I wanted to talk about this was that. Let me see if I can find the thing. Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Elijah was like, oh, God, the man who can't speak of the men who can't read are fighting. It's good stuff. This just.

[Linus Sebastian]

This got flagged for us because of PSU circuit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I don't think that falls under that.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it doesn't. But that's what I thought would be an interesting conversation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Should Something that. Because a lot of what people have said about PSU circuit and the AI voice read, bit of it is that, hey, it seems like spam. So I guess the conversation that I wanted to have is like, where does the line for AI generated content exist? If this was what YouTube was trying to do, if they were demonetizing AI produced content, where in your mind is the line? Because PSU Circuit is certainly not entirely AI generated. It uses original testing done by humans. It uses a template that was not generated by AI that humans worked hard on for its scripts. What it uses AI for is to actually read it. And the reason that we do that is not because we can't pay someone for six minutes to read the script. It's because the editing is also automated. And if we have an AI read it, then the timing of the read is extremely consistent and the AI and the editing script can just plonk all the right things onto the timeline where it can be quickly reviewed by a human. The reason we're doing that is that PSU Circuit is not even meant to make money. It is purely the article in video form for people for whom that is the best place for them to discover it. That's it. Maybe in the future it'll gain some traction and we'll kind of go, oh, okay, yeah, maybe we should start doing nice B roll. Oh, maybe we should start having a human host. Maybe we do this, maybe that. Or maybe for key releases we could do something like that. Special occasions. But for now, it is entirely a money burning furnace. Okay. Just so we can test power supplies so people can learn about them. That's it. But would that be too much AI? Is that. Is that AI?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. I'm going to give you a little bit of a non answer because I think what's more kind of interesting to me maybe is that I don't necessarily care too much. But I think the reason why they won't go after things like PSU Circuit is because it would be way too hard. Not because of PSU Circuit, but because of everything else, especially in the short space.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, just like how much AI like voice there is in it now, using.

[Luke Lafreniere]

AI to like copy and steal other people's content a little bit easier to detect.

[Linus Sebastian]

I see. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Making actually original content that has some layer of AI stuff on it. One that I've seen that's pretty common is you use art or references from a thing that you're discussing, but then it's an AI voice. Like I remember I was getting a lot of shorts recommended to me for a while there, way back when I played the Warhammer 40K Space Marine. I like looked up a couple things about it and then just my whole everything got taken over with Warhammer content.

[Linus Sebastian]

And like a Lot of it, like AI spammy stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I started getting really interested in that because there was for sure real people making videos. That was them talking about like Warhammer lore stuff, but with just like art of Warhammer playing. And it seemed like. I don't know if it was being stolen or what. But there was also definitely not real people doing exactly the same thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Different pictures maybe, maybe, I don't know, I didn't look extensively enough to like really compare. But different pictures and stuff. But it was for sure an AI voice. Like I would bet my life on it. So it's, it's.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you think it would be an improvement to the YouTube platform if every individual person or corporate entity had to like register who the owner of every channel is and you basically couldn't have one if you don't register. Was Google Circles just way ahead of its time?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it kind of was a little bit. I don't think commenting users should have to.

[Linus Sebastian]

But uploading. Interesting. Bluestrike says it could still get bypassed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, there's a bypass for anything. But I'm just. This is more of a hypothetical conversation because I think generally kind of pro Internet freedom, people like us have, have generally been on the side of like no anonymity and anonymity is our, is our God given right as users of the Internet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think ultimately I think it would take away some of the magic that is YouTube.

[Linus Sebastian]

But like Facebook Marketplace was really good for a very short period of time because it was all real verified people doing real verified ish deals.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it could because I'm trying to think like, you know, if a whistleblower comes out, they might use YouTube as a platform to make sure that their message, yeah, sure. Goes far. So like I don't necessarily want to.

[Linus Sebastian]

You want to harm that, but maybe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There'S a hybrid model where like you get a little bit elevated more or something if you go through the verification.

[Linus Sebastian]

As soon as there's a crack in the armor though, the spammers will find a way into it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But think about old Twitter. The verified tag actually did matter.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's true. Like actually it's like so worthless now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, it literally means nothing now. Yeah, it means I want monetization. I will probably be more spammy than most other people on this platform. Yeah, that's what that means to me at this point. But it used to mean something. It was a very frustrating Twitter verified.

[Linus Sebastian]

Check marks used to mean something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They did though.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean they did. Yeah. Do we have any. I'm gonna. I'm gonna look.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There was one on the back. Your laptop. For a while, but I think we switched laptops and I. I hated them. And like, because I remember there was a. There was an. There was an account that was impostering me and then being super racist. Do you remember that? And they wouldn't shut it down because they wouldn't verify me for, like, I don't even remember the reason. It was just stupid. And then eventually. Eventually they were open to verifying me and I just said no because I was, like, salty about it. So I'm not saying the. The system was perfect, considering there was an account that had my profile picture and would auto update to my profile picture if I changed it. My banner, same deal, and all of my tweets immediately after I sent them. And then also inserted racist ones. And I proved all of this. And they were like, yeah, we can't tell who's the real one, so I don't know. We're gonna leave it up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice. Yeah. You know what's funny is my personal Twitter is also not verified because I was just like, no, it's a bigger chad move if, like, I don't care. You're verified because you just like, are you. Boom. Got him. I don't need a check mark to be verified. I was like, way ahead of the it's not cool to be verified curve. Yeah. I forget when they offered me verification, but it was like, before the takeover. And I was like, no, yeah, I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did the same thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it's just like, it's dumb. Like, to be clear, that's stupid. It doesn't matter.

[Luke Lafreniere]

At no point in time did it matter.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I just liked it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it was still fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

I liked being not verified. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then I put a little globe there because it was just blue. And then somebody, I don't remember who said I was some form of political thing because apparently that became a political movement, and I put the globe there, like, years before that became a thing. But then I got bundled in with that.

