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Luke Lafreniere
This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome?
Dan
That's new.
Linus Sebastian
It can help you with practically anything
Luke Lafreniere
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Linus Sebastian
you've had open for weeks.
Luke Lafreniere
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Linus Sebastian
What is up everybody and welcome to the WAN Show. We have a great show lined up for you guys this week. The big launch was of course, the Steam Machine, the Gabe Cube, the overpriced gaming console. Call it whatever you want already, having spent only four additional days with it since we published our review. I love it probably three times more than I did when I first evaluated it, and I'm going to talk about why. And it has nothing to do with gaming. I'm going somewhere with this.
Luke Lafreniere
Can that be topic one?
Linus Sebastian
There will also be cake. In other news.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh wait, it's actually the okay, that's cool.
Linus Sebastian
In other news, Microsoft's June update fixed 208 security flaws while also introducing a cascade of new bugs across all Windows versions. And that ties into why I am loving the Steam Machine so very, very much right now. What else we got this week? Mr. Lafreniere?
Luke Lafreniere
China's Ministry of State Security accuses Spy Turt and Spy Fish of stealing sensitive marine data. But if you want a more serious topic, his happiness around the Steam Machine might be able to come to you without buying it. Because soon you can too. You too can run the Steam. Oh my goodness. You too can run steamos on your own hardware.
Linus Sebastian
The show is brought to you today by amd, Red Tiger and shokz, along with our rap partner dbrand, our laptop partner Razer, and our chair partner, who is also Razer. Let's jump right into our headline topic. Let's do the quick sort of rundown of the what I want to I'm
Luke Lafreniere
so curious about your Steam Machine comments.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, that's the headline topic. You're literally slowing down me talking about the headline topic. You're behaving like someone who, instead of getting into the headline topic, is gonna go and draw everyone's attention to the fact that it's Lime Day with the freshest deals of the year. You can shop Lime Day. Now. There's combo deals like loaded up backpack bundles. We've got commuter bundles with gift cards. We've got the screwdriver plus stubby screwdriver bundle for 99 USD, we've got deals on cable management, Arches, our new map of Siberia, desk pad, other desk pads. All you gotta do is head over to lttstore.com it's a great week to send a comm, a checkout message. We've got end of season clearance on a bunch of apparel. Lttstore.com collection lime day. Head over there and send a checkout message. It'll go to producer Dan. Yeah, we're doing it that early. And he will curate it or he'll put it up on screen or he'll respond to it himself, usually in his fantastic, snarky way. Anyway, what I actually want to talk about right now is the Steam Machine. Let's get through kind of the bones of what happened this week. For anyone who lives under a freaking block of compute black cubic rock. That's exactly where I was going with that. Nice. We've got the wavelength. We got the wavelength on today.
Luke Lafreniere
I'm not sick anymore.
Linus Sebastian
And then I want to talk about why I love the Steam Machine so much more today than I did even just a few days ago. All right, Valve Engineer. Okay. This week Valve launched the Steam machine. It's got six AMD cores, it's got, you know, about a 7600ish class GPU, it's got 16 gigs of RAM, an eight gig GPU, it's got 512 gigs or two terabytes of storage. And it landed at a whopping 1050 US dollars starting price, which took a lot of wind out of the Internet excitement's sails because a modestly specced but very small, compact, quiet gaming machine is fine as long as it doesn't cost more than US$1,000. And unfortunately it did. Valve engineer Yazan Aldehyat told Eurogamer that the Steam Machine price is significantly more than they planned. And we all know what that because of. He added that while Valve was aware of component market trends, he didn't think anybody really expected or predicted the extent to which they were going to go up and are still going up. In a Steam Machine FAQ from before the PC console hybrids price announcement, Valve said the limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping and pricing schedule. So we've known for a while that they were going to have to adapt the price. Valve has not disclosed exactly what the price was expected to be, but what they did say is that and this came from Lawrence Yang, what they did say was that the increases to the Steam deck were a good point of reference for the price that Valve would have been considering for this before the price increases. So you know what's kind of funny about this is that if not for the industry going completely wackadoodle crazy on RAM and storage pricing, I wouldn't have had to eat this. I would have nailed it.
Luke Lafreniere
Did you qualify it at all?
Linus Sebastian
I did. So what I said was $700.
Luke Lafreniere
I haven't watched it back.
Linus Sebastian
$6.99.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
But it could be another hundred if things go crazy. And I think what people are estimating based on the Steam Deck price increases is that it would have been around 750. So I would have been like, I was right in there. I was bookending what would have been the price of the Steam Machine. But what I said in the video was, if I'm off by more than $100, my team and I will eat cake.
Luke Lafreniere
I was not. I don't think I was in that. Because I think you were saying that with. Weren't you hosting that video with David?
Linus Sebastian
David's on vacation.
Luke Lafreniere
Are we. Are we gonna, like, rush the set with lmg? This is so much cake.
Linus Sebastian
I mean, I didn't say we'd eat the whole cake.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
Dan
You can.
Linus Sebastian
You can have just a small piece. Dan, would you like a piece?
Luke Lafreniere
I don't know what the quote was. I haven't watched.
Dan
I. I have the quote here, actually. Let's see here.
Luke Lafreniere
Where's the white candle in the middle?
Dan
If the Steam machine costs more than $700, I will eat a whole portal cake on wanna.
Linus Sebastian
That is not the quote, is it? Is it really?
Dan
Let me just take.
Luke Lafreniere
Can you play. Can you play it?
Dan
Screenshot so it'll freeze for his screenshot.
Luke Lafreniere
That doesn't.
Dan
That's an Instagram post thing. I don't know. Sammy.
Linus Sebastian
Screenshot.
Dan
Oh.
Linus Sebastian
Sammy is not a credible source of information.
Luke Lafreniere
What did he say in the video?
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, there's no way I said that in the video.
Luke Lafreniere
What did he say?
Dan
I will eat an entire Steam machine on camera.
Linus Sebastian
We all know that's not it.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, man.
Linus Sebastian
What I will do, though, is I will eat an entire dang segment of Steam. Of Steam. Of portal cake.
Luke Lafreniere
So this is a real type of like, portal cake is a type of cake, right? What is this? Black Forest cake?
Linus Sebastian
Dan, would you like a piece?
Dan
Yeah, let me just throw this code up first.
Luke Lafreniere
We got to get the clip. You're putting the clip up, right? We're just listening to the clip.
Dan
I don't know if I got sent the clip classics.
Luke Lafreniere
It was a part does full plane chat have a timestamp for it?
Linus Sebastian
Luke, how big of a piece would you like?
Luke Lafreniere
Not, not, not big.
Dan
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
Small. Okay, that works.
Linus Sebastian
Here's a baby.
Luke Lafreniere
I'll take that. I'll eat that. That I will accept.
Linus Sebastian
Baby dainty lady size piece.
Luke Lafreniere
Thank you.
Linus Sebastian
You're welcome.
Dan
Thank you.
Luke Lafreniere
I have. I am a dainty lady.
Linus Sebastian
Well, I. Yeah, I brutalized it. So. So your piece looks like that.
Luke Lafreniere
My cake.
Linus Sebastian
Dan's cake on the other hand is. Is full truth.
Dan
I will come grab it in a second.
Linus Sebastian
I gotcha. I got you.
Dan
Dan.
Linus Sebastian
I'll just.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh my God, you're so clunky with it. I understand. It'll survive. But it feels disrespectful or something.
Dan
I don't know.
Luke Lafreniere
It bothers me. Are you eating too, Sammy? Sammy wants cake.
Linus Sebastian
All right, Sammy, you can cut your own cake because I got to kind of get on with the show a little bit. Get on in here.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. I think. Yeah, of course. No key.
Dan
Found it.
Luke Lafreniere
That makes sense. Did you get that LinkedIn?
Dan
Okay. Yeah, just waiting for the ads.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, brilliant. All right. So in the meantime.
Luke Lafreniere
Well, we know we at least have to eat some amount of cake.
Dan
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
So we could just kick off with that while he gets his.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, we're going to start eating cake.
Luke Lafreniere
But what else is going on here?
Linus Sebastian
I still don't. Okay. Right. I know. I wanted to talk about pricing a little bit more.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Even though I have to eat portal cake.
Luke Lafreniere
Do you want me to keep reading the topic unlike.
Linus Sebastian
No, no, it's okay. Unlike some folks, I'm actually not upset with Valve about the pricing because I think realistically what Valve is doing is they're just, they're. They're coming into this product launch without any pre negotiated supply. So while it seems like they're out ahead of the schedule of price increases of someone like a Sony or someone like a Microsoft who by way just increased their pricing again this week. So that's US$100 additional for 512 gig models. 150 on 1 TB models and they are sunsetting the 2 TB model outright.
Luke Lafreniere
Honestly, I could see that. That makes sense.
Linus Sebastian
I could see that. But what all of that tells us is that Microsoft is able to put off these price increases because they've already been in mass production for years on this thing.
Luke Lafreniere
So they've bought a year ahead of time or something.
Linus Sebastian
Xbox quarter or Xboxes that are going to be an increase. So they could either launch it at 979 knowing that they were going to have to go up to 1050 or you know, maybe even beyond later or they can make their best guess as to where we're going and then try to blend it as best they can. And I think that they were put in a really difficult position. Launching a product right now is kind of a nightmare.
Luke Lafreniere
Brutal. Yeah. Honestly, launching almost any kind of product is a nightmare right now with the Hormuz and everything else going on. And then you also add on top of it anything that includes any compute components, especially ram. It's just like, oh my God, our
Linus Sebastian
battery bank might be impacted.
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
I'm not surprised because we're seeing like, I think it was like eight month lead times on some of the ICs.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Just because all the fab time is just for AI stuff.
Luke Lafreniere
Well, aren't even like just plastics going up? Like, like almost everything is going up by a little bit because transport costs are going up, everything's going up, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Linus Sebastian
But that doesn't mean that there's nothing that I can't blame Valve about.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh no.
Dan
Dan.
Linus Sebastian
After some backlash about Steam machine performance, Valve has quietly changed the Page's CPU and GPU description from 4K gaming at 60fps to up to 4K gaming, which I think is a lot more reasonable. And honestly, Valve should have known to do.
Luke Lafreniere
They should have known to do that right out of the gate after the deck. Maybe if you make that mistake with the deck.
Dan
Sure.
Luke Lafreniere
But games are just too varied. I'm 100% certain it will play some game at 4k 60.
Linus Sebastian
Sure. Quite a few don't starve together at 4k.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
No. 4k 120. Let's go.
Luke Lafreniere
Barrow. 2020.
Linus Sebastian
Now that's a deep cut.
Dan
That'll.
Luke Lafreniere
That'll do it. But yeah, not everything.
Linus Sebastian
Not everything. And especially, and, and not even like, you know, anything that's really, really recent. Not at reasonable settings. It's just, it's not feasible. Like yes, I could render at an internal resolution of 320p and I could upscale it and rub Vaseline all over my screen. But like, come on, let's be, let's be real.
Luke Lafreniere
And that's maybe fine. It's just not what was technically claimed at the beginning.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Do we have that clip ready? Should we jump to that?
Dan
The YouTube clip? Yeah, yeah, it's got it linked there at the top of the top.
Luke Lafreniere
You want me to play it for if you.
Dan
Luke has no audio. Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Required.
Linus Sebastian
All right.
Luke Lafreniere
I'm not apparently.
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
Don't worry about that. Is this too. Unskippable ads. Oh, my goodness. YouTube without premium is rough, man.
Linus Sebastian
We definitely have some thoughts on the current state of YouTube. Later on in the show, by more than US$60, I will eat an entire portal cake on the Wan Show. What is a portal cake? You don't remember?
Luke Lafreniere
The cake is a lie.
Linus Sebastian
An entire cake.
Luke Lafreniere
It's true this time.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, well, because I counted on you guys to help with the work, you are gonna help me eat it.
Dan
Gladly.
Linus Sebastian
We win as a team and we die as a team here, but I don't think that's gonna happen.
Dan
Someone was taken out of context.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, so I definitely said that.
Luke Lafreniere
You for sure said a whole cake.
Linus Sebastian
We as a team, would eat it.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Okay.
Linus Sebastian
Me, Dan, who else is still in the office? Because we're gonna need some more help eating this cake.
Dan
Half hour.
Linus Sebastian
Can you please. Can you please put out a cake?
Dan
Everyone that I can?
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, that would be great.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. Anyways, the cake will be eaten. We will. We will finish consuming the entire cake.
Linus Sebastian
All right. And while we work on finding some people to help us consume cake, I would like to talk about why the Steam machine is.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Why are you more positive on it more?
Linus Sebastian
I'm. I'm. I am.
Luke Lafreniere
Do we have a cake?
Linus Sebastian
Get on in here, Nicole.
Luke Lafreniere
You gotta cut it yourself. Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
You gotta cut a piece and then grab. Grab some cake.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
This is the cake station.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
All right. That was my nickname in high school, by the way.
Luke Lafreniere
The cake station.
Linus Sebastian
Wasn't. Wasn't at all.
Luke Lafreniere
It is now.
Linus Sebastian
All right, so in the hubbub of hitting the review embargo for the Steam machine.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Like, I was like, it landed in
Luke Lafreniere
office and there's so much price disappointment and we basically.
Linus Sebastian
We dropped everything.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
We had like an all writer hands meeting.
Luke Lafreniere
Makes sense.
Linus Sebastian
We talked through. Okay, what's our content roadma for this? Who's working on this? Who's working on that? Because we had. We had something along the lines of like eight days to execute all the shorts and all the long form videos that we wanted to get done, including editing, which, by the way, massive shout out to Nicole and her team for getting all that done. Like, yeah, our. Our pipeline is not like written where once it's written, it's written, it's done. No, from there, you know Glenn, who also showed up for cake? Glenn and his team, they have to shoot. It goes to the editors, it goes back to the writing team, and then to me for review and then we finally post it. There's a lot of steps, right? And so in all of the like running around from this set to that set and reviewing this script and experiencing it hands on here, I didn't really get a chance to like take a deep breath and just use it. You know, Labs is giving me FPS numbers and I'm like, okay, yeah, yeah, that, that looks about right. And yes, I agree, the experience, it doesn't live up to 4K60, but I didn't really get to like just experience it. And that changed on. I guess it was, I guess it was Tuesday after the review was up and then we had, you know, any lingering things we still needed to quickly test that were done and it was finally handed to me and I went, you know what? I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to use only the Steam machine as my computer for like some period, a week, two weeks, a month. I'm not sure I'm going to start and I'm going to see how it goes and then we can always change the title of the video according to how long I end up using it.
Luke Lafreniere
So you're doing a form of Linux? I switched kind of, but it didn't blow up immediately.
Linus Sebastian
But it's not Linux. And let me explain that.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
What I thought Valve was making with the Steam machine was a competitor to the PlayStation 5. In fact, the vast majority of what Valve communicates that they think that they are making is a competitor to the PlayStation 5.
Luke Lafreniere
Sure.
Linus Sebastian
But whether it was on purpose or by accident, what Valve created instead was the best competitor that I've ever seen to the Mac mini. Think about it for a second. Who else has done it with the semi custom silicon from amd, Their own operating system, their own hardware design? Valve is as a PC maker, the most integrated PC manufacturer outside of Apple. They control the whole ecosystem, I guess
Luke Lafreniere
because the custom silicon, because there's, there's a number of, of brands, System 76 included, that sell computers that have their own, their own operating system on it. But the custom silicon, sure.
Linus Sebastian
The moment you boot up a Steam machine, you are having the Valve curated experience in a way that is simply not true of any other flavor of Linux or any other Windows desktop. They have one person in mind in the creation of this machine and that is the customer. And only Apple does it like that. I booted it up and I went, okay, yeah, forget big picture because I'm not actually gaming right now, I'm using it for work.
Luke Lafreniere
Is that why you're hauling it around with you? Yeah, you're like almost like laptopping not almost. Yeah. So you're like hotel desking it everywhere you go.
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
And. And from the moment I fired it up and said, goodbye, Steam Big picture mode and started using it as a desktop, I went, this is what I've been waiting for the whole time.
Luke Lafreniere
What? That's so interesting to me. Okay, so why, why?
Linus Sebastian
Okay, okay. This is going to sound a little bit crazy. Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
To be clear, I didn't own. I've never owned a Steam Deck.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
I've never actually really used steamos. How is it any different?
Linus Sebastian
It's the little things.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
Okay. I fired up my settings. Okay. So first of all, I forget which desktop environment they're using. SteamOS DT, which one are they using?
Luke Lafreniere
Wouldn't the Microsoft Surface also come out under that category? Did the Surface have custom silicon?
Dan
You know what?
Linus Sebastian
No. It had exclusive silicon for a while in partnership with Qualcomm, but I can't think of a time when it had custom silicon. So. Sorry. It uses KDE plasma. So you jump right into the desktop and it's immediate, very familiar to like a Windows user. You've got your, you've got your, your not start menu.
Luke Lafreniere
It's in the cup.
Linus Sebastian
You've got your not start menu down in the bottom left. You've got your system tray in the bottom right. You've got everything works kind of the way that you'd expect except just, you know, better. So jumping into my, my display settings, for instance.
Luke Lafreniere
Sure.
Linus Sebastian
On Windows, your display settings are a mess. They're just. Yeah, I will. The fact that this still looks like this in the year of our Lord 2026 is insane.
Luke Lafreniere
Hey, want to do anything with it? Click Advanced.
Linus Sebastian
Here's a gigantic thing. Okay, Here is some realistically kind of advanced settings to do with multiple display management, which I suspect that the majority of computers remember, a lot of them laptops don't even have this. So we don't even care about this a lot of the time. Okay, we got our, we got our brightness, nightlight, color profile, hdr. I have to go all the way down here to find resolution and scale. Scale is something I'm very likely to be touching the first time I open this. I have to click advanced to get to refresh rate. To get to refresh rate.
Luke Lafreniere
Are you in the most commonly incorrectly set up display setting?
Linus Sebastian
Are you insane that I have to go into a sub menu to access that?
Luke Lafreniere
I'm surprised Windows doesn't at least notify you at this point that it's set low.
