Linus (2:50)

Sure. It's. It's all kind of related and it all started when I was still in the Uber on my way to the airport, and I realized, holy crap, I forgot my WAN show away kit. So you know how the last WAN show that I did remotely, the quality was, like, actually kind of awesome.

Luke (3:09)

It's very good. Lots of good comments about it.

Linus (3:11)

Yeah, Yeah. I was using an Elgato Wave 3 microphone, so I was just using, like, a desktop, like, kind of podcasty gaming microphone. Yeah. And then. So I was. And then for the camera, I was using that, like, Super Bougie Razer one from our webcam roundup. Yes, the, like, $400 webcam. And I was like, this is freaking awesome. And I was in the Uber and I realized I didn't bring it. It was right next to my luggage. It was where I keep my passport, so it's impossible for me to forget.

Luke (3:45)

It's kind of interesting because you did bring it to ztw, even, like, that's how, like, default it is for you to bring it. Um, but it didn't. Didn't come on this trip, I guess.

Linus (3:56)

Well, what happened is I got interrupted in my packing multiple times because I have kids and stuff with me, so they needed help. And when my routine gets interrupted, I. I can't. I can't do anything. I'm useless. I'm worthless. Hate me. You're not worthless. Thanks, Luke. That's the affirmation I needed.

Luke (4:18)

Yeah.

Linus (4:19)

Anyway, I was in the Uber. I realized I didn't have it. So Yvonne, because she is, I don't know, a saint, was like, oh, well, you know, why don't we, as part of our trip, go to a tech mall and maybe you could make a video. Hey, seriously, find a wife who supports you and your career as much as Yvonne does.

Luke (4:41)

That's amazing.

Linus (4:43)

Yeah, it's crazy. And I was like, wait, so did she film?

Luke (4:47)

Is this, like, old school?

Linus (4:50)

You're getting so far ahead of things.

Luke (4:52)

Sorry. I'm getting excited. I'm getting excited.

Linus (4:54)

I'm telling my story. Tell my story.

Dan (4:57)

So.

Linus (4:58)

So she. So she's like, oh, we should. We should, you know. Yeah, you could do that. And I was like, you know, I had really planned to just be on vacation this time. This one time, I had planned to just be on vacation. We could just go to Asia. And I could not shoot a video in a tech mall. And then I was like, well, okay, let's have a look at what my options are if I don't go to the tech mall. And I went, wait a second, my laptop is running. Kubuntu. Right now. And I have. I had a bunch of issues on the plane on the way over here trying to get screen capture going because I was gaming on the plane. And because I didn't bother to convert my handheld yet, I was like, okay, well, my gaming machine for this trip then is my laptop, because I have to game on Linux, dude. I had so many problems, but then not any of the problems that were anything to do with gaming. So we can talk about those later.

Luke (6:07)

Okay?

Linus (6:07)

The point is, we got here and I was like, oh, I really don't know about doing the techmol thing. And then I was like, wait, can I even join the WAN show in my laptop's current state? Because OBS was a mess. I couldn't get screen capture working because I was trying to show some of the challenges that I was having on the plane on the way over here, and I wanted to record them, and I literally couldn't. Still haven't solved it. I'm sure I can, but I just haven't put in a ton of time to solve it yet. So I fired it up and I was like, oh, we are in serious trouble here. Because what I didn't realize is that while my camera works, the camera on this Asus machine that I'm demoing right now that I'm using for the Linux challenge. Super cool machine, Strix Halo OLED screen, beautiful machine, awful webcam, just horrendous. So the webcam sucked. And even worse, my onboard audio, it turns out, wasn't working. And I didn't realize that for I've been Linux pilled on this thing for, I think, two weeks now. The reason I didn't notice is because I almost exclusively use my laptop docked. So I'm always running over. I'm always using a USB audio device or an HDMI audio device, which does work, or I'm using my AirPods, which do work. My actual onboard audio doesn't work. And so I'm in the hotel room and I'm like, okay, am I going to be able to do this? And I just plug my headphones into my laptop and I go, holy crap. I don't have my say. I would normally use this mic and then I would use my headphones, and. And neither of them were working. I was like, okay, what now I can't go back to Windows. That's not in the spirit of the challenge. So what are we going to do? All right, we got to go to a tech mall. We're going to the tech mall. So, okay, one.

Luke (8:17)

One second.

Linus (8:18)

Just.

Luke (8:18)

Just. Just to pause. Just to pause. You're. We're getting some choppiness. Is this because you're on the other side of the planet? Like, I'm looking for input potentially from Dan as well. This is your laptop?

Linus (8:30)

No, this is me using a solution that I found.

Luke (8:35)

Okay, okay, okay, okay. All right, all right.

Linus (8:37)

That I think you're gonna like. I think you're gonna like the solution.

Luke (8:41)

Okay.

Linus (8:41)

Is it a perfect solution? No. Is my audio good? Is it just the video that chops a bit?

Luke (8:48)

The audio, I mean, it's. I can. It's clear. It's not as high quality as we've sometimes had on remote calls, but it's.

Linus (8:55)

I just mean, does it chop? Does it chop.

Luke (8:57)

No. Audio seems fine. I think. It's just the video, I think.

Linus (9:00)

All right. Okay. So I headed to the tech mall, which the Wikipedia article indicates is amazing, you know, and I found some other sort of rah, rah, rah, Korea type articles that are like, yeah, yeah, it's amazing. It's the best. It's the biggest in South Korea. It's awesome.

Luke (9:18)

That sounds great.

Linus (9:19)

And then I found some recent reviews on TripAdvisor and found some recent discussion on Reddit that it's maybe seen better days and is, quote, unquote, a ghost town, and quote unquote, full of scammers. And so I went in with very mixed expectations. It's gigantic. It's across over 20 buildings and totals like 5, 000 shops. So unlike, you know, Sim Lim Square or unlike the one that I went to in. What's it called? The. The. The Taipei one. It's not a mall. It's more like. Like. Oh, I'm gonna pronounce it wrong, but like Washong Bay, like. Like the big tech district in. In Shenzhen. It's. It's. It's more like that. So it's just like. It's like a district, and some of it is, you know, corporate offices, and some of it is tech malls, and some of it is more like traditional malls that just have a bunch of tech on the ground floor. So I had a simple objective, Luke. A simple objective. I wanted a desk, USB microphone, and a bougie webcam at any time, anytime.

Luke (10:43)

Linus Points has a simple objective. It's like, oh, no.

Linus (10:48)

Why?

Luke (10:49)

I feel like you need to have more complicated objectives, so then maybe things will be easier. I don't. I don't know.

Linus (10:55)

It's so true, though. Like, seven gamers, one cpu.

Luke (10:58)

Yeah, you nailed it.

Linus (11:01)

Got it. Done.

Luke (11:04)

Yeah. I don't know, for bonus points.

Linus (11:08)

For bonus points. I was like, hey, it'd be kind of cool to have a little LED light, you know, so that I would actually look dece.

Luke (11:15)

Sure. All right.

Linus (11:17)

So I made my way through four or five floors of this place. And first, it seemed extremely promising. Just about the first store I walked into had a little like Razer desk microphone. And I was like, oh, this is great. This was basically effortless. I'm gonna be good to go. But hey, you know, I don't want to buy the first thing I see. I'm not that kind of guy. I wanna, I wanna scrapyard hunt a little bit. I wanna, I wanna see what else they got. So anyway, I like pore through this place and dude, it's a journey. It's a journey. It ended up being like a very old school video. I actually filmed it completely myself. So I'm just on an iPhone, I've got my mic pack, and I'm just exploring this tech mall. And the ups and downs of are crazy.

Luke (12:13)

I'm like, this is probably more excited about this than like, I don't know. That's just. That sounds great. I don't have much else to say.

Linus (12:24)

At one point, at one point, shortly after noticing an entire store dedicated to Noctua, which was pretty cool, I was like on the verge of giving up and I find a Logitech store and I'm like, oh my gosh, that's it. That's the solution to my problem. And I go, wait, oh, oh, oh, it's just mice. It's like, it's like just mice.

Luke (12:49)

Whoa.

Linus (12:50)

Okay, he's got two webcams. He has the dinkiest webcam of all time and the other ever so slightly less dinkiest webcam of all time and no microphones. And then finally I was like, okay, well, I don't want to walk away completely empty handed. I'm going to go get that microphone. And the shop's closed. Every other shop in the entire mall is open. The one shop I went everywhere else. Not a single other desktop microphone. Lots of like crappy, tacky gaming headsets. No desktop USB microphones. They're freaking closed. So I'm just like, okay, cool, we are getting to the point now where we are starting to run out of time. And I have nothing. I have no microphone, I have no webcam, and I especially have no LED light. So I'm just like, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go to the Noctua store because they have an entire noctua store. They're just probably based. And I'm gonna ask them for help because I did ask. I did ask some other people for help and they were basically just like, no English, goodbye. And I was like, okay. I mean, fair enough, right? Like, yeah, fine, yeah. But which is funny though, because in general, I'm in South Korea. If nobody figured that out yet from sort of the contextual clues, I. Everywhere else I've gone, people have been like trip over themselves to be helpful. Helpful. Like, I'll just.

Luke (14:20)

I had a great experience, a little bit confused.

Linus (14:23)

I. I spent like, like four seconds looking at a metro map just to make sure that I was going down the right stairwell to go to the right terminus station, right? And some guy walks over and he's like, can I help you? Do you. Do you need help? Are you lost? I'm like, no, no, I'm actually good. But wow, like, thank you. Been absolutely incredible. Not in the tech mall. For some reason the vibe was very like, like you make eye contact with them and they go, oh, Foreigner. Pretend I didn't see him. Like, and then even like, like, like laughing to each other that they're. They're both like going out of their way to ignore me right now. I'm like, okay. It might just be the one building that I started in though. Anyway, the Noctua dudes, absolute bros. We used Google Translate and we figured it out and they sent me to a different building where once again, I found something I needed like immediately. Hold on, I'm just gonna check. Yeah, I walked basically through the door and into a shop with Rode nt USB plus, which is a perfectly cromulent desktop microphone. Except once again I was like, well, come on. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna just buy the first thing I see. Never mind that it's like getting to be close to Yvonne and the kids are done at the zoo and we should probably get together for dinner at some point. But I want to look around a little bit because, dude, this place was nuts in terms of like camera and production gear. Like they had. I think it was, what was it, like an FS7 Mark 2 or something like that. Like multiple used camera bodies of that caliber right next to each other amidst like a hundred other production grade camera bodies. Just like, dude, you'd never get away with this kind of thing in North America. Just like on the ground floor of this mall right next to the exit. Yeah, like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of camera bodies just like sitting on the counter. Crazy. Not Even like, like bolted to anything and like, and full of like secondhand stuff. Tons of second hand tech actually in both. In the first mall which was more like PC hardware, and in the second mall that ended up being more like video production and then also PC hardware and also like the bougiest audio equipment. Dan, you'd get such a kick out of this place. Like I saw turntables that were way more art than they were actually meant to be a turntable as far as I could tell. Anyway, I walk into the place, I get a quote. Okay, how much is it? Nothing's got pricing on it in a lot of the shops. So they just like, they pull out a calculator and it's like you ain't calculating nothing, you're just typing a number in. Like you just. They just use it so that they can, I don't know, seem like they calculated the price.

Luke (17:09)

Wasn't it that thing? Like, don't automotive dealerships do this too? If they don't say it, if they just show it to you, it doesn't like impact as much, I think. I think it's like a psychological thing. I think so. Because dealerships will like write down the number and like slide it over to you on paper so they don't have to say it.

Linus (17:27)

Really.

Luke (17:28)

I wonder if chat's gonna chime in. In Japan they use calculators show prices everywhere too. Maybe it's so that there isn't like

Linus (17:36)

trouble of miscommunication barrier maybe. Yeah, yeah, like I could, I could definitely see that's what happened when I bought my bike.

Luke (17:44)

So he negotiation tool. Maybe it's both.

Linus (17:48)

He shows me this price, he shows me this price on his calculator and I go, okay, well you know, I want to shop around a little bit. No, not gonna buy the first thing I see and I go and I look it up after I leave and I'm like, oh my God, that's like a hundred US dollars more than if I just bought this thing at B H. So while it's a perfectly good desktop microphone and while I'll be honest with you guys, right? Like I'm, you know, let's be real, the land show must go on. And if it came down to it, I would buy it so that I can be coming to you guys with reasonable quality from halfway around the world. But I don't like just burning a hundred dollars like that. It doesn't make me happy.

Luke (18:29)

Yeah.

Linus (18:30)

So I was like, okay, I need to try to find something else, dude. If I'd been Looking for like a, like a hammer microphone. And I wanted like a professional, like like audio mixer or whatever. Dude, I'd have been, I'd have been so good. So awesome. If I wanted a rode like like camera mounted like vlogging microphone, I'd have been so good. I couldn't find a single other place that had a USB microphone even in this second mall. And I was like starting to lose hope. And then, and then this is actually kind of amazing. Totally serendipitous. I was going past this store, kind of like talking about the, the, the one one side of it, and Buddy gets like real mad at me for having my camera out. Because some of the stores here, in particular the gaming ones, they do not want you filming their storefronts. And I don't know if it's because they have knockoff stuff or like pirated software or they have like emulated software running as part of their display. I. Whatever their reasons are for it. There was one like like very Nintendo centric shop in particular that was like super mad. When I had my phone out, I was like, sorry bro, I like honestly don't. Didn't even care about your store, so. Sure. Anyway, I was going past this like this island in the middle of the mall and I, and I, I accidentally shot it and he was like, Bro was like super mad. And then that actually made me stop and I realized that and. Oh, and he got mad at me about wearing a backpack too. He was the first one to yell at me about my backpack. And because I stopped because he yelled at me, I realized that he also had the like the, the little hole in the wall next to it. And he had an NT USB plus in there. And I was like, okay, well look, we got off on the wrong foot. But I'll tell you what, I'm going to take my backpack off. You can have it. I'm going to go over there and I'm going to look a little bit more closely and he gave me a way better price. So here it is. Okay, I'm coming to you guys from a rode NT USB plus. And I had long since given up on finding a bougie webcam. So I went all in. Luke chips all in on the table on being able to use my phone as my webcam, which is where the Linux saves the day comes in at the end of this story. Okay, anyway, interesting, Buddy, Buddy with the mic also had. What were the other things I needed? Okay, right, right, right. I needed a stand and a. And a light. The light ended up not Being great. I've got this. What is it? It's a small rig. I want to say P96. Yeah, more like poo poo 96. Because this thing, as far as I can tell, just makes everything I pointed at worse. Dan had me turn it off before the show. So I also bought a stand and a light that are. That are pretty bad. And then from another one down the. Like just down the walkway in the mall, I got a little phone tripod that's also a selfie stick. And. And that's what I'm coming to you guys from there. So it's just over my. My laptop webcam. So last night I get back to the room. Land shows in the morning for me, right? Like it's a 9am start or whatever it was. So I'm not going to have time to go out shopping and reconjigure a solution before literally don't have another SSD to like put Windows on this laptop and get that working. Because I've done the whole phone as a webcam thing before, but never on Linux. So last night, it's desperation time. First I get the mic working. The mic's working, but like Obs wasn't recording it for some reason, blah, blah, blah. A lot of troubleshooting that unfortunately I tried to record and ultimately I don't think I was able to record because the mic wasn't recording any of it. So, yeah, cool, that probably won't make it into the video. And then I was like, okay, I need to figure out this camera. So I found three solutions suggested by AI, all of which apparently are Ubuntu ready, Debian ready. I'm not using Ubuntu. I'm using Kubuntu or Ubuntu. It's Ubuntu, not Ubuntu, but it's hard for me to remember that. Anyway, I'm using Kubuntu, but that's basically just Ubuntu with Kitty. So it should be anything, anything Ubuntu. I should be good to go. So I fire up my. What's. What's it called? Home Discover, which is the kind of the app store that Kubuntu comes with. And even though I've already configured it to use. What are the ones that I added? I added Flathub and I think I added something else. Two of the three suggestions for use your phone as a webcam, things didn't show up or they like, basically, yeah, didn't work. And then I found this one that is rated like 3 stars. Irion webcam for Linux v2.9.1. I installed it. There was literally nothing to configure. I don't think I have ever used anything this seamlessly before in my life. You've just got a drop down. Which camera would you like? Back camera. Back. Telephoto.

Luke (24:29)

What was that?

Linus (24:29)

Ultra wide.

Luke (24:30)

What was that? One of them was like a monkey face or something.

Linus (24:38)

What do you mean monkey? That's my face, bro.

Luke (24:41)

I don't know. I think one of them wasn't you. No, I swear. Anyone else? I swear. Was there not? Dan. Did you see that? Did anyone else? Am I crazy?

Dan (24:52)

I'm pulling up playback.

Luke (24:53)

What was that?

Linus (24:56)

That was. That was my face, bro.

Luke (24:58)

No.

Linus (24:59)

Anyway, there's another dropdown for video format. You just pick your resolution and you pick your frame rate and then there's another one. Whether you want to use the audio from your iPhone. That's it. And you're just. You're just good to go. What are you.

Luke (25:18)

What? Apparently it was. It was zoomed in, super blown out and upside down. The telephoto.

Dan (25:30)

I'm gonna just screen cap it.

Luke (25:31)

My bad, my bad. Okay, sorry, sorry. Hold on one second.

Linus (25:37)

It's gonna.

Dan (25:39)

Monitor's gonna.

Linus (25:42)

So I connected with a cable and that didn't seem to do anything. So I'm just on hotel WI fi. It just immediately worked and has not been perfect, but it has basically worked for as long as I've been streaming with you today. So I am completely coming to you, Linux Live. And it's going great thanks to iRion webcam v.2.9.1.

Luke (26:11)

Awesome. That's actually pretty cool.

Linus (26:15)

It's been sort of almost like a microcosm of my entire Linux experience over the years. If I try to do something complicated, it's shocking how somebody thought of that and built a solution for it. It tends to be.

Luke (26:35)

And you try to do something.

Linus (26:38)

When I try to do the simplest bloody thing, it breaks.

Luke (26:44)

Let me install Steam. Gone. Let me. Let me use my phone's camera as a webcam. Instantly works. That's crazy. See, like I would have. I would have been scared of that problem, to be completely honest. Yeah, I'm surprised. That was just like one shot. That's really cool. Actually.

Linus (27:03)

I was. I was scared of this problem. And like, I don't know, man. And you know what's funny is I saw someone cringing that I'm using AI as part of the Linux challenge. But there's two things, right? One is that that's how people are going to do it.

Luke (27:19)

Yeah.

Linus (27:19)

You don't have to like it, but you do have to just kind of sit down and accept it. Like all of my normie friends and family, they go straight for the AI when they want to know how to do something these days.

Luke (27:29)

And there's also like, you don't have

Linus (27:30)

to take my word for it. That's just like a fact. And that's just like declining use of, of click through. That's just a fact. That's just how it is. And you can hate it.

Luke (27:41)

Yep.

Linus (27:41)

But you do just have to like deal with it that that's how people are doing things.

Luke (27:45)

And what this is. Sorry, you can keep going.

Linus (27:49)

Number two is honestly, it's been way more useful. When I was trying to figure out my screen recording issue, I came, I came across a, like a discussion thread that had, I kid you not, five different solutions for how I can solve screen recording issues on Kubuntu. I don't want five solutions. I want to know how to fix it. And all these individual people are just arguing with each other about the validity and merit of all these various solutions, some of which I tried the first couple and they didn't even apply anymore. Just wasn't that useful. And so that's the two, that's the two things. So as part of the Linux challenge, it's something that I would do anyway just because a huge part of my approach is that I'm trying to, I'm trying to kind of channel my inner. What would a random. You know. And I have this one guy that I think of when I think of the slack jawed gamer and I bumped into him at PAX like 11 years ago. Oh, it was back when Nvidia launched the SHIELD portable handheld. Remember that thing?

Luke (29:02)

Yeah. And I know know the story.

Linus (29:04)

You know the story. You know the story. Okay. So I encountered this guy who's sitting on a beanbag playing a PC game on this, on this Android portable that is streaming over WI Fi, which at the time was absolutely mind blowing. Like I was so I was so amped about like WI Fi game streaming and the fact that this device with like decent ergonomics and reasonable portability that could play Android games and, and you could stream your freaking PC games over WI Fi to it. It blew my freaking mind. And eventually became GeForce now and Moonlight and, and Steam remote play and just this technology and it was at the forefront of it.

Luke (29:50)

I think even just that concept in general also inspired you pretty heavily towards what ended up being your, like my, my compute at My home is a server room thing.

Linus (30:00)

Yes.

Luke (30:00)

Because you used to talk a lot about how it would be likely that a lot of people would end up going that route and then distributing compute throughout their house. And then that didn't get as popular as kind of a lot of people actually expected. But you were still able to pull it off for your setup.

Linus (30:15)

Not in the way that I anticipated.

Luke (30:16)

Yeah.