[Linus Sebastian]

So do that. Something was like, who knows? Like, the. The symbolism of what? Like, whoever is doing, like, like, oh, yeah, Kate Middleton was wearing this color, which shows solidarity with the. Are you talking.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How do you keep track of.

[Linus Sebastian]

How can you possibly know, like, what we're celebrating this month and, like, what color. But what this color represents today is like, hold on. Okay, I'm trying. I don't know what. Red is definitely something because Apple did a red iPhone at some point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's blood and it means that you support.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is breast cancer, I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is the breast cancer screwdriver.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Oh yeah. Communism. There you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, stop. Port Studio.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I got that from Curious Brad. Thank you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Virtuos says that any Xbox Series S60 FPS game can be easily quoted. Quoted, easily ported to the Switch too. They've ported many games over the last couple decades, or at least helped, including heavy rain, Horizon Zero Dawn, Cyberpunk 2077 and COD. Modern Warfare 3 might have heard of some of those. And they are aware that the Switch 2 is the fastest selling console of all time. Thanks to the improved hardware and software, they're confident that anything running well on an Xbox Series S will run well on a Switch. That's hilarious. I sincerely doubt that what Microsoft had in mind when they released a less powerful version of this generation console to the ire of many game developers who all of a sudden had to build two stupid performance profile targets for the lesser selling console this stupid generation that they would be just creating a path for relatively quick and easy cross platform optimization of the Xbox series S version over to the Switch, which is one that actually sells. I'm sure that's not what they had in mind. Oh. Oh, sorry. That's me. Okay, thank you, Dan. That's very helpful. But I guess my question is, how important do you really feel that third party game support is to the Switch 2?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Personally, I don't think important almost at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean that was a big deal on the Switch though. Like so many developers ported.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it might be a user based thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. Like, I just don't get it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It seems unimportant to me. It is not the reason why I buy the console.

[Linus Sebastian]

Me neither. But then I mean, I asked my son this too. When he ultimately chose the Switch too. I was like, okay, look, but if, if you didn't have a gaming PC, would you have gone with the PCs? Like yeah. So like, wait, no, that disproves my point. Yeah, we buy Nintendo games to play Nintendo games. If we didn't have something else, then we wouldn't buy a Switch. Yeah, you'd probably. Yeah. What would you get first though? It wouldn't be a Nintendo, I don't think if you computer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I know.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was reading an article from someone that's like, yeah, I'm not sure if Mario Super Mario Kart World is a great game, but I haven't put it down since the Switch came out and I'm just like, really? Like you've played Nothing but Mario Kart World for the last month. I've seen some people say that they've really found the grinding and like, yeah, like, the new mechanics, like, really, really engaging. But, man, I just didn't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't. You know what? I'm genuinely happy for them that they like it. It's just. It's not my game.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oops.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no. Oh, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't forget to monetize my death.

[Luke Lafreniere]

At least you don't have to laugh with a lisp. Sorry. Cough with a lisp.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whoops. Ow. Donkey Kong Bonanza looks good, though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When does it come out?

[Linus Sebastian]

Soon, I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is 007 only on Switch?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Game Switch 2? What's the name of it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Even Donkey Kong is Thursday. They said first.

[Luke Lafreniere]

First Light. Is that what it's.

[Linus Sebastian]

Can I help you?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm trying to figure out if the upcoming 007 game is on, not Switch.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, while you figure that out, the creator warehouse team has reacted to Shift Fashion.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just gonna fire this up here. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. We upload this on LMG clips, which is the place to go to check out when clips as well. If you don't feel like sitting through the whole bunch. I don't blame you. It is a cool hangout, but it's pretty long.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, we needed somewhere to put this. It didn't really make a ton of sense on Short Circuit or ltt. So here it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here it is. So you guys can go check that out. In summary, we agree with some of it. We don't necessarily agree with all of it. And there are design constraints around the creation of our products that, you know, not every brand might deal with and some also do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I thought the original critique video was cool. I also thought this was really cool. It was really cool for me to hear some of the reasons, especially personally. I found the cargo pants, the reasons around the pockets and stuff was like, oh, yeah, that's pretty sweet. Do we explain that on the site?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that something that we would even really want to explain?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a pretty neat.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's a bit much. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I wasn't really sure when I was watching it of like, is this something we should communicate more or not?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't expect everybody to agree with our thought process, but what I can say is there's always a thought process, if that makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And sometimes the thought process is, I really like cotton poly blends.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

We do have some. All Cotton shirts coming. Yeah, I don't personally find that the hand feel is particularly better and they will shrink more. So like sure, some people are into that and that's totally cool. Some people will only wear an all cotton shirt and I totally respect that we're gonna have small cotton shirts coming, but it's not my preference.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So yeah, cool. Add an explanation in faq. Yeah, I don't know that people are frequently asking that question.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I really, I honestly don't think they are either.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, you guys should go check out the response. Belkin. Now that's her name I've not heard in a long time. Belkin.

[Luke Lafreniere]

True.

[Linus Sebastian]