Linus Sebastian
It's wild. It's Kind of like how when you look at the. At, like the Best Buy product tag for a laptop, GPU is still not on there. On some of them it is, but on a lot of them, it's not on there. It's like, my God. That's the first thing I want to know, right? They've got. It's crazy. And the SSD will still be under hdd, you know, hdd colon. What kind of ssd? Like, it's wild. I just had to shop. It's fine. I just had to shop for a laptop recently and I was, like, blown away that GPU is still not on a lot of them. So KDE plasma, just everything is on one screen. I don't even have to scroll. It's all above the fold. I can change my. I can rotate 90 degrees or 180 degrees. I can do everything I need to do. It's very.
Luke Lafreniere
Plasma's really good. There's an upgrade.
Linus Sebastian
Plasma is great.
Luke Lafreniere
That I haven't installed yet. I'll probably do it tomorrow. That I'm actually pretty excited about. It's fun. That's one of the really big things is whenever my. My distro updates, I get really excited. Whenever Windows updates, I'm like, oh. And we'll. Honestly, we'll talk about that more in the show. But, like, I don't think that's just me being hypocritical. It feels real.
Linus Sebastian
And again, this is another KDE thing. So they use the KDE Discover Software center for their. For their, like, App Store. Unlike previous Linux experiences that I've had, every app that I've searched for has come up with meaningful options that I might actually want that are just curated for me. Everything about the SteamOS experience so far, it boots up so fast. It sleeps and wakes without flawless. It shuts down so fast, which matters to me a lot more than it would to most people because like you said, I'm hoteling this thing around with me. I'm like, carrying it around in my
Luke Lafreniere
backpack, which is not an average experience, but is a pretty cool one.
Linus Sebastian
But it's working and kind of viable. Totally viable.
Luke Lafreniere
It's not that big.
Linus Sebastian
It is so much more responsive feeling. No unnecessary animation craft. Oh, this one. This one's been driving me nuts.
Luke Lafreniere
Which, if you want the unnecessary animation craft, you could probably add it. Yeah, yeah, it's Linux.
Linus Sebastian
So, like, okay, okay, check this out. This has been driving me insane. Samsung recently pushed an update to one UI that does this. Do you see? Do you see how it does a little wiggle yeah. On the two above and below. The one that I'm dragging.
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, can you guys see this little wiggle?
Luke Lafreniere
Oops, it's gone. It still works. Yeah, I can see it.
Linus Sebastian
You guys see the little wiggle?
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Distracting. Distracting and annoying. I went. Okay, well, that's fine. Realistically, I can just go into my accessibility options and I can turn it off. Here we go. Animations.
Dan
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
Reduce animations. No problem. I'll just do that. Check this out. Now it does this. Oh, it does a wiggle with a stutter.
Luke Lafreniere
That's horrible.
Linus Sebastian
Hold on, I. Oh, I forgot to switch to Linus Cam.
Luke Lafreniere
That's so bad.
Linus Sebastian
Why? Who is asking for this? And more importantly, if I say turn it off, it means turn it the off. What are we even doing here? The Steam machine just feels like a well thought out experience. More than. More than. And I've used KDE before. More than KDE bolted to some other distro does.
Luke Lafreniere
Sorry, I'm not. I'm not laughing because of that. I'm laughing because it's more than Windows, which is just hilarious. I just. It's. Oh, man. It's kind of sad. You gotta find the humor in it.
Linus Sebastian
And so as much as I'm disappointed in the gaming performance of the Steam machine, and as much as I don't love the price, I recognize that Valve didn't really have a choice on the price, that the cost is what the cost is. I mean, Microsoft themselves acknowledged that certain key components of the Xbox have gone up. I think they said 4x in price and probably I probably more since then because that was a little while ago. So there are things about it that are. That would still give me pause to recommend it to someone, especially as like a 4K gaming console. But when it comes to the desktop computer experience, especially now that Apple actually just increased prices this week as well, the Mac MINI is now a hundred dollars more than it used to be. Still a fair ways off the Steam machine, but let them cook. Even Apple's not immune to the supply chain disruptions.
Luke Lafreniere
Also, take some cake.
Dan
Eat the food.
Luke Lafreniere
Tina, take the cake.
Linus Sebastian
Nice.
Dan
Thanks, Vance.
Luke Lafreniere
You don't take the whole.
Linus Sebastian
Well, it's like one slice.
Luke Lafreniere
One. Yeah. Good.
Linus Sebastian
Okay. He's taking it.
Luke Lafreniere
You're gonna eat it.
Dan
Take it.
Linus Sebastian
Please.
Luke Lafreniere
Grab a fork.
Linus Sebastian
Have a good weekend.
Luke Lafreniere
No, in the. There you go. Thank you. Okay. Cake has been eaten.
Linus Sebastian
As a computer, distributed as a computer, I love it. And if there was a Steam book, I would be talking to you to go to the Infra team and I would be seriously like, hey, LMG on SteamOS, is there any reason, other than maybe editors, is there any reason that the company could just be running steamos at this point?
Luke Lafreniere
To be completely honest, yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Other than editors, is there any reason that we couldn't just be running Steam OS? I've been very bullish on SteamOS since Valve first announced the Steam deck, because to me, what Linux was missing was a clear vision, a focused vision for what the user experience should be, what a smooth user experience could be. And that's what Valve has done with a lot of help, with a ton of help. But I think that, I think the pricing is just so unfortunate because it has distracted from what is otherwise such a complete package here. Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED Talk. I think that's all I have to say about that. I. I wish more people would get a chance to try it, and I hope that I'm not being too optimistic here, but I think that if pricing goes down, Valve will be responsive to that. And I think that maybe in a year, maybe in a year and a half, maybe more, this should be more accessible to more people. Knock on wood.
Luke Lafreniere
Can we skip to a future topic?
Linus Sebastian
Do you want to talk about the whole steamos? Yeah, like thing? Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
So the next topic. Soon you can run Steam os.
Linus Sebastian
Gotta collapse topics when we're done, otherwise
Dan
people are gonna do it for you.
Linus Sebastian
No, you were right. Dan was wrong.
Luke Lafreniere
Soon you can run steamos on your own hardware. Valve has stated that starting with SteamOS's 3.8 release, you can put together your own Steam machine using whatever PC parts you want. The first non beta release of SteamOS 3.8 released just last week, with patch notes including improved compatibility with recent intel and AMD platforms and greatly improve video memory management on discrete GPU platforms, which is, I believe, the key thing that they needed. During an interview with the Verge, Valve's Pierre Lou Grifi
Linus Sebastian
Griffey.
Luke Lafreniere
Sure, close enough. Sorry, stated that Valve has been growing, has a growing team collaborating very closely with Nvidia for driver support in SteamOS as well. He mentioned Nvidia support might not come this year, but emphasize that it's being worked on. While these are great improvements, the installation process is still geared towards a fresh install on a new drive and not installing beside an existing OS on a separate partition. Which makes sense.
Linus Sebastian
So what? So is Windows.
Luke Lafreniere
So is all of them Mac OS? Sure as heck is, yeah. Discussion question if SteamOS was in a state where it would have fully supported your hardware at the beginning of The Linux challenge, would you have chosen it for any of your devices? Are there machines you would install it on now?
Linus Sebastian
No question.
Luke Lafreniere
Yes, really interesting. That's so interesting to me. I don't think I would have changed anything but only because honestly I hadn't used it and the zeitgeist was around cache and I had recently been using Arch and cache is based on Arch. I know steamos is as well. There's a maybe on the desktop but I probably still would have gone cache and laptop. I'm pretty happy with Mint.
Linus Sebastian
I'm a mainstream normie little bitch based on your description.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, it almost sounds like I would rather adopt it on my laptop because you're talking about things just working and like ease of the approach of the. Maybe. Maybe it's an everything install. I don't know.
Linus Sebastian
I think if I could have, I would have just put Steam OS on everything. But the reason I couldn't was because no Nvidia support.
Luke Lafreniere
So are you gonna try now with. Because you have a 7900 xtx in one of your systems, right?
Linus Sebastian
I do.
Luke Lafreniere
It's a discrete AMD card.
Linus Sebastian
My daily driver has a 7900 xtx.
Luke Lafreniere
Are you gonna try?
Linus Sebastian
What I said at the end of the Linux challenge was true. I think I want to try a cut down Windows install first.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
But the good news is I got time because Valve's not ready yet. Their collaboration with Nvidia is just ramping up it seems. And you know, if I have from now until, if I give Microsoft six months, right, and then Valve and Nvidia come through like early next year on proper Nvidia driver support and steamos then I think that that's a perfect timeline that gives Microsoft a shot and then if they. Whether they succeed or fail, I am going to want to give daily driving steamos a fair crack here. And the coolest thing about bringing Nvidia into this partnership is you look at what they're doing with the RTX Spark. Look at the influence that Nvidia has on the gaming industry. If there's anyone that can get Linux taken seriously, it is probably them. It's Nvidia like name another company that has their hooks into almost quite literally every game developer on the planet.
Luke Lafreniere
AJ in Floatplane chat this is like LMG Floatplane. AJ said I'm thinking of adding a GPU to my NAS and running a steamos VM from my tv. That's pretty cool. That is pretty cool actually.
Linus Sebastian
That's a cool. That's.
Luke Lafreniere
Leave it to AJ to come up with a cool.
Dan
Literally the words out of my mouth.
Luke Lafreniere
So he came up with one. I sent it to Linus. I don't want to spoil it, but AJ came up with an idea that is freaking sick. And if we do it, I'm pretty excited.
Linus Sebastian
Commander Queen here says if you need Linux pre installed, you really shouldn't be using Linux. But see that's, that's one of the reasons that I think steamos is so important. Because pre installed Linux here, by the way, is fine as long as somebody is making sure that a bunch of dependencies don't go out of date or someone is making sure that the latest kernel is working fine with the hardware that you're using or whatever it is. That's exactly where steamos comes in is because if you're running that hardware that they expect, you are having that curated experience, you are getting those updates on a reasonable cadence. Someone else is doing the busy work for you. So you can enjoy everything that's good about Linux and just be a user of Linux rather than a tinkerer with Linux. And that is 100% the experience I'm having so far.
Luke Lafreniere
You can enjoy both or you can go for a more, a more like open up to you type, you know, distro or desktop environment or whatever on the Linux side.
Linus Sebastian
But it's all about choice.
Luke Lafreniere
But yeah, that's, that's, I think where the answer kind of lies is like there, there are ways to approach Linux where yeah, you should, I mean you should probably know how to install it. There's also ways to approach Linux where like you don't need to at all. I remember way back in the day I had my mom running Ubuntu.
Linus Sebastian
I think you said it was Ubuntu.
Luke Lafreniere
Probably.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
On like a netbook, just because it was like so cheap, like 3 gigs
Linus Sebastian
of RAM or whatever. So it was the only thing that would run on it.
Luke Lafreniere
And it was, the netbook was so dirt cheap that if you added a Windows license it would like double the cost. So like it just, it didn't make any sense and it was fine because what she needed was a Browser and effectively LibreOffice. Yeah, so like my mom is familiar with Library for whatever reason just because that like series of events that happened and it was completely fine, it wasn't really a problem because Ubuntu was fine, she wouldn't have installed it.
Linus Sebastian
Ado says, linus, you said you shouldn't buy a pre built custom water cooling PC if you can't build one. Yourself due to maintenance. And I agree, sort of the same as Linux, except that I just explained why. It's not the same thing. This is Linux. The fact that I can't install it doesn't mean that I can't run it. Right? It came pre installed on my phone. It's Linux based. That's like. The whole point is that if you are rolling something kind of custom, something kind of cutting edge, then yeah, what you're saying is true. But if you are running a curated Linux in the same way that if you're running a. A custom water cooled PC where the technician checks in on it every few months to make sure all the seals are good, perform maintenance on it. Yeah, exactly. This is like running Linux with a maintenance contract. Somebody else is going to make sure that it's always working. That's why it's different.
Luke Lafreniere
Hey, I really wonder what. Sorry I was thinking I really wonder what the experience is like. I want to spend some time with SteamOS because it is Arch based so it should actually be. You should be capable of doing a lot of damage if you poke around under the hood I think.
Linus Sebastian
I mean it's immutable though so like it should keep you doing too much. Stupid Steam os. Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, interesting. Okay.
Linus Sebastian
It should be pretty hard to break it too badly. I mean I'm pretty good at it.
Dan
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
So yeah, I could probably do it.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't think I would want to run that on my desktop then because I like the tinkering aspect. Aspect so I'm not, I'm not dogging on. It's just. I've enjoyed that part of it. But again that brings me back to like it might even seem weird, but that might make it more. I'm quite happy with Mint. I have no desire to change but if I was starting again from fresh that might make it more interesting for my laptop where I honestly don't want to tinker at all. Yeah but I have been really enjoying running Linux on there because I swear everything you just said, it boots up really fast, it shuts down really fast, it goes to sleep perfectly fine, the updates are lightweight, it doesn't bother me at all. It. There isn't a ton of unnecessary stuff. I can just get into things really quickly like I am. It has finally passed that test of. I kept trying to run Linux for work for years and I kept going back to Windows because it was in my way more than Windows was. And at this point not even because Linux or Windows has gotten so much worse, which it has. Linux has gotten so much better that it's actually just very efficient and I am more productive running a lightweight, easy to use distro on my laptop than any Windows install. This is very interesting to me and I don't think about it like ever. I never think about the fact that I'm like, oh, I'm using Linux on my laptop. I just. It just never comes up.
Linus Sebastian
Meanwhile, on the Windows side of things, on June 9, Microsoft released the largest patch Tuesday update in the entire program's 23 year history, fixing 208 security vulnerabilities, including 38 that were rated critical and three publicly disclosed zero days.
Luke Lafreniere
Very good, very good, very good.
Linus Sebastian
Since then, that same update has created bugs on every supported version of Windows, not just Windows 11. Bugs include recycle Bin filename issues. When the confirmation dialog to permanently delete a file shows up, it displays the file's internal storage identifier, something like $R4F7A2C instead of the human readable file name. Nice. Note that the list view still shows the correct name and the restored files come back unchanged, but the delete prompt is functionally useless for confirming it is exactly that you're about to nuke. Microsoft formally blamed that one on a security hardening change that closed a 23 year old unchecked buffer vulnerability in the Windows Shell's desktop.ini processor. The fix for that isn't expected until July 14, and the bug affects Windows 11 versions 23H2 through 26H1, Windows 10 22H2, and every LTSC and LTS B version. Also Windows Server from 2012 through 2025. There's also BitLocker lockouts on enterprise hardware. Corporate devices are rebooting straight into the BitLocker recovery screen after installing the update. One administrator reported pushing the update to 300 machines overnight, and 42 failed to boot by morning. This is impacting Mostly HP EliteBook 840 G10s, a bunch of other Elitebooks, and some select Dell Precision laptops. The cause of this one is that the update's new Secure boot certificate data changes the Trusted Platform Modules boot environment measurements enough so that BitLocker treats the boot as potentially tampered with and demands the 48 digit recovery key.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, that's so annoying.
Linus Sebastian
On HP Enterprise units that shipped with a 100 megabyte EFI system partition, the certificate refresh doesn't fit and errors out.
Dan
Oh, I remember that one.
Linus Sebastian
Microsoft's AI support tool told affected administrators who didn't have recovery keys that the only available resolution is a Full OS wipe and Windows reinstall, which means losing all locally stored data on the device. Meanwhile, other issues that Microsoft hasn't formally acknowledged yet. OneDrive seems to be broken on corporate PCs. The shortcut and File Explorer sidebar still appears, but it can't be used to access the files. System freezes within 5 minutes of boot on some Windows 11 machines. In some cases, the freeze hits so fast users can't reach settings to uninstall the update. Over 150 Blue Screen of Death reports in 48 hours, including a DPC Watchdog violation boot loop where the system crashes during startup reboots and then crashes again in a cycle. Broken Word and Excel Automation and third party line of business apps, for example commercial dental software like Dentrix and Softdent because of a change in how Windows hands off comm calls to Office. There's no confirmed link between the use of AI for development and this catastrophe of bugs. But users on Reddit and Twitter are pointing to Satya Nadella's disclosure that roughly 30% of Microsoft's code is AI generated as a potential cause for these quality concerns.
Luke Lafreniere
It's hard to not acknowledge that it really isn't.
Linus Sebastian
It
Luke Lafreniere
sounds like you might hit the nail on the head there a little bit.
Linus Sebastian
Way to go users on Reddit. You did it this time.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, maybe.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, we found the culprit.
Luke Lafreniere
Wasn't there a. Hold on, wasn't there a discussion question stuff on there? And now we're, now we're shrinking it too fast. Did any LMG systems get impacted by this? Not as far as I know.
Linus Sebastian
I haven't seen anything. Yeah, that's why, that's why I collapsed it. Overall, I just think it's. I just think it's funny what a refreshing experience I've had this week running steamos while also reading about the absolute hell that people are going through on Windows right now.
Luke Lafreniere
I'm so happy that happened to you because I felt kind of insane this whole time being like it's just working.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, just like Linux.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. I don't know what to tell you. It's just fine.
Linus Sebastian
I don't know. My favorite is the short circuit where I have that, that laptop with Linux pre installed and I just, I like install Steam or something and then I go to reboot it and the entire desktop, the entire OS is corrupted. I mean, and you saw the one with Wade's Dank Pods machine. I did nothing.
Luke Lafreniere
I've since seen the laptop when you told me to watch it and I saw it.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I did nothing. You saw me, I did nothing.
Luke Lafreniere
He had been. Hadn't even running that fine for like months or so.
Linus Sebastian
Wade's machine. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was like his daily driver install. I did nothing to it.
Luke Lafreniere
So I'm just. I'm just happy that it's happened once I. At least we got one. Thank goodness.
Dan
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Magical little box dude.
Linus Sebastian
You know what? Even during Linux Challenge, like the things that worked well didn't always work perfectly well.
Luke Lafreniere
Sure.
Linus Sebastian
Like it's probably down to the MediaTek Wi Fi chipset that I was using in my. In my weird Strix Halo laptop. But I couldn't connect to some access points. Whereas this so far connects to everything because somebody made sure it would, you know. And so it's little things like that that somebody did QA on this hardware running that software.
Dan
Right?
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
And that's something that no Linux distro can do unless they are. I mean, I hate to use system 76 as an example here because technically they do that. But like popos was a dumpster fire when I went to use it. Not for anything to do with hardware software integration.