Linus (30:16)

Instead it lives in a data center somewhere in the form of GeForce now or whatever Microsoft calls their remote Xbox stuff. Anyway, the point is I walk up to this guy who's experiencing the freaking future in his hands and I go like, oh yeah, what do you think? And he's sitting there on this beanbag and he's like, that was cool. I was like, oh yeah? Did you. Do you realize that like it's, it's like beaming to you? And he's like, I don't know, he's just gaming. He's just gaming. He doesn't care how it works. He doesn't, he doesn't want to go any further than like the lowest possible friction path to. He's just playing his game. He's like locked in. And I was like, okay, well I'm basically, I'm talking to a vegetable at this point.

Luke (31:05)

Yeah.

Linus (31:06)

But it was just, it was really eye opening to me because you know, for many years I had thought, oh well, like, you know gamers, we're like, we're very interested in like the hardware and how it all is configured and what every setting means and we really care about all this stuff. But no, there is a very, very large, much larger, way larger proportion of gamers who don't care at all. Not even a little bit. And, and so yeah, probably high, yes. Charge nuclei, almost definitely like high as a kite, this guy. It was remarkable. Anyway, I forget where I was going with this, but the point is that that's how I'm doing it because that's how people are doing it. And honestly, I can't argue with the result. Worked great.

Luke (31:53)

Thanks.

Linus (31:55)

I'm coming to you, I'm coming to you over Linux. Linux saved the WAN show, boys.

Luke (32:02)

I don't have much Linux news. Things have been going fine for me. I think I've already updated WAN show on what's going on with my laptop. So I have Linux Mint on there, I guess a little bit of an update there just in case you don't know what's going on because in the video I talked about how I've been running Arch on my laptop for a while. Technically when I filmed that it was running Windows, and up until fairly recently, it was running Windows, but it was running Windows because it was having a hardware issue. And Lenovo, the laptop maker, was like, maybe it's Linux. Which I'm not even upset at them for saying that. Reasonable enough. Because the hardware issue that was, that was happening was the screen would just, like, lock. And that's kind of weird. So, like, it wasn't like the computer would just shut down randomly or anything. The screen would lock and there was no. Yeah. Anyways. So they were like, can you try Windows? So I did, and the same problem happened. And then I just was too lazy to switch back over because the whole point of running Arch was to just point out that if you live in a browser all the time, it just doesn't really matter. And then Windows was getting in my way because the Start menu stopped working. So I raged, I rage, installed Mint because I'm more comfortable with Mint and Mint's been a fantastic experience. I was pointing out to people before the show that I think it's actually really cool. And I don't know how many. Maybe there's tons of other examples of this. I don't know. I'm not that experienced. But, like, if I type in SN for snipping tool, screenshot will come up. A tool that Mint has. Yeah, it's not snipping. Whatever. It's Screenshot. If I type in Paint, it'll come up with drawing. It has like something, some form of information that's like. These are common things. A Windows user would type in a Start menu, kind of what they expect to come up. And then those things tend to come up, which is fantastic. Keywords. Yeah, aliases, keywords, something. They have some type of list, some kind of metadata. Yeah. And it makes it just super easy. Oh, my God. Everything I've had to do, super easy. I had to sign PDFs, stuff's already installed, whatever. Super easy. What a joke. The biggest problem with computers that I've had in the last week isn't, like, technically a problem. It didn't stop me from doing anything. But it's been that this computer is Dan. And I think it's like failing to Windows Update, but constantly trying because. Because there's the Windows modules, installer worker that for literally hours at this point, has been taking up a very significant amount of memory, a very significant amount of cpu, a decent amount of disk, just everything and going, like, hard. There has been times where we've seen it spin up to over like 40% CPU usage and it's just sitting there almost always at the top, the highest process being used. And like I've got, I've got Chrome open right now on here with, with the wandoc and float plane and chat and all this kind of stuff. And it's, it's not even Chrome that's using the most system resources. It's the Windows module installer.

Dan (35:15)

I've had some other interesting issues with it. You try to install it and it fails and then to retry it has to download the whole thing again.

Luke (35:22)

Nice.

Dan (35:22)

And so it's probably downloading and it's so slow and then it fails and

Luke (35:27)

tries it's so with, with one browser with three tabs open and task manager, I'm at 60% memory, 25% CPU usage because Windows module installer and the service host, Windows event log and WMI and a few other things are just cranking like all the time. And. Yeah, so the biggest problem I've had during the Linux challenge has been a Windows computer. That being said, I haven't. I've been intentionally avoiding some things knowing that they won't work. But. Yeah.

Linus (36:13)

So here's a question for you. Yeah, is that a hack? Because I, I have mixed thoughts on this. Like on the one hand, launching a game that says not compatible on Proton db, that feels like just throwing Linux under the bus. Right? Well, on the other hand, if you go in in good faith being like I need to accomplish task A, well, here's my. It turns out there's no solution.

Luke (36:41)

Yeah, no, that's fine. Here's my good faith thing. I don't check, I don't even go to Proton DB. I run in compatibility mode with 10,04, whatever it is, the newest Proton compatibility mode and I just run it.

Linus (36:58)

Interesting.

Luke (36:59)

I don't play as many games as I used to. I don't game as much as I used to. Everything's been fine.

Linus (37:04)

The little tucks in your game library will like tell you if it's Linux ready anyway. So you don't even use that?

Luke (37:11)

Nope. Don't look.

Linus (37:13)

That's crazy to me. That's the kind of thing that if I did, people would be losing their minds at me. Like I'm trying to.

Luke (37:21)

I haven't ran into a single problem. If I clicked Play and it didn't launch, I'd look into something, but there has been no reason to. Like, I'm not, I'm not trying to. There's. I saw some reviews, some people like reviewing our first video and like some comment threads about it and they're all like, oh well he's fine because he's like super Linux experience. I'm not in like the same way that Linus isn't doing anything. I'm not doing anything. I'm not, I'm doing nothing. I, so far it's been kind of luck of the draw. But like you saw this, right? Like we went down to Florida, I downloaded slay the Spire 2 on pre release launch. I clicked Play.

Linus (38:03)

I would assume something light like Slay the Spire would work, but then you can't assume. You can't assume.

Luke (38:09)

But I don't think that's a crazy assumption either, to be honest. But like yeah, yeah, it wouldn't be

Linus (38:15)

crazy if it didn't work.

Luke (38:16)

Yep.

Linus (38:16)

It's in ea, right?

Luke (38:18)

Yep. But I didn't check any.

Linus (38:19)

Not Electronic Arts.

Luke (38:20)

I didn't look up if anyone was having problems before we went into a place with dubious Internet. I, I didn't plan anything. I did nothing. I installed the game, clicked Play, and it worked completely, flawlessly. It's also Godot. It's like, yeah, it's, yeah, I just, it's been fun.

Linus (38:42)

I, I, I, I played probably about three hours of God of War like, like re, remaster, like not the first God of War game from like the PlayStation or whatever, but like yeah, God

Luke (38:56)

of War, the relaunch, whatever you want to call it.

Linus (38:58)

Yeah. And it was freaking awesome. I don't know if I was getting as much performance as I would have gotten on Windows, but I was getting enough performance. I did run into a weird issue where my charger, I only brought like a little compact 65 watt charger and this laptop realistic. It comes with like a 150 watt charger or something like that. But I can, I can game off of that charger and it'll like, it'll hold the line like it won't charge or discharge. So that was what I brought with me. And I did run into an issue where I got down to 10 battery and I got that notification and then I was like, oh crap, someone knocked my, my charger off on the plane. So I put it back in and then because that notification kept like coming and going and coming and going because I was like riding 10% forever, the game eventually entered a state where it just got kind of choppy and wouldn't run properly. So I had to turn it off, charge up a little bit, launch the game again, and then it was smooth again. But like, realistically, I don't know, I would have you could have an issue like that on a. On a Windows PC as well. So I'm. I'm counting that as. As it ran pretty darn good and I'm really enjoying the game so far. I finally freaking playing it. It's funny how that kind of happens for me is it takes like a new device launch or a Linux challenge or something for me to finally get into a game I've been meaning to play for years.

Luke (40:28)

Yeah. That come out 2018 or 2017 or something. Not quite.

Linus (40:34)

But I think.

Luke (40:35)

I think we're getting close. There's been like sequels to it since then. But there is some things like, you know, I'm not playing, I don't know, basically any multiplayer shooter game.

Linus (40:49)

Yeah.

Luke (40:51)

And again it's. I feel like it's less impactful this time around because I'm not playing as much stuff.

Linus (40:57)

Right. Yeah. I mean your gaming rig has been just like locked away for freaking six months anyway. So it's not like you're like locked in and hyper.

Luke (41:06)

Yeah.

Linus (41:06)

Deep into a season of something.

Luke (41:08)

Yeah.

Linus (41:08)

Right. As you're. You're starting the challenge and there is the wipes coming soon and you want to get in a bunch of gaming or whatever.

Luke (41:13)

The one casualty is Tarkov released 1.0 recently and you can like escape from Tarkov now. You can like complete the game. And I like have some curiosity to do that and finally put like a pin in it and be like I really want to go completed. And that's. The draw is not strong enough for me to really care. I think it's one of those. We had this conversation pretty early of like it kind of blows you to compromise what games you can play because your operating system. And I'm sitting here on Linux being like the experience has been pretty good. I don't really care enough I think to. So far this is even.

Linus (41:57)

I think that might be a bit of a boomer dad take though.

Luke (42:00)

It might be.

Linus (42:00)

But it's where like gaming is not gaming. The game is much older. No, no. That I know. I just mean like gaming in general I don't think is as much of a central part of your social life. That's where I'm getting with this. Yeah.

Luke (42:14)

There is a weird. I saw somebody point out and I don't know if this would work with Tarkov. Maybe it works with other things and this isn't even a recommendation and like it's kind of. I wouldn't want to do it. I'm. I have actually less interest in this than I do in like dual Booting, which I don't have a lot of interest in. But GeForce now is apparently a way you get around some stuff like Fortnite. Apparently you can play Fortnite through GeForce Now. I. I didn't have interest in playing Fortnite before. I don't have interest in playing Fortnite now. But yeah, like I'm trying to think of What Slay the Spire 1 and 2. I've launched both of those. Baldur's Gate. My dad and I jumped on. Wow, that worked. You just have to add.

Linus (43:02)

Wow.

Luke (43:03)

You have to go in Steam and then click activate a non Steam game and then just add the installer through there and it.

Linus (43:12)

And then it'll just proton you.

Luke (43:14)

Yeah, it just works. Okay. Which is like, you know, that does take a second. You have to Google like, okay, what. And then the whole Internet. Honestly, what's been really, really helpful and I wonder if this is a bit of a hack for me is part of the reason why I went with Caches because it's based on Arch, so I can follow the Steam Deck guides, by the way.

Linus (43:35)

Right. Yep.

Luke (43:36)

So that was what I ended up seeing for wow was a Steam Deck guide. How do I play on Steam Deck? And I was like, it'll probably work for me. And then. Yeah, it did.

Linus (43:48)

I got to be honest with you, I've been happy about my Kubuntu choice for pretty much the same reason. Because you can follow a bunch of Debian.

Luke (43:57)

Yeah.

Linus (43:58)

Are by far the, the, the most supported when it comes to just like a random application for using your iPhone as a webcam.

Luke (44:09)

That being said, literally, I'd be really interested if you sent that to me because I figured out recently the whole Tarball thing, it's just a zip file. You just open it and then run the stuff that's inside of it and it seems to work fine. I had something that was made for Debian work with nothing from my end immediately and it was completely fine.

Linus (44:36)

I don't know. Let me have a look at what their. What their download formats are. Oh yeah, it's a. Oh, it's a beta. I actually forgot to mention that. That the Aryan Webcam is beta for

Luke (44:47)

Linux and it just worked immediately.

Linus (44:48)

Ubuntu 2204 or later required. So they're literally on their site. Was not an obvious way to. Yeah, so it's a.deb download. So I just. So all I had to do was just open it in my. In my store. In my Discover store or whatever the stupid thing is called. In my Discover store and go for it. So sorry, no, this one's not beta. So the support for Ubuntu is not beta. And then there's a Linux RPM package which I'm not familiar with. I don't know what that means. I don't know how that relates to your tar balls or whatever, but that one is in beta and that's. Yeah. Dot rpm, whatever that is. So when it comes to doing anything not gaming, which I haven't actually really needed a ton of guides for, I've been extremely happy to be on Debian basically to be on Ubuntu.

Luke (45:48)

Yeah. I found, you know, Mint just had all the stuff pre installed. Like I've been having a good time with Kashi, but I don't know if I would recommend Kashi to a ton of people. It's.

Linus (46:00)

I hate to be that guy out of the box. I don't know if I would recommend any flavor of the week distro.

Luke (46:07)

No.

Linus (46:07)

And not, not because this is a

Luke (46:09)

big part of the reason why I think. Yeah.

Linus (46:11)

But because the people who tend to evangelize these distros are self selecting as people who enjoy tinkering.

Luke (46:23)

Yeah.

Linus (46:23)

And so the very fact that they are recommending it tells me that that's probably not what I want. No offense. No offense.

Luke (46:35)

And for me, I mean it's been fine, but it is been like, okay, I have to like go get something for screenshots. All right. Like there's been stuff like that and it's been easy to do. So I like you. You were talking about how you haven't been using like.

Linus (46:50)

Thank you. I like you too.

Luke (46:52)

You're talking about how you haven't been using the like forums much and stuff. Yeah, I've been kind of avoiding them as well. Me too. But I've been mostly avoiding them. The Level 1 Text Forum is, is permanently based, but a lot of the other ones, like honestly I just don't need that much negativity. You get, you get like a, a simple question and then it's just 20 pages of people screaming at each other for like often completely unrelated reasons. It's wild, it's, it's honestly just kind of terrible. But level one text form Holy wars

Linus (47:28)

are bad and the collateral damage is not worth it.

Luke (47:32)

And you were talking about how like the flavor of the month distros thing. One thing I will give Kashi, as much as I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to new Linux users so much, at least in my experience, is their wiki is awesome. If you're willing to kind of like pour through a wiki a bit. I could actually totally see new users using Cashy. They have like this software list thing where it's like, oh, here's a ton of different things you might need to do on your computer and here's recommended software that you can use on Cache and here's the like package name so you can stall it super easy stuff like that. But yeah, their wiki is sweet. Their documentation is really good. So I've often, I've kind of defaulted to just like, I'm not actually going to look up what people are saying. I'm just going to the wiki and just find the information already there's. And grab that. Yeah, yeah, it's been, it's been pretty good. I will say the Mint experience has been more comfortable.

Linus (48:32)

Isn't safe.

Luke (48:34)

Nope. Nowhere is.

Linus (48:35)

I think like toxicity.

Luke (48:36)

Yeah, I actually think it's safe.

Linus (48:38)

You've never tinkered with Windows, especially when you had learned PC Stop lying. Nobody said that. Nobody said anything about that.

Luke (48:46)

It's just, it's honestly like, it sucks. I honestly, I think, I think it might be worse than the first time we did this, which I find interesting.

Linus (48:57)

I was expecting it to be better after that. Like I. It seemed like after the initial very strong reaction last time around, it seemed like they. A lot of people stopped blaming the user quite as much when they realized, oh wait, that was a really bad bug that caused that. Oh wait, a lot of this feedback is really valuable. We actually have a couple of people who between them had at the time probably about 30 years of experience testing tech products, doing free QA. Like maybe this is valuable what's going on right now. And a lot of stuff on the developer side got fixed after we flagged it, after we had issues with it.

Luke (49:48)

Linux. The experience of using Linux again itself, both Mint and Cache has actually been really cool. The improvements over the last, what, four years has been.

Linus (50:01)

Yeah, it's been about five years.

Luke (50:02)

That's been one of the really cool things about using Mint on my laptop too is as much as I'm playing around with Cache, I get to experience the thing that I did last time too. And seeing the gap like Mint has come really far. People, people trash on Mint for not getting as many updates because it's an LTS thing and all that kind of stuff. There's other parts of that as well, but it has gotten a lot better actually and I kind of liked it last time. So like that's been really cool and even Just using Cashy. Like things feel like they've really been worked on since last time we did this challenge but the community just ah, guys, the memes aren't cool. Like it's actually just sucks. It's very, it's very acidic. I don't want to go near it too much. And again there are havens for like the fourth time or something. The Level 1 text forum is awesome. That, that Cashy wiki is freaking fantastic. There are places where you can have really good interactions but man, there is just so much prickly. I don't know, it's very like holier than thou mentality. I must be right about my opinion that multiple people could be right about situation.

Linus (51:15)

So this is really important on my floatplane. Commenter is still upset. Basically going, you hold Linux to a bar and then flame it. That's how it feels. And it's like, yeah, it's all about the perspective. When you hear me talk about Linux in general, Open source in general, you'll hear me be extremely, you'll hear me praise it like very, very strongly because the concept is incredible. World changing is not an overstatement. Right? The free open source software is, is, is like, you know, YouTube, I would, I would say is a wonder of the world, is incredible, is something we've never had before and may never see again. If somehow we, we lose what we have now. This amazing thing and part of what's amazing about it is that it shouldn't be lost. It doesn't seem like it's possible for it to be lost, but we should never take that for granted either. It's all I'm trying to say. So from that perspective, you know, I'm very positive, very bullish. I mean, you've heard me many times publicly talk about how the year of the Linux desktop is coming. I think SteamOS could be the one. However, when I am approaching something from the perspective of an individual user who is trying to get something done, you're just going to have to put the emotions aside because. And so am I. If I go and I click run this software and it doesn't, or it has me donking around in the terminal a bunch, then I'm going to have to just give you a reality bomb that most people don't want to do that and that's a terrible user experience. And when I show up on a forum talking about that terrible user experience and you get emotional like you're getting emotional right now and you make it that, you know, I'm attacking this thing that is precious to you instead of just going, okay, maybe this thing I love isn't perfect and could be better, that's destructive, that actually works against what we're all trying to do and what I am rooting for, which is year of the Linux desktop. But these different perspectives matter and these different framings matter. Linux Challenge is not about do I love open source software and do I support it. It's about hey, as a gamer, how actually usable is this day to day and how much work do I have to put into it.

Luke (53:47)

It's also not a.

Linus (53:48)

Am I substituting? Go ahead.

Luke (53:51)

It's also not a Linux sales pitch. Like I, I've, I've seen some, yeah, I've seen some people like upset that the negativity exists. I've seen some people upset that Linus is trying to interact with things in the way that a normal user might and stuff. And it's like, guys, what, like what positivity? 10 trillion. I switched to Linux videos on YouTube. There's so many people have figured out that this format kind of works and people click on it. Cool, Sounds great. This is our angle. Everyone's going to have their own. Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting but like it's, it is a problem that the community is so tight.

Linus (54:39)

I think being, honestly being too, being too positive about something, I think can, can be equally destructive to it if you misrepresent something big. I mean, think about it. If you're shopping for a car, okay, and you walk into the dealership and they tell you it gets 1,000 miles to the gallon and the paint never peels, it never needs to be washed. And the second, you know, a woman sees you in it, she will be drawn to you magnetically. And you buy this thing and it turns out it's just a car, you're going to be disappointed because the framing

Luke (55:19)

of it was totally wrong and you lose trust.

Linus (55:22)

Exactly. And you might never buy a car from that brand again. That's why I think it is so important to just take off the makeup and be realistic about what this is like and what the problems are. And if I find a problem, if a problem that I find is that, hey, this OS that everyone knows is bad still gets recommended a lot by tools like Google search and like ChatGPT that you don't have to like it, but you do have to just kind of deal with it that basically everyone uses, then don't be mad at me. I'm just the messenger. Solve the problem. If that's what you're passionate about.

Luke (56:07)

This is off topic.

Linus (56:08)

Solve the problem.

Luke (56:09)

But you said steamos could be the one for year of the Linux desktop. I don't think it's going to be. I don't think it's going to be probably ever really. I don't think Valve is going to want to support the non gaming aspects of it. But that's one of the reasons why I've been playing around in like Arch land and like playing around with a couple different distros and stuff like that is because my current extremely ignorant vibe check is like maybe the path that they're on is going to get a lot of support. And I've been kind of seeing that with Cash, eos and like these different types of things. I don't think if we went back four years ago and I'm probably wrong about this in some way, was it. Was it Manjaro?

Linus (56:58)

Okay, you have a button for that.

Luke (56:59)

Manjaro was Arch based, isn't that right? Is Manjaro arch based?

Linus (57:04)

No, I don't think so.

Luke (57:08)

Yes, Manjaro is Arch based. Yeah.

Linus (57:11)

Oh, okay.

Dan (57:12)

Yep.

Linus (57:13)

Thank you.

Luke (57:13)

So that, that was like around but that was if I'm. You ended up using that, right?

Linus (57:20)

Yeah, I did. I used Manjaro. I forget why I decided to use Manjaro but I ultimately settled on it.

Luke (57:26)

So I think that was like.