Eh. Sent out an email alerting customers that it will be ending support for older WeMo products effective January 31, 2026. In reality, this is most WeMo products because support for the WeMo app will be discontinued at the same time along with all features that require cloud connectivity. WeMo products configured for use with Apple HomeKit before January 31, 2026 will continue to function via HomeKit in the absence of the WeMo app and WeMo cloud services. This does not impact WeMo's thread based products, all four of them, which will also continue to function through HomeKit. Belkin is offering partial refunds for some products if your WEMO product would still be under warranty on or after January 31st. See belkin.com wemo for details. Our discussion question is is it time for stop killing smart hardware to go along with stop killing games? And I think the answer is yes. If you are not going to engineer your product in such a way that it can continue to work when you pull your support, that is on you, that is not on the customer who bought the product based on the promises that you made about its functionality. I was actually explaining stop killing video games to my dad who was in town visiting and he was like yeah, I tuned into your Wayne show or whatever you call it and I saw you talking about talking about like killing games and took actually took me a little while to figure out what he was talking about. He was not super technical but you know, you. He's trying to tune in and you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Know, sure, that's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, he's getting the lay of the land. Yeah, that's cool, that's cool. I respect it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, yeah, he's like so you're talking about game killing or something. And I'm like okay, hold on a second. Oh right, Stop killing games. And he kind of goes yeah, it seems like, it seems like it's bad but can you kind of put it in simpler terms for me? And, you know, if you're not familiar with all the lingo, I understand the way that we present stuff sometimes can be a little bit overwhelming. And so what I came up with. With. For him, and that really seemed to kind of land was I was like, okay, well, look at it this way. Okay, so the game, you know, when I was a kid, right, when you bought a video game, it was on a cartridge, and the whole game was on there. And if you wanted to play that game, you put it into the machine and that was it. That way, you had the game. If you own the machine, you own the cartridge, you own the game. It's yours forever. You can use it any way you want. And he kind of goes, yeah, okay. And I go, okay, well, that's not really how things work anymore. Now, when you buy a game, some of the features or in some cases, all of the features of that game rely on the maker of that game to have their server interacting with your game machine in order for them to run. And so you're basically at the mercy of them to keep that running forever. Now, we can't tell them, okay, well, you just have to run your server forever. I mean, how long is Reasonable a year? 10 years? 100 years? 1000 years? You can't tell a company to run a server for 1,000 years. That doesn't make any sense. Right? So I understand that maybe those. Those functions might not work forever, but what's clear is that we have a problem then, because imagine if this was anything else that you bought. So I was like, okay, your pants, right? They come with. They come with pockets with zippers, okay? And then all of a sudden, I, the manufacturer of your pants, go, okay, those pants, you've been using them for five years. You bought them because you really like pockets with zippers. Yeah, you're still gonna have the pockets, but they don't have zippers anymore. Well, that's. That's f ed up. And he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's. That's pretty f ed up. That's. That's not very good. And it's like, that's the problem here, because I'm not actually. I'm not trying to drive companies out of business. I'm not trying to say like, hey, video game makers, hey, smart hardware makers. You should just be legally obligated to support everything forever until you just collapse under the weight of your. Of your legacy product stack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's also a little bit of a difficult argument because, like, in your exact example about the zippers thing, like, if we look at floatplane, if floatplane has a feature, but we think that it should work in a slightly different way, or this is a feature of a pocket. You haven't removed the pocket. You're just changing the way that you access and secure the pocket.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe it has a button now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So, like, it's. It's tough. And like, we have to be able to change things. You can't. You can't be in a situation where you release a website or a service and it has to stay in the exact same state it always is. That's obviously stupid. So, like, the. The line gets a little bit funky because as we talked about looking at, like an mmo, patches versus expansions.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. And even things like back to smart hardware now, like my Sonos speakers. I invested heavily in the Sonos ecosystem because I loved the integration with Google Play music. It was the best. I've never seen anything before or since that has been as seamless as that. I could literally be listening to music in my car or on my earphones, and I could just pull up my phone, press the cast button, like Google's, like, Chromecast cast button. And then I'd just go, this speaker, this speaker, this speaker, go. And it would just start streaming to my Sonos speakers. And then Sonos and Google went at it. And now the products, you can still use them together. You go in the Sonos app and then you go to your Google stupid YouTube music thing. And then you go to your search and then you find a thing and like, your. Guess your playlist is in there. But it just. It just. It sucks. It just sucks. And I just want them to fix it. Yeah, but that's not something that I could. I can't say, like, hey, you know, it doesn't work exactly the way that I used to like it. Therefore, I want a refund. I don't think that's reasonable either, because I can stream my YouTube music over my Sonos.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We've had people do that with floatplay, and we've just approved it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Approved. Whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're like, hey, you guys. We've literally had someone complain about the new general user experience design that we did with the sidebar changing and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, really?

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're like, I hate this a lot. And we were like, well, okay. They're like, I want my money back. And it was like, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, all right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

See ya. Well, we're not trying to trap people.

[Linus Sebastian]

But, like, that's different. We're A subscription service?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, for sure. It makes it a lot easier.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, if I wanted to cancel my last month of, you know, YouTube music, I think that's one thing. But I. But in the case of hardware, it's not that simple.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but this, this is.

[Linus Sebastian]

It can be a whole ecosystem.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is. This is where the conversation gets pretty deep because there's so many different types of sites and services and apps and products, and I think just forcing them.

[Linus Sebastian]

To go open source.

[Dan]

Then.

[Linus Sebastian]

If you won't support it, what's the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What's the line? Because if you won't support what is like a really important part of this conversation. If I play a video game that has guns in it and my gun gets nerfed and it sucks talking and. No, but like, let's say they're like, oh, this gun's overpowered. Let's lower the damage stat and the handling stat.

[Linus Sebastian]

You bought it because you love playing with that gun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And I'm like, well, you need to support a game with multiplayer for the. The patch that has my gun being good is like, bro.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's impossible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So like, and. But then that's like, at what point in time are we ship of theseusing this thing? Like, if all these MMOs that are releasing expansions that completely convert the entire game just doesn't call them expansions anymore and calls them patches. Because a lot of people, a lot of these companies don't even charge for the expansions anymore. So, like, it's you.