Luke Lafreniere
I think some of the. I don't know a lot about like distro development and stuff like that, also known as effectively nothing. But I'm assuming they have like beta programs and stuff where.
Dan
Sure.
Linus Sebastian
But there's an literally an infinite number
Luke Lafreniere
of hardware combinations when you're talking about your Strix Halo machine. That's.
Linus Sebastian
That's a super weird hardware. Yeah, exactly.
Luke Lafreniere
The chance that you'd land on that is pretty low.
Linus Sebastian
And that's not. That's. That's not their fault.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
A lot of them are volunteers.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Right. Yeah. So you can't blame them for that.
Luke Lafreniere
No.
Linus Sebastian
Whereas now somebody is being paid to make sure that the software runs on this and that it works right.
Luke Lafreniere
As well as I'm sure.
Linus Sebastian
And the drivers work Right.
Luke Lafreniere
I'm sure there's upstream benefits, which is so exciting. 100% like it's just good for. That's one of the reasons why I was so excited about the Steam machine is just more Linux attention will hopefully mean that things will get more betterer and more like big companies behind it, like Valve. Releasing hardware that runs on this stuff should result in more corporate money coming in and helping upstream benefits. It's based on arch blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Linus Sebastian
Somebody brought up. Somebody brought up Red hat. But yeah, Tyler2003 says red hat, question mark, question mark, question mark. Yes, they're paid, but they don't have hardware. So even. Even then like, it's not there. It's not like a lot of I'm
Luke Lafreniere
sample machines and stuff.
Linus Sebastian
I'm sure they do. Yeah, but it's not quite the same thing.
Luke Lafreniere
It's also not every distro. Like, we're talking. We're talking about one. Exactly. Not super commonly used by exact random consumers.
Linus Sebastian
All right, Dan, that still just says headline topic. Are you okay over there? Are you getting buried under comms?
Dan
No, you were, like, halfway through one, and I didn't want you to think. Think that you had to move on to the next one.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, I see. No, no, no, you're good.
Luke Lafreniere
We use that as a. What we should do next.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, yeah, we need. We need that. Oh, more topics. That can't be right. We've done, like, four. All right, well, now's a good time to do our creator warehouse announcement.
Dan
I put them up, they don't listen. I take them down. They do. I don't know anymore.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, wait.
Dan
He's not even gonna listen to the cards now, is he?
Linus Sebastian
No, no, I'm. I'm doing it.
Dan
I'm doing it.
Linus Sebastian
I'm doing this. Did you want to pull up the story and then I'll talk?
Luke Lafreniere
Well, sure.
Linus Sebastian
Okay. First up this week is the Net Nudes collection, which is not what it sounds like.
Luke Lafreniere
It kind of is.
Linus Sebastian
I mean. Yeah. Networking noodles.
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Well, yeah, but it's not everything that it sounds like. How cute is that design?
Luke Lafreniere
What were you thinking?
Linus Sebastian
You gotta. You gotta zoom in more. You gotta zoom in more. Look, look, look what's in there. Keep going, Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going.
Luke Lafreniere
You don't think they can see it?
Linus Sebastian
I think, yeah, you can see it.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. I can't go anywhere.
Dan
You can't do that with fiber.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, the fiber optic.
Dan
You can't do that.
Linus Sebastian
Don't worry about it.
Dan
That's bad.
Linus Sebastian
The Net Noodles collection is inspired by the cable Bend it like that. By the cable spaghetti behind your desk. And comes in both a T shirt and a hoodie with a ramen takeout. Inspired design. It's printed on our classic lightweight poly blend tee, while the hoodie uses our classic 100% cotton blank. Both feature a mix of regular and puff print details to really bring the design to life. If the Net Nudes design hits a little too close to home, might be time to upgrade your setup. Good timing, too, because our TRUSPEC cable lineup is fully restocked with plenty of lengths and connector options. There they are. And they are flipping moving. So if you want to make sure that you get the length that you need, then now is a really great time to put in an order.
Luke Lafreniere
This is the first time I've seen genuinely all of them in stock.
Linus Sebastian
I know.
Luke Lafreniere
In maybe ever.
Dan
I know.
Luke Lafreniere
I'm not even kidding.
Linus Sebastian
This is our first, like, big mass shipment since we launched.
Dan
Do you know why they're back in stock?
Linus Sebastian
Because we got a big shipment.
Dan
Because you push the big red button on the table.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, wait, really?
Dan
Oh, that was the restock button. We had lost it.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, my God.
Dan
I don't know. I'm just making up lore.
Linus Sebastian
What?
Luke Lafreniere
I thought he was being.
Linus Sebastian
No, I thought you were serious.
Dan
That is what the button was supposed to be for. It's like, aha. Restock. I don't know why there's no batteries.
Luke Lafreniere
No batteries in it.
Dan
I didn't. I didn't set it up. I'm not part of our social shows
Luke Lafreniere
how easily we can be gaslit by
Dan
this.
Linus Sebastian
No, because Dave did tell me something. Something about that. He wanted me to, like, press the button live on cables are back in restock and then the cables will be back in stock. But then the fact that I pressed it early doesn't matter because there's no. It's not connected to anything.
Dan
It's wireless.
Linus Sebastian
Check out the Net Nudes collection at LMG GG Netnoods with a Z. And head to LMG GG truespec to get some of our truespec cables. In other news, I'm going over to your laptop. Lime day is still going strong, but not for much longer. Don't miss out on deals like our loaded backpack bundles, our magnetic cable management bundles. We have up to 30% off select apparel and more. The sale ends Monday at 11am Pacific Time. If you're shopping with us for the first time, by the way, you will also get a $10 coupon towards a future purchase of $50 or more. So head over to ltdstore.com before Lime Day wraps. Up up. We have a daily deal today on the US site, we have old stock of the Precision Pro driver and a bit kit, today only 1999 each. So that's 40 bucks for the combo of the Precision Pro driver and the BIT set. And on the worldwide site, we have the Precision Pro kit, which is the driver, and the bit kit for 39.98. So the same price, but it's. But it's like a combo instead of being individual.
Luke Lafreniere
These aren't clickable.
Dan
Eh?
Linus Sebastian
View more on the right.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, view today's deal.
Dan
There you go.
Linus Sebastian
All right, we got there. Nice. These have been pretty good. Popular. Yeah, there's. There's some pretty. There's some pretty good. Some pretty good lime day deals. There's a big way. This is funny. Gotta love lumpy inventory. So that's explaining why it's a combo here and why they're individual here because we have separate warehouses. So we've had a lot of people ask us over the years, why don't you have a warehouse in this region? And why don't you have one in that region? And it's because we have a lot of SKUs, and we're actually, relatively speaking, a small company. And it creates a lot of logistical challenges when you're trying to perfectly balance your stock across all your different distribution centers and then run your promos according to that so that it's not confusing. So I don't have to stand here for like five minutes and explain why we have, you know, three meter, one and a half meter and one meter cables on this site.
Luke Lafreniere
And question.
Linus Sebastian
Yes.
Luke Lafreniere
If you had, had, say you had 10,000 backpacks in the US and you had two in Canada and you wanted to have way more in Canada because that's your global hub. Because you're like, why are we out there? And we have so many down there. You paid shipping, obviously you have to pay shipping again to try to get it up to the other hub. So that sucks. But that's just built in. There's nothing you can do about that. Luckily it's hopefully not that far, but it's still going to suck.
Linus Sebastian
It's pretty far.
Luke Lafreniere
You paid duties and taxes and tariffs and other fun things to get it into the States.
Linus Sebastian
Sure did.
Luke Lafreniere
Do you now have to pay more?
Linus Sebastian
Sure do.
Luke Lafreniere
To get up to Canada. And you don't get your American ones back, do you?
Linus Sebastian
And if for whatever reason I ever have to send those Canadian ones back to the States, guess what I get again.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, my God. Okay, these are genuine questions.
Linus Sebastian
There's a bit more nuance to it than that.
Luke Lafreniere
Maybe you get some of it back or something.
Linus Sebastian
But in general, it is cost prohibitive to do stock balancing like that unless it is a very large quantity. So such that you're taking advantage of economies of scale for importing. And it's funny that you used backpacks as an example because we actually had pretty much that exact situation with backpack, the commuter one. So we. We vastly overestimated how many we were going to sell in the US we stocked up bigly in the lead up to the implementation of tariffs because it was way cheaper to import them directly into the US Rather than bring them into our main hub and then transfer them. And because the US market softened a fair bit because whatever the headlines say about inflation and consumer sentiment down there, I can tell you from sort of a company that has a lot of discretionary purchases and talks to other people who sell a lot of discretionary items that, that things are soft. US Sales are soft. And, and part of that, all sales
Luke Lafreniere
are soft, aren't they?
Linus Sebastian
Part. Not as, not as much, not as much as us chatting with, chatting with folks at Computex like, like global brands. Europe is still holding pretty strong. The US Is apparently pretty rough right now. Yeah. For, for consumer electronics brands. Shouldn't say consumer electronics. I should say more like it. It Electronics. Computer accessories brands. Computers and computer accessories. Scrappy. TP says flaccid. Yeah, I'd say, I'd say flaccid is a pretty good descriptor. It's still, it's still there, you know, and it'll, it'll, it'll grow. It'll grow again. But at the moment it's a little spongy and tired. It might need, might need some, some excitement, some, some motivation
Dan
for.
Linus Sebastian
To achieve engorgement.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, seems pretty good. Anymore on the story.
Linus Sebastian
I do think that, like free shipping, over 125 bucks.
Luke Lafreniere
Did we mention that?
Linus Sebastian
Oh, did we not?
Dan
I don't know.
Luke Lafreniere
Maybe. You probably did.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, I did not mention that. Anyway, Lime Lime day. Go check it out. Now. Now's as good a time to get a deal as there will be for a while. We had a, we had a long chat, me and the creator, warehouse leadership team, and we have determined that we've been doing too many promos. That's not to say that, you know, we won't still offer deals sometimes, but it was getting to the point where there was like always a deal on. And I think that's. It's not good for, it's not good for maintaining the value of your brand and maintaining the margins that allow you to continue to grow and scale and operate. So you can expect to see us probably do lime day on an ongoing basis. We'll still do Black Friday.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, that makes sense. Basically everybody does. You know, there's some seasonal deals like that is a thing.
Linus Sebastian
But beyond that, I think what you're going to see is you're going to see us be a little bit more responsible with the size of our buy rather than over buy and then, and then promo.
Luke Lafreniere
Well, and there was a lot of weird stuff like the, the tariff frenzy was a very confusing time. And you don't know how much to order, you know how much people are gonna buy. And sometimes you're trying to get that inventory down and stuff. Like things were a little crazy. I think I can. Because I did notice we were doing a lot of stuff too, but, you know, the world was kind of. It still is a little on fire, you know, Maybe people are gonna do some stuff sometimes. It's okay, dude.
Dan
It's.
Linus Sebastian
It's been. I feel like the last few years, like five years, six years. Like, basically since COVID I've just kind of. I found myself kind of going, okay, but like, when is just the business as usual for just a while? Is anyone else feeling that way?
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Linus Sebastian
You know, like, to be clear, I want to be. I want to make this abundantly clear. Like, I'm doing okay. We're doing okay. We're. We're fighting through it. Our team's doing okay. Like, we're okay.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
But like. Yeah, how about just like six months,
Luke Lafreniere
six days, business as usual, you know? Yeah, for sure.
Linus Sebastian
Like, you know, like, I feel.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
You know, like the Canadian dollars at like a five year low right now or something like that. Like, like, it's just, it's like, it's. It's always something, you know.
Luke Lafreniere
I was talking to a buddy from Venezuela, like, I don't know on what would that have been?
Linus Sebastian
14 months low. Excuse me.
Dan
Sorry.
Luke Lafreniere
Anyway, Sunday, yeah, I think, and then I heard the news of all the earthquakes and I was just like, oh my God. He's just telling me, like, things are going really well for him, like, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it's just like, like, oh, yeah, like one of my friends is just missing. Just like, oh my gosh. Ah, what do we, what do we do, man? Yeah, I, you know, condolences.
Dan
But
Luke Lafreniere
it's, it's. Yeah.
Dan
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
A few days even would be pretty good. Six months would be great. I, I just, I'm not saying no to six months.
Linus Sebastian
I. I feel like if I asked for a whole year, that's being greedy. I'm not asking for a year.
Luke Lafreniere
I love that it's greedy.
Linus Sebastian
I don't want to be greedy. I think, I think six months, Six
Luke Lafreniere
months would be so sick.
Linus Sebastian
Would be.
Luke Lafreniere
I feel like a lot of good could happen in six months.
Linus Sebastian
I think I could be fully reset and just ready to go hard again.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
And to be clear, I'm not even asking for time off. I'll come to work. I just Want it to not be a catastrophe. Like I don't want fires to put out. Yeah, how about we just, how about we have some time to work on fire prevention. Fire prevention strategies.
Luke Lafreniere
Speaking of which.
Linus Sebastian
Oh man, you see, Litton's on fire again.
Luke Lafreniere
Really?
Linus Sebastian
Or like I don't know if like since like this is a week ago news, but like, yeah, Lytton, poor Lytton. Not as, not as bad as last time. Apparently out of control six days ago, but three days ago says one home destroyed, which really is not as bad as last time. Apparently lightning two days ago was, was found to be the, the reason for it. Anyway, yeah, good luck.
Luke Lafreniere
Linton rescinded all evacuation alerts and. Good, good to hear.
Linus Sebastian
Hey, one evacuation order that we cannot rescind is that we need to evacuate expecting the WAN show to stream anywhere other than we created a new channel. So we heard you. We did it. Reddit, you do not want the clips and the stream on the same channel. Yeah, so we're giving that a shot. I'm not promising that it'll stay this way forever because if viewership on the WAN show is not sustainable, having this WAN show dedicated channel, we might have to go back to putting it on clips. But for now guys, subscribe. Yeah, ring the bell, get over there. We want to do what you're asking if YouTube algorithmically allows us to make that sustainable. So it's just at WAN show yt? Yeah, go over, subscribe if you want notifications for WAN show and then, and
Luke Lafreniere
then LMG Clips is back basically.
Linus Sebastian
Whoops, that was a typo. Well, it figured.
Luke Lafreniere
It is, it stays. Is it staying LMG Clips?
Linus Sebastian
I think it's staying LMG Clips. What's really funny might have to change that.
Luke Lafreniere
I think they might enjoy some inside baseball. There some, some people on the Internet, I guess noticed that the LMG Clips channel was kind of like flipping. It's like WAN Show. It's our LMG Clips. WAN Show LMG Clips. And then maybe it flipped some more times, I don't know. We were basically equally as confused. So, you know, sometimes things just happen and we got to figure it out.
Linus Sebastian
I think this is just medium sized company stuff.
Luke Lafreniere
100%. I mean 100%.
Linus Sebastian
That's why I like knowing well intentioned
Luke Lafreniere
actions by multiple people all at once are sometimes confusing.
Linus Sebastian
Knowing the people who are working on this, everyone's like doing their best and, and it's, you know, they're competent, smart
Luke Lafreniere
people and they had good reasons and
Linus Sebastian
they had good reasons and, and I think it's just it's one of those things where the longer I run a company, the more I look at the seemingly incomprehensible stuff that corporate entities do and I just kind of go, yeah, that was probably just like Jeff in accounting didn't talk to Joe in procurement and, and Kate, Kate from you know, logistics was on vacation and like you know, Harold got called out early because his kid was sick at school. Like realistically that's probably, there's probably no conspiracy theory. That's probably what happened.
Luke Lafreniere
Humans gonna human now and then sometimes
Linus Sebastian
there is when we're talking about like the long term roadmaps of like you know, consume all the water. No, it isn't a human right. Like obviously that's you know, evil top level decision making. But in terms of just the day to day shenanigans, I'm getting more and more forgiving of it as time goes on because I just see so much happen here again from like good people who are doing their best and this
Luke Lafreniere
wasn't even a big deal to be clear. I was just saying it was, it
Linus Sebastian
was, it's kind of funny.
Luke Lafreniere
Like I saw it happen was just like huh, yeah.
Linus Sebastian
There was something that I had wanted to work. So speaking of YouTube and its algorithm,
Luke Lafreniere
you actually want to insert one more thing about those channels?
Linus Sebastian
Wisdom.
Luke Lafreniere
There was a, there was a. Oh, oh, whoops.
Dan
I mean you can talk about the channel.
Luke Lafreniere
No, we'll do that real quick and then we'll do comps.
Linus Sebastian
No, I have to think first.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay, we'll get this, we'll come back. There was a thought that maybe LMG clips because you don't seem to be able to do with live streams but LMG clips could like collab upload.
Linus Sebastian
Yes.
Luke Lafreniere
Or something to try to help share. So we're probably going to try that
Linus Sebastian
maybe we're definitely gonna try some stuff
Luke Lafreniere
because give us some feedback on how
Linus Sebastian
it goes, moving it to a brand new channel and then just like hoping the almighty algorithm blesses us is a bit of a long shot. Yeah, especially when you look at the way that YouTube prioritizes the limited real estate that they have these days.
Luke Lafreniere
Dan, you want to see some shorts?
Linus Sebastian
Can you fire up?
Luke Lafreniere
You want to see some shorts, kid?
Linus Sebastian
I was having a particularly cranky night. Honestly. Not even for any particular reason. In fact things were going really good or I shouldn't say night. This was. Sorry day. Things were going really good. This was right in the wake of the launch of our Steam Machine review that was a top performer out of our last 10 bangin it did 3 million views, which is great. Our channel and our business would be sustainable forever with that kind of viewership on every video we could, could man, that would be like expansion, growth, all the things, let's go. You know, everything's good. But what I was struck by was how, how big the swing is these days. Like it used to be that you had kind of a performance band for your videos. There was a ceiling and there was a floor. YouTube wasn't going to promote it any more than this, but they also wouldn't promote it any less than this. Nowadays there's no ceiling. You can do mega banger views if you happen to be the hottest thing on the platform at the moment, but there's also no floor. You could, you can be the biggest channel and you can upload something that doesn't resonate and you could like just get no views. Not, not literally, but, but the band is, is much wider. And I was like, I was looking at this video and how this was performing and I was, you know, I was partly just frustrated because I was like, man, it shows that our team still just knows to how, how to crush it. Like we still got our mojo. I just need hardware manufacturers. So like for the love of all that is good, give me something that people are excited about, please. Because when we've got it, man, did we ever execute on this? We were the number one and two for shorts in terms of video performance. We were number one and three, I want to say for long form and then that might have actually changed to 1 and 2 across LTT and short circuit. And as I was going through and I was, and I was poking around and like, hey, you know, how are our videos performing compared to the broader Internet? I searched, as you can see, I searched for steam machine on YouTube and I was greeted by this.