Linus (57:27)

Yeah, no, okay. Yeah, it's because it's easy.

Luke (57:29)

Arch. Yeah.

Linus (57:30)

Or it was.

Luke (57:31)

Yeah. I don't know. May still be. But I think that was like just kind of starting to become a thing as like that could maybe be used for gaming. But Arch was always just the big spooky side of things. People didn't really want to touch it. I remember people started talking about the AUR around that time and it started becoming a little bit more approachable and there was Manjaro and a couple things like that and these days now it's like oh, it's the gaming thing and Cash OS is over there and oh, Steam OS is built on this thing and gaming focus, gaming focus, gaming focus. And I think the other things will kind of follow and I think something in that realm might make it which is why I'm trying to familiarize myself with those things instead of just sitting in my comfortable mint land forever.

Linus (58:16)

So the reason I think it's going to be steamos is because I, I believe at this point and I've just. I've seen too much in our, in our last Linux challenges and just with the, the development of open source software in general I believe you need a vision for something like an operating system. I think you need a really strong direction and SteamOS has it. And while I do absolutely see your point, that with their focus on ultimately like let's, let's not kid ourselves selling more counter strike gun skins. Right. Like you know, what drives Valve, at the end of the day I can see how you might not have faith that they're going to put the time and the work into the other aspects of the desktop experience. From talking to the folks there, from seeing the direction that they're going from the Steam deck. Right. Which is handheld only. It's big picture only. Right. And seeing how much they wanted to talk about how much they've improved the desktop experience with the Steam machine. The fact that one of their demos was with a desktop monitor and the Steam machine running in desktop mode. The fact that like it was a while back we were trying to get this ancient printer working for a video and that was when I realized that steamos had no built in support for printers of any sort. You had to basically like kludge it in yourself since then. I believe they do support printers now and there would be no. Do you want to double. Can someone double check that for me? I'm going to need a Luke. I don't know here, but I believe that is a thing. Now there is no reason to support printers and the printing stack out of the box if you don't freaking intend for this to be a desktop operating system. So to me the vision that I see and the direction that they're going are the strongest and the most cohesive and I just don't know. Yes, printer Support added in SteamOS 3.6 and I just, I see how much money they're putting into making the experience better for gamers and I know that gamers are just one specific use case, but they also are a use case that demands high performance that, that, that tends to be micro influencers for their friend groups around them. And I just, I see momentum building that way and I saw a couple comments in the chat. Yeah, but it's AMD only. Valve would love for SteamOS to be super Nvidia friendly tomorrow. But from, and this is me putting words in their mouth, no one from Valve has told me this, any of this. I'm assuming that they would love for SteamOS to be Nvidia friendly. And what I'm basing that on is that the Original steam machines 10 years ago used Nvidia cards. Valve clearly wanted to use Nvidia at some Point. But from what I can tell, it basically just comes down to vendor cooperation and vendor software support. Something that Torvalds mentioned has gotten way better from Nvidia. Now that Linux and AI and Nvidia all have a common direction that they're trying to go.

Luke (62:03)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Linus (62:04)

Will the gaming hardware follow? Yeah, I, I think it, I think it will. There's also, man, there's also like bigger industry trends that we can look at and go, okay, well does Nvidia matter that much? You could look at their, their gaming discrete GPU market share, what is it, 95% in the most recent report and go, yeah, yeah, it's the only thing that matters. But like the laptop that I'm running on right now, this machine does not have a dedicated GPU and I don't care at all even a little bit. I'm using an APU, but with the performance of the AMD Radeon 8060s or whatever the model is, graphics in this thing, I don't care. So yeah, if AMD's market share continues to absolutely suck donk on discreet. But their APUs continue to go the direction that they're going right now, where they own the business of Sony PlayStation, own the business of Microsoft, Xbox, whatever form that ultimately ends up taking, pretty much own the entire gaming handheld space and are shipping these incredible high power GPU APUs that are going to start to dominate in laptops or even small form factor desktops like the Framework. Desktop investment disclosure. I don't know man. Maybe that whole thing that I remember AMD first talking about with Fusion back shortly after the ATI acquisition. Maybe that whole thing where desktop computers don't need a discrete gpu like become a thing.

Luke (63:47)

Gross. Gross. I know you might be right. I know it's still gross though.

Linus (63:54)

And yet, and yet I was playing God of War and it was freaking awesome. On what as a high powered solution. Yes, very expensive right now, but I remind everyone is an integrated gpu.

Luke (64:09)

Icky. What?

Linus (64:11)

Icky Integrated graphics, dude.

Luke (64:14)

Gross.

Linus (64:17)

And yet here we are though.

Luke (64:19)

No, I hear you, I hear you. I can accept the reality and still be disgusted by it. There's a lot of that lately.

Linus (64:26)

Person for sure says I don't want soldered on ram. But guess what buddy, you already have soldered on ram. The RAM on your GPU is soldered because it needs to run at super high speeds. We're just using our GPU RAM as also system memory. Nothing changed. Just your, your perception changed, your, your perspective changed.

Luke (64:44)

Yeah, that, that computer that you Stick into your computer. That is the graphics card that always like really fascinates me. It really is its whole own computer. Like if you look at, if you look at, if you, if you really like analyze a whole graphics card, it has the whole everything.

Linus (65:06)

Has everything. Everything buddy. And like especially the professional grade ones that can do, you know, virtualization and stuff and that haven't and that.

Luke (65:17)

It's pretty nice.

Linus (65:18)

It's just a computer in your computer.

Luke (65:19)

Yeah.

Linus (65:20)

It's funny because like in some ways Intel Larrabee was so far ahead of the curve on that where it was general purpose compute that was just hyper, hyper parallel and could also be used for graphics and it was just a computer. But yeah, so much, so much for Larrabee.

Luke (65:37)

Yeah.

Linus (65:39)

Have we actually done any topics yet?

Luke (65:42)

I don't think so. This could transfer us into a weird jump if we wanted to to the 3060 news.

Linus (65:50)

Oh here, here's a good one. Hold on. Last thing Ana Hikaj says. Fun fact, the Bazzite devs just updated the website to make the warning for the Nvidia deck ISO which is broken more obnoxious and clearly stated. Linus's experience has already made Linux better. And that's the thing. The community zealots are mad. The developers, if they're smart are looking at this going this is free qa. Holy crap, we should action this. So shout out Bazzite for recognizing it for what it is calling something beta in this day and age. I mean Gmail was beta for 10 years. Calling something beta doesn't mean what it used to. And honestly the experience that I had on that particular ISO for Baza was not even the old definition of beta that was like alpha or pre alpha. It was completely broken, just completely broken. So I don't know dude. Yeah,

Luke (66:55)

where is it?

Linus (66:57)

Back then it was beta mail, now it's Gmail. Thank you chat. You guys are great.

Luke (67:04)

Top G. Here we go. This is a potentially short topic but I did want to transition to it just because we're talking about like what GPUs people are actually using and stuff like that. And then we can go to what Dan was talking about. But Nvidia reportedly brings back production of the RTX 3060 to Samsung 8 nanometer production. Samsung is restarting production of their 3060s discontinued in 2024 on its 8 nanometer node according to Korean outlet Hank Young. I'm just going to confidently say that and we'll see how it goes. Nvidia's RTX 40 and 50 series both both run on TSMC custom 4 nanometer node, a 5 nanometer class process. Because it's all just naming at this point that's maxed out producing Blackwell gaming and AI chips so the old Samsung 8 nanometer line can run without cutting into next gen supply. The move is being driven by a few things at once. A GDDR7 memory shortage is squeezing RTX 50 series supply and Nvidia's high end AI chips face an uncertain and shifting regulatory congressional restrictions in terms of shipping to China and doing all this weird stuff. The older RTX 3060 sidesteps pretty much all of that since it falls outside of the restricted categories entirely. It's still unclear whether the returning card will be on the 12 gig original or the cut down 8 gig variant. But one of the really really cool side effects of this is people who currently have a 3060 or potentially just 3000 series GPU in general will probably have elongated driver support because of this, which is really cool because those cards still kind of rip.

Linus (68:50)

Still pretty based.

Luke (68:50)

Yeah, absolutely. So like if you're still running a 3060 because hey, why not? I mean there's a ton of people still asking for a few more years out of their 1080s and 1080s, so I'm sure there's a ton of people still running 3060s then. Sick. You're gonna have a lot more driver support. There's so many games coming out that really don't need much more power. I'm sure 30s run something like Arc Raiders. No problem.

Linus (69:19)

With that said, if some of the rumors that I've seen about the next generation Xbox are anything to go by, and also the PlayStation 6, don't forget that we're at the end of a cycle right now. Yeah, we're at the end of a console cycle and there's always a leap. Once the dev kits for PS6 and Xbox, whatever they end up calling it, start to roll out to developers. We are going to start to see next generation games hit development. We're also going to continue to see live service games that continually get their graphics updated like wow. That are going to keep moving forward. And so we shouldn't get. We shouldn't necessarily go, okay, well you know, a 3060 ought to be enough for everyone kind of thing. But right now I 100 agree. I was actually, I was gaming on a 3060 recently for some reason. What was it? Oh right, I remember we did the Brazilian PC.

Luke (70:13)

Right.

Linus (70:13)

That's I think actually up on Floatplane right now. You guys can watch it. We ordered PCs from Brazil, which tends to be a couple of generations behind because it turns out that import tariffs are actually a really great way to make everything way more expensive for people who want to buy stuff. That's not a political statement, that's just math. And math is math. I don't make the rules about it. So, so we did the Brazil PC and I was gaming on a 3060 and I was playing freaking cyberpunk and I was like, holy crap, is DLSS ever, like, good these days? And I'm having a pretty darn good experience right now. Like, what? Yeah, 3060 is still a pretty freaking awesome sick car.

Luke (70:59)

So if we're going to get more driver support out of this, that's just like, I didn't even really think immediately about like what I would call like a restricted market. Like Brazil kind of is where this is going to help them even more. And that's awesome. Yeah, so I just thought this was honestly kind of, it's, it's. I could see people taking it as negative news. I'm just going to decide to take it as good news because, hey, we could use one of those. And I like the idea of the driver support extending, but yeah, I think

Linus (71:29)

this is great news. Is that a controversial take?

Luke (71:33)

No, I just, I'm just kind of sitting here thinking like someone might see it as negative because this means that they're not necessarily increasing, like they're not increasing capacity and getting out more like 50 series cards, which means that they'll be maintaining the price of those cards.

Linus (71:52)

I've wondered for years now why the, the low end one isn't just the last gen one. And for a long time that wasn't feasible because the old nodes, the gp, the dies would be so big that the cost just doesn't make any sense. But for years now, you've had everyone Intel Nvidia AMD talking about how well the new product is just more expensive because, yes, we can make a better one because of the die shrink, but, but it costs so much more to manufacture that there isn't really like a cost benefit. And I was like, okay, well then why don't you just make, you know, bigger, bigger dies on the older node of your last gen card and just keep printing them and that can be your low end. Like, I'm, I'm super like, dude, if Nvidia wanted to make more than just 3060s, if they wanted to make 3070s, I'd be super down for that too. Bring it. Bring it on.

Luke (72:43)

Like, what is the AI card? A lot of people try to go for 3090s. Oh, yeah.

Linus (72:49)

Still love 3090s. 24 gigs. That wouldn't make any sense, though, Just because of how much RAM you're putting.

Luke (72:55)

I know.

Linus (72:56)

And it's just too much GPU to make for how much RAM you have to put on it, for how much performance and how much power consumption you're gonna get.

Luke (73:04)

Yeah. And again, I've got. I've got people in chat yelling at me. I'm not saying. Relax. I'm not saying I think it's negative news. I said repeatedly that I think it's positive news. I was just saying that some people might think I'm getting. I'm getting that angle right so much. It's a tube of meat.

Linus (73:21)

It's seasoned. It goes on the grill.

Luke (73:24)

And I prefer flat meat.

Linus (73:25)

Comes off delicious.

Luke (73:26)

I'm going to come out and say I prefer flat meat.

Linus (73:29)

So much colon cancer. But that's later.

Luke (73:32)

My meat should be flat and circular.

Linus (73:34)

So not health advice. Not health advice, really? Okay. More information than I wanted

Luke (73:51)

anyways. No, I was just saying, like a shift of direction. I know it's a different process node. I know it's different manufacturing. I know it's going back to Samsung. It's not using the 5 nanometer. We literally just talked about that. I know that's a thing. It's like attention pulling away. It's not potentially increasing. Whatever, blah, blah, blah. It's still like. It's not an argument I even agree with. I was just saying that I could see some people trying to take that angle. Okay. So chill. Circular meat is fine. Tube meat is fine. Anyways, Dan, CW things or something. Get me out of here.

Dan (74:27)

Yeah, you blown blast. More topics. You blown plast comms. Why don't we do the CW announcement and a couple comms.

Linus (74:36)

All right. Hey, Creator Warehouse's ambitions of being more than just the, you know, merchandise arm of Linus Media Group are coming to fruition here. L's and G's. Because the blanks collection is expanding. Luke, if anyone's going to screen share,

Luke (74:55)

it's going to have to be it's up.

Dan (74:57)

Way ahead of you.

Linus (74:58)

What a guy. What a freaking guy. We are now showing off our blank zip up hoodie, which is designed for easy layering while keeping that clean, minimal look. It's available in black and dusty olive and is made from the same 100% French Terry Cotton as our classic blank hoodies. And we're also introducing a blank hoodie that is not zip up in dusty olive. You can complete the set with our new blank sweatpants, available in also black and dusty olive. These are great for lounging the gym or quick errands, and they match nicely with our other tops and hoodies, even older colors that you might already have. Visit LMG GG Blanks to shop the collection. And hey, if you happen to be another creator who has some kind of interest in working with us, but you're not that interested in having LTT branding all over the stuff that you have, you know, hey, then what about. What about creator warehouse branding? That seems perfectly not LTT nice. Dig Dug says blank is pointless.

Luke (76:13)

I mean, I prefer it a lot, actually. And like, lots of people do. There's tons of people that don't want to wear brand logos. And like, I. I think our brand logos are subtle enough that it's totally fine. And there's sometimes where I do kind of like brand logos. I don't know, I go back and forth. But this. This looks kind of sharp to me. It's subtle, it's understated. It looks nice. It works. It works good.

Linus (76:34)

I've had multiple people tell me, and this blew my flipping mind. I've had multiple people tell me that they would buy the commuter bag if only it didn't have the LTT branding on it.

Luke (76:44)

Can you just.

Linus (76:45)

And I was like, destitcher that, bro. It's 1cm by 1cm, black on black. What are you even talking about? But there are people who are. So how do I put this? Very set on a particular mindset goal that they just.

Luke (77:12)

Somebody in full plane chat said, you can feel free. Your point is mute. Yeah, except I've bought blanks that weren't from us before. So my point is not mute. It is. It is generally good.

Linus (77:21)

So triggered right now, even if someone not mute. M U T E. Yeah, no, yeah.

Luke (77:30)

I. As someone who isn't even that good at fashion stuff at all. Not even sort of nice. Something that the people who are good at the fashion stuff have told me is that I should have more blank things because I always just had like convention shirts.

Linus (77:46)

Oh, God.

Luke (77:47)

Basically, I had 100% of my wardrobe for a long years was convention shirts. And then fashion people were like, hey, you should probably just have like a plain white tee and a plain black tee and like a couple other colors, and then those can go with whatever. And then you'd look a lot more presentable in a lot more scenarios. And I was like, oh, that, that was like part of growing up. It was like, I'm an adult now. I need to not have like the equivalent of band shirt shirts, but for technology or games. And like, those are still cool. I still wear those. But there's time and place for things

Linus (78:26)

and sometimes it's not up to people. Brumby in floatplane chat says, yeah, I had to unstitch the logos off of my LTT cargo pants in order to meet work policies. Yeah, sometimes you're. You're not allowed to wear stuff. Totally get. And look, I totally understand the perspective too, of who is it Bookhorse says, don't want to be a walking advertisement, don't want to be a consumer, and totally get that too. But I don't, I don't Personally consider a 1cm by 1cm black on black logo on an entire backpack to be consumer level branding. Walking advertisement. That's like, come on, what do you even, what are you, what are you even talking about, buddy? Like, I don't know, man. But either way, either way, we're, we're doing our, you know, we're doing our part. We're making unbranded stuff. So now all you have to do is do your part and buy it and then we can keep making it.

Luke (79:30)

Yeah. And if you don't want a blank tease, that's totally fine. I didn't want blank tees for a long time. It's. But they obviously, very obviously have a utility. Hold on, I have an idea.

Linus (79:48)

What are you doing now? What are you doing now? Spanky says, I'd love Creator Warehouse to offer some self branding stuff. I'd probably buy 100 to 200 pens or pencils if I could change the logo to our companies. Oh, it is the kind of thing that we could do, but for a hundred units, that would be really tough. And it all just depends on how it's done. Like whether it's. If it's a mold, it's just not feasible for small amounts of units. Like, I think if someone ordered thousands of screwdrivers from us, we could talk about changing the logo for like the plastic screwdriver for something like pens. I don't want to put any words in the CW team's mouth, but I think it would have to be at least hundreds before we'd be able to look at a logo change. It just, it depends on, it depends on our suppliers. It depends on lead times. It depends on, you know, how much you're willing to pay for the customization. But hey, it Never hurts to reach out. Sorry, Luke, what were you gonna say?

Luke (80:49)

My Google search ended up working. I tried to like pull a gambit where I googled attractive man. And then I realized that they were all wearing dress shirts. And I was like, that didn't work. So I tried attractive man wearing a T shirt. And I wanted to be like, look, they're all wearing blank T shirts. And then even searching attractive man wearing a T shirt only brought up dudes wearing button ups. I was like, what the hell? That should tell you enough. Should it? Did a little bit. I was like, dang.

Linus (81:17)

I guess, Luke, we just got told.

Luke (81:19)

I think so. It didn't work at all.

Dan (81:26)

Good thing we sell pretty brandless button ups. I mean, maybe we did we get rid of them. I don't know.

Luke (81:34)

Wait, I got it to work this time and I'm totally right. They're all blank. They're all blank. Every single one of them is blank. All of them are blank. Okay, there's 1 1, 2 with upload your image here that. I don't think that counts.

Linus (81:53)

Almost all blank tees. Yep.

Luke (81:55)

There's a. There's a few that aren't, but they're almost all blank tees. So. Yeah. What up? I don't know fashion things, but fashion people told me and apparently fashion people were right. Surprise, surprise.

Linus (82:06)

But for shirts. Okay, Dan, you're gonna have to guide us a little bit here because we're clearly not. I can't see your signs.

Dan (82:14)

I'm trying.

Linus (82:15)

Like, Luke's ignoring me. Yeah. Cool.

Dan (82:18)

You're gonna plug Whale Land or just.

Luke (82:21)

Okay, you said it to him, didn't you? No. Oh, it was just me. Okay. Yeah, let's do whale.

Linus (82:27)

We have. We have locked in the dates for the next Whale Land. It's gonna be on May 23rd and 24th. BYOC tickets. So that is. Bring your own computer. Tickets are gonna be starting at $80 Canadian. So what's that work out to? About US$60. Like 55. US$60. And there will be a limited number of whale VIP tickets for $5,000. Canadian VIPs will get obviously their ticket to the event, but also a high powered custom built gaming PC to game on. A prismagic screwdriver, a lightweight packable jacket, a premium polo, and a studio plus labs tour. Ticket sales will start this coming Monday atnoonpacificwhaleland.com and we will see you there. Luke, how are those dates looking for you? Hopefully good.

Luke (83:20)

Oh, yeah, no, I think so. I think I'm like just generally gonna be at Whalelands May 23rd. 24th. May, yeah. When is Computex

Linus (83:32)

not May 23rd and 24th? I think it'll be shortly afterward.

Luke (83:40)

Whoa. It's like what, immediately after.

Linus (83:45)

Yeah, it's a week later.

Luke (83:48)

Just. Well, normally I go a week early, so maybe I'll just.

Linus (83:52)

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Luke (83:54)

Maybe I'll just come back a week later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just fine. I've done that too. Yeah.

Linus (83:58)

Yeah.

Luke (83:58)

That's good to know, though. I'm happy we just figured that out. But yeah, I mean, I'm intending it. I'm intending to generally be attending. Yeah.

Linus (84:10)

All right, sounds good.

Dan (84:12)

Yeah.

Linus (84:12)

Let's get another topic to another topic.

Dan (84:15)

Yeah, look at that.