[Linus Sebastian]

We.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We know thoroughly that places will detect what the rules are and work around them.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think with physical products, it does get a little bit simpler. My Sonos one is super muddy, but in the case of like Belkin and Wemo here, I think this one's pretty clear. But in terms of like, exactly where the line is. No, you're right. It's very difficult to say.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really tough.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it's going to end up probably being different in every different jurisdiction. Like, it's gonna get messy, man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you don't want to support the servers anymore, offer them to the players. Yeah, sure, but that's. That's not what I was talking about. Right. They are still supporting the servers. They're just supporting the servers. For a patched version of the game.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is a different hypothetical. We kind of moved pretty fast through them there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We did. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Anyway, you can act now to keep Gemini out of your third party apps. Source Ars Technica. Starting Monday, July 7, Google implemented changes enabling its Gemini AI engine to interact with third party apps. Like WhatsApp, even when users previously configured their settings to block such interactions. Google recently sent out an email informing users of the change, framing it as a positive move that will make it easier for Gemini to access phone messages, WhatsApp and utilities. Regardless of whether your Gemini apps activity is on or off. A notification page linked in. The email states that human reviewers, including service providers, read, annotate, and process the data that Gemini accesses. Yikes. The email provides no useful guidance for preventing the changes from taking effect. The email said users can block the apps that Gemini interacts with, but even in those cases, data is stored for 72 hours. Okay, so last week we took a little bit of light flack for saying that Apple being hypocritical is really, really bad and not also calling out just how Google is like really, really bad in those ways.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Here you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

He's just honest about it. So here we go. Here's where we talk about Google being pretty up right now and this not being okay. This is way worse than Apple sending an ad for some stupid movie that they bankrolled.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, I might be misinterpreting this, but the email said users can block the apps that Gemini interacts with, but even in those cases, data is stored for 72 hours. So that's not true. You can't block the apps.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not sure 100% what they mean.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not sure what that means.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wouldn't overthink it right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Because I want to block this now. This sucks.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is wild.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I hope they get if this is true to the words that are in the doc. I hope they get crushed in court for this. This is insane.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let me, let me make sure we get you guys an update on this next week. I'm just going to flag this at. Okay, here we go. Can we keep abreast of this situation and keep providing when show viewers with updates? This is crazy. Okay, I have assigned. I have assigned.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I want to see how this develops because I think, I think we're like, we're pretty early on this right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So there could be details that we've got not quite right. And maybe Google will back down on this. Let's hope that both of those things are true. Yes, true. Finally, Twitter co founder Jack Dorsey posted on Twitter saying that his weekend project to learn about Bluetooth mesh networks and related technology is bitch. At a decentralized peer to peer messaging app that works entirely over Bluetooth while the tagline is secure Mesh chat. A notice in the GitHub Readme warns that the app is a work in progress and that private messages and channel features have not received an external security review and may contain vulnerabilities. The disclaimers were apparently added after researcher Alex Radocia demonstrated a man in the middle attack that would allow an imposter to impersonate a user through Bitchat's favorite system. Cool. Anyway, it's an offline chat network that's limited to a very small geographic area with simple functions. Sounds kind of cool. It's like. It reminds me of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I already have these that don't. That don't use Bluetooth. They just use other stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Was it a carrier or something that used to have, like, a walkie talkie feature? Was that a phone manufacturer? Was it Motorola?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that was phone.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you know, Dan? Can't remember. It was a thing, though. If you were, like, sitting on the same plane together, you could, like, chat with each other. It apparently was Motorola, Nextel, Nokia. Okay. Apparently there were a few folks that had done stuff like that. So. Yeah, look at that. We reinvented that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And there's like, good job, Jack Dorsey.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's definitely stuff for this that's, like, actually really good. And you can set up your own static networks for it and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Fire Panda says it's basically Briar, then.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, there's, like, a lot of good job, though. I hope Blue sky is going well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

See ya.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, Dan, time for After Dark. Let's go.

[Dan]

Banner to After Dark.

[Linus Sebastian]

My tongue is so sore because, like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Didn'T even let me do topics for you.

[Linus Sebastian]

The bite block.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I could have saved you.

[Linus Sebastian]

The bite block's not smooth. It's textured. So every time my tongue brushes against it, why, it's, like, quite uncomfortable. And so my tongue is raw.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was it textured because your teeth keep impacting it?

[Linus Sebastian]

No. Oh, it's just textured.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Charged nuclei in chat. Said what I was thinking.

[Linus Sebastian]

Definitely not. All right, again, yeah, I'm not repeating.

[Dan]

That question for Duke and Dynus. What was your scariest Scrapyard wars encounter?

[Linus Sebastian]

Definitely finding the crack pipe. Oh, man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm trying to think 100%.

[Dan]

Was it over budget or what?

[Linus Sebastian]

Or no? No, my scariest. My scariest Scrapyard wars was definitely when we killed our motherboard right before testing, when we did the one with Bob Rod, and we never really proper showed how the fix worked.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, in the episode, by the way, that motherboard. Oh, that's right. You have it. That's hilarious. So we had to, like, Jump her off the fan, header to something or something. I don't even. I still don't actually understand why it worked.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was stunned.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was actually crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cuz, like, the board like, like made fire.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then I like, plugged that header into like another header and then it like, worked or something, which I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Even really know how you thought of.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it was a time of desperation, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And then it worked for like a decade. Amazing. I don't know. I don't know if I had. I mean, there's a lot of scary moments in regards to if we were going to have something or not, but, like, I don't think I ever really had, you know, terrible interactions with people that were selling me things or anything like that. I think it's been fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Hey, Linus, what got you into badminton? And any tips for anyone who wants to pick it up as a hobby? Thanks a million for this killer lime day. And the keyboard bonus will make the girlfriend happy. Colon, capital D. Heck yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