Luke Lafreniere
And to make it look so for you guys, I'm looking at a TV over here that actually shows the graphic that you guys are seeing on it. But when I look like this, it looks like I'm looking away from it. It kind of looks like Linus is looking at it for me to look at it out after to stare at the wall. Anyways,
Linus Sebastian
yeah, so this is my search result for steam machine. 1, 2, 3, 4 shorts.
Luke Lafreniere
His entire screen is just short.
Linus Sebastian
My entire screen above the fold before I actually click and scroll. Dan, can you scroll me another screen here?
Luke Lafreniere
We're trying to be friendlier to audio only listeners.
Linus Sebastian
I get a show more button. Then as soon as I scroll down I get.
Luke Lafreniere
Which is More shorts.
Linus Sebastian
I get two long form videos, I get my own. I get one from Voldemort and then going below that, I get two more shorts, I scroll again, I get two more shorts and then I get a show more.
Luke Lafreniere
But one thing I would like to note as well, if you go up to the long form, there's no show more.
Linus Sebastian
There's no show more.
Luke Lafreniere
So the only show more is that you can do if you. Why it's a screenshot we can't check. But that show more button would just show shorts, is that correct? Yeah, it wouldn't show long form.
Linus Sebastian
Is that crazy or what? Remember when search used to at least give you meaningful headers like, you know, more for this result? Or it would tell you content creators you might enjoy. You know, like it would. It would give you search results that weren't relevant to your search result, but at least it would tell you what the F they were. Whereas now what even is this? There's some short with 400 views instead of more actual relevant Steam Machine content that's actually got any traction here.
Luke Lafreniere
That's a Steam Machine. It is.
Linus Sebastian
But where's the. Where's the hot Steam Machine content? Why is that above the Verges thing?
Luke Lafreniere
Okay, the verges one is necessarily.
Linus Sebastian
I'm okay with that. I'm okay. Okay with that.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't necessarily mind that they try to. Like, I think the YouTube algorithm has always been really good at lifting up.
Linus Sebastian
Where's my long form being lifted up?
Luke Lafreniere
That I agree. That I agree.
Linus Sebastian
Why do I have a short that's got like 400 views instead of a long form video that probably has more depth to it? Like, is there any wonder, like, you know, you can take this down, get. Get it out of my sight. You know, is there any Wonder, you know, YouTube will make comments to me like, oh yeah, you know, for long form content, TV is really where the growth is. Yeah, you think so? Maybe because on mobile you're not even presenting me with the option.
Luke Lafreniere
Is there a way to forcibly load the. No, it's a TV app, it's not a TV website.
Dan
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
Because I would be really interested to see like a side by side of the experience of using desktop versus using a phone versus using tv.
Linus Sebastian
Sure.
Luke Lafreniere
Because desktop still does show long form.
Linus Sebastian
It just also shows a lot of screen now.
Luke Lafreniere
A lot of shorts.
Linus Sebastian
It shows a lot of shorts.
Luke Lafreniere
So here's the top of mind. This is just whatever account I have
Linus Sebastian
for search for Linus Tech tips. I guess that's a search for ltt.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't I don't think. I don't think it's entered.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, okay. I was going to say you got ad. Wind show ad. Yeah, okay. No, those aren't ads. Okay, never mind.
Luke Lafreniere
Not an ad.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's. That's what it looked like. I had like two car things and then I.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay, yeah, I noticed this account gets some, like, some old bangers. Like, I remember this from 11 years ago.
Dan
They all do. They all get old band bangers. I get weird.
Luke Lafreniere
Less on my main account. I got a legendary, legendary poll. I. Let me. Let me look this up. Left ear. Here it is. This. This came up.
Dan
I had that a few months ago.
Luke Lafreniere
This came up on my feet yesterday.
Dan
Absolute classic.
Luke Lafreniere
I was like, what the heck he you talking about? There's no way. And then I brought it up and it's. It's amazing, actually.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, my gosh.
Dan
Can we just play that on the rest of the. Rest of the.
Linus Sebastian
Definitely not.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't think so, but. Oh, my God. I was. I was proud of my algorithm when it pulled me that. I was like, yeah, all right.
Dan
I'm doing.
Luke Lafreniere
I'm doing pretty good.
Linus Sebastian
Solid.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
So, yeah, basically I was. So. I was in a cranky mood about the amount of shorts content that was
Luke Lafreniere
on here, which is very understandable. And I. I still don't run the YouTube app at all.
Linus Sebastian
I sent my rep an email I probably shouldn't have sent. I was basically just like, can y' all at least pretend that you care about long form? No, I said. I said, at least can YouTube at least pretend that long form matters? Brutal screen grab. Not a single long form above the fold. Come on, guys.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I mean, I think it's fair,
Linus Sebastian
but I don't think. Yeah, I don't think I'm out of line here.
Luke Lafreniere
The soul of what YouTube is. And like, I know we've talked about this for a long time and I. I do understand that they're in a tough spot because when you look at, like, you know, we know because we've talked about a WAN show before, that they stopped publishing their, like, new user numbers a long time ago because they effectively, like, saturated the planet, which is hilarious. High five and crazy. Good job.
Dan
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
So now they're not even going for new users. They're going for, like, total attention time. And every business, especially at that scale, is going to have some type of metric that they have to fight for. And there seems to be the time on platform, which is effectively when you distill it down to a Creator basis. It's watch time on videos attention. They're competing for attention. And there's a lot of attention going towards Instagram and TikTok and all these other platforms that are running shorts. But again, I feel like, yeah, sure, it's video, but you're kind of rotting the soul of what YouTube is because a lot of shorts are junk and they aren't all. And a lot of long form is junk. But I think the, the like percentage of long form that is junk is way lower than the percentage of shorts that are junk. Like, not comparable.
Linus Sebastian
Well, part of it is just the way that shorts are presented is it encourages infinite scrolling junk behavior.
Luke Lafreniere
It incur. Yeah, exactly.
Dan
It's.
Luke Lafreniere
And it's like, it's. It's a widely accepted thing that shorts are like basically bad for you and YouTube was not seen that way ever.
Linus Sebastian
And.
Luke Lafreniere
And they're really getting dangerously close to brushing with that type of reputation.
Linus Sebastian
I think so.
Luke Lafreniere
Which is not good, man.
Linus Sebastian
I. I agree. I mean, I told you. I think I told you this, right? Last time I was at Creator Summit, I would tell any executive who would listen, don't lose your soul.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Don't lose the identity of YouTube. Don't be TikTok, don't be Reels, be YouTube. Because you have outlasted everyone. You've outlasted Vine. You outlasted.
Luke Lafreniere
There's a reason why the like, dream job of all the kids was YouTuber, not content creator. Like, there's actually a reason. Come on.
Dan
Oh,
Luke Lafreniere
damn. Am sorry. Just hurts. Hurts, hurts my.
Linus Sebastian
I know everything.
Luke Lafreniere
Speaking of everything hurting, what do you want to do for your 40th comms?
Linus Sebastian
Let's get the comms done first.
Luke Lafreniere
Let's do.
Linus Sebastian
I just threw that in as like a throwaway extra topic and he just grabs.
Luke Lafreniere
I had to take the segue.
Linus Sebastian
Just grabs that.
Dan
Just like all the people on LTT store grabbing some products. Hi, DLL Luke. Did you catch any of the day nine, aka Paul Mango's recent AOE 2 streamer tourney?
Luke Lafreniere
I didn't even know that was happening. I don't really watch streams, like, ever.
Dan
Those were words in sequence.
Linus Sebastian
Nice.
Dan
Linus. How are the recertified drives from server part deals holding up? Good.
Linus Sebastian
Parts deals good. I had a couple that top of the bathtub curve kind of conked out pretty early on, but server parts deals was. They were on it and then everything's been really, really good since then. I don't hit them super hard, the ones at home, but they're spinning and that's all you can ask Russ to do.
Luke Lafreniere
I'll add one thing for that previous one. If he ends up uploading any of it as VODs on his YouTube channel, I will likely watch it. I still check in with Day 9's YouTube channel every once in a while. I don't know why I typed in vod. Here it is. Nice.
Linus Sebastian
It's because you're a boomer.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, probably.
Linus Sebastian
Boom.
Luke Lafreniere
Elimination round versus Atriok. My worlds are colliding.
Dan
Oh, my gosh.
Luke Lafreniere
I guess I'll check that out.
Linus Sebastian
All right.
Dan
I used to watch day nine back in the day.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, dude, episode 100. I had my parents watch it so they could understand who I was. I'm not even kidding. And they liked it.
Dan
Cringe.
Luke Lafreniere
Nope.
Dan
Imagine sharing interest.
Luke Lafreniere
Day nine, episode 100. Well, my parents are based, but day nine daily episode 100 is, like, actually really legendary. If you're like a kid who cares about games and your parents don't necessarily understand, it might work.
Linus Sebastian
Cool.
Dan
And number two. Hellowen 64 dll. Wow, look, we got an upgrade. Great. Having recently met so many fellow creators, if you want to talk about that, did anything interesting come up that you've been chewing on? Oh, man.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
I have actually met or, like, not even necessarily met, but, like, got to catch up with a lot of creators lately. I had the. There was the Mr. Beast collab, which have I even talked about on wan show yet.
Dan
Yet.
Linus Sebastian
I don't think I talked about shooting the. The 50 YouTube Legends Challenge thing.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't remember it. No, no. He says.
Linus Sebastian
No, no, you have not.
Luke Lafreniere
I believe him.
Linus Sebastian
That's crazy. So that was incredible. I got to. I. It was. Even if I hadn't shot a video and even if I hadn't had an opportunity to win a million dollars to share with all of you guys, I think I would have done it anyway. It was so cool to get to connect with some people I knew. You know, I ended up hanging out with Marques a fair bit, but also, you know, meet some people that I never knew, people who were foundational to the growth of the platform in the early days. Like, I got to chat with Fred. Like, yeah, like that Fred.
Luke Lafreniere
That's interesting.
Linus Sebastian
Harley from Epic Meal time was. This is what. This is. What I find is just so, so cool about YouTubers. And I don't even want to, like, lump myself in with them right now, because I'm talking about other people right now. But in general, I found that these are not people who asked for fame, went looking for it. A lot of the Time it really happened accidentally, especially the people who got into it early on.
Luke Lafreniere
A lot of people early on in YouTube were just playing around.
Linus Sebastian
They were just having fun.
Luke Lafreniere
They just wanted to make videos for whatever reason.
Linus Sebastian
And some of them ended up, you know, making a lot of money and, you know, enjoying financial or business success or whatever else. But. But they were. But they were just normal people when they got into it. They. They weren't like. They weren't groomed for it from a very young age to, like, get into show business.
Luke Lafreniere
They didn't think of a meta and uploading videos.
Linus Sebastian
They were just uploading stuff.
Luke Lafreniere
Think of the algorithm or retention charts or anything like that.
Linus Sebastian
And so it was cool. And Harley was such a great example of this because he was just a
Luke Lafreniere
super real dude, was a teacher or something, if I remember correctly. He just kind of go back into the old knowledge.
Linus Sebastian
He was so down to earth and so funny and so honest. He was like. He was basically just like, I'm probably the most. I'm probably the most unk. Washed up, fallen off one here. You're hilarious, man. Look, I'm not. I'm not creeping anybody's numbers. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna deny or. Or I'm not gonna. What? What's that? The opposite of deny. I'm not gonna whatever the thing.
Luke Lafreniere
Admit.
Dan
Sure.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. I'm not gonna say you're right or wrong about that. Confirmed.
Dan
Thank you.
Luke Lafreniere
There we go.
Linus Sebastian
But you're hilarious for saying it. So, yeah, it was great. I got to hang out with, like, Nico from Corridor a little bit, man, you know? Oh, there were. Okay. Okay, this is interesting. This actually ties in really great. Someone in chat. I forgot to put copy their username, unfortunately. But they said it's a bit hypocritical that you upload shorts when you clearly know they're bad for people. I don't think every short has to be bad for people. We actually did a really fun short at the event that I don't think is. I don't think is bad for people at all. It's not. It's not designed to be bad for anyone. We went around and we talked to a bunch of YouTube legends and we asked for their tech hot takes and we got some really interesting ones. And it's worth going and checking out is this. Seriously, the least you could do, YouTube, is at least play the shorts that you're gonna, like, put all up in front of me. Yeah, dude, just the atmosphere at this place was so cool because even the ones that I You know, didn't know. Well, like, I, I don't know if Casey and I had ever actually met. Met.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't think you have, but we
Linus Sebastian
like, we have a lot of shared experiences anyway because.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, you've been in the game for so long. You did daily up. I have two, bro. He did daily uploads for years. He did daily uploads for, I think, years.
Linus Sebastian
I think so, yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
So, like there's a lot of the, the pace and the constant nature of it and stuff. Like it's.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, so we actually hung out a fair bit. I. There's so many storylines that got cut, even just the ones that I experienced personally that got cut from the main edit. And I understand, like, you can't upload a four hour video to the MrBeast channel or whatever. I feel like this video could have been an entire season of content though. But like in the third, in the third round when, when we did the mannequin challenge, I feel the video's been up a couple weeks now. Like, spoiler alert. In the third round when we did the mannequin challenge, we kind of divided into two teams because you had to find the real people that were not mannequins outside of the, the cube that we had to stay in. And I got like kind of my, my 15 people and we were kind of a team. And then the rest, they kind of teamed up. So it ended up up half of people were going to advance. So even though Jimmy didn't say form two teams, we like totally did. Because you had to monitor in 360 degrees all of these mannequins that were like in frozen poses and you had to try to find the real humans. And we figured by working together we could find them a lot faster and then enter the data onto our iPads. So Casey was on the team with like me and Marques, a couple of the beauty creators. And we all like got into our corner and we're like keying everything in, but a couple people from the other team just saw that we were ahead and came over and just kind of like mingled and entered them before him. And I felt so bad when he had to walk out. I was so.
Luke Lafreniere
I was so unhappy because it wasn't technically divided team. So they did like an, an input speed win.
Linus Sebastian
Yep.
Luke Lafreniere
And, and in that, in that competition, it's fair game.
Linus Sebastian
It's fair game, but like, sucks. Yeah. I was like, rip, rip Casey, I'm so sorry. So just like all, all, all kinds of those sorts of things, you know, didn't make it into the edit. But it was a lot of fun just hanging out with those folks. Had some. Had some really good chats. Epic gardening is so cool. He is just, like, so smart. That was at Creator Summit. That wasn't at the. The Mr. Beast collab thing.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I met him in an event, too. Definitely he's on it.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I. Oh, sorry. I guess I wasn't really done with the Mr. Beast thing. Yeah, it was. It was. It was a completely different scale of production than anything that I think I've ever been involved in. How dead are we? Out of ten? Dan, you're good. Okay, cool. It was a. It was a production on a completely different scale than anything that I've ever been part of, let alone lead. And I don't think I aspire to it at all. If anything, I think what I took away from it is that I would like to do smaller productions.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, I see what you mean. I didn't realize you meant aspire to, like, B style productions. I thought you meant the. Because you were talking mostly about the other creators that were there. It is an unsurprising takeaway for me that you were much more interested in, like, meeting the other creators than the production. As much as we fawned about the production when we were on the Fallon show.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Well, that's a different. That was like.
Luke Lafreniere
No, I know, but it's related.
Linus Sebastian
It's sort of. So Fallon had, like, the glitz and glamour, the Hollywood sparkle on it, whereas what Jimmy's doing is, like. It's big, but in, like, in a very YouTuber way. It's totally different. Different. And I don't. I don't think I aspire to either of them. If anything, the video that I had the most fun creating in probably the last six months.
Dan
Oh.
Linus Sebastian
Is probably this one. No, this is just the live show right now. Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Way to go.
Linus Sebastian
No.
Dan
You're so sweet, Linus.
Linus Sebastian
I clicked the channel icon and it went to the live stream.
Luke Lafreniere
This current one.
Linus Sebastian
It was this one. Oh, it's a roundup ad.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Can you believe this is legal again?
Luke Lafreniere
No, I can't, actually. That's a whole thing.
Dan
But anything is legal with enough lobbying and money.
Luke Lafreniere
He said from. I'm not gonna go there. I was close. I'll sue you.
Dan
I'll sue you.
Luke Lafreniere
Under the ground I started down the path and then bailed I turned around
Linus Sebastian
and ran these unskippable ads I'm dying. Here we go. This was probably the most fun that I've had making a video in like a solid six months. Yeah, it was right up there with like shopping for a PC at Costco with David, just like hanging out, just doing stuff. I got to just work in a computer shop for a whole day. Just like helping customers, building systems. I built a sick water cooled system. Let me see if I can find it. That turned out great for like, I
Luke Lafreniere
never got to see the payoff of
Linus Sebastian
this for like a one day build. While I was.
Luke Lafreniere
That's sweet.
Linus Sebastian
Also working on other systems and troubleshooting stuff and helping customers. I had to do a little bit of customization to make all that hardware fit in there. It was. Look how, look how tight this fitting is. Hold on. I should. Let's go back. My boss gave me, gave me an A for the quality of my work, which. That's a Taiwanese A. Yeah, that's a tough A. Okay. That's not like some, some namby pamby North American A. Yeah, yeah. I think it looks freaking awesome. Hold on, I'm trying to get that. I'm trying to get that spot where you can see how tight that fitting is. These fans are cool, by the way. It's like one frame and it has like three fans in it. Okay, well, whatever. We missed it. The point is you go watch the video. But if anything sounds less reusable. Doing that video made me want to resurrect the idea of like Little Tech Shop of Horrors again. Where like our entire production actually just becomes based out of like a computer shop. We just get a computer shop and like, there's no reason that we couldn't review a Steam machine in the back room of the computer shop. Like, we could still do reviews and stuff like that, but I would actually love it if a lot more of our content actually revolved around customer systems, customer problems.