Linus (84:16)

Intel's new CPUs are their fastest gaming desktop processors ever. And there was once upon a time, a time when I would have said, wow, the new water is wetter than ever in response to that. But in fact, intel did have a generation of desktop CPUs that in fact were not their fastest gaming CPUs ever. So we can't take that for granted. So this is good news, everyone. Intel is super bullish on the recently announced Intel Core Ultra 7 270K plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus. These new chips offer four additional E cores or efficiency cores compared to their direct predecessors have faster clock speeds and this has got to be a really big one here. Have significantly improved die to die frequency over their predecessors. The 265k and 245k. This translates to support for 7200 megatransfer per second RAM, as if anyone can afford that these days. And early support for four Rank CU DIMM modules, again, as if anyone could afford those. But cool, cool, cool beans. Intel appreciate you. Notably, these improvements were achieved without intel increasing the chips 125 watt TDP. The Ultra 7 to 70K plus features 8P cores and 16E cores, which actually matches the core count of the flagship Core Ultra 9 295K. Okay, and it is also worth noting that while the 295k was and in fact the whole lineup of Core Ultra 200 series was criticized for uncompetitive pricing and lower gaming performance, over time they have improved, pricing has gotten lower, and these new refreshed Arrow Lake CPUs are apparently looking to deliver up to a 13% gaming increase over their predecessors while coming in at very similar pricing. So the 250k plus is going to be starting from 199 with the 270k plus starting from this says to 199. But I believe it's 299. Yeah, starting from 299. So cheap. No, but a $200 chip that intel claims is faster than the 9600X from AMD comes with that many flipping cores. Like yes, some of them are E cores, but these intel hybrid P core E core chips tend to be great for non gaming as well. Not to mention all of the gaming improvements. Man, that seems like. It seems like a pretty compelling value. And it's not just hardware. Where intel is trying to make gains like Nvidia, they've realized if you can't win with better fabrication then you can take the fight to software. Except Nvidia also has been using cutting edge fabrication. But yeah, whatever. The point is Intel Binary optimization tool will be part of their intel application optimization software package and is touted as a first of its kind optimization technology hoping to increase instructions per clock in certain games by leveraging intel compiler and profiling IP to streamline library and executable performance. Now I remember a time not that long ago when we considered that kind of optimization to be like cheating and using sort of using non standard compilers in order to get a performance benefit compared to your competition.

Luke (88:07)

And now they're just playing the game.

Linus (88:09)

We live in a very very different world. You know, remember when, remember when making changes to the rendering pipeline on a GPU was cheating and now that's like Nvidia's headline feature for their latest GPUs is all the changes that they make to the rendering pipeline with AI and whatnot. And honestly this implementation sounds very different from the old Qidi way where they would allegedly coerce companies into using their tools that benefited their CPUs. It sounds like what's happening here is they're taking scattered instructions from code that might be optimized for older architectures and repacking them to reduce architectural contention. And it sounds like it won't have a negative impact on the competition, it will just perform better on intel, which maybe is better than it used to be before. Anyone been around long enough to know if that sounds about right? Anyway, we don't know how well it's going to work until we can try out their APO software in our upcoming review. But it seems like from everything that we're seeing communication wise out of intel, they are extremely bullish.

Luke (89:25)

Yeah. On these, which I would hope so. So hopefully we're, hopefully we're happy about the result.

Linus (89:36)

You can hope, but like last time around, hope didn't really get us anywhere.

Luke (89:41)

Hopes all we can have brother. Nothing else is worth it. Nothing else is worth it. Despair is not worth it. It doesn't help you. Anyways, thank you.

Linus (89:53)

Do you have any supplements to sell me?

Luke (89:56)

Yeah, I've got a lot of peptides. Whatever peptide you want. Tell me your problem and I'll come up with a. Yeah, we should probably not.

Linus (90:04)

Medical advice.

Luke (90:15)

Whatever your ailment. I'll have a pill. Okay, what do we want to do? Google's Killing the Play Store Monopoly. That's fun. By June 30 developers.

Linus (90:24)

Oh, you know what? No, hold on, hold on. We can get to that in a second. First, I want to talk. I had to have the. I had to have the snake oil folk medicine conversation with my eldest daughter on this trip. They. They all got $20. 20 Canadian dollars for a souvenir budget. And she picked out this little. It's like a little woven mat and it has a little cat on it. It's cute. It's a cat on a mat. Whatever.

Luke (90:52)

Sure.

Linus (90:53)

Anyway, the. The seller lady was super determined to talk about the air purification and, and health benefits of this little stuffy cat on a. On a little woven mat and, and kept talking about activated charcoal. And I kind of went. And then I had to have the conversation with my daughter after the fact, where I go, okay, so this is the most dangerous type of hook em where there is a grain of truth upon which a tower of lies and misunderstandings is built. Does activated charcoal have odor reduction qualities? Yes.

Luke (91:43)

Yeah, totally.

Linus (91:44)

However, only if we are actively running air through it, not if it's just sitting there on your dresser. And we need to have a way to either swap out the.

Luke (91:58)

You're gonna gut that fake, the activated

Linus (92:00)

charcoal, or we have to have a way of removing it and putting it out in the sun to reactivate it. Neither of those things are true. It's just activated charcoal in a pillow that just sits there and has no way to replace it or recharge it. And so we just need to, you know, learn to. I read this really interesting article on the Atlantic earlier this week about how Western society has a major problem with both gullibility and cynicism and being gullible to the wrong things and cynical about the wrong things. How can you be so gullible and so accepting of anything that's. That someone tells you, no matter how ridiculous it sounds, and at the same time, so cynical and disbelieving of. Of. Of experts. And there's a. There's a lot of like, super, super deep reasons for it that the article only skims the surface of. But it's, it's fascinating and it's something that has sort of been on my mind as something that we really have to flag. Flag with our kids and talk about, you know, how to navigate your way through. You should be cynical and you should believe people, but you've got to make sure that you're cynical of the right things and you believe the right people. Otherwise you're going to end up in. In deep trouble. Like, one of the things the article touched on is how smart people, you know, let's not just be dismissive and say, well, anyone who believes in something stupid is too stupid. It's not that simple. Smart people who live in a bubble, who live in an information echo chamber, can end up believing some, some, some, some.

Luke (93:53)

Shockingly, there's also tons of crazy stuff. The desire to. For something to be true can also influence how much you believe that it is true.

Linus (94:01)

And like, yeah, life is jumping in with, hey, these fries would be like, super healthy and you could eat as many as you want if only they were fried in beef tallow instead of scary seed oils. It's like, yeah, yeah. You know, if I just wanted to, like, taste French fries, I might love

Luke (94:19)

to believe that I can ignore. Tastes amazing.

Linus (94:24)

Not going to die. It tastes good, but that ain't what we're talking about.

Luke (94:26)

Totally.

Linus (94:27)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Errol Doe says I work around so many brilliant people in tech and some of them believe the silliest scams. And we woo things. Yeah, 100%. Oh, no. Everyone's like, piping up with their. Piping up with their stuff. Magnetic flux. My grandma thinks vegan burgers make people gay. No, no, no. See, that's correlation, not causation. No, I'm, I'm, I'm. This is joke. Is joke, but I love me a good vegan burger. Wait. Oh, no, this is my mouse.

Luke (95:05)

Wait a minute. It turns the freaking YouTubers. Oh, man.

Linus (95:22)

Apparently there's an XKCD for this. Of course there is.

Luke (95:26)

I think there is for everything.

Linus (95:32)

Oh, okay. Nah, it's not that good. I normally, to be clear, love xkcd. I didn't personally appreciate that one that much. All right, I guess we'll do another topic. Oh, yeah, right. You were going to do the thing.

Luke (95:49)

Wait, sorry, I'm doing what thing?

Linus (95:51)

The topic.

Luke (95:52)

Which, yeah, by June 30, developers in the U.S. uK and the European economic area. Okay, we'll see. The standard 30% in app purchases fee on the Google Play store. Drop to 20% for the first time. Sorry. For first time installs of apps after the new fees launch, recurring subscription service fees will drop to 10%. Furthermore, Google is introducing a new business model intended to decouple the fees by separating the cost of their billing system from the service fee. Developers that opt into Google Play's billing system in the U.S. uK or Europe will have to fork over an additional 5%. However, mobile developers will officially have the option to use their own billing system alongside or in place of Google's. Enrolling into Google's new Apps Experience program will drop the service fee to 15% for new installs. The rollout will gradually hit Australia, Japan and Korea by the end of the year and the rest of the world late 2027. Apart from cutting fees, Google is also launching a registered app store program thing that will streamline the process for third party app stores like Epic Games as long as they meet certain quality benchmarks. So it's an app store for app stores. Hold on a minute. No, no, no, no, no.

Linus (97:18)

It's not a store for app stores, but you can have an app Store to App Store program quality benchmarks. So you'll, you'll work with Google to have like an Epic Games app store on, on Android.

Luke (97:32)

Okay, sure. I don't know what I think about that, but. All right, more topics, I guess, maybe.

Linus (97:41)

Well, I mean, I can. Can we.

Luke (97:43)

It's sponsors. Can we shout out what?

Linus (97:46)

Can we shout out a guy who I don't always agree with, but who I, I gotta shout out here. Who else would have had the balls to go toe to toe with Apple and Google and force this change? But Epic Games is Tim Sweeney. I.

Dan (98:04)

Yeah.

Linus (98:05)

Oh man. This is another one of those ones where at the time I took a ton of flack for just being like, yeah, obviously the App Store and the Play Store are a huge antitrust problem and the fact that people are pretending they can't see it is just corporate bootlickery of the highest order. And especially Apple people were like, we don't want the App Store to be. We like the iPhone the way it is. We love the taste of leather. It's so good.

Luke (98:38)

And other things.

Linus (98:39)

Yeah, no, this was, it was like just.

Luke (98:41)

They do ate vegetable and bean burgers.

Linus (98:45)

It was, it was, it was a, it was definitely a thing. And, and, and Quartz and, and Google and Apple all know, everybody knows it was just a matter of time until you could figure it out. And this is great. I'm, I'm, I'm very, very, very excited. Eraldo says I refuse to accept the hypocrisy of simping for Steam. That's the thing. And again this is.

Luke (99:16)

We've brought this up a ton.

Linus (99:17)

You need to. You need to read more. Steam has things about it that where they where Valve leverages their quite dominant position, but they are not in fact a monopoly because they just like aren't because you're not bound to use Steam in any way. You can go on gog, you can go on Epic games, you can go anywhere you want and you can download a game for any platform where you can also get that game on Steam. It is. And Steam, unlike the App Store and the Google Play Store, is not owned by the platform owner. That's why it just isn't the same thing at all. And I'm sorry but I can't be the one to explain it to you. You're going to have to go and just learn more about monopolistic behavior and anti competitive laws and stuff. Cool.

Dan (100:22)

Shall we do the floor sponsors?

Linus (100:29)

Yeah. Float plane announcement. Let's do it. Where is it? We all have an embarrassing tech story or two. So Riley sought out some embarrassing moments from members of the LMG team. It features Elijah who admitted to a crime. Adam who blew out his partner's ears with music that was too loud and James who bought a laptop that cost $2,300 at the time just to play Team Fortress 2. That's a. Yikes. But where is David, you might ask. No one ever asks how is David? Okay, I did the delivery on that. Totally wrong. Anyway, his setup from five years ago. The point is David showcased his setup and how much it's changed from his original ultimate tech upgrade. He's got his man cave upgrade in there and shows what it looks like today. Also, if you are from Brazil or think Brazil is cool or you don't understand tariffs and you want to understand tariffs better and how they can be like really bad for consumers. You might want to check out the early release. Luke, are. Are you showing any of this?

Luke (101:44)

Yep, we're doing it. Keep going.

Linus (101:45)

Also. Oh yeah, there you go. Tariffs, tariffs, tariffs. All of this and more at lmg, gg fpwan Cool.

Dan (102:02)

Now for some sponsors.

Linus (102:06)

Hold on, hold on. Give me a second. Lozarth says Linus, Valve and Steam is creating that environment with SteamOS with the with the ownership of the platform and that you're trying so hard to make this a thing but it still isn't because SteamOS still totally supports other app stores with Valve taking absolutely count them $0 and having 0 involvement in that transaction. So it's still completely not the same thing. I'm sorry, but no amount of trying to make Steam the same thing as the App Store and the Google Play Store is going to make it the same thing because it's just not the same thing and it's just not going to work.

Luke (102:53)

Steam could be compared to one of the app stores that is now allowed to potentially be on there.

Linus (102:59)

Yep, totally. And if one of them had an extremely dominant position that enabled them to do certain things that. That could be anti competitive, then we could draw a parallel there because Valve does have an opportunity to do certain things that can be anti competitive. But one of those things is not the thing that Tim Sweeney was complaining about with the App store and iOS and the tight integration and control over transactions and payments and the availability of apps for the platform. They're just not the same thing. Magic Cheeseburger says. I agree with you. It's not about agreement. It's about like, this is a fact that it just is a thing.

Luke (103:40)

I'm gonna have a nap.

Linus (103:44)

But if you delete Steam, if you leave Steam, you lose all your games forever. Yes, yes, you do. But that is nothing to do with what we're talking about.

Luke (103:53)

Cool, dude.

Linus (103:56)

All right. Oh, man. I don't know, dude. You know, I think part of it, Luke, I think one of the big challenges we have is that you and I watch every WAN show and most viewers don't. So all.

Luke (104:09)

I don't watch every WAN show. Well, no, I just read the comments

Linus (104:13)

there for it, though. Oh, my God. So. So we end up in this situation. Why are you. So why are you so down on Linux? And you never criticize Windows and it's like, so previous LAN show's title could literally be, you know, Windows is cooked, you know?

Luke (104:32)

Yeah, I complain about it all the time.

Linus (104:36)

Their own exposure bias is that all they see in here is the thing that's making them emotional right now. Yeah, it's like, guys, we criticize Steam and Valve all the time.

Luke (104:48)

Windows is becoming like, very, very rapidly terrible. I had this whole thing where, like, I was getting really nostalgic about old Windows. Actually, I was thinking back to like, how much I just really enjoyed using Windows xp. And I know people go like, oh, if you go back now, it's. It's terrible. It's like, yeah, that's cool for the time. It was amazing. And then you look at Vista and it's like a lot of people have terrible memories of Vista because they bought a laptop from best buy with 512megs of RAM and try to run Vista on it. And that was terrible. Terrible, terrible, terrible. But when I had some better hardware, and especially when I had a custom version of Vista, dude, Vista Black Edition was so sick. It was amazing. I loved using Vista, especially late in the game when I had better hardware and especially a custom version. But I still really, actually liked using Vista. Aero looked amazing. It just couldn't run on your crappy laptop. Okay. And then seven came out and seven was amazing again. People keep talking about this, like, oh, it's good and then bad and then good and bad. In my opinion. Not really. It was kind of just good and then the hardware wasn't ready and then good. Like Vista was actually fantastic.

Linus (106:03)

Like printers. Printer compatibility on Vista was a nightmare.

Luke (106:08)

Yeah. Then. Then we get 8 and 8 out of the gate was to use the young people's probably out of date term by this point, dog water. But 8.1 came out and with a little time, with a little bit of time in the marinade, 8.1 was actually really solid. Especially if you got the Windows 9 thing and got the custom version, all kind of stuff. Fantastic. And then we hit Windows 10 and it was like, ooh, now, now it's still edible, but something's wrong with it. I don't necessarily know what it is. It's still Windows. All my stuff still kind of works.

Dan (106:49)

You left the sticker on when you were eating it.

Luke (106:51)

Yeah, something's just okay. And then Windows 11 came out and then it was like, okay, no, like this for sure still works, but is clearly bad for me. Like something. Something is not good. I think this 11, yet I am being food poisoned. And then I think with looking at 12 on the horizon, like, it's just we were doing this thing right, where like they'd stumble a little, like amazing launch. Maybe a little bit of a stumble because of hardware, but then amazing, just amazing. And then really troublesome launch, but then they totally fixed it and then now we're just, literally just doing this and it feels terrible. And you can jump off the ship early and maybe have some troubles trying to learn Linux and maybe come back to Windows. Who knows, but gain a little bit of familiarity. Or you can jump off later when it's like just death or. Or I don't know, or Microsoft will maybe, but I doubt it. Actually. Listen to some people and stop just doing this with their operating system, which, by God, I will volunteer. I expect nothing. You never even have to admit that I helped you. I require no compensation. I will tell you all of the things you need to do to make it not garbage anymore. No problem. I am yours to be resourced. But you won't slow down. You know what? Yeah. Linus will come with me. We'll figure it out. If you want Windows 12 to be like the AI operating system, I think this is still possible. You can still accomplish that goal and still make it not complete crap. I like you can do it. I don't believe you're going to, but you totally can.

Linus (108:31)

I know a lot of people, I know a lot of people are just sort of like reflexively against anything that has AI of any sort involved in it. I'm not. I actually agree with you that Windows 12 could have AI as a central part of the experience. And all they need to do to make that palatable to everyone who doesn't want it.

Dan (108:59)

I bet you were going to say

Linus (109:00)

the same thing is just make it so I can remove it.

Luke (109:02)

Yup, done. Be able to turn it off, Be able to remove it, make it modular so I could plug my own in. Make it so I could make it.

Linus (109:10)

Have it so that. Make it so the first time I press the copilot button, it goes, hey, I'm copilot. Do you want me to rebind this button to something else right now?

Luke (109:21)

I do this.

Linus (109:22)

Hey, what an idea.

Luke (109:23)

Do you want it? It can also do this other thing. Or like, I would love it if they built these systems where it can work with your computer in really good ways. And then I could be like, right. But I don't want it phoning home to Microsoft all the time and literally screen recording everything I do and putting in your server farm just for someone else to steal it. So I would like to use my own resources, run some stuff locally and then be able to just plug my own thing in. And it still has those capabilities. That would be awesome. You could make a really, really cool Windows 12. I don't believe you're going to. So I'm trying to jump off the ship early, but man, I will help you for free. I will put in time, I'll put in hours. You don't have to tell anyone. You don't have to compensate me, please.

Linus (110:04)

It's too bad because they are doing some stuff that is pretty cool. I left my rog ally on our last trip. I'm getting it back. I did find it, so that's cool. But on our trip down to Zero Trust World, I left my ally. So I grabbed a handheld to bring on this trip. And ultimately didn't end up needing it. Like I said, Linux challenge. And I'm using my laptop for gaming right now, but it had the new, the new gaming optimized Windows on it and it's, it's pretty cool. The, the Xbox interface on the, on the Rog Ally X Series X or whatever the stupid thing is called. It's like legitimately pretty cool. And the RAM usage is way lower. Like Microsoft is putting in work, they're optimizing stuff. They just have to not be at the same time breaking things and moving the user experience backwards. Like, dude, you were talking about the CPU usage issues that you're having over there right now, right?

Luke (111:10)

Yep.

Linus (111:11)

Okay. Do you want to know what my CPU usage is right now?

Luke (111:15)

Yeah. What?

Linus (111:16)

It's hovering between about three and a half to four and a half, 5%.

Luke (111:23)

What's your memory?

Linus (111:24)

And that's with, that's with everything I'm doing right now. So I have the live stream running, I have the chat open, I have the separate window where I have the call running. I have that app for my phone capture. So I have wifi up the butt because I'm also, I couldn't get the wired connection working for my, my phone as my webcam. So I have all that data streaming in and I'm sitting at a handful of percent. Now I do have a lot of RAM use, but I think that's just because when ASUS sent this laptop to me, they sent me like a fully loaded version, which is honestly crazy given the current situation. I have 128gigs of RAM in this machine, so I'm using 12gigs of RAM. But when I look at my applications, I am sitting at a total of under two gigs. So I think that's probably just the OS just caching everything.

Luke (112:28)

So mine I have Chrome open with admittedly three floatplane tabs, one Google sheet, one Google search, the Steam hardware survey and the LTT store. I have one notepad open with one page on it and I have the Task manager open and that's it. I'm hovering between 15 and 20% CPU usage. I'm at 52% memory usage and usually around 5 to 10% disk because the Windows module installer worker is still just ripping. It hasn't stopped once. It's still the number one process. It has constantly been the number one process. The next one is like Windows event log that just went down. It kind of jumps up and down all the time. And now I talked about this when we recorded this before the show. We do have Sentinel 1 running. We do have Ninja RMM running. Those are in there. Those are never like the number one through five, but they are floating around. So it's like there are. There is some stuff that we installed running in the background. But on my latest desktop back at home, there are. There's things running. I have stuff. I have been using it as a desktop for a while. This happens when you have a system. You know, it's just. I mean like Chrome is like usually like 5 to 8 in the. In the top processes. Like and this thing, it's. It's mostly calmed down now. Before on camera, without touching it. We saw it Spike to like 75% CPU usage and it wasn't Sentinel 1 or any of those other things. I mean Threat Locker is also on here. It's just not showing up in like a highly like a super heavy process compared to these other ones right now. Comparatively like Recall is. Recall is part of it.

Linus (114:20)

Oh, God.

Luke (114:21)

The Recall preview. The Recall preview. It probably sneaked its way back in.

Dan (114:26)

Yeah, I neutered those before I deployed them.

Luke (114:29)

I'm sure Dan can see it on my screen. And now Recall sitting right there.

Dan (114:32)

I'm looking at mine. I'm sitting at 50% CPU usage with a cool 42 gigs of memory usage.