A couple things. I enjoyed it in high school. Like, I just found it fun. And then I never played again until I met Yvonne. And her parents had some badminton equipment and like, there was a group that included her parents, friends that played at like the gym of a local church. And so we started going there and playing and some of the older players were kind of nice and took us under their wing and sort of showed us some of the basics and kind of the rest was history. I think it's a really complete sport is the way that I describe. Works out your whole body, your dominant side a little bit more than your not dominant side because, like, it's a racket sport. You know, it's what it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But we've been discovering that with Little Man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. It so it. So it works out your whole body. And to really excel at it, you need speed, stamina, reflexes, strength, bit of flexibility. Yeah, flexibility, brains. Like you, you. Their strategy. Very deep strategy. Yeah, it's just. It's a. It's a fantastic sport. I love it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Good with plyometrics too. It's good with fat fascial movements.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Basically the entire time you're doing it, you're doing hit, which is pretty cool. Um, yeah, it's great. Um, any tips for people who want to pick it up as a hobby? Find a friend group basically every single time. And it doesn't. There's no room to be shy. I used to be too shy to ask people to play. If you want to network, you can't be shy. So you just have to go to places where people are playing, whether it's community centers or like finding online groups. This is something that I had to go through twice in my life. Once to build my group locally and then again to build a group of players in Taiwan because I go there once a year and I play badminton when I go. So you gotta, you just have to go put yourself out there. If you see someone who's kind of at your level, you know, don't impose on the really strong players. If you're still a beginner, like they might be nice and play with you, but you're really like messing up their groove if there's a huge skill disparity. So try and find people who are like kind of close to the same level and then get contact info. Try to create a regular group, go to the same place, play at the same time every week so you can make it part of your routine because anything that you don't make part of your routine is not going to help you. It's so easy to bail on a fitness program, but when you have a group that will help hold you accountable, it becomes so much easier and it becomes so much more enjoyable and rewarding as you guys build each other up and make each other into stronger players over time. So that would be the biggest thing is build your Rolodex. You got to do it because otherwise it's just not going to last.

[Dan]

Kyle asks, how long do we have this version of Linus for.

[Linus Sebastian]

This bad Until Monday morning I called the ortho. I said look, I need these bike blocks out. I can't talk and I talk for a living. As for the train tracks, I think it's probably going to be about a year. I think the top's not too bad, but the bottom's pretty rough.

[Dan]

Question for Mr. Tech tips y' all did a collab with Delta Hub for the LTT edition Capio Carpio 2.0. Why not carry it on Yalls store as well as theirs?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a good question. If I had to guess, I'd say it just comes down to the margin structure. Like they're a direct to consumer brand. So them I assume they paid us money for the co branding opportunity. So then if they also had to sell us the product at a reduced rate from retail then they'd be giving us a disproportionate amount of the margin on the product would be my best guess. But I'm completely guessing though.

[Dan]

First wan show message Longtime floatplane Member. What was your first reach out to sponsor? Like when you first started YouTube videos, NCIX LTT. Was it difficult or awkward?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, super awkward. That first CES was wild, man. Like, I was desperately trying to get any meeting that I could. People didn't really understand YouTube sponsorship. It was all like traditional written advertising at that time, whether it was the right thing to do or not. I heavily leveraged the contacts that I had made at NCIX to try to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Somebody told me Dan did that. I didn't know. Press yours? Yeah.

[Dan]

I thought you guys noticed.

[Linus Sebastian]

I noticed his.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I had no clue.

[Linus Sebastian]

I haven't seen mine yet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry. I had no clue. I wasn't trying to derail you. I just wanted to test it because I didn't even believe it at first. It turns out it was true. Sorry about that. Keep going.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, as a buyer, you know, I had contacts at various tech companies, but they were like, in sales, not marketing. So I tried to kind of, again, it comes down to networking. I tried to build my network and just kind of lay out, like, why you should sponsor us. And like, I think our first product was just those quick, like, pre rolls or what was it? No, no, our first product was just sponsoring our trip to CES at all. We wouldn't have even been able to go. I didn't have that kind of money. And so I think it was Corsair, Seagate and Linksys, I want to say. So that basically just came down to, like, my buddy. Oh, yeah, that was weird.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyhow, can't tell that whole story.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, no, I don't think that would be best. But yeah, those were the main ones. And what those companies all have in common, which is hilarious, is like, one guy, Brad Hutchinson, has worked at all of them at some point or another. Shout out. Shout out, Brad. Because, like, breaking down the barriers of bureaucracy to get someone to do something that's out of the normal is hard. It's really easy for someone in marketing to just, like, renew their quarterly spend with the people they already work with. It's really hard to shift that bucket around, especially to something that has KPIs that are measured in a completely different way and where you have to, like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No one else is really doing.

[Linus Sebastian]

And we have to say, oh, sorry to, you know, a longtime partner that you've been supporting. Right. Like, it comes back to the whole, you know, intel thing for a long time. Or was it IBM? No one ever got fired for buying something. Who is that again? I forget. Was it IBM? Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Or it was either IBM or Intel.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's easy to do the safety. I think it was IBM. Yeah. IBM says charge nuclear and chat. Yeah, exactly. So like no one ever got fired for just continuing to do the ad buy that they always did. That was, I guess, effective enough or something. Whereas when you make a radical change. Yeah, you can get in trouble for that. So yeah, no people have stuck their neck out for me. I appreciate that.

[Dan]

Dear elves, when you play Towerfall, do you ever play the co op mode? You've mentioned playing Towerfall a few times. So if you haven't tried co op. Oh, glad this black pack isn't all black.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I haven't. I haven't actually tried co op. I've only ever tried versus it. In fact, I thought it was one of those games like, like Nidhogg where it just like doesn't even.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I had no idea. Work co op mode.

[Dan]

Maybe it's new.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just looked it up.

[Linus Sebastian]

But is it like a campaign or something? Or like what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no idea. 4 player co op gameplay.

[Linus Sebastian]

What am I looking at? You like take out baddies or what? Huh. That looks like 2v2.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, it's. By four player co op they probably mean 2v2.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, this isn't co op. What the hell? Okay, well, fine, sure. Well, we'll figure it out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What co Op is supposed to mean? No one or two player co op quest mode. Towerfall Ascension.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, neato.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And they say specifically a brand new one or two player co op quest mode.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm down.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll have to try that sometime when we're not playing tape to tape.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's gonna be tough.

[Linus Sebastian]

That'll be pretty tough right now.