Luke Lafreniere
Sorry, I'm just thinking on that idea.
Linus Sebastian
Just be. Be all real, you know.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Be like the coolest retirement but not retired plan.
Luke Lafreniere
You know, I feel like the first maybe two months would be really weird because you'd have a bunch of people coming in with like troll systems and weird junk and then people would get bored and then it would probably to start, feel better and more normal and what you're kind of going for. But I suspect there will be a little bit of growing, growing pains as people try to troll you at the beginning.
Linus Sebastian
Troll systems, you say? Like this one.
Luke Lafreniere
Wait, what? Do you actually put that on a customer PC?
Linus Sebastian
No, they put it on it.
Luke Lafreniere
Did they know you were there?
Linus Sebastian
We did tweet that I was gonna be there and they, like, rushed set up their system like this and then just brought it in to get, like, some cable management done.
Luke Lafreniere
Sure.
Linus Sebastian
Just so that I would see it.
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
And you know what? Honestly, I think I'm with Scrappy DP on this one. I don't know that the trolling would be a problem. I think it'd be okay.
Luke Lafreniere
Sure.
Linus Sebastian
Because there would be real systems as well. And we can always decide what does or doesn't end up in the video. Right. Like, that's where we get to make editorial decisions.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. It kind of works that you're making money in a different way off of it. Because I worry somewhat that this is, you know, making a tech review website in. In current year again, where we're going into a field that is very progressed along the path of death.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, mom and pop tech shops.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah. They're, like, all gone.
Linus Sebastian
I mean, okay, here, here. This actually kind of ties into what also Beltrix said. Motherf cker is 40 and talking about retirement. That's why I said retired, not retirement. Like, it's. It's like how pewdiepie's retired. He's not retired. He's posting. He's got freaking video sponsors on his. Like, he uploads all the time. What are we even talking about?
Luke Lafreniere
Cares about certain metrics and stuff are gone.
Linus Sebastian
Sure.
Luke Lafreniere
But that boy is still working and he's still releasing bangers.
Linus Sebastian
He's working. He's working. He's got sponsorships. There's no retirement when you're still taking, like, dedicated video sponsors. What are you talking about?
Luke Lafreniere
Your goals and things might change, but
Linus Sebastian
you can retire from what you used to do. I mean, it's the same way that, you know, like, okay, Trevor Lyndon is a local hockey player who played for the Canuck. He retired. Yeah. From hockey. And now he runs, like, fitness gyms. He's still. He's still doing stuff, obviously. So that's. That's what I mean. I mean, like, retiring from the. Like, what we do is, like, review hardware and just. I feel like. I feel like running a tech shop would be the answer to so many questions, you know, why did you build that system? Well, because a customer needs it.
Luke Lafreniere
So you might end up almost like clerks, though.
Linus Sebastian
Why did you. What?
Luke Lafreniere
You spent a lot.
Linus Sebastian
I die at the end. No spoiler alert.
Luke Lafreniere
No. You kind of spend a lot of time sitting around talking about whatever. Because I don't think there's gonna be that much work. It's why they're all closing, I think.
Linus Sebastian
I think that with our.
Luke Lafreniere
Maybe there's room for like a high end shop.
Linus Sebastian
With our brand and with our reach, I think there is. I think we could be like a boutique builder because we could build systems to ship as well. So I see no reason why once we've got a tech shop, we couldn't also just be an si. Tell me why not?
Luke Lafreniere
Let's stack on more industries that are struggling right now. Let's see how many we can throw into one bucket.
Linus Sebastian
Hey, what's Warren Buffett say? When others are scared, be greedy. When others are greedy, be. Be prudent, careful or something.
Luke Lafreniere
So go into, go into every industry that's actively dying.
Dan
Right, hold on, hold on.
Luke Lafreniere
PC repair and gaming bar. Gaming bars in Canada, or at least BC are trouble. A lot of them have been forced to shut down.
Linus Sebastian
Here it is. The famous Warren Buffett quote. Freak the out and panic. Sell everything right now. It's over. No, that's.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, definitely.
Linus Sebastian
No, that wasn't him.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, no for sure.
Dan
No, it was.
Luke Lafreniere
Was. Yeah, that's what he said.
Dan
You can't lie on the Internet.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, Exactly.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
SpaceX, talk to me.
Dan
Or misattribute quotes and make Linus eat an entire cake on the wan show.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, so here's what he said. Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful. I think, I think we could. I think we could survive.
Luke Lafreniere
Whoa.
Linus Sebastian
Oh yeah. How is that going? I've been wondering.
Luke Lafreniere
Almost a little bit below where it started.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, so some people capitalized on the ipo and then some people are holding the bag for the time being.
Luke Lafreniere
Fun time. And then more stocks are going to release from all the people that haven't been able to sell them yet. And then that's going to keep happening over the course of the next few months and we'll see what goes down.
Linus Sebastian
Listen, we'll see what happens in a sane and logical world. You are so right.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Who knows? That's why I'm saying. I'm not saying it's going to go
Linus Sebastian
down in an everything's a casino world.
Luke Lafreniere
Who knows, maybe it'll go.
Linus Sebastian
This ain't financial advice. L's and G's. Let's just put it that way. I mean, would you take financial advice from someone who's talking about starting a mom and pop tech shop in 2026
Luke Lafreniere
and an SI in a component shortage. Yeah, and a new SI in a component shortage who doesn't have necessarily pre existing deals or anything.
Linus Sebastian
Look, look, do you think, okay, tell me this. Do you think that LTT SI would Do things like source secondhand components to build affordable computers. I bet it would. That'd be kind of cool. Weird DDR4 Machines R Us. And put that right up on the sign and it'll be really awkward when like we're on DDR8.
Luke Lafreniere
But the sign would still be there because you're a mom and pop tech shop.
Dan
Yeah. I think.
Linus Sebastian
I think we could just change the number. Just get a new. Put it on top, just cross it
Luke Lafreniere
out and Master Chief from Halo 2 on there or something.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Hatho says, how would you warranty second hand stuff? The same way that anybody warranties secondhand stuff. You just have a limited time period for it and you eat it when it dies. And then you just build that into your margin. I mean, it's the same way that I was going through the launch collateral for the. It looks like we've got the branding for our socks. Am I wearing them today?
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, man. Kate win, bro. I need socks so bad, but I've been holding on.
Linus Sebastian
Well, I'm not going to be able to help you with that if you need socks so bad. I got none of those. I got socks so good.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. When are the socks so good coming?
Linus Sebastian
Really soon.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
We unfortunately were not ready in time for lime day. We wanted to be. Bridget actually messaged me right before the show and made my entire day. Just wanted to let you know they passed testing and inspection and are approved to ship. Have a great vacation. She says that's awesome. I sent her a grand total of six hearts. Made my day.
Dan
Bridget. Thank you.
Luke Lafreniere
That's great.
Linus Sebastian
I'm so excited to see them.
Luke Lafreniere
I think this is extremely not unique of me, but I swear I just have a constant attrition rate of socks. I don't know where the heck they go. I will never understand. And again, I don't think this is unique. I hear jokes about this from everybody all the time. But it's.
Linus Sebastian
There's a monster that eats.
Luke Lafreniere
Very confusing to me.
Linus Sebastian
Dude. My lost sock pile in my house is like this volume. Almost none of them are mine. It's all my children. And Yvonne. Yvonne, she's one of the worst. I do the laundry in my house. So like. And I'm on it. Like I'm on the lost sock box. Like I will go like once a month, I will go through it and I will make, make, make mates out of things. I don't know. I don't know how they do it. How do you lose your socks? They're attached to your feet.
Luke Lafreniere
I can never explain it. And it's weird to me because I'll go on, like, a trip and I'll lose no socks on the trip, which is when you would more expect to lose socks. And then I'll come home and a few months will go by and I'll be staying at home. I don't take my socks off when I'm not at home. Where are the socks going?
Linus Sebastian
They hate you.
Luke Lafreniere
I have no idea.
Dan
They hate you.
Luke Lafreniere
I bought, like, a bunch a while ago.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
None of them have, like, ripped open or anything. None of them have been thrown away because of damage.
Dan
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Probably, like, half of them are gone since I did that. Like, huge haul.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. So it looks like our branding for our socks is gonna be the forever sock astronaut risk. Not forever, but we are going to be putting our limited lifetime warranty on them because we have achieved what I thought was impossible and made a very durable, breathable, cushioned, antimicrobial sock that I'm really, really proud of the quality of. And apparently we're. Apparently, it's approved for shipping, so. Oh, the timeline is what sizes?
Luke Lafreniere
I don't remember if, like, one size.
Linus Sebastian
No, no.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
Dan
Okay. Linus, you caught me wearing a test pair the other week, didn't you?
Linus Sebastian
I think I did. How do you like them?
Dan
Damn.
Linus Sebastian
It's a good sock.
Dan
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Cool. Are they.
Dan
I was talking to Tatiana about it, and I'm like. I'm holding them and looking at them. I'm like, why am I always surprised? You think I would have learned by now? And then we had a really nice chat. She gushed about it for, like, six hours about these socks.
Luke Lafreniere
I love when people care that much about stuff.
Dan
It reminded me what I was fighting for here, you know, day in and day out. It's like. It's so infectious of just. I'm excited. I'm excited.
Luke Lafreniere
Caring about stuff is cool.
Linus Sebastian
I actually said just about exactly that to Tatiana the other day. Okay. What did I say to her?
Dan
And floatplane should be excited about the feet cam when we launch.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, no. I told her this was. This wasn't. What?
Dan
What?
Linus Sebastian
We're not doing that.
Dan
We are.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't know. The different names. Are they. Are they, like, tall or so they're full crew. Okay. So that's why I don't know the names.
Dan
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
What does that mean?
Linus Sebastian
Full crew means, like, kind of up the. Up the calf.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
We'll look at a half crew and maybe an ankle later, depending on how these do. But just. Again, programmer.
Dan
You're gonna do a programmer sock? Everybody's Been asking for a programmer sock.
Linus Sebastian
So in terms of the colorways, which is, I think, what you're referring to.
Dan
No thighs.
Luke Lafreniere
No programmer socks or thigh highs.
Dan
Thigh highs.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, don't worry about it.
Dan
Don't worry.
Linus Sebastian
Probably not. It'd be like $100 with all that material.
Luke Lafreniere
Don't worry about it.
Linus Sebastian
Anyway. Anyway,
Dan
you would sell. You would sell so many. I'm not kidding. Okay.
Linus Sebastian
I'm not.
Dan
You hate money, don't you?
Luke Lafreniere
Look at. Chat. Look at you
Dan
See? Okay, this is like, you should do tall shirts, and then you're always sold out. It would surpass screwdriver.
Linus Sebastian
I do not know about that. Anyway, that's hyperbole. I think I was talking to Tatiana. May have been someone else, because I can't find it, but basically I said something along the lines of, like, it means so much to me that I can take my hands off the wheel and know that somebody cares as much as I do about something being awesome.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
And she's a great example of someone like that internally here who just, like, just gives a sh.
Luke Lafreniere
T. Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
And the funny thing about it, Dan, is like, you. You kind of. You look at the thing and you go, why am I surprised every time?
Dan
Every time.
Linus Sebastian
And it's because the philosophy in our products is not complicated. It's. It's the reason we're able to do this, the reason our true spec cables are so good. The reason the socks are so good. The reason the products are so good is not. And I remember this all comes back to, like, a conversation I had with the nova to a CEO, like, 10 years ago or something. I went, you guys have the best products. You must have the best engineers. And he goes, no. And I'm like, that's not a very nice thing to say. And he's like, well, it's not a nice or a not nice thing to say. It's an honest thing to say. We have good engineers. The difference is that we give a shit. He didn't say it like that. He's a very proper person. But the difference is that we care. And the difference is that we take the time to do it right. And it's the exact same thing here. I am not knocking anybody on the CW team. They're great. I love working with them. But the reason the products are good is not necessarily because they are the best designers and the best engineering folks in the world. They're great, and I love them. But it's because we just take our time and we just care a lot. And so, you know, for the socks, like, the reason they're good is just because we were willing to spend another. The copper infusion is really great.
Dan
Oh, that was cool to hear about.
Linus Sebastian
I would never. I would never recommend to someone, wear your socks. Wear the same socks for two or three days. You won't hear me recommend that.
Luke Lafreniere
You still won't. To me,
Linus Sebastian
however, I wear my LTT socks for, like two, sometimes three, even four days. Not a workout.
Luke Lafreniere
The amount.
Linus Sebastian
Not on a workout day.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. I was going to. I was going to say the amount this man's feet sweat. That's saying a lot. That he soaked through his shoes before.
Linus Sebastian
That was in Taiwan.
Dan
That's foul.
Linus Sebastian
And those shoes, I found out because I was leaving squishy marks under the soles actually have, like a mesh in the. In the soul. It's not. Sorry. Soul sole. The soles.
Luke Lafreniere
Two shoes.
Linus Sebastian
Two shoes.
Dan
Taiwan.
Linus Sebastian
That's in Korea. Solas in Korea, Dan. Anyway,
Luke Lafreniere
Jeez, I didn't even.
Linus Sebastian
I still got you. I still got you. You got yourself. That was.
Dan
You're both laughing.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, Jeebus. Anyway, so the antimicrobial treatment was developed by a Canadian company, and it's like a copper ion infusion thing. And I was looking through the data sheets because I'm actually the writer for the video for this, and it was, like, over 99% effective at, like, killing E. Coli bacteria or something like that. Don't quote me on any of this, because I'm going to look at it in more detail and have supporting visuals and stuff from the actual test report when we do the real video. But it was, like, shockingly effective. And that's the kind of thing that costs a little bit extra. But is. Is we didn't have to develop that. Like, that's the thing, is if you're willing to just pay to make a not crappy product, this stuff already exists a lot of the time. It's just nobody else wants to pay for it and make something that doesn't suck, which is so frustrating for me, but also creates an opportunity for me because now. Now we have a whole company.
Luke Lafreniere
That's your spot.
Linus Sebastian
That does more than half of our revenue. That just. The entire approach is just have good people, give them time and space and be willing to pay a little more. We got this. And I'm not saying we always do it perfectly, just to be very clear, because I'm sure that if someone from CW was watching this, they might be going, well, I sure wish I had more time on that. Or I sure wish I had this piece of equipment there, but the requisition didn't go through. We still, we still operate in the real world where things are limitations, where resources are finite. But in general, we try. We make a good faith effort, and I think the results speak for themselves. What are you guys talking about in flow plane chat?
Luke Lafreniere
Probably programmer socks.
Linus Sebastian
No, they're talking about spermicidal socks.
Luke Lafreniere
Maybe the same thing.
Dan
Maybe I'm not gonna do the feet cam. Maybe that's a bad idea.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, you think, Dan?
Dan
Yuck.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, what are we supposed to be doing? Why does it say sponsors three and four? We didn't do one and two.
Dan
Well, we only have three, so I figured we have three.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, okay. I scrolled past them. I don't even know where they are. What even is this show talking about? Spermicidal socks? The show is brought to you today by amd. Yesterday we dropped our latest AMD Ultimate Tech upgrade, this time with the head of our business team, Steve Chan. Asian man. He called himself that. That's not my. That's his words, not mine. If you have. What's that?
Luke Lafreniere
That isn't why.
Linus Sebastian
I guess if you haven't checked it out yet, spoilers. He is a very generous husband. As part of his AMD Ultimate Tech upgrade, he got a blender.
Luke Lafreniere
Nice.
Linus Sebastian
Some cleaning supplies.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
And. And some gaming stuff for them to share.
Luke Lafreniere
Nice.
Dan
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
We were mostly. We were mostly memeing on it because we. I thought going into the shoot that more of the stuff was for her. And then it turned out just a lot of it was for him. Anyway, AMD is paying some of the generosity forward to folks like. Like you by giving away an ROG Xbox Ally X. You can enter with the link in this video description or the link on the upgrade video for a chance to win. AMD also asks us, considering the Steam machine and PC hardware pricing popularity of handheld mobile gaming, as well as rumors about the PS6 pricing being out as early as next year, what do we think the future of gaming hardware is going to look like? I mean, this is going to. Oh, man know. Am I really supposed to start controversies in the middle of a sponsor spot?
Dan
They asked for it. They're paying for you.
Linus Sebastian
I guess they did. I'm gonna stand behind what I said about the PS Portal. I think that streaming is a huge part of the future of gaming. Whether that's streaming from online services like from Xbox, or whether that's streaming from your own services, which is maybe related to that cool idea that AJ had for maybe, you know, doing like some kind of Cool. Self hosted, like streaming setup.
Luke Lafreniere
Dude, such a sick idea.
Linus Sebastian
It's the implementation. It's an idea we've had before. But yeah, it's the way that AJ conceived of to maybe architect it. That is pretty cool.
Luke Lafreniere
And an alternate use for some hardware that we kind of would.
Linus Sebastian
So I think that as things get less affordable, I'm looking at what my house would look like if I was trying to make it more efficient. And remember I had that idea of having the computers in a central location and then using either display cables or network cables or whatever else to not even have thin clients, but just, just, just stream the content throughout the house, man. I think, I think with fast enough, low latency enough, high quality, enough networking, something like that's very feasible. Like in a family of five, how often are all five of you playing? Could you just have three computers and then you just access a session at your various locations where you happen to be using them?
Luke Lafreniere
You might even be able to have it so that like you could all, all five play at the same time. But maybe the performance of the systems effectively scales down. So you know, if you're, if you're all five of you playing the same thing.
Linus Sebastian
Pools of resources. Yeah, I mean we, we. Man, when did we talk. We talked about this a long time ago, back when like human home streaming.
Luke Lafreniere
Seven gamers. That goes very far back.
Linus Sebastian
And I, I think I, I think I pitched a concept where like, you know, the home computer was effectively a virtualized like server closet ancient.