Luke (114:37)

Yeah, but you're.

Linus (114:38)

Well, yeah, but you're handling this.

Dan (114:40)

I'm so much better than you guys.

Luke (114:42)

That's not fair.

Dan (114:43)

My Ferrari is so much faster than your bicycle.

Linus (114:48)

I'm just a better person.

Luke (114:52)

Yeah.

Linus (114:56)

All right. I think we're supposed to do sponsors.

Luke (114:58)

Can't believe recalls there. I know that Dan killed it too. It must have snuck its way back in. This is like. This is what I'm talking about. Dude. Get out of here.

Dan (115:07)

I'm going to do another pass and rip out more of its brain.

Luke (115:10)

The Recall preview.

Dan (115:12)

I learned how to neuter Windows 11, so I'm a little happier with it now. Did I restore your right click menus on the desktop? I can't remember if I did that on those ones or not.

Luke (115:23)

I did.

Linus (115:23)

I would have noticed if my right click wasn't working. That would have made me extremely angry.

Luke (115:28)

Yeah.

Dan (115:30)

What? The new menu.

Linus (115:31)

All right.

Dan (115:31)

Yeah.

Linus (115:32)

The show is brought to you today by Vessi. Here's the thing about the Vancouver area. Every year, without fail, we get hit with a random wave of snow. Not when you'd expect it just randomly this time in March, but thanks to Vessi, our sponsor, a little bit of spring snow doesn't need to slow you down. Their weekend Neo shoes are perfect for this time of year. They're lightweight, which makes them easy to pack for any excursions or even travel. If your old shoes are on life support, they need cpr, but not the weekend neo. They breathe great and as always, Vessi claims they're 100% waterproof. Okay, you spoke up and Vessi listened. Oh, this is cool. Their shoes come in half sizes now. Wow, that's incredible. And every pair of Vessi's is still backed by a full year warranty and a 30 day hassle free return policy. So if your March plans involve moving, commuting, traveling or exploring and you need a shoe that keeps up with you, check out Vessi. You can get 15% off your weekend neo@vessi.com Wan show. The show is also brought to you by Factor Meals. Whether you're working part time, full time or overtime, when you get home, it can feel like there is no time, Especially if you're logging 16 hours into every night. Am I supposed to know what this is?

Luke (116:50)

I don't know.

Linus (116:52)

Okay, well, with our sponsor factor, I have to worry about budgeting a ton of extra time to make a meal. Factor makes fully prepared meals designed by dietitians and chefs with never frozen ingredients all ready in just a couple of minutes. They have a hundred rotating weekly meals so you can have hearty proteins, vibrant veggies, and healthy fats to keep you going through the final stretch of winter. Factor can even help you stick to all kinds of diets with meal options like high protein, calorie, smart, Mediterranean GLP1 and more. So kick meal prep stress to the curb and spend more time on things that matter like family or Procopia. Or your Procopia family. Sorry, quick clarification. When I said GLP1, I didn't mean like it has an injection needle in it. I meant like GLP1 support. So it's for people who are on GLP1s? Yeah. Braille Cortex and float plane chat says. What was that last one?

Luke (117:51)

Yeah, you said that. A little confused. Yeah.

Linus (117:54)

Okay. Yeah. Head to factor meals.com when to get 50%. When 50 off.

Luke (118:00)

Wait, what? Don't worry about it.

Dan (118:05)

You could just make them.

Luke (118:05)

Sorry. Keep going.

Linus (118:07)

Head to factorymeals.com wan50off and use code when 50 off to get 50% off and free breakfast for a year. Eat like a pro this month of fact, new subscribers only varies by plan. One free breakfast item per box for one year while subscription is active. There you go. All right. Okay. Let's get some more time here, people. No I want to know what's going on. Did I say it wrong?

Luke (118:36)

No, no.

Linus (118:37)

Is it Pocophia?

Luke (118:38)

No, it was an image on screen. Don't worry about it too much. I did notice based factory meals. A lot of them were were chicken, some simple carb like rice and then a vegetable.

Linus (118:55)

Look, they don't need to reinvent the wheel here. Success.

Luke (119:03)

Chicken.

Linus (119:06)

Don't forget your flat meat.

Luke (119:08)

There was like three or four different ones and I was like, yeah,

Dan (119:14)

meat is critical.

Luke (119:15)

There was like the chicken, rice and asparagus. There was like the chicken. I think it was like rice and corn and some type of broccoli or something. And it's just like cheese. Chicken, simple carb plus green yes, very good.

Linus (119:31)

All right, should we talk about Linux hacked on to a PS5, effectively turning Sony's console into a into a Steam machine Security engineer Andy Nguyen successfully ported Linux to a PS5 Slim by bypassing Sony's hypervisor using an exploit called By

Luke (119:49)

Pervisor, which has got to be the best name of an exploit I've heard in like so long. By Provisor is so good.

Linus (119:57)

It grants kernel level control and allows unsigned code to run. The hack required firmware version 1.0 to 2.0 though, which is about five years old. So if you've been keeping your PlayStation up to date, this isn't really going to be a thing for you. However, once he got it running, it was kind of awesome. The modded console could run GTA 5 Enhanced Edition via Steam at 1440p 60fps with ray tracing enabled. And because it's a PS5, supports 4K HDMI, output audio, and even had all the USB ports running, the CPU runs at 3.2 GHz and GPU at 2 GHz with boost capabilities. Although it did start overheating at higher clock speeds. Sony actually used to allow something similar on the PlayStation. My notes say the PS3 had the other OS feature and if you go back even farther you could just get a Linux disk that you could put in your PlayStation and run Linux on it. When we did our I bought every PlayStation video, we actually showed it, but they don't allow it anymore. But apparently nothing would prevent it and it would honestly, in my humble opinion, Luke, be the best solution right now for gaming.

Luke (121:12)

Really, really cool considering you can run PS5 games. It's so sick.

Linus (121:17)

Yeah, a used PS5 that could dual boot Sony's PlayStation operating system and Linux to just like run Steam would be the goat gaming machine for that price like killer, super, super cool.

Luke (121:35)

Super cool.

Linus (121:36)

Our discussion question here is with Sony rumored to be pulling back from PC releases, does a hack like this hint at a future where console hardware could be repurposed as a PC as the lines between PCs and consoles keep blurring? Unfortunately, I don't think so. I think the Sony rumor that they're pulling back from PC releases, if anything, indicates that Sony wants to draw clearer lines between their consoles and general purpose software PCs in the lead up to the release of the PlayStation 6. I think they are recognizing that later in the console's life cycle it's very beneficial to take that software and tap into a new market with it and sell a bunch of, you know, Spider man to PC gamers. But if you want to move the machine, if you want to create the install base, you got to have exclusives. And I remember talking about this back with the original Steam machine where I was like, yeah, I understand Valve's like good guy philosophy where they don't want to have exclusivity, you know, you know, locked games for the Steam machine and they want to be open. But at the end of the day games move consoles. It's that simple. And I think Sony is either recognizing or this was the plan the whole time, that when they launch a new generation, there is absolutely no way that they are not going to be. That they are going to be a success without exclusive titles. It's just not going to happen, man.

Luke (123:14)

Microsoft, they're like losing consoles there. I think people are genuinely getting just a little too over it when it comes to operating systems. I don't think we're quite there yet, but there are actually does seem to be a lot more people that I've been hearing from actually genuinely switching over to Linux lately.

Linus (123:35)

Especially Normie people.

Luke (123:37)

Yep.

Linus (123:37)

That are mad about it. Sorry, I thought you were going to say that are that are fed up with it.

Luke (123:41)

No, yeah, I know people that used a Steam deck and were just like wait, this is fine and just actually replace their computers with Steam decks and don't even think of it as like I'm running Linux. They're just like, yeah, I use a Steam deck and it's fine. Like I don't even know if they're really fully understanding like what that means.

Linus (124:03)

It's steamos. But that's the thing. Linux is not a distro. Linux is not an operating system. Yeah, I think steamos is going to be the one.

Luke (124:12)

Azure is running. Linux Copilot is kind of OpenAI powered like the Office company Now teams. Yeah. The worst chat program, I guess. But honestly, this is. Have you had to do anything, I'm assuming. Yeah. Have you had to do anything with documentation so far on Linux? What have you been using? Libra Only Office. What have you been using? Have you used any of it?

Linus (124:44)

I just use Google Docs.

Luke (124:45)

Google Docs?

Dan (124:45)

Yeah.

Luke (124:46)

Okay. I had to sign some PDFs recently and I went with Only Office just to give it a shot. And it was really easy and totally fine.

Linus (124:59)

Right. Did you have to pay like. Like five bucks for a picture?

Luke (125:03)

Nothing.

Linus (125:03)

It's feed or like.

Luke (125:04)

I'd also. I thought this was kind of funny. There's definitely more things when you download Office365. I feel like I didn't hear something.

Linus (125:13)

That's okay. Everyone else got it.

Luke (125:14)

There's definitely more things that you're downloading when you download Office365. But only Office downloaded fast. And it takes a While to download Office365 and you have to jump through a bunch of login hoops and do all these different types of things. And I was probably done signing my first document before I would have been done installing Office.

Linus (125:35)

Oh, you have to. I remember for years it was a pain in the butt to even find the Download link for Office365 because they had it behind a login and then you would download it. Then you'd have to log in anyway. I don't know if the Creative Cloud, but that would. They had a really similar situation where getting the Creative Cloud application download link involved logging in and then you'd have to log in again once you got it. It's like, what is the downside of just letting me download this thing and then I'll log in once I get it.

Luke (126:04)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. But yeah, I mean, it was a pretty great experience. So just want to throw that out there. But yeah. Microsoft, stop taking Ls, bruh. I liked it when you were cool. I really. God, this whole Linux thing has been fun. I would really love to enjoy Windows again. It would be so.

Linus (126:27)

That's something that I think a lot of people miss in all of our takes on basically everything is that we are not pro. One side.

Luke (126:38)

One sec. Sorry, Dan.

Linus (126:39)

Pro competition.

Luke (126:41)

Is this going to the. To the viewers? Can they see this mouse cursor? What?

Dan (126:46)

What?

Luke (126:47)

There's a mouse.

Dan (126:47)

Oh, that's my mouse cursor.

Linus (126:49)

Are you hallucinating a mouse cursor?

Luke (126:50)

No, there's a mouse.

Dan (126:51)

I'm sorry, it was on the wrong screen.

Luke (126:52)

Can they even see that?

Dan (126:54)

No, that's. That's my fourth monitor.

Luke (126:56)

Oh. So it's just for me. Okay, Just keep it there.

Linus (126:58)

But anyway, we are, we're pro competition. Competition between Windows and Linux and Mac OS and competition between Android and iPhone and. And competition between Xbox and PlayStation. So you're gonna see us like, like I've seen people who are like, Linus always flip flops anyway and he's all, he's not consistent. Yeah, I'm not consistent.

Luke (127:24)

We're trying to support underdogs in a

Linus (127:25)

time when Nvidia is so dominant in GPUs. For instance. You're going to hear me say, hey, like Intel's doing some really cool stuff over there right now. And it's really important that we acknowledge that because we need competition. And in the same way, you know, even though I might say that from a day to day use perspective, there's a lot of aspects of the Linux experience that are not working too great for me. You're still going to hear me talk about how the Microsoft dominance in the operating system space has to be challenged because otherwise we end up with what we've got now. A monopoly. Always in crapifies, always. Every single time. It will turn to crap eventually because competition puts pressure on us to do better. And so you're always going to hear that from us. Yeah, yeah.

Luke (128:19)

Speaking of which, Live Nation Ticketmaster agreed to settle a federal antitrust lawsuit with the Department of Justice. And apparently they. They won't be broken up. The DOJ reached a surprise settlement with Live Nation just one week into its landmark antitrust trial, allowing the company to keep Ticketmaster without admitting any wrongdoing. The deal cap service fees at 15% at Live Nation Menus bars. Oh. At Live Nation menus bars Ticketmaster from requiring exclusive contracts with large amphitheaters and requires all acquisitions to be submitted to the DOJ for approval regardless of size.

Dan (128:59)

Wow.

Luke (129:00)

Okay.

Linus (129:00)

The middle one is actually not that that helps a lot. The exclusive contracts one, the whole exclusive contracts thing. However, in my humble opinion, that's not enough. Carry on.

Luke (129:14)

Yeah, not at all. The settlement blindsided State. State attorneys General, more than 25 states and D.C. say they're continuing the trial. Anyway, the presiding judge called the process entirely unacceptable after it emerged. The DOJ and Live Nation had already signed a. What? Had already signed a preliminary agreement on Thursday without notifying the states, giving them only 24 hours to decide whether to join. SeatGeek called it incredibly disappointing. Senator Amy Klobuchar said breaking up the company is the Only real fix. And rival promoters say 16 years of surface level remedies haven't worked. The settlement still needs final court approval, with more than half the states rejecting the deal and continuing the trial. Does a settlement that lets Live Nation keep tickle Ticketmaster actually solve anything?

Linus (130:15)

The current DOJ is. I, look, I'm not American, so take this for all it is, but the current DOJ appears to be an enormous problem for people who want things like this, which are important things that, that impact the everyday people. Lots of people seems to be the most people. Massive, massive problem.

Luke (130:35)

My friends call me. They're like, wow, that's so many people.

Linus (130:39)

It is, it is so many people. I mean, if you buy a ticket for basically freaking anything, you have to deal with Ticketmaster. And the, the clearly back alley deal that was done to reach this settlement is just so clear that it should be a wake up call to anyone who's not certain how clear this was, that it was very clear that this was a back alley corrupt deal. And charcoal. Nunyan says, but have you seen the dao, dude? Yeah, exactly, exactly the Dao, though, the dao, but the Dow, it's. It is so fascinating watching politicians and billionaires talk about the stock market as though it matters. To what, what percentage is it of, of even people in, in affluent countries, like, even in North America, what percentage is it of people who actually own stocks? I know that a lot of people will have part of their retirement invested in, invested in stocks, but in terms of like, actual, like having a personal portfolio, my understanding is the, the investment class is shockingly small.

Luke (132:03)

I know the, I think is the top 1% own 50% of the entire stock market.

Linus (132:09)

Yeah. Noki says 62% of U.S. adults own stocks, apparently.

Luke (132:13)

But that, but that's the thing.

Linus (132:15)

Hold on, hold on. Yeah. How much, though? Like, we've got people in chat that are like, yeah, I own, I own four grand in stocks. I own, I own like a couple grand in stocks. When the, when the stock market goes up, you know, 10%, it's like you made $400, which is like, yeah, okay, great. As long as, you know, inflation isn't going wild and that's not just, you know, treading water, but like, in terms of people who own like, significant value of stocks. Like, I remember, I remember reading that it's like, it's like shockingly small. I don't know the exact numbers. Eraldo says it's something like the wealthiest 10 own 87 to 93% of the actual like dollar value of the stocks though, it's like, okay, cool. Oh yeah, I'm not, not much of a stock guy. I do feel. I honestly, I feel like I've like missed out over this incredible like what is it like a 20 year bull run or something like that at this point?

Luke (133:21)

Business Insider in 2024 said that the wealthiest 10 of Americans own 93 of stocks, even with market participation at a record high.

Linus (133:33)

Cool.

Luke (133:34)

But the Dow is pretty freaking sick, dude. Let's let the. Oh man. Nah, I'm gonna lose it. I need to.

Dan (133:44)

In through the mouth, out through the nose.

Luke (133:55)

What can we talk about? Don't worry though about that because the. The dock just moved. Don't worry about that because the Steam Machine is coming. Even with rising DRAM prices around the world and a slight delay in the Steam Machine release valve posted a blog post that the Steam Machine, Steam frame and Steam Controller would all arrive in 2026. On that train, our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year. This is a quote has not changed, but we have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates. They did also skate in the blog post that if you have a line on a bunch of ram, we are in the market and would like to buy. Which is, you know, probably a joke, but still, maybe someone will Discussion Question Going back to the original discussion about Steam Machine and the price it would hit. It would have to hit. Do you think your original guesses about price would make this more appealing to people now that DRAM prices have affected things so much? Yeah, I feel like it kind of has to be yes.

Linus (135:02)

Because it would be more appealing.

Luke (135:04)

Yeah. Because relative things have gone up.

Linus (135:07)

It's gonna go up.

Luke (135:09)

Yeah.

Linus (135:09)

But then again I.

Luke (135:10)

Okay, I guess a little higher though. I wonder.

Linus (135:13)

Here's where I get a little confused though. On the one hand, yeah, DRAM pricing has gone bananas and so has NAND Flash. But then on the other hand, Apple just released a 600 laptop that from my understanding it is like trivially easy to get an educational discount on. And is 499 with the educational discount. Yeah, it's only got 8 gigs of RAM. Sure. But. But still, like price competitive products are clearly still able to be released.

Luke (135:45)

So possible so. And.

Linus (135:47)

But then again, I was. No, you guys, I was talking to the writers about this and someone was like how are they doing this? And my guess is that Apple locked in their contract for this stuff like two years ago because they operate on a timescale and a general scale that

Luke (136:04)

they have few other Companies, they have the bank to do that kind of stuff. And on top of that, Speaking of that, MacBook Neo Co CEO of Asus Flippin loves it and is also pretty scared of it. Asus Co CEO Sue

Linus (136:23)

Sy

Luke (136:26)

I was just trying to do the last name. Yeah, Sy called the Apple's 599 MacBook Neo or 499 if you're clever. A shock to the entire PC industry, which honestly, yeah, saying Apple has never competed at this price point before. Sue said all major PC players, Microsoft, intel and AMD are actively discussing how to respond to the MacBook Neo threat, and they probably should be, to be completely honest. Despite this, he attempted to downplay the Neo's appeal, pointing to his 8 gigabytes of non upgradable unified memory and calling it more of a content consumption device similar to an iPad, also known as what almost everyone uses their laptops for. The Verges. He didn't include that part. I put that in there. The Verges review also flagged slow SSD speeds as another notable limitation, along alongside the RAM cap. Again, it's 600 bucks. That said, most outlets are reviewing the device quite positively and demand from the market is notable and I'm not surprised. That's amazing, dude. What a crazy piece of hardware.

Linus (137:36)

Our discussion question is, do you agree with Sue's assessment that the Neo is just a content consumption device or is that maybe just a cope? I actually do mostly agree, but I don't think it's the gotcha that maybe he hopes that it is. Because to Luke's point, the vast majority of what people are doing on their laptop is content consumption.

Luke (138:02)

If you bought a MacBook Air, what were you doing with it?

Linus (138:05)

Yeah, yeah, content consumption.

Luke (138:09)

Maybe you did some garageband for fun. I'm sure that still works. I wouldn't be surprised if you can do some not super crazy final cut.

Linus (138:17)

Oh shoot. Who sue is pronounced shoe.

Luke (138:20)

Shoe.

Linus (138:20)

Thank you Melo Geek.

Luke (138:22)

I thought something might have been wrong. Sorry about that.

Linus (138:23)

I thought it was shoe. Anyway, shoe. Also, I think this is just the first volley. Apple never. No matter how catastrophically a product performs, Apple never launches. Just one. Okay, I shouldn't say never. There might be an example at some point, but like even Vision Pro. Okay, got. Yeah, got a follow up. People are trying to gotcha me with the Vision Pro. Got a new model. Yeah, okay. Newton the Pippin.

Luke (138:59)

The Pippin?

Linus (139:00)

Yeah.

Luke (139:00)

Where's our Pippin?

Linus (139:02)

Yeah, we lost our Pippin. We don't know where it is.

Dan (139:04)

I.

Linus (139:06)

Yeah, if Spanky2k says even the weird hi fi thing led to the home pod. Yep. Like they. Apple doesn't release a product in a vacuum. They release a product with a freaking roadmap with a freaking plan. Okay. The trash can poke brick. Yeah, the trash can was kind of a disaster. Not in a long time though. Okay. It's been a long time. Still, I'm still different.

Luke (139:33)

It was just a different form factor for their desktop product line though.

Linus (139:38)

It was, but it was kind of a dead end in terms of the paradigm. The paradigm of the Mac Pro as this like kind of lockdown, no expansion cards.

Luke (139:49)

Yeah, but like the Mac Pro existed before that. I understand what you're saying. I see the logic, but I don't think it 100% fits.

Linus (139:57)

I see that in both ways. I see that in both.