[Dan]

Next, bike painting, I guess.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I heard from the devs. Hold on, let me just make sure I don't get this wrong. So I complained about the interface issues with multiple players and they were like, yeah, we've never really tried more than 2v2, so that makes sense. And then they said that it's going to be a little while before they can get that fixed. Probably. Oh, I don't want to commit them to anything. I'm not committing them to anything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can work around it.

[Linus Sebastian]

It'll be a little while, but not that long.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool, Sounds good.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then I was telling them the keyboard requirement sucks, so they're gonna look into that as well. We tried 5v5 for the first time ever in Tape to Tape, which is this roguelite hockey game that we've been playing. I might as well just bring it up on screen. So this is what it looks like. Basically it's like, like a hard, fighting, hard, farting, top down style hockey game like you played back in the 90s, but with no rules and a lot of hits and throwing sticks and all kinds of wild stuff. Ton of fun. In its current form, it's still very Early Access and there's still, There's. It's got, it's got a long way to go, especially with how ambitious they're being about the game. But yeah, Luke and I were at this point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They literally could have just done a few small polishing touches to what they originally had, fully released the game as.

[Linus Sebastian]

Tape to tape one and then just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Made tape to tape two. And I don't think literally anyone would have bat an eye.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because it is so incredibly transformative what they're doing. Like, what a wild. Yeah, sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's been fun to be part of the journey regardless of what form it ends up being released. Absolutely. Awesome. Basically, people are asking what did they change? And what they changed is that this whole campaign system where you, like, are a hockey player.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you're. This is old.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Where you're a hockey player and you're like taking hockey back from the big bad golfers or whatever. This whole, like campaign seems to be dead in the latest versions of Early.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Access, which, like, I actually really liked.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. And I'm not saying the new ones, like worse. I don't think it is. I think it's. I think it's gonna be better once they fine tune everything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It seems like they're overall headed in a cool direction.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but. But this was also really good and could have easily been tape to Tape one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I agree with you to the point where it's. It's like so substantially different that I think similar to Civ. I would have had fun playing both.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We might have done like a tape to tape run this day and let's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Try the OG version.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whatever the next day.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, earlier this week, our softball night got rained out and so I recruited a handful of people from softball night, a handful of people from elsewhere, and we did the first ever in the world, including by the developers. They've never actually tried it. 5v5 human teams. So 10 player tape to tape. Dude, it was awesome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Elijah actually streamed it. There's a VOD somewhere.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice. Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice. Dude, it was. It was awesome. There's a lot of issues like the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, right.

[Linus Sebastian]

The sports teams are really poorly balanced. They're like way too Fast and they're like way overpowered. They're all like OVR 90 which is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which I mean I already feel even with the not too powerful teams, the rink is a little bit small.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I find the. The game is best like midway through.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, agreed. So there's definitely issues. One player has to play with a keyboard. We managed to find this like joystick to keyboard, like controller to keyboard mapping thing but we found all kinds of issues with just the identity of that controller not being recognized properly. I mean you got 10 controllers connected to the system which is already kind of an edge case. So it didn't really work. So Elijah went back to playing with a controller. Yeah, the menu selecting was bad but we like kind of. We kind of figured it out and it was an absolute blast. So I kind of wanted to try and get it going again after wan show today but I don't know if we're going to be able to. To recruit enough people. Will certainly try. The dev said though that 3v3 is apparently the kind of the sweet spot that they found for versus anyway and it's definitely worth worth playing. It's pretty fun. What else did they say? Oh yeah, I told them that IMO checking needs to get a little easier but they could counter by making the stagger for the checker a little longer so that it kind of punishes you for checking too much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It. I definitely prefer the old system. I don't know. I also understand that the old system was kind of like really op.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So there's got to be a downside. You're just throwing the body all the time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like I could even see them having a risk of injury checking someone else. Like when you play a super physical game like you're an Alex Ovechkin or something like that. There's a reason that players like Eric Lindross run into a lot of injuries in their careers. Although Lindros was a bit of a special case. But just those super physical power forward type players, they do tend to get injured sometimes when they are throwing the body against someone else. I should probably also give that feedback. Oh no, I think I already gave the feedback that injuries need to be short though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I was going to say right now are weight. I think they're punishing and they're too long.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're working on that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think the impact should be low.

[Linus Sebastian]

But yeah, there's a. There's a. They're working on a lot of tweaks to the formula right now. They're. They're working hard. This is their first game apparently, which I think is crazy. X. Excellent rectangle.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Incredibly good for a first game. Like kind of mind bogglingly good for a first game. I think the bench also needs some work. There's like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, they, they, they're cooking.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They had a complete game.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, I know. They're cooking. Let them cook.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. What else is going on?

[Dan]

What is the logistics of this? Did you all find a spare parts box in the back of the shelf from the ltx?

[Linus Sebastian]

They're talking about the, the mix and matches. I think it's a combination of that because we do still have a bunch of like random mishmash bits left over. And also I think we shot some new parts so that we'd have enough inventory. Don't quote me on that, but that's my understanding of how the mystery screwdriver came to be. Another element of it is that discounting is a bit of a double edged sword. On the one hand, you make the people who buy it with the discount extremely happy. On the other hand, you make the people who bought everything at full price extremely unhappy. If you create a different product with a different value proposition. In this case it's a product where you get a random color. Then you're far less likely to upset someone who bought it for $69.99 a week ago if you have this available for $49.99. Because at least they got the color that they intended. So it's always a balancing act. But I think it's a combination of those factors. Hello.