Luke Lafreniere
When rocket shows you could put as
Linus Sebastian
much hardware in it or as little hardware in it as you wanted and then split those resources according to how they were needed. I'd love to see better support for virtualization on mainstream GPUs. Yes, I think that's something that's really holding back that sort of Linus conceived future and then also anti cheat virtualization for gaming just kind of died like five years ago, something like that. Because you just started not being able to play the latest games because they would detect the running on a vm and that was no worky one way or another. I know that AMD is going to be involved in the future of gaming, whether it's on the CPU side or GPU side or console side. They've kind of got their little fingies and everything. So check them out. Enter to win an ROG Xbox Ally X at the link down below. The show is also brought to you by Red Tiger. Red Tiger is having a sale as we speak. So if you've been looking for an excuse to grab yourself a dash cam, here's your excuse free of charge. Their F7NA dash cam uses the Sony Starvis 2 IMX678 sensor for its front recording, so it can capture every bit of the road ahead in great detail. They are participating in Prime Day, however, keep in mind today is the last day of the sale. It's also great for capturing footage at night without any light disturbance that will cloud the image quality, so anything that happens while you're parked overnight gets caught on camera. You can upload footage at 20 megabytes a second at high speed over the 5 GHz Wi Fi 6 connection and it's easy to use and navigate any menus with a built in touchscreen and English voice control. So protect every journey with Redtiger True 4K dash cams. We'll have links in the video Description finally, the show is brought to you by Shokz In Ear Headphones can create awkward and uncomfortable pressure. I love them, but I'm actually sitting next to somebody who really, really doesn't. And with over ear things can get warm, itchy and sweaty, especially when you're sitting at a desk for hours. Shokz has a great third option with their Open Fit Pro headphones that give you clear sound while keeping you still aware of your surroundings. And they stay on during even the most vigorous of workouts if you need to take a call. The Open Fit Pro uses multiple microphones to help reduce external noises like wind and traffic, and they're also optimized for an earbud version of Dolby Atmos that gives you an extra dimension of sound. You get 50 hours of battery life with the charging case. So if it's a walk in the park or a long road trip, you'll have plenty of charge to listen to the WAN show. And I think we didn't really mention that like it sits just kind of like near your ear. Like we didn't kind of mention that part so it doesn't go like into your ear canal. So check out the shocks Open Fit Pro through our link below and take advantage of their Prime Day sale which is still going on with up to 35% off. You can even use code when at checkout for an extra 5%. Ah no, we should do some more topics. We have like eight topics left in so we can. I mean. Oh wow. No, there's. Dude, there's still. How many topics have we even done? We've done like no topics. No, no no no no. We'll do this. We'll do this. Somebody built a website that will let you drive a Steam controller around using its haptic motors. This is amazing. Do we have a Steam controller handy?
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah,
Dan
to the Bluetooth. I wasn't given a puck.
Luke Lafreniere
Theoretically, it should be a tab on your browser.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, no, I closed all the tabs.
Dan
Yeah, I close it too. The second link is this site or something.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, I'm gonna put it here. Which could only go well. Okay, so this. This video is from Very Lazy Pixels, which the reason I wanted to show the video was actually I just wanted to be like, hey, that's so cool. Thank you for your order from lttstore.com. i see you sticker bombed your Steam machine. That's one of our stickers.
Luke Lafreniere
They copy exactly the sticker bomb that Valve had because isn't that exactly how Valve did it? Is it?
Linus Sebastian
Did Valve use our stickers?
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Really?
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Am I tripping?
Dan
I don't know.
Linus Sebastian
Did they.
Luke Lafreniere
I thought they had exactly that layout on the Valve one.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, apparently they did. Oh, that's cool.
Luke Lafreniere
Are you just learning of this?
Linus Sebastian
I don't know. Yeah. No.
Luke Lafreniere
Chat says he only reads comments. It's so funny. Yeah. Here. Yeah, so they did exactly the same. Can you just wait? What? How do they have that?
Linus Sebastian
Ow.
Dan
I'm sorry.
Linus Sebastian
Really, Dan, Chocolate all over your seat. Oh, that makes sense. Oh, there's more here.
Dan
Okay, don't worry about it.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, well, I mean, you're worrying about it. I mean, the chocolate's a lie.
Luke Lafreniere
What do we. What do we do? I don't even know.
Linus Sebastian
Does it matter? Anyway, we're gonna go to. We're gonna go to the website.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, but how do they. How do they, like, perfectly copy that? That's wild.
Linus Sebastian
I don't know. Dan, do you want to remove the lower banner?
Dan
I was. I was. That's why I was standing over there. So we have Luke Cam.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, brilliant.
Luke Lafreniere
Did you could race Steam controller?
Linus Sebastian
You could totally.
Luke Lafreniere
It struggles sometimes, I think, with the, like, textured vinyl that we have on the. On the table.
Linus Sebastian
I'm gonna bring it to you.
Luke Lafreniere
You can deliver the controller.
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
It's actually shockingly accurate.
Luke Lafreniere
I mean, you. You park it right next to my laptop.
Linus Sebastian
Now it seems like it's really trying to give it to you.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, it really is. They can't see that at all.
Linus Sebastian
That's. That's fine. That should be censored.
Dan
There.
Luke Lafreniere
Send it.
Linus Sebastian
There's a. Oh, they can't. They can't see that. That's probably for the best. That's probably for the best.
Luke Lafreniere
That's fun.
Linus Sebastian
That's. That's pretty cool. So. Sorry, what was there? What was there? Yeah. Very lazy Pixels. A developer has made a browser app that uses the new Steam controller's rumble motors to scoot it around like a little RC car. No, installs just a Chromium browser with web hid. This illustrates how hackable the controller really is and how people are already finding weird, fun uses for it beyond gaming. The website says it was heavily inspired by Steam Hapticsinger by Pilot. Crazy critic. You are moving my document.
Luke Lafreniere
Sorry.
Linus Sebastian
Crazy critic89 and double A Gaming.
Luke Lafreniere
I've never touched one of the Steam controllers before. The Steam Controller 2. Or what? I'm upset. All right, moving on.
Linus Sebastian
Sammy says we just released a short where Elijah, Steven and Sven raced with it and we collabed with him on the post. So I'm gonna. Okay, well, I'm gonna check this out. Out. Collabed with very lazy pixels. Oh. So here's our three Steam controllers. Did DBRAND sponsor this classic? Oh, Elijah's in the lead. Oh, he's being held back by Sven.
Luke Lafreniere
Being pushed, I think.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, and it's Elijah at first. This is hilarious.
Luke Lafreniere
That's pretty good. Love is pretty good.
Dan
Anyway.
Linus Sebastian
Pretty cool. People are already doing very creative stuff with it. This is a. This is a great little. Great little post. But basically they. They made it walk to the dock and charge itself. Oh, it's pretty.
Dan
Pretty cute.
Luke Lafreniere
Like a Roomba someone. Someone's gonna make a system that does that automatically. That's a matter of. Someone's gonna make a system where there's like a webcam or something and it can figure out the position of it. It on their table and it'll walk itself back in. Someone's going to do that. That would be sick.
Dan
I know what. My weekend's going to be nice for the next eight years. Will I learn how to do that?
Luke Lafreniere
Someone can figure it out. I'm sure.
Dan
I'm sure there's a library that's already been updated with like Steam machine identification.
Linus Sebastian
Do you want to talk about spy turtles and spy fish? Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Yes, Yes. I really. I really do. China's Ministry of State Security accuses spy turtles and spy fish of stealing sensitive marine data. That's a big deal. They put out a WeChat post warning that foreign intelligence agencies are using these sea animals to snoop in its waters. The claim is that large marine animals have been fitted with sensors and sent to swim in specific areas. That's gotta be a heck of a thing to control, collecting data like Water temperature, salinity, and ocean currents in real time, then beaming it overseas via satellite. China says the goal is mapping the seabed to find weak points in its coastal defenses. And it's asking fishers to report any strange buoys or devices. Apparently not fish or turtles, though China didn't name a specific country or actually show any of these cyborg sea creatures. But the wider idea isn't totally far fetched. Russia famously deployed a beluga whale in a camera harness spotted off Norway in 2019. And British intelligence said in 2023 that Russia was training dolphins for combat. The CIA also genuinely tried to turn a cat into a listening device back in the Cold War with Acoustic Kitty, which went about as well as you might have expected at that point in time.
Linus Sebastian
Ever tried to get a cat to do anything?
Luke Lafreniere
And if you've played, I don't remember what game it was some red alert game, I think there was. There was military dolphins.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't remember exactly how they attacked things,
Dan
but yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Sweet. Nice. I mean, it's a lot more interesting than automated drone swarms of a million drones just automatically defeating anything they go against.
Linus Sebastian
How. How much. How. How much of an admission of your own top secret programs are these types of accusations? You know, like, no one else. No one else is even thinking about spy turtles. China. Okay, someone probably is, but, like, really, like, I know there were those. There were those robot fish spy things that we saw recently.
Dan
Man, where.
Linus Sebastian
Where was that? That. Here you go. Like, there are fish shaped fish alike drones. But it didn't sound like that was what they were talking about.
Luke Lafreniere
They're talking like ones fitted with stuff.
Linus Sebastian
Were they trying to oversimplify it? Maybe, maybe, like, maybe just trying to. Rather than explain what a turtle drone is to any random WeChat reader, were they just trying to. Trying to say it? Well, just. It'll look like a turtle. So for all intents and purposes, it's a turtle. It has dangerous sensors in it. Report it. That seems more likely to me. That seems like the simplest explanation is they just didn't want to explain themselves.
Luke Lafreniere
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We got to go back to this. You got to go back to that thing. They didn't drive it to the point it did that automatically. They already did. The thing I was talking about get wrecked. I made my steam controller automatically charge itself.
Dan
Now I don't have any project.
Luke Lafreniere
You scroll down. Tracking points are a bit finicky. It tries to remember success. Not guaranteed. Surprisingly easy to try yourself. The RPMs are tuned for Steam Controller 2026. So.
Dan
Da da da. You could get. You know how you have the stickers on the. And it's thumb pads. You could do that with fiducial markers.
Luke Lafreniere
It's just. It's just up on. It's just up on the githubs.
Linus Sebastian
That's amazing.
Luke Lafreniere
Wow.
Linus Sebastian
How fun is the Internet?
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. And they did it the way. This is just completely what I expected. That's amazing. I expected this was gonna take forever and they just were. They're already done. That's cool.
Linus Sebastian
Hey, want to hear something else that's cool?
Luke Lafreniere
I need.
Linus Sebastian
Okay. Nope, nope. Steam Controller driving itself around is as cool as anything needs to be. We no longer need anything cool. From now until forever.
Luke Lafreniere
No, sorry. I got really excited. I want to read more about it before I really talk about that or what they're doing and I will do that before next show. But somebody's. No, actually.
Linus Sebastian
Well, now you're over committed.
Luke Lafreniere
Do we just look into it now you're committed. We can just look in now we're committed. All right.
Linus Sebastian
You've committed us.
Luke Lafreniere
Somebody made Vinegar.
Linus Sebastian
Oh really? Finally.
Luke Lafreniere
They reach out literally right before the show.
Dan
No way.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Dan
Oh my God.
Luke Lafreniere
I hope you're doing well. I'm not entirely sure this is your actual email. I guess it worked.
Linus Sebastian
I'm.
Luke Lafreniere
I'm Zach, founder of Convoke. I wanted to reach out because we actually built something based on the idea you mentioned on an episode of Wan Show. It's a tool called vinegar. It's on get vinegar.com. i haven't looked into it. I got this email.
Linus Sebastian
We are not recommending to try it because we don't know what it is.
Luke Lafreniere
It's a browser add on. We don't necessarily know if it's going to steal all your stuff or not.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. But for those not familiar, Vinegar was Luke's concept for like the anti honey browser extension.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
So instead of, you know, taking a bunch of your data and harvesting your affiliate, your affiliate cookies and all that kind of stuff and funneling money into whoever has the best affiliate program, which is for a long time was Amazon. Vinegar would be a browser extension that allows you to use the convenience of shopping on the most popular platforms that have big affiliate programs items but redirect you to where you can buy that item on some other website that doesn't pay for penis rockets for Jeff Bezos.
Luke Lafreniere
So this isn't 100% of what the vision for Vinegar was. But I'm assuming they're just starting and they've already got some pretty cool stuff going on. So block list this random. I guess KitKat is a product that is owned by Nestle. You put Nestle on your avoid list. So just letting you know that type of stuff. So it's like that's pretty cool information that is now put in front of you that is generally obfuscated by almost every company in the consumer space being owned by a bunch of other companies that filter down to like seven companies or whatever it is. I'm going down into their features section. They have the brand ownership so you can see who ultimately actually does own it. Conglomerate flags. This was interesting spot. When a product traces back to a company worth over 50 billion and you can figure out who it is. Avoid lists, you can set up lists, source everything, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The one thing that I noticed, independent alternatives coming soon. Okay, there's the thing. Get suggestions for independent products in the same category that are similar to smaller companies. Okay. So that's not suggesting smaller stores. But I think that's going to be a very tough thing to do. So. So I wish them luck. I also noticed that they have a free forever tier, but they also have a premium tier which I was actually kind of happy to see because the first thing I tried to figure out when I went on this site is how are they monetizing it?
Linus Sebastian
Right.
Luke Lafreniere
Because if just everything was free then I'd be even more suspicious. I do think it's worth being suspicious. I don't know if it's like on GitHub or anything so we can figure out if. If it's spooky or not.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, this is, this is definitely some verify then trust level stuff. Just because it's a random outreach email.
Luke Lafreniere
But yeah, totally. But I mean the logo is really cool. Apparently it's a Chrome extension for now. But I just got the email. I'm assuming these guys like just launched this. I am very interested in this and if I can get some information that it's not just going to steal all the data that I ever have that's in my browser, I'm definitely interested in running it. Sounds awesome.
Linus Sebastian
Cool.
Luke Lafreniere
Sounds very cool. Yeah, I just, honestly I saw that email and just like my brain blanked for a second because I was just like really? That's so cool. And you know, it needs some more features and stuff but how we use data control f. How we.
Linus Sebastian
How we use data, I don't think we're going to be able to.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, this will take a lot more
Linus Sebastian
time on the show.
Luke Lafreniere
It's just okay. It's very interesting.
Linus Sebastian
I've got something else interesting.
Luke Lafreniere
I hope they do well by it.
Linus Sebastian
This is a fun one. A study published by Pew Research shows that Americans are using AI way more than before. About half now use chatbots, which is up from roughly a third just a couple of years ago. With usage spanning work, search and everyday tasks. About a quarter of US adults use a chatbot daily and Americans report using ChatGPT far more than other chatbots. But seemingly running completely counter to this. Even with that uptake, attitudes are pretty skeptical. Only about 16% of those surveyed think that AI will have a positive impact on society, while a large chunk thinks it'll be negative or just aren't convinced either way. So the usage is hitting all time highs. Well something I'm wondering sentiment has hit an all time low.
Luke Lafreniere
Something with AI tools though is that you can't avoid them at this point. Yeah, so like how much of the increase of usage is actually people wanting to grow it in use it which I think there are a lot of legitimate uses for. I I kind of think that a lot of people should actually use them for a variety of different smaller like assistant type things like hey review this for me or whatever. As we've talked about too many times on WAN show, but I you mentioned search. You included search usage spanning work, search and everyday tasks. So is this include like how many people just went live? Like oh yeah I use it for search thinking oh well I mean when I google things there's an AI result. I I actually that is technically using a chatbot at this point in time. Googling something is using a chatbot?
Linus Sebastian
I doubt that. And the the main reason I'm saying so is this is not based on concrete fact, but the main reason I'm saying so is watching the decay of what we think of as classic search. Some of our folks from Creator Warehouse earlier this week attended kind of a a direct to consumer brand webinar thing and pretty much all I wasn't able to attend it unfortunately. But from what I heard from the team, pretty much all anybody was talking about was how classic SEO is basically dead and completely irrelevant now and it is all about fine tuning how to get included in chatbot search, which in this case means how to get a chatbot to index information about your product and surface it as a recommendation for a customer. It's pretty much hard pivoted over a span of time that until now is completely unprecedented. Just crazy. So knowing that I don't think people are thinking of that kind of search as, as. As AI chatbots.
Dan
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
I feel like you're. You're probably right.
Linus Sebastian
I don't know that for sure, though.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't know how the question was staged.
Linus Sebastian
We didn't. I mean, it's Pew research, so maybe it didn't suck.
Luke Lafreniere
But as I've, you know, I recognize their name, which might be a good or bad thing. I don't know. At this point, it's hard to tell.
Linus Sebastian
The study also found that most people feel that AI is moving too fast, with about two thirds saying its development is outpacing society's ability to handle it. How do these survey results compare to your own experience with AI usage? Do you find yourself using it more frequently than even a year ago, and do you find your sentiment towards it to be lower? I would say I'm using it a little bit more frequently. I've been using it.
Luke Lafreniere
You're using it more frequently.
Linus Sebastian
Especially frequently. Over the last couple of weeks, as I've been working my way through setting up Fedora on that workstation and getting Odysseus working, which I have it like, kind of working now, I can chat with my Quen model, I can get the email client working, but I can't get it to do an AI summary of an email right now for some reason. And I can't get it to do any kind of like agentic tasks yet. So I'm still just kind of. I've only had like a couple hours to poke at it over the last week, so that's interesting. Still kind of chipping away at it, but I'm using a chatbot for a lot of that. I've been using Gemini pretty extensively just because I have a Gemini Pro membership that's included with my work email. So it's a lot better than like ChatGPT was basically freaking useless because I ran out of being able to upload images after like two images or something like that. And I was like, yeah, and I need to be able to upload images. So I guess I'm using Gemini.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I feel like my usage is probably pretty similar to about a year ago. I suspect once I get my local stuff up, I will use it more.
Linus Sebastian
But that makes sense to me.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I like strongly suspect that and more internal pressure for me of wanting to get my local stuff set up has been wanting to use it more, but not wanting to use the public tools, to be honest. So I don't think my actual usage has increased. And man, it's hard to tell if my sentiment has changed. I don't think so.
Linus Sebastian
I'm giving myself a completely free pass on using the big tech AI as much as I want to want if it's to set up my own personal
Luke Lafreniere
one, yeah, that seems fine.
Linus Sebastian
So that's, that's where I'm at on that. I I don't use it much outside of that though. As for my sentiment, I think I my sentiment's actually up, but with the giant asterisk of only because I'm really excited about local agents. That's the, that's the thing that I'm like, this is the bright point in this sea of diarrhea.