Luke (139:59)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Linus (140:00)

But the point that I'm getting at, the point I'm getting at Here is the MacBook Neo is almost certainly the first in a line of MacBook Neos. And I guarantee you that if they didn't have the limitation of only 8 gigs of RAM on top of the package for the A18 processor, that they would have at least considered allowing you to pay for a memory upgrade. I mean, Apple loves having people pay for a memory upgrade or a storage upgrade. Now they didn't go far in terms of the storage upgrades that are available on it. That does tend to be a way that Apple differentiates their top models. So for instance, the, the latest iPhone, you have to buy the Pro if you want to get, I believe, is it 2 terabytes or 4 terabytes of storage? Whatever it is, whatever the top storage configuration it is, you, you have to get a Pro. And I would expect them to not offer a MacBook Neo with 200 gigs of memory and freaking 4 terabytes of storage or whatever. That is a differentiating point for them. But I would be shocked if the next one doesn't allow 12 gigs or 16 gigs. As we make our way through subsequent releases. And with the way that software optimization is going right now, 16 gigs of DDR4 was like good and a lot and 16 gigs of DDR5 is pretty good and a lot. And like we, it's. If you think about it, it's actually been quite a while since we've really needed more than 8 to 16 gigs. You know what I mean?

Luke (141:40)

It's mostly been websites, but you can just close tabs. Yeah, it's just a little bit of convenience. It's not so much capability that much for most users.

Linus (141:51)

Exactly. And so if we see an A19 Pro chip with 12 gigs of RAM in a next gen. Man, that thing is going to be killer. It's just going to be killer. It's going to. It's going to destroy the budget Windows machine market. Like Apple is. Dude, Apple is freaking. They're out for blood. Like it's like they want market share for a change.

Luke (142:20)

Good.

Linus (142:20)

The Mac mini is already like the computer to buy distro game on the Linux under a certain price.

Luke (142:28)

Seem to be hungry and Apple seems to be hungry and I'm very happy because Microsoft needs some people chomping at them. Microsoft can be great again. I believe in a positive future for Microsoft. I just.

Linus (142:44)

They have to get focused.

Luke (142:45)

They have to get focused, man. Oh my God.

Linus (142:47)

They're going to Luke not suit like 8 or 9% of their business. It's less than 10% of their business. I just don't think they're paying attention. They're not focused on it. I mean they went and they put that AI exec in charge of Xbox. Like what are they.

Luke (143:01)

Yeah, but if you start, if you start losing Windows, Windows is a part of. You're talking revenue and for sure. But I think if you start losing Windows you start losing 365 subscriptions.

Linus (143:16)

Oh, you're 100% right.

Luke (143:17)

Like I think it's, I think it's this like it's, it's their infrastructure department that happens to make money.

Linus (143:24)

I'm talking about the, the dangerous path that they could be heading down.

Luke (143:28)

Oh totally.

Linus (143:28)

If they, if they manage their business based on counting beans.

Luke (143:33)

Yeah, you gotta. You got so many beans, dude. You got so many beans coming in. Your bean income seems to be pretty good. You should probably work on making it so that the thing that supports all your incoming beans is a little bit better. Just let and okay, honestly I'm going to use that argument the like it's 8% or whatever. Just make it awesome. Whatever. Get the stupid ads out and stuff and just make it really good and go back to the whole just everyone uses Windows therefore Microsoft wins by default thing. That worked for you so well. And just make money off Azure and make money off office 365 business subscriptions. Whatever. Because every single freaking person in the world is using Windows because everyone has these cheap laptops. Because if you don't do that everyone's just gonna get MacBooks because there's for a business. You know their businesses aren't going to do the student discount thing for a business. There's 600 bucks and if they run pretty good, a lot of users would love to have MacBooks. Anyways. We're reviewing right now our subscription software at work and we've been running into the like. Okay. Well it's incredibly uncomfortable but we're probably going to have to make a choice finally between Google Workspace and Microsoft. And there's a lot of pushback in each direction. I think if I could speak for them, most of the IT team kind of wants to lean towards the Microsoft route. I think from an IT perspective it's easier and better for them. I viciously hate teams. Sorry, sorry.

Linus (145:15)

Should we be ditching teams? Are we talking about ditching teams?

Luke (145:18)

We're talking about ditching something. Either Google workspace or Office 365 which includes teams because each one of these are massive, very expensive contracts. I'm trying to save you tons of money is ultimately what's going on.

Linus (145:33)

Oh I'm, I'm very aware.

Luke (145:35)

Yeah. So we're trying to figure out one of them if we ditch365. The like popular tech bro route is to use Slack and Google Workspace. But Slack is so expensive.

Linus (145:49)

Yeah.

Luke (145:49)

Which sucks. And people are saying matter most just you know, you can talk to each other if you want. It's so it's, it's, it's this thing. But there is the curveball. I didn't, I said I didn't believe them. I didn't believe them for years. I said on wan. I didn't believe them. I was at Google and saw people's laptops. They actually use chat. They actually just use Google Chat.

Linus (146:14)

Are we going to go full circle and go back to hangouts?

Luke (146:17)

So it's. We're trying to figure out. We're trying to figure out do we go to chat and hangouts? Do we go to chat and hangouts and Google Workspace keeping our like insane pile of things that are in Google Drive.

Linus (146:33)

Yeah. Yeah.

Luke (146:34)

So do we. Honestly. Even though I hate teams. Honestly probably sacrifice in the chat department.

Linus (146:40)

Yeah.

Luke (146:41)

And still have to have some people like the accounting teams. They're still going to need stripped down licenses for Microsoft so they can have things like Excel. They just need Excel. Excel is just the best at what it does. I dog on a ton of Microsoft things but local desktop Excel is just unassailable as far as I can tell at this point. So they just need Excel. Some of the teams might need Excel. People that need Excel will have a license that gets them Excel. But we don't mess around with too much other stuff. Or do we go the other route and keep teams but have to migrate all of this stuff out of Google Cloud.

Linus (147:12)

You're going to have to buy my Google Docs from my cold dead hand.

Luke (147:15)

See, this is, this is. The thing is for people like you, I think it would be easier to go the Google route, but for other people it might be easier to go the other route.

Dan (147:24)

And.

Luke (147:30)

It's rough because both of these companies, their subscriptions are going whoops because they're trying to bundle AI stuff and make it so you can't really get out of those contracts that include AI. They're just starting to include AI by default and then cranking the price because of it. And like all this crap is getting really expensive also I think because there was like some unlimited data loophole thing or something. But back in the day you guys signed up for a pricey Google Workspace subscription. So there is a way that we could actually like half. Basically the Google workspace description and was

Linus (148:07)

because we were using it for cloud backup and then nobody ever canceled it, I guess.

Luke (148:10)

Yep. So we were probably just going to

Linus (148:13)

one video that was.

Luke (148:14)

It's. We think that it's still there. So we're very likely going to drop. There's other things we would lose though. Like that way that we figured out that email issue that you had, we would like lose that. So there are things. But we've only ever used that twice. There was one for a document security thing a while ago that you are aware of that I'm not gonna go into details for that. I would have needed that tier for. And there was your email thing. Those are like the only two things I can remember that we.

Linus (148:42)

That's pretty good though.

Luke (148:43)

It is. But those are the only two times we've ever really used it. And it's like 30k a year or something. So Jeebus, you might, you might want to just drop it.

Linus (148:57)

And I'm not gonna lie, we do need to. We do need to look at our expenses. I mean, I've been. Yeah, I think I've been very, very clear internally and you know, talking to the audience on WAN show that we don't operate in the same environment that we used to and we're gonna have to find some efficiency. I don't know if you saw this, Luke. Probably not, because you don't stare at the. The Views Dashboard as obsessive aggressively as I do. But over the last little while, the last like week or so, we've had quite a few releases closer to like our old daily cadence and A handful of them actually like performed quite well. And the, the channel was just like going. And then we had one day that we didn't upload and the overnight dip, which was something that I would look at traditionally in order to determine what the kind of like the background viewership is, you know, aside from your. Your new release, like your hottest new video dipped below what it was before. We had a bunch of like good performing videos over the last little while. So the, the just like background VOD viewership of the library of content that we've produced over the years is just going down as people's interest in the tech hobby wanes. And we can see this with like Google. What's the search relevancy tool again?

Luke (150:22)

So we're asking if his feed is laggy. I think that's just him being. There's like, there's like half a second of there and back time. He's literally across the planet. It's. I've been pretty happy with the stream so far. Sorry. Keep going.

Linus (150:36)

Yeah, doing our best. And also as YouTube emphasizes shorts more and more and more, it's just the back catalog and the competition increases for people's eyeballs. Those back catalog videos are just not getting any views anymore. Oh, wow. No, I'm getting like really choppy now.

Dan (151:01)

Oh, it'll self reflect.

Linus (151:03)

Anyway, the point is that we're going to have to find some. We're going to have to find some efficiency. Thankfully, we are pretty well diversified. We, you know, we have the Creator Warehouse, LTT Store team.

Luke (151:16)

Oh.

Linus (151:16)

Oh, good lord. Is my voice okay at least getting some robot?

Dan (151:21)

But your voice is fine.

Linus (151:23)

Okay, cool. That's great. So, yeah, if we could lose one of these subscriptions, I would find it extremely hilarious if we ultimately went full circle back to freaking hangouts, whatever they call it now.

Luke (151:37)

Yeah, I don't know what we're going to do. We. We are probably going to do that subscription reduction thing, but we need to really figure out all the different levels of impact and then make sure that people are okay with us, you know, not actually having certain levels of tools. But it would save a ton of money, so it's probably worth it, but we need to figure that out still. And then after that, that seems like just. We should definitely. AJ identify that and we should just like definitely look into that first. But then we have basically until the end of the year because there are such massive penalties to early cancellation. We have basically till the end of the year to figure this out. And when AJ pointed out like, look, the cancellation early cancellation fees are so bad, there's basically no point in doing so. And the contract renewals are basically at the end of the year. It was like, okay, we have some time because this is going to be insane and painful. No matter what route we go, it will be bad. There is no, like, this is going to be a hard sell internally because there is no route without pain. But it will be a massive reduction in cost no matter what direction we go. So we're going to kind of need a direction.

Linus (152:51)

YouTube and going in the direction of more and more shorts all the time. They clearly aren't going to change course anytime soon because it turns out YouTube makes more money from ads than Disney, Paramount and Warner Brothers Bros. Combined. According to research firm Moffett Nathanson, YouTube earned 40.4 billion in ad revenue, while Disney, NBC, Paramount and Warner Bros. Earned 36.1 billion combined. Parent company Alphabet confirmed last month that in 2025 YouTube generated 60 billion with a B in revenue, which still trails behind Meta, which generated 196.2 billion in ad revenue. But this isn't Google versus Mega, though. YouTube.

Luke (153:34)

Yeah.

Linus (153:35)

Yeah, not all of Alphabet. That is pretty freaking incredible. And I think one of the most recent insights we've gotten into exactly how YouTube is doing revenue wise. The female audience says, hey, wait a minute, Linus. Doesn't Paramount own Warner Brothers now that. That is still happening. That's still pending. But. But yes, the. The offer is in and I is functionally accepted, but they are still operating today as separate companies until such time as the acquisition is complete. So yeah, I still have my only question for.

Dan (154:18)

There we go.

Linus (154:19)

Oh, am I gone?

Dan (154:20)

Nope.

Luke (154:21)

No, you're back.

Linus (154:22)

Cool. Okay. My only question for YouTube is when will it be enough? And can you stop in goopifying the service? Because I heard they just added 30 second unskippable ads to TVs. Will 30 seconds be enough for you? Are we just gonna go all the way back to cable TV with like three minute ad breaks? Can we not? Please, can we just not?

Luke (154:47)

Honestly, the AI slob content is getting to be too much. We were talking before the show about how things Theo Joe, which it might have been a joke, might not have been, but Theo Joe posted on Twitter about like, bro, I'm done. It's like too much. I don't want to compete with like actual just junk and I run into it on the platform decently.

Linus (155:09)

I don't have to compete with junk. I'd go on only fans.

Luke (155:13)

Yeah, I mean we should put our. Put our Stuff up on the hub.

Linus (155:16)

Where's my ding Dan?

Luke (155:18)

We got to bring that project back. We got to put our, put our videos on the hub. But yeah, it's, there's so much of it, it's crazy. I don't know.

Linus (155:34)

Yeah, this is another tweet from Theo. Joe Noki just posted this in chat. I really think YouTube is going to be overwhelmed with garbage slop within a few years to the point where it will no longer be usable. And this comes back to the conversation I have with YouTube every time I can get in a room with them. And I may have an opportunity to chat with some execs in the near future here and I'm going to bring it up again. It's like, look, you guys need to decide what you want to be. You can be TikTok, you can be Facebook and Instagram and just full of AI crap, garbage, short form dopamine hit, move on to the next dopamine hit crap. Or you can take a bit of a hit now and in the long term, keep your soul, keep your identity, be YouTube because. And I'll just, I'm going to be really honest with them. With the way things are trending right now, LTT in its current form may not be viable in the medium future. It just may no longer be viable. Like, we upload relatively few shorts, but like I can tell, I can tell in our analytics what they're pushing and what they're not. And YouTube's response to this kind of thing is always, well, you know, we're giving the audience what they want. It's like, yeah, kinda, but also, not also, you guys control how prominent the short shelf is. You actually decide that. And yeah, people, you know, click on it because you know, you're, you're the dealer and they want another hit. But you can, you can be part of breaking the cycle. You can be part of, of making YouTube an app that I don't feel icky about opening that I don't feel guilty about using. You can feed me high quality content that makes me feel enriched after I'm done consuming it. Don't just like, it's like, be a good parent, right? Like, obviously my kids would eat more if I gave them candy at every opportunity, right? They'd eat so much. I could have the kids that eat the most. Good for me. But what if there was a goal beyond that? What if I wanted them to be healthy? What if I wanted them to reach adulthood and go, thanks, dad.

Luke (157:55)

I didn't always look at YouTube fondly.

Linus (157:57)

My vegetables.

Luke (157:58)

Yeah.

Linus (157:58)

Yeah. I didn't always love it.

Luke (157:59)

Still use it because of that. Yeah.

Linus (158:02)

And sometimes, sometimes I didn't do what you said and I went on tick tock and I ate candy. But I understand why you were trying to feed me something different. Thank you. You know, maybe you could have that attitude. I'm starting to. I'm starting to lose hope though. Speaking of in crapification, let's talk about Hisense. Oh my God. Sammy just told me something I didn't know. If you watch a lot ofShorts on YouTube, the app defaults to a short when you open the app that is unhinged. I didn't know that.

Luke (158:39)

It kind of makes sense though. I don't even have the app installed anymore

Linus (158:47)

and see, it shouldn't come to that. Dude. It should not come to that. But I got to either of these things.

Luke (158:52)

I got so tired of shorts that I actually uninstalled the app and I was watch YouTube on my phone through

Linus (158:56)

a browser Now Noki says not even that if your last watched video is a short, it will just launch a short. Whoa. This is nuts.

Luke (159:14)

Yeah. Yeah.

Linus (159:20)

Huh. Okay. Well, in other encrapification news, owners of Hisense TVs in Spain and Britain have reported unskippable ads appearing during basic functions like powering on their TVs, switching inputs, navigating to the home screen, or changing channels. Reports of intrusive ads on Hisense TVs have been growing since 2022, Tom's Hardware reports, and have escalated from small tile ads to unskippable videos. We've got links to some Reddit posts showing incidents I won't be able to screen share. Luke, do you want to fire one of those up?

Luke (159:59)

So I was reading something else for a second. Which one is this?

Linus (160:03)

Hisense TVs want to show us one of the examples while you're finding it? The ads began appearing after purchase on sets with hisense recently rebranded Home os, formerly vda, an OS that is licensed by other manufacturers. At least one of the complaints has been about a Toshiba TV. Some users have reportedly contacted Hisense directly and provided their TV's unique ID to disable the ads. Spanish publication La Razon I don't know how to Spanish accent, but anyway published a statement from Hisense that denied wrongdoing, asserting that an incident covered was a one off test that did not affect the normal operation of the television or limit access to its main uses. This is translated by Google Translate. The question for me and whenever a company uses this as an excuse Is why are you testing that? You know? Yeah, it's like, it's like. Do you think that, do you think that that would. I don't know. I mean, I'm in Korea, so I got Korea on the brain. But do you think that if the North Koreans, you know, did a nuclear test and everyone was like, yo, can you not, you know, don't, don't build a nuclear program? And they're like, well, I was just testing it, you know, what does that mean? Right? What does I was just testing it mean? It means you're testing it. Like, why, why did you. Why did you need to test that? Sorry, Luke, do you want to show the thing now?

Luke (161:33)

I love this comment. Katos said, oh, God, there's an emergency alert. Better turn on the news. And then you just get an ad, right?

Linus (161:40)

Like, can we not please?

Luke (161:43)

What do you want me to read?

Linus (161:44)

Sorry, I wanted to see one of the examples.

Luke (161:47)

Oh, yeah, no, I showed them all.

Linus (161:50)

Oh, brilliant. Okay. Well, I missed them. Yeah. IIRFTW in floatplane chat says you spent dev time on it. Yes.

Luke (161:58)

Here, here's not a bug. I'll show it again. Here's my favorite one. So they're, they're on their like, homepage thing. You can see them navigate down to here. Just.

Linus (162:10)

Wow. And that, that is a whole ass ad.

Luke (162:15)

Whole ad.

Linus (162:19)

Whole ad. Rough wild, dude. Okay. Investment disclosure Framework. Hear me out. Framework tv.

Luke (162:28)

I'd be interested, actually.

Linus (162:29)

It just wasn't crap.

Luke (162:30)

I'd be super interested, genuinely. Oh, my goodness. Yeah.

Linus (162:34)

What about a TV that you could upgrade? You could upgrade the processor in for like your Google TV or whatever it is. Or it just had a little like nook that you could like put an Apple TV in and then you could just configure the firmware of the TV to just launch your Apple TV every time you. You know what I mean? So Black Raven asks, would it be a dumb TV or a smart tv? I would see it as. I would see it as both.

Luke (162:58)

Yeah.

Linus (162:59)

Kernelcritic says that's just a TV with a dongle. But. But that's the thing is I wouldn't want to. I personally like using whatever it's called. I forget they've rebranded it a couple times. Whether it's Android TV or Google TV or whatever it is. I like Google tv. It's pretty good. I like to use it, but over time you get heavier media files or, you know, whatever. I might like to be able to upgrade the processor, make it more responsive. Sometimes I like gaming on it. There's A fun game. Bomb Squad. That's really fun with a big group gaming on the tv. Choice. Exactly. Ricky Bobby Choice. I want choice. And so if somebody wants a stupid one, then, yeah, have a stupid tv. Have a dumb tv and have it not do any of that stuff. But I also want to have the option to do that. And if there was anyone that I would trust to do it, I think it'd be framework. I think. I think I could trust them to not screw this up. Investment disclosure.

Luke (163:53)

Yeah, that'd be awesome.

Linus (163:54)

I'm pitching it. I'm pitching it right now. No guarantees that they'll do it.

Luke (163:58)

Of course they're going to be more expensive.

Linus (164:00)

They don't work for me.

Luke (164:02)

Yeah. And they're going to be more expensive even if they do make one. Like, people have to realize that this crap is why. Is part of the reason why TVs are so cheap now. Because they're monetizing your.

Dan (164:16)

You know, I'm getting a lot of packet loss. Sorry, guys.

Luke (164:20)

I can maybe just do another topic while we wait for him. Let me see if there's something I can talk about. Slay the Spire. I can talk about that for as long as you want. We'll. We'll wait for Linus to catch up here. Slay the Spire 2 almost beat Silksong's record, which I didn't even think it was gonna get quite that high, but I'm very proud of them. Good job, Megacrit. I've played too much of your game. The sequel to Megacrit's 2019 hit record. Well, just called Slay the Spire, to be clear. Hit this one. Hi. Hit. They apparently recorded nearly 575,000 concurrent players after its early access release last week. It's still in early access that was, you know, whatever. Only about 12,000 players shy, which, when you're at the scale of over half a million, is not that much of the indie record set by hollow knight Silksong back in September of last year. Really?

Linus (165:20)

September? Yeah.

Luke (165:21)

It was that long ago? Yeah. Wow.

Linus (165:26)

I mean, I was gonna say it was not very long ago, but, yes, it's both.

Dan (165:32)

All right.

Luke (165:34)

The game already has more than 43,000 reviews on Steam and is rated overwhelmingly positive. Yes. Let's go. Exciting. Have I been playing? I have played. I played mostly on the plane to. To and from Florida, but I played a little bit since then, too. It's.

Linus (165:53)

It's a long flight.

Luke (165:54)

It's a long flight, so I got a lot in there. It's. It's good. I Don't know if I.

Linus (166:03)

Did you achieve your goal, Luke? I did once with every character.

Luke (166:08)

He's lagging to all heck. But he. He asked did I. I'm gonna. I'm gonna take the self brag alley oop that he gave me. He asked, did you achieve your goal of being it once at least on every single character before we got back. And I only played it on the plane and I tried not to be too antisocial and yes I did like kind of Dan I think saw me do it like kind of as we were landing almost. Yeah, I think I finished the last run.

Dan (166:32)

You're like, I did it.

Luke (166:34)

Yeah, I did it. Laptop closed. All right, we're landing.

Dan (166:37)

Still having conversations the whole time.