[Dan]

Luke Linus and Dan Linus. I'm a father to be. What are some movies, TVs games that you couldn't wait to share with your kids?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh man. I'll say this. The ones that you kind of hoped that they would enjoy. Put your expectations aside. Just trying to think like the stuff that you enjoyed as a kid is probably not going to resonate with them. Like, I really wanted my kids to like Final Fantasy 6, but the ones that they actually picked up on, like my son played through crosscode because he saw me doing it. And if I'm being honest, like it's a way better game than Final Fantasy 6 because it's way more fast paced and the characterization is fewer characters, but is really good. Really, really strong. Like it's almost like art a lot of the time does improve over time. Yeah. So I'd say maybe don't worry too much about it and find new things that you guys can enjoy at the same time. I think those are the ones that have gone the best. You know what's pretty cool, though? My son finally likes to play catch. Oh. I wanted someone to just throw the ball around with for so long, and this is even more exciting. My daughters are into it because they've seen him do it and they've come to, like, work softball nights and stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

They want to play catch. They can't really throw hard enough to get, like, a satisfying, like, game. Like, just, like, throw and catch thing going.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure, he can.

[Linus Sebastian]

He can. He can even put a bit of a curve on it now, which is fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, nice. That's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, so that's very satisfying for me. It's just like. It's a weird sensory thing, but there's like. There's just something about like a. Like a hardball. I don't really. I don't really love throwing the softball as much as I love throwing the hard ball. Like a hard ball landing right in the pocket. Like, oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Baseball is like one of the very few sports I didn't play when I was a kid and I, at zero points in time, ever thought I would be interested in being a quarterback. Never really into throwing, so I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

It feels good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's like I used to do these things called sports days in the summers where we just go to the field with a bunch of random, like, sports equipment and just do stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And we'd end up, you know, throwing footballs back and forth or whatever, doing that. And it's fine. It's a good, like, I want to be outdoors and do a thing activity.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't find catching the football nearly as satisfying. There's something about the sound of the ball on the leather and just like, ah, it's good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's good.

[Dan]

Hey, Wangame DLL question for Linus. What pool control panel did you have installed and have you played around with any of the WI fi features, if any?

[Linus Sebastian]

I wouldn't recommend whatever I have. I don't know if it's because of them or if it's because of our unskilled installer. Maybe. Maybe this is an opportunity for, you know, someone to reach out to our. To our public facing emails. If you happen to. To work for Jandy and you want to fix my. At some point. It's still a cluster, so totally open to that. I think our autofill on the hot tub still doesn't work, so we just have to, like, go with the hose periodically and just, like, make sure that the Pump isn't sucking air, which is kind of stupid in the year 2025, I think. First world problem, obviously. But like, yeah, like, topping up water. Like, my toilet can top up water. Are you, like, kidding me right now? Like, what are we even talking about?

[Dan]

Did you have a second company come in and do a good job? Yeah, remember what happened?

[Linus Sebastian]

They did a bad job too.

[Dan]

Okay. Because I was gonna ask for a recommend.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nope.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Great.

[Dan]

Great. Hey, will there be more Lime Day deals tomorrow and Sunday? Will the current deals just persist as is until Monday?

[Linus Sebastian]

I actually don't know. I know that throughout.

[Dan]

I'll ask next.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know that throughout Lime day, we did plan to add deal drops. I just don't know if this is the last one. Stay tuned. It's Lime day.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Why are AMD drivers still trash? Recently bought a new RX7600 on a deal here in Portugal. And AMD Catalyst keeps crashing, only resolved when installed the basic driver.

[Linus Sebastian]

That doesn't sound right. I literally daily drive AMD right now, and it's mostly fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was going to say, I've heard they've been pretty good for quite a while.

[Linus Sebastian]

You may have a defective card. You should definitely. You should also definitely DDU and or even reformat before you conclude that you have defective hardware. But if your drivers are crashing and only resolved with a basic driver, like the included Windows driver, you may have bad hardware. You could have a bad power supply as well.

[Dan]

Hi, DLO auto mechanic here. Boss is floating the idea of using meta glasses for videos of the courtesy checks. Any good arguments against it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Honestly, that sounds kind of smart. Yeah, it sounds kind of smart. Like, there's been so many times in my life when I wish I, like, kind of logged what I was doing, like, while working on, like, like fixing something. Because, like, sometimes you'll just feel like have something happen. You'll be like, oh, oh, man. Okay, how do. Can I replicate this? No, whereas, like, if you're like, just logging a check that you're doing on a customer's car, man, that's. It's such a great tool for like, showing them. Okay. Yeah, like, here's where we found the problem. I don't know. I kind of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Logging is fantastic in, like, the server and hosting world.

[Linus Sebastian]

However, your boss is also basically installing a surveillance tool on you. Oh, right. So any language you use or whatever, they can easily take that video file, throw it into like a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's recording audio too.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would assume so. If you. I would. I would argue that it's a privacy concern. To record audio. Like I know in some places they can't. You can't. So if it can just record video, I think I'd be into it. If it can record audio, I would. I would probably put my foot down if I were you. That's I think where I'm at on where I'm at on it.

[Dan]

Why is the dock only available on the US site?

[Linus Sebastian]

I actually don't know that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not a clue.

[Linus Sebastian]

It could be down to because remember that's not our product. So we don't determine like which markets it can or can't be sold into. So that's a. That's a Corsair product. If I had to guess, I'd say it has to do with a combination of either Corsair said that it's intended for a specific market, which could be done to warranty support or whatever else. That could be a possibility. Another possibility could be that they are all at our US distribution hub. What? We're really working hard on getting faster shipping times around the world. And one of the first steps that we've taken is having a hub for some products in the us including that one. Another guess would be that we don't have many of them. So maybe we went for some of those at one DC and some of and the other product at the other dc. DC is distribution center, not District of Columbia. Those would be my three guesses, but I don't actually know the answer. Hi.

[Dan]

Question for Luke. I saw you're going to open Sauced.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not a question.

[Dan]

What are you planning to talk about or show over there? Sending love from Argentina.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's leisure. Is it work? I don't think it's work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it's for sure work.

[Dan]

Let's work about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sauce Plus.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't buy it.

[Dan]

I'll keep tabs on him.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not getting paid over the weekend if that helps you.

[Dan]

Are you getting paid for WAN show from Sauce Plus?