Luke Lafreniere
The only reason why I'm just not sure is I think I was already really excited about local agents a year ago. I just don't know. I sometimes have a hard time recalling
Linus Sebastian
I was excited about the idea of it, but it seemed out of reach for me to easily set up with my limited free time, which was why it was hard for me to really gain any momentum around that excitement.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I just knew it was coming,
Linus Sebastian
but I was like that sounds cool. And also Sketch Avon Fox in Full
Luke Lafreniere
Plane Chat says a friend works in finance. The CEO is pushing AI for everything. The answers are often wrong, so they have to hide the fact that they did it. Not using AI to hit AI use target demands. I don't super think that the Pew Research thing would have caught up too much stuff like that, but I do know that is a thing at a variety of different industries. Very funny to me.
Linus Sebastian
But yeah, I already mentioned this a little bit earlier, but yesterday Apple raised pricing on many of their products. Marques posted a handy dandy little tweet with some of the differences. Some of them are pretty small, some of them are pretty not small like the Mac Studio, which has been a major player in the in the home, in the desktop AI space. As well as the price increase on the MacBook Pro. It's a $300 adder. Even the MacBook Neo got another hundred bucks, which puts it right on on par with the Dell xps. Oh shoot, what is the size of it? The new XPS that that uses Wildcat Lake. So even Apple is not immune to the pricing pressure that DRAM and NAND shortages have been putting on the entire PC industry. Hey, but you might not have to upgrade your system because Windows 10 support was just quietly extended until October 2027. No fanfare. This change was first spotted by Windows, latest in an updated support document and Microsoft confirms to them it is a real change, not a typo. Anyone who was already enrolled in the Extended Security Updates program. Gets the extra year automatically with no action needed. Enrollment is still free. Ish. You either have to sync your PC settings through a Microsoft account, redeem 1000 Microsoft Rewards points, or you can pay a one time $30 fee. But that one license will cover up to 10 devices, so it's $3 per device if you happen to have 10 devices. To be clear on what the Extended Security Updates program is, it's security patches only, so you won't be getting any new features, no bug fixes beyond security, and no technical support. Also, Domain Joined and MDM Managed Workmanship machines do not qualify for this consumer program. The reason this is happening is the quiet part that Microsoft, I guess, is saying out loud now. Users are refusing to move to Windows 11 largely because their otherwise perfectly good PCs don't meet the TPM and CPU requirements and people don't want to buy new hardware for an OS that they see as a downgrade. Microsoft's own wording frames the extension as giving customers more time to transition, but the takeaway seems to be that this upgrade is going to happen on users timelines, not Microsoft's, and they're just going to have to be kind of stuck continuing to provide Support for Windows 10 for a little while longer. In other news, Microsoft is testing a hidden search setting that finally gives users more control over Bing results on Windows 11. I can do it.
Dan
That's.
Luke Lafreniere
I mean, no, I got it. It's just interesting.
Linus Sebastian
Overdue.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, and I don't think it'll win people back, but Microsoft is finally building a native toggle in Windows 11 that lets you turn off Bing powered web results in search. Oh, that sounds very different than the title. But yeah, that sounds awesome. So you can keep searches local instead of getting web stuff mixed in. That's. This is honestly huge. It's just not what it's kind of like the title was saying at all. The same update also includes another switch to hide Microsoft Store app suggestions from search this is it. This is. This should have been like a title topic.
Linus Sebastian
We're so back.
Luke Lafreniere
That's incredible. What the heck? According to a G Hacks article, these controls, previously only available in the European economic area, of course are now being extended to all markets. They continue. Users in the European Economic area have been subject to these subject subject to these controls for some time. It sounds so negative. As part of Microsoft's compliance with the EU Digital Markets Act, Linus has a comment here that says while we're at it, can we eliminate any settings Box that has the options. Yes. And later. Yeah, no, yeah, that should be, like, literally a legally binding thing.
Linus Sebastian
That should be law.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
That every Pop up, like, I don't know how many times or never. The unifi app. Okay? The freaking Unifi. Like, like that I need to use to sign into my stupid. To enter my building. The number of times that it popped up going, hey, how much do you like? Do you want to rate our app now, yes or later? No. I don't know. I don't want to. I'm not interested. Don't bother me. I'm trying to. I'm trying to enter the building right now.
Luke Lafreniere
Such an inconvenient time.
Linus Sebastian
Like, just. No, no, no. It needs a no. And you know what? Maybe I should rate it because it does seem like a perfectly cromulent app. But also, that's. That's up to me, not you.
Luke Lafreniere
I've had that with, like, Expedia. I needed to get up some travel details really quickly. Like, it was time imperative, and it's, like, very slow, animating the screens, lagging. I know something's gonna happen. Oh, slide up from the bottom. Do you want to rate the app? I'm like, get out of my face. The Expedia app is, like, brutal at best. So adding more junk on top of it is rough.
Linus Sebastian
Anyways, Yvonne was shopping for some shelving yesterday, and she had to dismiss, I kid you not, three pop ups, asking if she wanted to join the newsletter, offering to let her spin a wheel for a discount. Something else. It's like, I am trying to buy something from you. Get out of my way.
Dan
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Discussion questions. If you could redesign Windows Search, what changes would you prioritize? These ones, mostly. That's why I was so excited about the topic. Let me. Let me get Microsoft Store app suggestions out of there. Let me get web search stuff out of there. I wanted to search my system for programs and files. That's all I want it to do. I don't want it to ever do anything else. They could, if they wanted, in my opinion, have a little. You think Microsoft understands consent?
Dan
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
That's pretty good. What was I gonna say? Oh, right, we were supposed to read it. It was a chart on screen that said, do you think Microsoft understands consent? The yes bar had almost nothing. And then there was a remind me in three days bar that had 99.2% of the votes. It was a. It was posed as, like, a poll on Facebook or something. I was gonna say, yeah, I. I would be okay with it if they had like a toggle button. Like if, if, you know, the search bubble bar on the far right there was maybe like a globe icon and you could click it. And if you did that, it would do web results. And there was a little store icon. You could click that. If you did that, it would do store results. But if you just unchecked them, it would never do it again. I would be fine with that. I would just uncheck them and never, ever, ever, ever use them. But, you know, some people might like searching from their thing and if they want to, they should be able to, I guess.
Linus Sebastian
While we're coming up with ideas, how about don't pin anything that I didn't pin.
Luke Lafreniere
That'd be so sick.
Linus Sebastian
I sure as didn't pin LinkedIn here.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I don't think anyone ever.
Dan
Where's my new installed programs? Bring that back. Yeah. What did I just install?
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, where is it, please? You know, it would be even kind of nice. Is like, you haven't used this in a while.
Linus Sebastian
That seems unlikely, but yeah. So File Explorer. File Explorer falls under one note. Edge, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, sure, fine. Outlook, the store settings. Fine. Razor, Synapse, which I did not pin. Like, come on, man. Are you even trying to surface things that I want to interact with?
Luke Lafreniere
Even clock being there is like, pretty weird. I don't think I've ever gotten to clock through the Start menu. Maybe someone does. I would probably click on the clock.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, my God, you missed it. I clicked it. I clicked clock and this is what I got.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, my God.
Linus Sebastian
Do this in the fucking background.
Luke Lafreniere
Holy crap.
Linus Sebastian
Are you kidding me right now? Oh, my God.
Luke Lafreniere
Wait, there was no option other than get started, was there?
Linus Sebastian
Is there just like a.
Luke Lafreniere
What are we doing? Didn't you click on clock?
Linus Sebastian
Clock. Okay, there we go. We got there.
Luke Lafreniere
Hooray.
Linus Sebastian
Hold on. What happens if I open it again? Is it going to take me through the wizard again? Unbelievable. It takes me through the wizard to set up Focus sessions again.
Luke Lafreniere
Wow.
Linus Sebastian
I just want to know what time it is. And meanwhile it's like, how many clicks is it now to change your time zone? Oh, it's actually a little bit better now. Okay, never mind. I'm not going to. I'm not going to harp on them for that. Are you. Are you bringing out your mint to show?
Luke Lafreniere
I just want to see.
Linus Sebastian
Okay. Luke wants to see. Okay, well, let us see too. Hold on. I'm going to the loot Cam. Luke Cam. Are you going to.
Luke Lafreniere
I mean, I type in clock and nothing even shows up in the start menu. Because why would you find. Here, let me. Let me clean up my desktop and then I'll do it.
Linus Sebastian
Wow. You slob. You have five whole things there. Yeah, okay.
Luke Lafreniere
I didn't mind the fact that they were there. I didn't want people to see what they were.
Linus Sebastian
Whoops.
Luke Lafreniere
What?
Linus Sebastian
Other side. You can't hold up your laptop here.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, I see. I see.
Dan
There we go.
Linus Sebastian
He got there.
Luke Lafreniere
I thought you. I thought something was showing that you didn't want to show.
Dan
No, no.
Luke Lafreniere
So I typed in clock. Let me do it again.
Dan
Sure.
Luke Lafreniere
Nothing came up. Don't miss the L because why would you.
Linus Sebastian
Oh yeah, it won't. Web search. It's okay.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. So like, why. Why even would some.
Dan
Well, 7,000 files returned, but if I
Luke Lafreniere
click on the thing in the bottom, it's just like.
Linus Sebastian
He just really likes roosters. Dan.
Dan
He's a bird guy.
Luke Lafreniere
And everything in date and time settings and everything's just like.
Linus Sebastian
That all just makes sense.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah,
Linus Sebastian
and those 7,000 results make sense too. I don't judge. What I would judge is Chrome testing an Ask Gemini button that follows your text highlights around the web. As someone who reads like this.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah.
Linus Sebastian
That would drive me absolutely bats crazy. This was spotted in chrome canary by Leopiva 64 and offers four options. Ask Gemini, copy, share and a three dot menu. Clicking Ask Gemini would drop your selected text straight into the Gemini side panel as a prompt, so you can ask follow up questions without copy pasting into another tab. The three dot menu has a hide for this site toggle, but its settings link just dumps you on Chrome's generic content settings page rather than anything Gemini specific. Google hasn't announced it yet, and there's no guarantee that this will shift, but it's the latest in a steady stream of Gemini entry points that are being baked into Chrome after the mini address bar shortcut and a right click Ask Gemini option. Linus's note if this is anything like the way that auto compose emails gets in my way constantly, then it sounds like a huge L. It sounds like it. Dude, it is so freaking annoying. I know that I can just click the Reply all button at the bottom and that will work to open up a new email reply. But remember when you used to be able to just click the empty text box and start typing and not worry about if you click not quite exactly the right spot and it starts auto composing a stupid email? I don't know about you guys, but my emails need to be composed by me. I have to make decisions. I have to. Like. I'm trying to wonder who it is at Google whose job and the decisions they make and the correspondences they have are so unimportant that a feature like that seems like it could ever possibly work for them.
Luke Lafreniere
My dog just like died. But I got it. I got it working again.
Linus Sebastian
I thought you said dog.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, no.
Linus Sebastian
And then you were like so immediately over it. And I had to kind of of figure out how that happened because I didn't think your family had a dog right now. So I was trying to figure out, Trying to catch up. What dog are we talking about?
Dan
I said he was a bird person.
Linus Sebastian
Where did he hear that it died? Who is taking care of this dog? You have birds? Why are you over it so fast? I. I was. Yeah, okay.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah, I know. Doc. Document. Doc. The. The doctor.
Linus Sebastian
Doctor died.
Luke Lafreniere
No, no, no.
Linus Sebastian
You think if they were a doctor, they would stay very healthy. Is this like the mechanic with the broken down car?
Dan
Luke likes apples. The.
Linus Sebastian
The chain smoking doctor with like high cholesterol? Sorry. Okay. Any who.
Luke Lafreniere
No, yeah, it said. It. It said it errored, which I've never even seen before. I clicked the reload button and it had like one topic from a very long time ago. I was like, this is bad to just nuke the whole thing, reload it again and it's fine. Anyways, it's really cool story. Speaking of, I gotta find a cool story. Hold on. There's gonna be one.
Linus Sebastian
You don't like the a 24 one.
Luke Lafreniere
Is that a cool story?
Linus Sebastian
It's. It's an interesting story.
Luke Lafreniere
Dan just like whelped from behind the. The tv.
Linus Sebastian
He'll be fine.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't. I don't know what he said. Google invests $75 million in A24 to develop AI powered filmmaking tools. Google's DeepMind is investing that money into that thing. Its first ever equity stake in a film studio. Cool.
Dan
Do you understand the noise now?
Luke Lafreniere
Yes. No, I already knew. The deal is a multi year research partnership to build AI filmmaking tools, starting with an AI storyboard generator rather than a text to video generator. Importantly, it does not give Google access to a24's film library or any data for training. A24 Labs head Scott Belsky says the tools will preserve creative control and won't look like the prompt based AI people are uncomfortable with. Oh, the phrasing of that is funny. It's kind of awkward. Since A24's biggest recent hits hit is backrooms, whose director Kane Parsons has called Generative AI a source of creative Rot and said he'd erase it forever if he could. But 85% of backrooms opening weekend audience was under 35. And a Pew study last week found that roughly half of adults under 30 think AI will harm society. Predictably, fans are calling for boycotts. A24 is far from alone here, though, with Lionsgate, Netflix, Disney and probably more all making their own AI movies moves.
Linus Sebastian
Oh yeah, that's fine. Probably that too.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, we'll call them both.
Linus Sebastian
So I thought this was interesting because if there's anyone that I would kind of look at and go, huh, maybe you won't screw this up, it would be a 24.
Luke Lafreniere
Interesting. I thought you're going a different direction with that. I thought you were going to say if it was anyone that you were surprised by. That's what I was very surprised at. Specifically a 24.
Linus Sebastian
I'm not surprised that anybody is. I think that anyone who is not looking at it as a tool and figuring out how they're going to use it to stay competitive is going to be left behind.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I do think that's fair.
Linus Sebastian
So. So a 24 is clearly a group that is not interested in being left behind, but also clearly a group that cares deeply about artistic intent. And so what AI usage from a 24 would look like is fascinating. It's an interesting.
Luke Lafreniere
I hope they don't screw it up, but it will be interesting.
Linus Sebastian
I want a bolder prediction than interesting.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh yeah, I need a screw it up or not.
Dan
I need a Luke. Luke prediction.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh boy.
Linus Sebastian
Luke prediction time.
Dan
No, doesn't show.
Linus Sebastian
We need a market for Luke predictions, you might call it a prediction market.
Luke Lafreniere
Tend to be based around.
Linus Sebastian
They do tend to be based.
Luke Lafreniere
People will use it. That's why if they will or not, or if it will be successful. I think their approach is interesting because the storyboard thing feels like a brainstorming part of the process where a creative mind that's in there could look at it and be like, no. And then redo that part or the whole thing or whatever themselves if they really wanted. I think earlier on in the process is better, later on in the process is worse. And it feels like they're only really talking earlier on in the process. I do agree with Kane Parsons, where, you know, if you could erase it forever, then I think we'd go ahead, but the reality is that you can't. So like Linus said, I think. I think use it to accelerate yourself and compete or don't. But
Linus Sebastian
A24 says we'd rather have a seat at the table than be on the sidelines while defending their decision.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, and I think that's quite fair. I just, I, I, I'm not as familiar with a 24. I know, I know. I think I discovered what a 24 even was through Dan. So I, I know there's some people that like really deeply appreciate A24 stuff.
Dan
Yeah, I mean I'm a huge A24 fan.
Luke Lafreniere
They seem, ever since I discovered them, they seem to be pretty in tune with like their people.
Dan
Let's just make a movie that's fun and here's a bunch of money.
Luke Lafreniere
So hopefully they don't, they don't step off it. One of the reasons why I think it's so interesting that they're the ones doing this is, is actually the fact that they did do the backrooms thing. They're kind of more well known for much more budget conscious stuff.
Linus Sebastian
I mean they've done some, they've done some reasonably high budget stuff and risk.
Dan
I think it's their risk. So let's just make this movie that might not appeal or let's just bankroll this movie because I think they're, they're like more like a publisher, producer type company than anything else. So it's like, I don't know, back rooms. It's a dumb meme from 1600 years ago from Proto Internet. Yeah, sure. Here's 10 million bucks. Go and make a fun film. Yeah, I don't even know what the budget was for that. It's probably not a lot.
Luke Lafreniere
I, I'll say. I think they'll be successful with it because I think the, that, honestly, that statement of the, like we'd rather be at the table than out of the conversation or whatever it was that makes me think they might be doing it for the right reason and that gives me more confidence that they'll be successful. I mean, it's the whole thing, I think I told you about someone that we know having a conversation with someone. I think it was at Nvidia, but I'm not going to specify who at Nvidia or the person that we know. And they were laughing together about all the companies that are firing people because they're able to do the things that those people used to do with AI this was, this, this was a very, very well informed person laughing with somebody who works at Nvidia about that reality. And they weren't doing it because like, oh no, that's like impossible to be true. Which I think in some cases is somewhat valid. I think it's pretty obvious That a lot of these things are just disguised layoffs. But the reason, the core reason why they were laughing is because that's going to make you lose.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
The people who are going to win are the people who are going to retain their talent and accelerate them and get the. So they don't have to do the crap that they don't want to do, largely because of like mental state improvements for their people. Because if they're drudging through junk that they don't want to do versus if they get to automate a little bit of that and then do the more creative, fun work that they do want to do, you're going to get higher quality output and probably more of it. And it's just like the. The proper use of this stuff can be very, very, very helpful. It's just you. You also hear the person floatplane chat, who mentioned earlier of that, like, finance CEO, that's like, everything must be done by AI. And then there's people like, faking that their things were done by AI. I even read something online like ways to make your work look like it was output by AI. And it was. It was. It was actually like a very serious. They were being quite genuine. Like, different words you can use. It's like everyone knows the N dash thing, but it was like different words you can use and sentence structures to try to make it seem like it was aioput, which is just like, what the hell? Like those companies are going to burn. The companies, I think at least the companies that just try to replace en masse, like their entire staff because they're automating stuff. Stuff or they think they are. I think those companies are going to burn and I think the comp or not do as well. And then I think the companies that are going to start winning are the ones that are accelerating people. You see Nvidia hiring.