Luke (166:39)

Yeah, it's ah. It's early access. The original game went through a bunch of balancing over time. I think it definitely needs more balancing work in. Right. I'm looking over here now. In. In my opinion it still needs more work. But the, the bones feel really good in my opinion. I don't actually care too much that there's like animations now and stuff. It looks nice. It just doesn't really mean much to me. But the, the bones are really cool. The new Necromancer characters like one of my favorite ones. I'm not super happy about the current state of Silent, which is generally my favorite character. So I'm hoping there's some rebalancing stuff that happens there. But yeah, we'll see. We'll have to see what they do over the course of the early access and then what they do after the fact like slow this fire one. If I remember correctly I. I think it was like released before Defect even came into the game. I'm not. I'm not sure when it was technically out and then Watcher came after as well. The difficulty floor is so much higher than STS1. That's interesting. It feels just actually easier to me. But I've been. I've been really interested in what the community thinks about the. The difficulty of the game there. I have found that there are more like kind of just. I run into a mechanic and I'm just like. Like the. I think it's called the Time eater in Slave Spire 1:1 of the Act 3 bosses, which is super annoying because if you played a lot of cards then it just hard directly counters you. And almost all my favorite decks on almost every character was just play a crazy amount of cards. So it's really annoying to run into Time Eater. And now I find that there's more like Time Eater style enemies where it's like haha, you decided to build your deck that way. I guess you have a bad time now and I don't love that so much.

Linus (168:37)

Again into that the balance wasn't obscure as well.

Luke (168:40)

Yeah.

Linus (168:41)

Or sorry, everyone calls it Expedition 33 where it's like oh, you are not built in this exact way, therefore your. Your break damage is too low and you can beat this boss, but you will have to grind. It will take you forever.

Luke (169:00)

Like there's an end boss called the Queen. And I haven't read a bunch of like other people's opinions on Science Fire 2 yet, but I read one thread

Linus (169:09)

because I was like, I heard that one was super. Thanks for asking. It's an old reference.

Luke (169:19)

I don't get it. But yeah, I was like, I wonder what other people think about this like horribly difficult boss. And I honestly thought all the other Act 3 bosses were like so easy that they might as well been like elites or not even that hard. And then the Queen is just like this, this horrifying mess of destroy my everything. And then I read online that everyone's like wow, that's the easiest one. And I don't know what's going on. So I might not have opinions that line up with other people. I also find that. Or sorry, I also saw in that thread that apparently people were saying that the Queen punishes hyper optimized decks and if you just like grab cards for fun and your deck isn't like built around a certain system, that you have an easier time with it. And I tend to try to make optimized decks, but then that's. It runs into the same problem where it's like, especially when you're running on really high difficulty, you're probably going to want optimized decks. So then you just have like a die roll that if your game has the Queen as the end boss, you just lose. Like I, I don't like that. That's what I really really hated about Time Eater. But anyways, Slay Aspire. Really cool game. It's. It's overwhelmingly positive even if I don't currently like it as much as Slayerspire 1. And I think they can tune things up because they have in the past and Megacrit is based and I even really liked their other random game, Mega Crit Dancing game. Will I be able to find it this way? Dancing Duelists. This game I believe is even free. It's on itch IO called Dancing Duelists. And this game is super fun. Yeah, you can just Download the zip for Mac, Linux or Windows right there.

Dan (170:58)

That's a game jam game.

Luke (170:59)

Yeah, it's a game jam game and it's super fun. This was their first exploration into Godot if I remember correctly. And it's. It's a fun little game. Let me see if I can swoop gameplay. Yeah, you pick your little dancer bro and then you have your different cards and then the game kind of like semi auto plays but it's like you build the deck and then it kind of does the things or whatever and blah blah blah blah for a game John game. Holy crap. It was.

Dan (171:30)

That's cool. It seems to be done the jump ship jam which is over a month so probably why it looks a little better.

Luke (171:37)

It was like pretty polished and stuff month game jams.

Dan (171:40)

Intense.

Luke (171:41)

Yeah. But yeah, cool Slice bar two. Sweet. I'm sure I will continue playing it for a long time. Very nice.

Linus (171:52)

All right, why don't we jump into

Luke (171:56)

sponsors, please, good sir.

Linus (172:00)

Fine.

Luke (172:00)

Do you want me to do it? Because your Internet choppiness, it seems to be green now.

Linus (172:04)

Am I good now?

Dan (172:04)

You're good now.

Luke (172:05)

You seem good now.

Linus (172:06)

Yeah, I. I turned off my wi fi and turned it back on. Classic troubleshooting tech tip. Wow. It's actually brought to you today by Odoo. If you're running a company of just about any size, it's easy to be pulled in dozens of diffractions for different software and tools for every tiny aspect of running said company. We were even talking about this earlier on the show. That's hilarious. Odoo is business management software that offers tons of integrated apps for all your needs in one convenient place. If you were to say run a YouTube channel, how are you going to keep track of all those videos? OD CRM? More traditional business. Odoo can help automate inventory inventory management with replenishment strategies based on min max rules as well as help you schedule vendor follow ups. And hey, look, all businesses, you know, YouTube or traditional need to have employees. So why not use Odoo's HR tools. They will help you build an org chart to keep track of your team, help you with onboarding, scheduling. It's super cool. And the best part of Odoo is that hey, if you only end up needing a single app, they will let you use it with unlimited users for free. So book a demo with a member of their team or get started with the 15 day trial. No credit card required@odoo.com Wan the show is also brought to you by Squarespace Fun fact, the website linushasperfecthair.com does not currently exist, which is good to know, because if I ever decided to start a shampoo tips business, that domain is right there. And with our style sponsor, Squarespace, it would be easy to acquire with their domains tool. It really is as simple as punching in your business's name, hitting search, then picking and purchasing your site. From there, just tell Squarespace what your business or your hobby is all about and Squarespace will suggest templates for you. For that extra bit of personality, their design AI lets you answer a couple quick prompts about your business, and Squarespace will create something that fits that criteria. And look, while I've never used Squarespace to launch my hair and shampoo tips website, we have used it for our Linus Media Group website and it is super easy. So start building your website today and get 10% off your first purchase by visiting squarespace.com when

Dan (174:17)

I'm so disappointed that you fixed your hair because the last one was supposed to be a hair. Zoom in.

Luke (174:21)

Oh, yeah.

Linus (174:22)

Oh, that's funny. Darn. I had this. I had this situation before the show where this was doing a weird thing and I decided to fix it.

Luke (174:30)

I also. One quick last thing. Quick I swear about Slay the Spire is the very first event I did. On my very first run. I. I got an. It was an option. I could do something. Who knows? Never choose that choice. Or I could get an egg. And spoiler alert, don't listen to this part. Plug your ears if you care about spoilers for Slayer Spire, which I don't

Linus (174:51)

think anyone does, but I have headphones in. What am I gonna do?

Luke (174:54)

Linus? Yeah, Linus doesn't care. But I was. I hatched the egg. And this was first event, first run. I'm just putting it out there, just saying.

Linus (175:02)

No, maybe I don't want to know. I don't want to know.

Luke (175:05)

You literally get a little bird, bro.

Linus (175:08)

I'm not gonna worry about it.

Luke (175:09)

You get a little bird bro, and he fights with you all the way up the spire. The second that happened, I was like, I can't lose. I can't lose when I have bird friend. That's impossible. That can't happen. I just thought it was amazing that my first run, I got bird immediately.

Dan (175:26)

It was great.

Linus (175:29)

Let's jump into. Sony appears to be experimenting with Dynamic AB pricing on the PlayStation Store. PlayStation Store price trackers@psprices.com have been following Dynamic A B pricing experiments since late last year, where Sony has shown users varying discounts of up to 27.8%. The experiment has lasted over four months and included over 190 games in over 70 regions, including the U.S. affected titles have included developers like Sony 2K Games, Focus Entertainment, Deep Silver, Bethesda, Rockstar, and Ubisoft. Our discussion question here is are deep discounts coming to consoles?

Luke (176:12)

And what I don't think that's the

Linus (176:15)

more important discussion question is dynamic pricing. Can we not infect absolutely everything with this? Can we just have the price be the price?

Luke (176:25)

Yeah, I don't think this is deep discounts coming to consoles. I think this is trying to extract as much possible dollars from each possible person you can by like tracking what things they might like and might not like and making sure that there's optimal amounts of discounts applied to each individual person so you can extract as many dollars as possible at any given time. This is super bad.

Linus (176:51)

This is just a bad mromut says. I was about to say dynamic pricing on a digital store is pure evil, but if it's just discounts, I'm not as upset. But that's the thing.

Luke (177:01)

Everything is dynamic.

Linus (177:02)

Discounts are just dynamic pricing. Yuck.

Luke (177:09)

Yeah, you could kind of consider that everything is a million dollars with a certain amount of discount applied to it. Like it's the the original. Sounds like Best Buy doesn't matter.

Linus (177:22)

Oh my God. Have you seen some of the some of the stuff people are sharing about Best Buys Compare at feature? We already talked about it a couple weeks ago. I think it was so we don't have to go through the whole thing, but people are posting some unhinged comparisons. Like I think there was someone bought open box AirPods or something like that, and the compare AT was to brand new AirPods. It's like, okay, yeah, sure, that's. That's how that works.

Dan (177:47)

I think that's what I saw. $350 of savings.

Linus (177:51)

Gross.

Luke (177:53)

Cool.

Linus (177:55)

In other news, that's gross. Metta has acquired Mult Book, the social media platform for AI agents, bringing the company's founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr, into Meta's AI research division. Schlicht says he built multiple book without writing a single line of code, relying instead on his personal AI assistant, Claude Clauderberg. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Luke (178:23)

Oh my God.

Linus (178:25)

In other AI our discussion question is, does whatever research benefit we might gain from AI agents sending each other pictures of their lunches outweigh the cost and natural resources? Thank you Jordan, for asking such a leading question with such an obvious answer.

Luke (178:44)

In other fun AI News Amazon's AI coding tools linked to outages as internal documents reveal push for senior sign off on generated AI code after a 6 hour Amazon.com outage and multiple AWS incidents. Internal documents seen by the Financial Times show Amazon Senior Vice President Dave Treadwell calling out a trend of incidents tied to gen AI assisted changes with a high blast radius and pushing for senior engineer sign off on AI assisted code changes. Amazon disputes the framing, saying only one incident was AI related, none involved AI written code, and the sign off requirement is being formally mandated. Ooh, the last part. Okay, the AWS incident.

Linus (179:31)

That's not the win you think it is.

Luke (179:32)

Yeah. The AWS incidents included a 13 hour outage caused by Amazon's own KIRO AI coding tool deleting and recreating an entire environment which Amazon attributed to user error rather than AI itself. Everything can be. And in a lot of ways, fair enough. But that's why you need the sign off thing, right? Discussion question. Amazon's own internal memo blamed AI tools, but the company's PR team is saying it's the opposite. Who do you believe? The internal memo.

Linus (180:02)

Internal memo 100% of the time. To be clear, internal memos can be BS. Yeah, but when I'm comparing it to a PR statement, it's going to be the internal memo 100% of the time.

Luke (180:16)

Yeah, it's not corporate popular right now to be like, no, no, no, the AI tools are bad for sure. Don't use ours. They have problems. That's not, that's not going to go well right now.

Linus (180:27)

Silicon Valley, like the TV show was just so far ahead. Like feels like, it feels like. It feels so accurate that it's, it's almost creepy at this point. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how to deal with it. Like it's, it's, it's gone full circle from like so outlandish or so true to life that it's funny to so true to life that it's not funny anymore.

Luke (181:03)

Yeah.

Linus (181:04)

Wet Melon says, I work at a Silicon Valley company. I still haven't seen it. Lol. I should really get around to that. You really, really should. If you've ever been anywhere near a startup or a big tech company, it is so funny. Like I don't understand how it's that. Just how it captures the real experience and yet manages to be funny and not just depressing. It's.

Luke (181:31)

It's so good inside out, dude.

Linus (181:34)

I actually have only. I've not seen the entire run. I think I've only seen the first three seasons, I like bought them on Blu Ray.

Luke (181:40)

I binged the first season with Austin Evans randomly enough.

Linus (181:43)

Really?

Luke (181:44)

Yeah, it was great. Nice hanging out.

Linus (181:48)

Nintendo is suing the US Government over tariffs Nintendo is seeking a full refund with interest of tariffs it paid under the IEEPA executive order signed by President Trump after the Supreme Court struck these orders, or, sorry, multiple orders struck these orders down in February. Over a thousand companies, including Costco and FedEx, have filed similar suits, with a judge already ruling that they are, in fact entitled to refunds. Nintendo's lawsuit has since been automatically paused pending the outcome of a broader Supreme Court case covering all similar claims. Trump has since announced plans to reimpose tariffs through section 122 of the Trade act of 1974, which is a more legally constrained method and has two dozen states over two dozen states already suing over that move as well. Here's the thing that I'm going to just come out and say I'm finding a little bit confusing about all of this. I have paid, through companies that I am either sole owner or partner owner, a lot of money in tariffs for products that we have imported or exported into the United States. There is a part of me that would obviously love to have that money back. I, I'm pretty sure it's like over a million dollars. Like a lot of money. We sell, we sell a lot of goods on lttstore.com it's a good store with great products. People love them and businesses has been okay, you know, there's a lot of headwinds right now. Every, every, all hands. You hear Taran use the word headwinds. But, but overall, you know, we've been, we've, we've diversified. The team has worked hard. We're, we're doing stuff, you know, we're, we're getting it done. And so with that volume of business, there's been a lot of money that has gone towards tariffs. I'd love to have it back. But here's the thing. I believe not. I believe it's just, I believe it is a fact there, I'll say this, that tariffs are in fact a consumer tax. So why would I get the refund? So here's what I'm kind of trying to understand. And I know that for someone like Nintendo or Costco, right, they have made the argument, especially Costco. I don't actually know that Nintendo is making this argument, but I know that Costco made the argument that they held their pricing steady right in or, and they absorbed the tariffs because they believed that they would be able to sue for the tariff money back, and that would make them whole eventually. I mean, you know, minus interest, obviously, and opportunity cost and whatever else. Right. But in the current climate, where will we find the nuance to differentiate between a company like Costco who claims. Right. And I would tend to believe Costco, they've operated with pretty strong integrity over the years. Who claims that they ate the cost compared to other companies who pass the cost along to consumers and then will basically be taking back free money. How do we differentiate that? How do you prove that?

Luke (185:31)

I have no idea. I think that's part of their argument actually, is they. They haven't started this stuff. And if I remember correctly, the Nintendo suit is already paused. And I think the big part of that reason is because they're saying it's just too complicated, so we're gonna to have to see where that goes. I also think, like, I think as far as my understanding goes, we tried to keep prices down for Americans, so that would partially include us. So maybe there needs to be just a refund in both directions.

Linus (185:58)

Ours was complicated because, like, some products, and I'm sure that almost everyone is probably kind of like us. Yeah. Because it was so volatile. And at times there was a tariff one day and then there was like, oh, forget it the next day, and it was just. It was chaos. There were times when we just ate it. There were other times where we went to our suppliers and we worked with them to manage margins across the board. So they would take a small hit, we would take a small hit, and we'd make a small adjustment to pricing. So everybody's taking a small hit. The consumer, us and our manufacturers. Then there were the times when we just. We had to. We just had to increase pricing. So we've done all of them. So what's the right thing to do?

Luke (186:54)

There's also. I don't want to say this name, but someone at Full Point Chat said, yeah, so what about companies that raise global pricing to subsidize Americans? Which did also happen. That's tough. You can't really solve that.

Linus (187:06)

Where's the refund for European Xbox buyers? Yeah, it's not happening. So basically this is the. This is the dumbest possible outcome because the US Taxpayer gets nothing for all of it. The US Government gets nothing for all of it.

Luke (187:28)

It's like the least surprise they don't

Linus (187:30)

get any of the money, just funnel

Luke (187:31)

more money to the rich.

Linus (187:34)

And are we really just going to give a refund to the corporations who, you know, What? From my point of view, we're dramatically inconvenienced by this whole thing and it did affect our did affect our revenue and it did affect our profit. It wasn't just inconvenience. This was a serious problem with the money that was charged and also the haphazard way that the whole thing was implemented and messaged it. It burned countless, countless cycles and a ton of money for us. Like the whole thing just is looking even dumber and like an even stupider, more useless crap outcome than I even could have predicted. And I was pretty opposed to the whole thing in the first place for fairly obvious reasons. Just wild. So dumb. Did you hear about a government affiliated official that's been running around selling or basically buying companies tariff refunds for like pennies on the dollar? Yeah, yeah, corruption in plain sight, boys. It's been, it's been.

Luke (188:49)

I think he's a dude in like the financial part of the government as well. Like I think he might have some amount of influence over if this is even happening. So wait, say the name again. Was it Scott Besson? Yeah, I thought it was him.

Linus (189:09)

I can't remember.

Luke (189:12)

There we go. Isn't he still in finance stuff anyways?

Linus (189:15)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Luke (189:17)

United States Secretary of Commerce. So like the a person doing fine at stuff who like is gonna have a lot of influence. I just. Anyways, let's man, let's get through this. We got a couple more to go. I need to get into after dark here. This is getting brutal. BYD reveals charging network and world's longest range EV Chinese automaker BYD has replaced reportedly been testing a 1500 kilowatt hour flash charging network in Shenzhen that is capable of adding 249 miles of EV range in five minutes. That means this network is more than three times faster than the ultra rapid chargers that currently exist in North America and Europe. The test hub uses liquid cooled charging guns which just sounds awesome that allow users to roll up, plug in and handle payment on either the infotainment or an Android app. The pricing at the demo site was about 18 cents per kilowatt hour making a charging session about 15 bucks. Meanwhile in America, cyber trucks currently handle the highest charging speeds with peaks at around 500 kilowatt hours. So a third if the claim is real. BYD's luxury brand Denza also teased their new Z9GT SUV with 644 miles of range. A 64% improvement from the current Z9GT models 391 mile range which is priced at around 50,000 USD.

Linus (190:52)

It is worth noting that the Chinese range estimates are not as. As difficult as the EPA US ones. So there's a bit of translation that'll have to go on there, but that is still freaking wild. That's an enormous range for. For an suv. It's not a big suv, I don't think. Trying to see, like, how. What would this. Dude, it looks more Model Y or model X. It actually looks amazing.

Luke (191:25)

This is the Z9. I decided I'll just look it up. But like that $50,000 car, dude, like,

Linus (191:32)

I'm so stoked on Canada being able to get BYD soon. Dude.

Luke (191:36)

Yeah, they're going to disappear. They're going to sell out instantaneously. There's. I think it's 50,000 cars that they're in total allowed to bring in. They're just all going to disappear. Looks like that inside. 952 brake horsepower. 952. Looks like that inside. Looks like this outside, and it's 50k. You think those aren't gonna instantly disappear in Canada? People are gonna buy those immediately.

Dan (192:03)

950.

Linus (192:04)

Is that a joke? Linus, how much.

Dan (192:06)

How much your Porsche got?

Luke (192:10)

I can see the video. I can see the video now. Nothing has that much. I can see the video now. I bought a new car. Linus Sebastian 400. The.

Linus (192:23)

The 2023. I can't remember if I have a 2022 or a 2023, but they should be the same power. The 2023 Taycan Turbo S. 750. 616 horsepower, which increases with launch control to 750. So this SUV would have substantially more horsepower than my stupid Taycan. Ridiculous.

Luke (192:49)

I really like. Absolutely ridiculous on their dash. I really like kind of how they laid this out. I know, I know. There's like other evs with this. To be very, very clear, it looks like they have dual wireless charging pads for phones, I think passenger and driver. And then I like that just in front of the wheel is actually quite simple. There are. There are lots of other EVs that do that as well, but sometimes they get a little bit too busy right in front of the wheel. And I do. I don't like that. Keep the infotainment in the middle. Damn or die.

Linus (193:26)

YouTube is expanding their AI deepfake detection to include politicians, government officials and journalists. That's it. That's all that I really have to say about that. They say they'll still protect parody and satire that involves these public figures. But yeah, this is. This is a good thing. And they should. They should do deep Fake detection more and just generally AI detection more and not less. Also, after complaints, Google will make it easier to disable generative AI search in photos, including a toggle for fast classic search. Nice. Nice. Now what I want to know is where's my good fast non AI Gmail search? Dude, I had a wild interaction with Gmail search the other day where I looked for a keyword that I knew for sure was in something recent and it wouldn't bring it up. It only brought up like one page of results. Even though there should have been like hundreds of emails with this common word. And I actually had to use for the first time the Gemini Gmail search in order to find it. And it found it immediately. But I was just so annoyed with that workflow. Just. Just find the word. If the email contains the word, bring up the email. How complicated is this? Google was good at this 10 years ago. Why do they suck at it now?

Luke (194:41)

All right, I don't exactly shop for cars too often, but this is cool, man.

Dan (194:47)

Is that seriously 50 grand cool configurator.

Luke (194:50)

You can like click around and stuff happens.