[Linus Sebastian]

Your salary does anyway. Sauce Plus. Check it out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Scare the Coyote Season one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And other stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

And also building a real Gundam Day four. This guy's such a mad lad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Those episodes. You're getting them one day ahead on Sauce Plus. I believe is the terms. But yeah, I'm going down there. I'm hosting three different panels. I don't remember what they're all about.

[Linus Sebastian]

Free virtual. Free virtual ticket to open sauce 2025. Just 5. 50. 50 per month billed yearly Original shows, ad free viewing support creators directly. Sauce Plus. By the way, it's also powered by floatplane.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. That's pretty cool, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Check it out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

William Osman.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sauce.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. The one panel that I remember the topic of is during industry day. So I don't think it's open to everybody, but it's. If YouTube disappeared tomorrow, what would happen to your business?

[Dan]

That's why you need float plate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Should be fun. I thought is. I don't think, I don't know if they actually really planned the fact that I do float plate and sauce plus for me being on the panel, but I was like, this is going to be great. I am in. Sounds good. Yeah. So, yeah, it'll be good. It was good last year, it'll be good this year.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke.

[Dan]

I teach high school programming and I'm going to teach the kids Vibe coding. Bite me.

[Linus Sebastian]

We actually have a video coming up on this that I'm very excited about. I need a ladder system that I want to be ELO based for badminton. Now, I could just hire someone to make that for me, but that would be a lot of work. I could tell Luke to give me one of his developers to do it for me, but that would be crazy because they have better things to do. So I came up with what I think is a brilliant idea. You can't justify creating the Celo system for my badminton club because it's not making money yet. And also we have other things to do that are more important. So. I get that. I get that. I understand that. But what if I needed a developer for a video?

[Luke Lafreniere]

For a video?

[Linus Sebastian]

So I came up with a video and it's going to be me versus a real developer. We're going to. Let me. We're going to sic me on trying to Vibe code an ELO based ranking system so that you can like, input people's scores and it will like adjust their ELO rating and blah, blah, blah, whatever. I've really given a ton of thought to how this is going to work. And then we're going to pit me against a real developer with the expected outcome. Right. Obviously we're not going to. We're not going to. We're not going to like, fake the results. Right. But we do have a hypothesis with the expected outcome that being a real programmer is probably going to be better, but that vibe coding will get me a lot further than I would get if you just stuck me in a development environment.

[Dan]

Could you explain Vibe coding for the folks at home?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Vibe coding is asking AI to code for you.

[Dan]

There you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Linus. Vibe coding, who has literally never written a functioning line of code in his life versus a real programmer with all the tools that they have, including the ability to use AI if they want to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And there's effective applications. Like, Emma built this tool for her old workplace that was really helpful. And it was based on Google sheets and she vibe coded with an AI to make it actually happen. And it's way better than what they had before.

[Linus Sebastian]

So, like, I may be able to build something functional, but part of the payoff for the video is going to be to have our real developer poke and prod at my thing and be like, okay, well, we've got a bug here. We've got an edge case that you haven't accounted for here. We've got a security flow. Oh my God. Like, I'm expecting it to not be very good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We'll see.

[Linus Sebastian]

But we'll see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, maybe it'll be good enough and maybe that'll be an interesting outcome too. Either way, what I really want out of it is the real product from the real developer. And I'm just going to pretend to vibe code it as best I can. Well, I'm going to. I'm literally going to do as I will do as best I can.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I'm, I'm just like, have you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Done any of that yet? Interesting. Because as much as I was a little hesitant with the teacher saying that they were going to do that, there is, like, things you can learn to do it better. There are skills to it. If it's actually a programming class, they.

[Dan]

Might also just be messing with you. Maybe so, I mean, take it as a hypothetical. Yes, they are going to do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I mean, if it's like a small segment. Because they're going to do it anyways. So if you can like work with them to hopefully help them do it better. A lot of people really use AI in, to be blunt, just dumb ways. But so if you can help them not that would be pretty cool, I guess, because again, they're gonna do it anyways.

[Dan]

AI literacy is apparently really bad in Canada. I heard that on the cbc. It's really bad everywhere, I think particularly bad in Canada.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How is that measured?

[Dan]

I have no idea. They probably asked AI Canada is not a country. Let's see, you're a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're Canada jab in your Google Yourself video is pretty good. I thought that was pretty funny.

[Linus Sebastian]

Important countries and also Canada. Yeah, I think we're nice enough, you know, but not particularly consequential.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It also depends on the scenario and the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

There was that convention we helped.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right? Yeah.

[Dan]

Next merch message.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey. The one right. Nice. Hey, Wanda. Dealo.

[Dan]

Why in bigger orders do you split the packages between two separate carriers?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. Oh, we had some, like, issues for a bit. So maybe that's what you're talking about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe.

[Dan]

Perhaps. And last one I've got to you today. Why don't more people talk about the lack of drivers on Windows for Intel SSC or equivalent Bluetooth LE audio on Broadcom? More can actually be a huge problem living in apartments in big cities.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so Google thinks I mean intel ssd. So let's go ahead and find out what you're talking about. Spread spectrum clocking. Oh, okay.

[Dan]

Like we do that for our WI fi here in the office, I guess.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting. Okay, I'm gonna confess that I was not super familiar with this because I've not tried to make my Bluetooth work. Really? Blown in a apartment lately. Lack of drivers on Windows for it? I don't know. That's a really good question. And like, I've run into like a super congested environment very recently. When we were doing Natalie's AMD ultimate tech upgrade, that it was like a huge problem, not because necessarily everyone around her was transmitting, but because there were just so many SSIDs that her wi fi wasn't working at all. No, it wasn't just the launcher. Like, we couldn't get anything working. Speed test wouldn't work. That part wasn't in the video. But it is a thing that we checked. I don't know. That's a really good question. I guess it should be a thing. Good point.

[Dan]

That's all I got.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's it. See you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. Bye.