Linus (194:52)

It won't be here. That's like converted. So there'll still be like extra transportation costs and they'll have to cover their. Just their operational costs of running in the country. So I would suspect it'll be closer to like 75 or 80. Yeah.

Dan (195:06)

But not like 150, which is kind of what I would expect for a car that looks like that has those specifications.

Linus (195:14)

Yeah, buddy.

Luke (195:15)

What if I click space? What does that do? Oh, wow. Scenarios.

Dan (195:24)

None of the domestics have like. Yeah, this is weird.

Luke (195:29)

Did you can see the shocks? I'm sure there's like other. Again, I don't exactly buy for new shop for new cars ever, but that's a cool. That's a cool little thing. They can.

Dan (195:39)

You can look.

Luke (195:41)

Yeah, just no touch.

Dan (195:43)

Can't wait to buy one on Craigslist in 25 years from now. Yeah, it's gonna be sick, dude.

Luke (195:48)

They have a freaking like what, bruh?

Dan (195:51)

Again, 50 grand. Like the big ones compete with Maybach and they're like 100 grand.

Linus (195:59)

Can't scroll this wild man devil audio system. So they even ponied up for Bouchie co branding for their audio and still managed to make it this cheap.

Luke (196:10)

Digital side mirrors.

Linus (196:11)

That's wild.

Dan (196:11)

Are those legal in Canada? I don't think so.

Luke (196:13)

Digital side mirrors?

Dan (196:14)

Yeah.

Luke (196:14)

Yeah, they might not be.

Linus (196:15)

I don't think so.

Luke (196:16)

I don't think they are either. The cooler is sweet, you know, to have Cold water be dope.

Linus (196:21)

I know.

Luke (196:23)

Anyways, enough drooling over that car. What do we got next? There's something I think. Are we done after dark Topics?

Linus (196:31)

I think it's after dark.

Luke (196:32)

Let's go.

Dan (196:38)

After dark. Okay, I got a few checkout messages for you here. First up. First, you really need tall sizes for the gray RGB shirts. Second, lld, what are your favorite guilty pleasure self serving?

Linus (196:57)

Dan.

Luke (197:01)

I liked that. That was good. That was really good.

Dan (197:05)

Second up, lld, what are your favorite guilty pleasure treats and candies? This guy was actually first. This is the first merch message we received, so double first.

Linus (197:14)

Oh, man, I've got, I've got lots of guilty pleasure treats and candies. I, I have a wicked sweet tooth. I remember this one time, you know those, those like sour strips that are rainbow colored that you could get in like a bulk pack at Costco. Costco, yeah. You know the ones I'm talking about? I once ate an entire Costco bulk pack of those in a weekend sitting gaming at my desk. Yeah, we're talking like an actual brick of sugar.

Luke (197:39)

Holy crap. Damn, that's wild.

Linus (197:45)

Yeah, I, I, I gotta, I've got a sweet tooth. It takes, it takes a lot of discipline for me to eat as little sweets as I do these days. As I'm getting older. I can't, I can't do that anymore. My metabolism used to be like hyper and now it just, I just can't. But like, oh man, I love me a perfectly toasted marshmallow. Like, oh, love that spicy ramen noodles. That's my like late at night. Yeah. Oh, just like a. I'll make. I have eaten in one sitting continuously, as many as three packs plus eggs. Just like nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom. After midnight, I. Whoa, this is a bad one. I once ate, you know, the Dempsters, like kind of like crappy white bread, cinnamon raisin bread. I once ate in one sitting in the middle of the night when I was like craving a midnight snack. An entire loaf of it, piece by piece.

Luke (198:55)

Okay.

Linus (198:55)

Slathered with butter.

Luke (198:56)

I've got one of those.

Linus (198:57)

Entire loaf of that.

Luke (198:58)

Damn. Okay. All right.

Linus (199:00)

Every slice.

Luke (199:01)

You might still have me then. My like diet when I used to work at the bread factory. So this would have been not way too long before I met you, to be honest. Yeah, was. I would bring a can of stag chili to work and a bowl, but I wouldn't bring any utensils and you know, statute of Limitations, whatever. It's probably fine. They had this policy where like, if there was a bag of ruined bread, you could just have it. So a single bag of bread would just fly out of the facility for some reason and it'd be outside on the ground and that's ruined. So then I would eat Stag chili with an entire loaf of bread and that would be my lunch like every time. So I would buy staggering for. With like when my parents would go to Costco, we'd get just tons of Costco Stag chili packs. So they're super cheap. And then the bread was free. And that was my meal that was like, I was effectively like one meal a day fasting. Because I would eat a whole loaf of bread and a can of steak and just be like, hell yeah. So I lived off that for like a while. In terms of guilty pleasures, these are rare, but a. A long term LTT staple. Community person Mape got me onto these, but they're licorice from New Zealand called RJ's and you can find them in stores every once in a while. I know, like, way back when we worked out of the Langley house that there was like a grocery store that was near the corner store that was down the street. I don't know the name of the grocery store, but that grocery store had it.

Linus (200:47)

Oh, Nesters.

Luke (200:49)

Was it Nesters? Oh, wait.

Linus (200:51)

Oh, I don't remember what grocery store that was.

Luke (200:53)

Yeah, I know. I've been there. I went there a few. It was more expensive than the Save on. The Save on was just down the hill. So, like, I didn't go there that often, but there's a couple times I

Linus (201:04)

have so many more.

Luke (201:07)

I mean. Yeah. Another one that I. I really like, which I think this might be controversial actually is Hawkins.

Linus (201:15)

Hawkins. I've never tried that.

Luke (201:17)

Hawkins Cheesies.

Linus (201:20)

I got a rifle here. I must have spelled it wrong.

Luke (201:27)

Yeah, Hawkins Cheesies. It's Canadian brand. Canadian made thing. Something that I really like is that the ingredients is like pretty chill.

Linus (201:38)

Yeah. Okay.

Luke (201:39)

Not about to say they're good for you. Not about to say they're low calorie. I don't think they're necessarily either of those. But the ingredients list is like relatively short and I can tell what's happening, which is neat. But yeah, they're Canadian, which I thought is.

Linus (201:53)

I didn't know the brand was Hawkins.

Luke (201:55)

Yeah, well, Cheesy. Yeah, Cheesies with a Z. And they're like. They're normally the. The crunchier kind of like smaller ones. They're not the, like, big, poofy ones.

Linus (202:05)

Not the poofs.

Luke (202:05)

Yeah. I don't like the poofs. I like Hawkins. That's another one that's, like. It's pretty rare, but when they're around, they're neat.

Linus (202:14)

My. My probably biggest guilty pleasure, though, has got to be breakfast cereal. And I'm talking like, like, the sugar bombs, chocolate frosted sugar bombs type, like Nesquik, Honey Nut Chex. Oh, gosh. Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I would.

Luke (202:31)

Something I'm. I think I'm fairly lucky for is I liked those when I was a kid, but now I. I genuinely just prefer, like, muesli. Like, actually just really like it. Especially you cut up some banana in it, too. Like,

Linus (202:47)

One of my worst ones. I. I didn't do it once this winter. I made it all the way through the winter without doing this. But I. I will make a cup of hot chocolate, and then I'll put probably about this much whipped cream on the top of it, and then I'll get a spoon and I'll dip it into the hot chocolate, and then eat the whipped cream off the top, and then I'll hit it again with whipped cream all the way down the cup. I love whipped cream.

Luke (203:16)

I think it's funny because you. You usually eat, like, quite clean, and then when. When you dive off the end, you just go really hard.

Linus (203:26)

Dude. A hundred percent. One hundred percent. And, like, for me, as long as I can. As long as I can pass a pinch test, like, I'll eat, like, the dirtiest stuff. Like, oh, dude. But it's. For me, it's all about the. It's all about the pinch test. But when I don't pass the pinch test, then I'm extremely disciplined.

Dan (203:52)

Hey, DLL love all your videos. I'm interested in a framework 12, but I was seriously turned off by the price of RAM. Do you guys think that the framework 12 is in trouble unless the price of RAM falls?

Linus (204:07)

I think everything's in trouble unless the price of RAM falls. That's been a. A major point of discussion in the tech space for the last three to five months. It's. It's a. It's a major problem. Yeah. Yeah, I think they're in trouble if the price of RAM doesn't fall. I. I hope. It kind of seems like there's signs of cracking in the AI bubble right now. It hasn't, you know, entered free fall or anything like that. But isn't Oracle stock, like, way down right now?

Dan (204:42)

I think everything stock is way down right now.

Luke (204:46)

Oracle Stock is, is definitely down.

Dan (204:49)

Yeah.

Linus (204:50)

And I think like because of AI, I mean over AI pressure, that's a big part of the reason that Oracle's coming down so down three. Maybe it's coming. Maybe it's coming. Well, I'm not gonna hold my breath

Luke (205:07)

today they're down like 2 and a half, 3%. Five days, they're up 2 and a half, 3%. One month they're down 3 ish percent. Six months, they're down 48.6%. So

Linus (205:19)

yeah, if you look at the six month trend, things are not looking good.

Dan (205:22)

They're up 5% from last year.

Luke (205:24)

Yep.

Linus (205:26)

Nice.

Dan (205:26)

Nothing matters.

Linus (205:27)

Yeah. So. So it following the AI bubble and then maybe we're, maybe we're on the way down, hopefully.

Luke (205:33)

That'd be awesome.

Linus (205:34)

I saw a new animal used to describe the stock market. Apparently we're in a kangaroo market.

Dan (205:40)

Boing.

Linus (205:41)

So forget about bears and bulls. It's just up and down.

Dan (205:45)

They're also the ones that punch you in the face.

Luke (205:47)

Yeah, that still seems right.

Linus (205:49)

Yep.

Dan (205:50)

Absolutely. Tracks.

Luke (205:51)

Yeah.

Dan (205:52)

What's up boys? Luke, how's your fitness journey going? Would like to know if you tweaked your diet at all lately. Looking good, my boy.

Luke (206:02)

The last comment's a little surprising. It's not going well. I basically for.

Linus (206:07)

Well, it's all relative, Luke. I mean compared to where you started, I think you're still looking pretty good.

Luke (206:13)

Yeah, that's probably.

Linus (206:13)

I can see where they're coming from. Yeah, I think you see every little imperfection.

Luke (206:17)

But yeah, I'm very frustrated right now basically. So. Okay, so I was traveling a bunch and was kind of out of the gym because I was still working out when I could. Like I got a workout in, in Hong Kong. Like I was, I was trying to make things happen, I was keeping it going. And then I came back and I had this crazy Renault that lasted for like over six months. So I was inconsistent about my workouts. Then a crazy Renault that went on for a long time where I couldn't really use my kitchen. So I had like non prepared meals and no gym time for over six months and that really. What are we hearing right now?

Linus (207:03)

Yvonne's back in the room.

Luke (207:04)

Okay. I thought that was local. Sorry. No, you're good. I thought that was local.

Linus (207:09)

Yep.

Luke (207:10)

So I lost a lot of traction there. And the big problem that I'm having realistically right now is that old injuries that I had like had under control, they weren't dealt with, they weren't fixed, but I had them under control. Are now, again, not in a state that I would consider under control. So, like, I have to go up a certain amount of quite a few stairs to take the stairs in my building. And I try to take the stairs exclusively every time. And every once in a while, that'll kind of throw my knee out a little bit. And it's just like, damn, man. Like, I think a week or two ago, I literally went up one flight of stairs and my knee was like, nope. And it's just like, oh, like this. This was something that I had completely solved, like, not that long ago. And then just through I. And I had talked about this on WAN show. I had talked about this with lots of people where I was like, no, I just have to do this forever. And I didn't really think, like, I. I knew I was doing stuff, you know, I'd work around the house, I was traveling, whatever. Like, I. I didn't. It wasn't like, laziness that was keeping me out of the gym, but I didn't go to the gym for a while and my diet went to crap. And that combination, I think, just brought everything kind of back. So I have to go through this, like, reparative phase again, which I've been working on. I do these like. Like. I don't know what you want to call them. These, like, really weird lunges where you get your knee way over your toe. And dude, there's a YouTuber guy, knees over toes guy. Been following some of his stuff. That's how I originally fixed my knees. Was following some of his stuff. My shoulder. I don't have anything particular. It's just these things that I call side poles. I don't know what they're actually called. And hanging, I do both of those and those help. But, like, my hangs have gotten a lot worse because I wasn't doing them. And, yeah, backwards running. Like, there's lots of different things that I do, but they're just in a terrible state right now. So I can't. Like, It's just very frustrating. And I would way rather. I know there's like the whole. You can't work out a. You can't work off a bad diet. Yeah. But you can really support a much worse diet by doing a lot of activity. And I would way rather. It's not even necessarily that I want to eat junk all the time. I just hate eating very little. I hate that scenario. I'd rather just be active and then eat, like, a pretty decent amount. Rotator cuff exercises. Yeah. So my. My things are both of My knees, but mostly my right knee. But it's both my right shoulder cuff and my lower back on the right hand side. I got speared there in hockey when I was younger. The back is kind of the least problematic one. But when it's a problem, I out. It's like when it, when it kind of flares up. I'll be done for like a month. But it's, it's, it's very frustrating. I, I knew when I was going to go back into the gym, my lifts were going to be way lower and that was going to be annoying. I didn't expect the like actually you can't go. You have to go for walks all the time for a while and do these lunch things and do this like really boring stuff. That has been no like measurable improvement. I like number go up. I don't like, oh, maybe I feel better today. I can't really tell. That's not very fun and it's difficult to be motivating. But I just have to do it because I have to get back on track. So I'm planning, if I remember correctly, it's like three more weeks. I'm going to try to go into the gym and try some stuff and I'll start with pretty low weights and be pretty chill and just try to see how things feel. And I'll probably only do like, I don't know, once or twice a week at the beginning and just try to kind of ease back into it. But I gotta be careful cause I'm dealing with some.

Linus (211:01)

Come with us on Monday.

Luke (211:04)

Yeah, I have very particular things that I do.

Linus (211:09)

That's fine. We're not necessarily gonna be doing the same stuff. I'm just saying if you want, if you want buddies, me and Jquan are there. I'm Mondays.

Luke (211:15)

Yeah, that's not a bad idea. Usually I do. At the end there, I was on a weirdo.

Linus (211:22)

You're too cool for us.

Luke (211:23)

No, Monday is usually a day that I do. Monday is usually legs for me. I like starting the week off with legs because legs takes the most energy and it is generally like the least. Like men don't tend to like doing legs as much. So I just start with that one and then. Yeah, so I, I used to do Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and then I was shifted to. I think it was like Monday, Thursday, Saturday for a bit there. But I'll move forward.

Linus (211:50)

A lot of granularity in the detail here.

Luke (211:52)

Yeah, we're, we're losing it. But anyways, it's a little off track, but I'm trying to get back on the tracks and I'm like actually peak frustrated right now. But we'll, we'll figure it out Now.

Linus (212:04)

Fanboy says, have you considered GLP1? But I think I can probably answer this for you. Luke's goal is not to have side effects and take a drug and do it the easy way. His goal is to be physically fit, which does not necessarily mean the shape. It means like he wants his strength back.

Luke (212:26)

Yeah, I don't actually care that much.

Linus (212:28)

Is a path to that.

Luke (212:29)

I don't actually care that much about the, the shape. Obviously I do a little bit, but like the, the goal is that I want to feel capable. I want to be able to run, I want to be able to jump, I want to be able to sprint, I want to be able to lift. I want to feel capable and feel healthy. That's my by far primary goal.

Linus (212:48)

Rivet says GLP1 is not the easy way. So what would be the easy way for weight loss then? Like, are you. I. I'm. I'm. I'm having a hard time understanding what you mean.

Luke (213:00)

First time I've ever heard that foreign.

Linus (213:04)

It's a head start. Right? Which is. Well, yeah. Ruby says I've been on it for nearly two years and been working my butt off combined with it. Well, right.

Luke (213:14)

But like, I mean, that's the exact same relative. That's the exact same and actually accurate as far as my understanding goes. Argument of steroids. Like, you don't just become Mr. Olympia by just taking steroids. A lot of they will make you. They will give you muscle mass just kind of automatically. But also a big part of is it reduces your recovery time so you can work out more. You have to, you have to try harder. It unlocks trying harder.

Dan (213:40)

Yeah.

Linus (213:42)

Yeah.

Luke (213:43)

Sorry, man. You're over 30. That feels good. Thing has sailed. No, I actually completely disagree there. There was like before this happened, before the house Reno. I was mostly feeling pretty good. I felt strong. Yeah, things are doing okay. Obviously there's gonna be lows, but like, there's relative. I'm speaking relatively and relatively right now. It feels terrible, but it also feels a little bit better than it did last week. So like, okay, we'll keep going.

Linus (214:14)

All right. Dan hit me.

Dan (214:15)

Hello, MentalGen. The Linux challenges are always interesting to me. I've been using a Fairphone 6 with EOS and loving it. When is the EOS or Lineage OS challenge also? Happy day. Before PI day.

Linus (214:30)

I would actually love to look at Lineage OS again. I'm going to put it on the list. It's been on the list for a long time, but I'm going to surface that in my inbox. LineageOS is such a cool idea to me in theory as a way to squeeze way more life out of older Android devices. And I, I'd love to see now that we have five year old phones that are totally still good enough hardware wise to daily, but maybe aren't getting software support anymore. I'd. I'd love to take a crack at it again.

Dan (215:09)

Yeah, I used to run it. It's awesome. Last one I got for you here.

Linus (215:15)

Hold on.

Luke (215:15)

Pointed question. Oh, you said it's awesome and used to. Why do you stop?

Dan (215:20)

It wasn't available on my more recent phones.

Linus (215:23)

Got them.

Dan (215:23)

It's only available on some very specific models.

Luke (215:26)

Seems like a fair enough answer.

Dan (215:28)

I'm so sorry. She's not an excise. Yeah, a lot of these are specific phones and I don't generally go for the generics but I do always try and buy the ones that have unlocked bootloaders for the future in case someone makes one in 10 years so that they can keep working. Last one. Hey. DLL just hit my 30s, career's peaking and my GF and I keep getting the when's the wedding questions. Any advice for this stage of life? Anything you wish you knew in your early 30s?

Luke (216:01)

Sleep. I've. I've wrecked my, I've wrecked myself honestly,

Dan (216:05)

by apparently you're supposed to work out with steroids and just hearing this now. I gotta, I gotta talk to my dealer.

Luke (216:12)

Don't work out with steroids. Just come work out. Sleep. I think that's the main piece of advice that I needed and I still need, I still need that advice.

Linus (216:24)

I'm not doing very good at this.

Dan (216:26)

Yeah, I got nothing for you.

Linus (216:29)

I don't know if any of my advice is going to be that applicable. I did my, I did my early 30s and my early to mid-20s just like went from. Well, I'm in high school now. I'm supposed to go to university. Well, I'm in university now. I'm supposed to get a career. Well, I'm in a career now. I'm supposed to get married. Well, I'm married now. I'm supposed to have a kid now I have a kid. Okay, let's, let's complete the set. Let's get the family going. Oh, I'm gonna start a business. I was just like, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And there's a lot of arguments to be made that, that is not the right, forever right choice for everyone.

Luke (217:06)

So, yeah.

Dan (217:09)

Yeah.

Linus (217:10)

You know, definitely, you know, for me, partnering up was critical to my success. But, you know, I fully recognize that, you know, if. If. If the wedding is not, you know, right or the timing is not right for you, then that's, you know, that's your choice. You got to be. You got to do things on your own terms. But also, if your plan is to get married and have kids, you also got to understand that time is not infinite. I remember for our second kid, I've told this story before, but Yvonne was. What were you, Vaughn, 26, when. When you talked to Dr. Tam about our middle child. Yeah, and she goes, man, it's just my sciatica pain is worse, and my fatigue is worse, and, like, my sleep is worse, and everything is. Everything is harder this time. And he just kind of has his clipboard out, and he wasn't even looking at it. Didn't even bother to turn around. He goes, well, you're no spring chicken. It's like, bro, like, what are you talking about? We have this perception today that, like, you just, like, have kids in your late 30s or maybe even, like, in your 40s, and that's, like, totally fine. But from, like, a biological standpoint, that's not how our bodies work. Peak. Peak. Childbearing years are way before that. So if your plan is to do that, then the people who are asking, hey, like, are you getting on with it? May just have your, you know, your health and your best interest in mind. But I will say that having kids young, there were a lot of things that we really didn't feel ready for. Ace of Tunes says, my mom had me at 32, and the last was at 36. She was fine. And that's nice, but that doesn't change anything that I said, so. Cool.

Luke (218:53)

Sick. Next one.

Linus (218:55)

Yep.

Dan (218:55)

I don't have any more.

Linus (218:59)

That's it. That's all. So we'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.

Luke (219:05)

Bye. Provisor.

Dan (219:08)

Such a good name.

Luke (219:21)

Linus's laptop is just ripping.

Linus (219:25)

Nothing running.