Linus Sebastian
Yep.
Luke Lafreniere
What do you think's going on?
Dan
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Like, I don't know, whatever.
Linus Sebastian
And then meanwhile, farewell. Bungie. Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Are they just done? Done? Are they. Is it over?
Linus Sebastian
It doesn't seem to be over, but okay. It seems pretty rough.
Luke Lafreniere
I got a message. Hold on. I got a message from.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, boy. As long as it's not a dead dog, I think I'm okay with it.
Luke Lafreniere
No, no. I don't know if they want to be named here or not, so I won't. But they messaged me after, I think it was last show. Yeah. And they said, fun fact. I was watching Wham. Just so you know, we were talking about, like the profitability and the difficulty with Microsoft Studios. Apparently halo infinite cost 850 million.
Linus Sebastian
Well, there's no way they ever got that back. No.
Luke Lafreniere
Also, why? What? Like. Oh my God.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I think out of the. Out of the five W's or whatever appropriate responses to that number would be. What? Why? How Technically one of the W's.
Luke Lafreniere
Where. Could probably work.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Where? Where.
Luke Lafreniere
Where's the money even going?
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
To be clear, I enjoyed the game.
Luke Lafreniere
What? On what?
Linus Sebastian
On my PC?
Luke Lafreniere
No, no, no, no.
Linus Sebastian
Who's on first? I enjoyed the game. I just. I don't understand where $850 million went. I didn't enjoy it. $850 million worth. That's for sure.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Yeah, that was a bit of an eye opener.
Linus Sebastian
7 of lesbians says hookers and blow. I mean, it's as valid a guess as anything else. Luke, I don't see you coming up with anything.
Luke Lafreniere
No, just literally every word in the sentence.
Dan
Do you get a bulk discount at that point?
Linus Sebastian
If you buy millions of. If you buy hundreds of millions of dollars of hookers and blow?
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, you probably do.
Dan
You get like one of those stamp cards.
Luke Lafreniere
At least on the blow.
Linus Sebastian
I.
Luke Lafreniere
Maybe not the hookers.
Linus Sebastian
I don't know. I feel like.
Dan
I don't know. If the American government does discount at a certain.
Linus Sebastian
At a certain point. At a certain point, would a process levels, would it be a better arrangement for the prostitute to just marry you and vice versa, you know, at a certain volume of business? Like, would that just be more tax?
Luke Lafreniere
Save on the taxes.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. So maybe there is a discount on both. Potentially that could be achieved.
Dan
Cayman Islands prostitute account. If the prostitutes are Irish, do you have to pay business?
Luke Lafreniere
Oh God, we gotta get out of here. What's the topic?
Dan
I'm sorry.
Luke Lafreniere
Speaking of video games, Grand Theft Auto 6's lice launch price has been confirmed. This week Rockstar announced that GTA 6 will be launching at $79.99 with an Ultimate Edition for 99.99. While the $80 price tag has been tested by some others, Nintendo has moved to this as a standard pricing for Multiple first party switch two titles. I've seen quite a few AAA's going 80 bucks.
Linus Sebastian
Honestly, I expected even higher.
Luke Lafreniere
I thought it was gonna. I thought they were genuinely gonna push. Yeah. 90 or 100.
Dan
Yep.
Linus Sebastian
And I mean, if we're being real, a lot of people are gonna buy that Ultimate Edition.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh yeah, it.
Linus Sebastian
I think the. The initial wave, I think that apparently Take 2's stock like dropped on this news of the pricing announcement, but I think and it like, because people were expecting a $90 price tag, but I actually think this is a $90 price tag. I think enough people are going to buy the Ultimate Edition that they'll be able to blend it to something kind of approaching an average of $90. Because, you know, they're all. They literally have already said, shown that they are working on additional content for this Ultimate Edition. And you know they're going to want to make that as enticing as possible. And you know that big fans of GTA who are going to be coming into it with pre orders are gonna. They're gonna want whatever's in the Ultimate Edition. Doesn't even matter what it is at a certain point. Have they. Have they announced what's in it?
Luke Lafreniere
That's what I was trying to find. I haven't seen anything.
Linus Sebastian
I haven't seen anything yet either, but I haven't actually looked that carefully here. Hold on. Tech Radar. No disk in physical editions. There's a big controversy over the like the game data being on the disc. This is an interesting one for me to follow because it's been a long time since I've put a disc into a game slot and the game just actually works without applying a bunch of updates.
Dan
The game license is on the disc.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I know.
Dan
I think so.
Linus Sebastian
Just like a Switch game.
Dan
I think that's the. The difference.
Linus Sebastian
I know, but the game license was already tied to the disc. Dan.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
With always on DRM and stuff.
Luke Lafreniere
The Ultimate Edition is just gonna sell.
Dan
Everything did that to happen. I missed that.
Linus Sebastian
I mean, I'm just trying to figure out what the difference is. So what's. What's in The Ultimate Edition?
Luke Lafreniere
GTA 6 Ultimate Edition includes a 67 vapid Dominator buggy and Paradise Garage, a 95 grotty Cheetah vehicles and Vapid Ganado retro build at Jason's Safe House Vehicle Mod Shops, Classic Car Collection, Shih Tzu, Squalo Hawk and Little Morgan Revolver. Personalized weapon variants, PTT, young gin, Sign Compound and Scores. I don't understand. Half the things I'm saying are more Good Time Gear Stock 305 clothing store, Sarah's Unisex Salon and Electric Fang Tact.
Linus Sebastian
All right.
Luke Lafreniere
There's enough things in that list they will sell many an upgrade.
Linus Sebastian
Ain't no way people are not gonna be buying that Ultimate Edition anyway. As to the. Yeah, as to the disc being basically a license for the game. I mean, like I. I had someone who was over at my place the other day. Oh yeah, it was. It was Hacksmith and Plasma Channel. And I was showing them my. My NCIX collector's items shelf. And I was like, yeah. And I've even got like an NCIX brand CD wallet. And one of them, I forget who was like, what's a CD wallet? I was like, you're like my age. Remember CD wallets? And I opened it, they were like, oh, yeah, like, to store your CDs. And it's like, games have. Games have been. Even games in my CD wallet were effectively just a license for the game that ultimately you just downloaded on Steam and then you entered your product code.
Dan
Anyway.
Linus Sebastian
Anyway, like, as long as there's DRM that prevents you from playing the game without the files. I'm sorry, but I'm. Am I missing something here?
Dan
Yeah, I meant that the.
Linus Sebastian
Hit me, Dan.
Dan
Instead of it being a download code that's tied to your account. Sure. The disk itself is the license code. And so I can give you GTA 6 and then you can play it at home.
Linus Sebastian
Well, then that's.
Dan
Even though you have to download the whole thing. And I think that's maybe what some of the controversy is, is that this kills the resale market. And big stores like GameStop and Best Buy can't sell used games. And I can't finish GTA 6 and just give it to you even if.
Linus Sebastian
Wait, even if the game is blank. So there is no disc in the GTA 6.
Dan
It's just a box with a piece of paper with a Steam code on
Linus Sebastian
it or an Xbox code or a code. Okay, okay, okay, okay. I must have misread this then, because I thought the controversy was that the disc was the license. But no, what you're describing is actually how it does.
Dan
Everyone's confused.
Linus Sebastian
So I went, what's the difference? Because that's what we've had for a long time.
Dan
No, there's no disc.
Linus Sebastian
So there is no disc. So it's like buying. So it's like buying the orange box.
Dan
Yeah, or. Or, you know, buying something off of. You're just buying a box.
Linus Sebastian
No, no, I meant the orange box specifically.
Dan
I don't think the orange box was.
Linus Sebastian
Which launched 19 years ago.
Dan
More of an Apples guy.
Linus Sebastian
But Valve's the Orange Box, according to the serious.
Dan
Or not. So.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, my God. You could buy copies of Valve's the Orange Box, which had Half Life 2, episode 1, episode 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal in one package. And I am pretty sure that there were versions of it that just had a key in it. And it was like a big controversy back Then I think the biggest difference is that this is now catching up to console folks. So has, has Take Two talked about the potential for being able to transfer licenses? Is that why we're really upset about it? Because there's no ability to transfer license?
Luke Lafreniere
No idea. I seriously doubt there is a way to transfer licenses if you can't just hand someone the disk.
Linus Sebastian
No key says, hold on, hold on. Rockstar Games responds to GTA 6 physical disk backlash claims a physical version of the game with a disc will come after launch by December. So basically this is just capitalizing on the, on the pre launch, pre order frenzy and there will be a physical version at some point.
Dan
Oh, so this is just a whole nothing? Well, they just didn't message it properly.
Linus Sebastian
It's not a nothing because they could have just as easily had a disk version at launch, but they decided not to because strategically if I'm them, I'm sitting there going, well now hold on a second. If we could have a version that's tied to accounts and have that be the one that comes out for the first, you know, several months, have that be the only one available for several months, then we are effectively going to nuke the first wave of. I played through the single player campaign. Now I'm going to sell this game, delaying that, that wave of secondhand discs for months after the game launch. And so anyone who wants to participate in that initial launch hype cycle. Are you playing GTA 6? I'm playing GTA 6. Are you at this part? Yeah, I'm at this part. Anyone who wants to participate in that is going to have a non transferable copy of the game. And anyone who wants to wait for after that is not going to be getting a deal from those folks. So I don't think this is like, this is clearly not a, like you know, Rockstar and Take Two are victims of all this. They've clearly made a strategic decision here. It's just not, not as bad as it initially sounded.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. Meta has just launched a cheaper alternative to the Ray Ban Meta glasses, creatively named Meta Glasses. Meta's new cheaper Meta glasses start at 299 and are still made with Essler Exotica because of course they are because there's no other brands but they drop the Ray Ban branding and built in display while keeping a camera, great open ear speakers, Meta AI and hands free photo and video features. Critics continue to raise concerns about people being recorded without their knowledge, which will and is happening. And recent reporting has highlighted Meta's exploitation of facial recognition features that could identify people through the glasses and a bunch of people doing explicit acts in their bedroom. Meta says what? Yeah, I did. That's the thing. It's like, started recording by accident while people are doing stuff and they have a bunch of footage of it. It's like, actually a thing. Oh, yeah, yeah, it's great.
Linus Sebastian
Why is anybody wearing. Don't get me wrong, I have a pair of Meta glasses, and I have used them on occasion quite successfully, I might say. Oh, yeah, hold on. Okay. Like, some of. Some of this. Some of this footage. Wait, no, not that.
Dan
Where.
Linus Sebastian
What the. How is YouTube search so useless? Okay, some of the. Some of the footage from this video. What now then?
Luke Lafreniere
Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it.
Dan
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
Some of the footage from this video would have been not easily captured if it wasn't for my Meta glasses because I did not have a way to, like, carry a camera around with me and I did not want to subject one of my camera operators to this.
Luke Lafreniere
Could have mounted a GoPro environment.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, no, it was. I was already whacking my head on stuff. The GoPro wouldn't have stayed. It's so much easier to just have it looking exactly where I want.
Luke Lafreniere
It's definitely quite convenient.
Linus Sebastian
Yep. So take this as the most sort of.
Dan
Of.
Linus Sebastian
I actually do use this product and even appreciate it sometimes.
Luke Lafreniere
Take kind of surprise. Oakley and GoPro haven't teamed up, but
Linus Sebastian
Meta glasses, I would think would be like a 100% effective prophylactic. Like, how are people banging while they're wearing Meta glasses? I don't think my wife would even look twice at me if I was wearing these. Well, she might look at me twice, but it would like, come on,
Dan
You
Luke Lafreniere
look like a different person.
Linus Sebastian
Like, they go perfectly with my dorky braces. Come on.
Luke Lafreniere
I guarantee you they work for people.
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
I also think the risk of possibly being recorded will work for people. But anyways, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth thinks the backlash of smart glasses is similar to the early reaction to smartphone cameras. No, it's similar to the early reaction to Google Glass. But anyways, arguing that people gradually became comfortable with the new technology through social
Linus Sebastian
adaptation, which is true, we do accept a lot of things now that we didn't. But that doesn't mean that they're good things and that it's progress. Discussion. Question Is society becoming the proverbial boiled frog when it comes to privacy?
Dan
Yes.
Linus Sebastian
Would you feel comfortable having a candid conversation with a stranger wearing AI glasses even if they told you they weren't recording that's never come up yet for me.
Luke Lafreniere
Candid? No.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. No, I don't think so.
Dan
Why Buddha?
Linus Sebastian
I mean, they could just as easily have a recorder in their pocket, though. I mean, is it more candid of them to have their recording device on their face? Well, someone could record anything.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, that has a camera on it.
Linus Sebastian
I mean, the pinhole cameras have existed at the spy store on Broadway street for 20 years. Like junk.
Luke Lafreniere
These are good.
Linus Sebastian
I'm not sure it makes that much of a difference. If all. If all someone needs is it's easier
Luke Lafreniere
to claim AI stuff if it doesn't look that good. It's just. It's like the same thing with UFO photos. All the UFO photos are super bad. I wonder why. Although.
Linus Sebastian
Because they were in a hurry to quickly get the picture. Yeah, obviously. They're moving so fast.
Luke Lafreniere
Government leaks have been really fun lately.
Dan
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
Even Apple, we talked about.
Linus Sebastian
Really interesting.
Luke Lafreniere
Apple has been affected by memory price. We talked about this, right? Pretty sure we did.
Linus Sebastian
Yes, we did.
Luke Lafreniere
Marquez's tweet.
Linus Sebastian
Yep.
Dan
Okay,
Luke Lafreniere
what do we got?
Linus Sebastian
We got more.
Dan
We got.
Linus Sebastian
Cloudflare is teaming up with Chrome, Edge and Firefox. So like everyone then on packed a way for websites to tell humans from bots without CAPTCHAs, logins or extra tracking. Cloudflare is working with Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Shopify.
Luke Lafreniere
Genuinely surprised Safari's not in here to
Linus Sebastian
build private access control tokens or pact to spot bots without any of that stuff. And they're planning to submit it for standardization. Pact works by having trusted sites hand your browser an anonymous token that other websites will accept as proof that either the visitor is a real human or an agent acting on behalf of a real human? Because the focus can't just be are you a human? It's more, should this traffic be allowed? Because is it at the behest of a human? Which is going to be a bigger and bigger deal moving forward because Cloudflare's own data recently showed that bots surpassed human traffic and now account for 57.8% of all web traffic. This is really important. PACT is apparently designed so that sites can't leverage it to track or identify users or their browsing history. Shopify's Ilya Grigoric mentions how PACT can help merchants block abuse of bots without driving real shoppers to abandon their carts over annoying CAPTCHAs or excessive tracking. Our discussion question is, considering that LTT store runs on Shopify, have we ever had a bot problem? Yes. And do the benefits of a move like this seem to outweigh the cons. This actually seems kind of smart. It's like a. It's like a crowdsourcing verification that instead of having every site live in its own little silo of like needing to identify the source of the traffic, you kind of have everyone kind of go, oh, yeah, no, that's a real guy. We know because they like actually made a real purchase once and we like shipped it and it was real.
Luke Lafreniere
I'm trying to think of bad things. Is it a way for like the US government to enact shutting somebody down? Can they. Could they target individuals? How can this be used nefariously? I don't know. There's probably something bad about it that I can't.
Linus Sebastian
I mean, right now I'm sure there's something nefarious, but it seems anonymous.
Luke Lafreniere
It seems like an interesting idea that
Linus Sebastian
seems like it would help.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Kato S says it's what Apple did, but it's federated instead of private and open source.
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
I don't know. I don't know that I saw. Is it open source? I didn't see that. But the fact that Fire Mozilla is involved gives me some hope that it doesn't suck like the other players I don't necessarily have a ton of trust in, but Firefox, I mostly think they've been pretty chill for the most part. So let's. Yeah, let's. Let's see how this goes.
Luke Lafreniere
Speaking of. Let's see how things go.
Dan
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
40th.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, that. So, yeah. Yvonne brought this up with me. She's like, what do you want to do for your 40th? I'm like, nothing. And she's like, well, the people around you want to celebrate it. And I was like, the way Emma
Luke Lafreniere
explained it to me.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Was that because I kind of somewhat feel similarly. Is. It's not about that at all. And I think I would give you the same speech that you give to other people about weddings is it's an excuse that other people can make to get out of things to go hang out with you. That's basically it.
Dan
It.
Linus Sebastian
Right.
Luke Lafreniere
It's not even necessarily for you.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, no, I know. That's my wedding speech, basically. Is that it isn't about you.
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
And so when everybody makes it about themselves, you know, the father, the bride, mother of the groom, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's because it is about them.
Luke Lafreniere
But like, if you think about the. I don't remember. I don't think it was. It wasn't this year. It was the year before. The one that we did for mine. Like those people, that group of people. It's hard to wrangle all those.
Linus Sebastian
This is true.
Luke Lafreniere
People together. Yeah, but she said organizing that was super easy.
Linus Sebastian
Right.
Luke Lafreniere
Because everybody was like, okay, it's for, like, a milestone.
Linus Sebastian
I will injure my ankle for this milestone.
Luke Lafreniere
He's never gonna drop it.
Linus Sebastian
I will drop it when my ankle stops hurting.
Luke Lafreniere
Is it still hurting?
Linus Sebastian
It's. It never fully recovered.
Dan
No.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, my God.
Linus Sebastian
I sprained my ankle quite badly. Remember that dbrand tour that I did where I had the cane? That was not a bit. That was not a Willy Wonka thing. That was like. My ankle was very injured. Yeah, yeah. Actually, you know what? Hold on. I'm gonna. It's pretty good now. I can barely detect it. Honestly, the tennis elbow bothers me more than the sprained ankle.
Luke Lafreniere
It's not anyone else's marriage. It's not his point. It's a long conversation. Don't worry about it. It's not bad, but it's. Yeah, it's. It's an excuse that other people can use to actually come all hang out together.
Linus Sebastian
Right.
Luke Lafreniere
And obviously you should have a good time too. But, like, sometimes it can be tough because there's, like, conflicting obligations or whatever. But it's often an auto win to get out of conflicting obligations. If it's like, ah, it's.
Linus Sebastian
Well, this is 40.
Luke Lafreniere
I guess I gotta go. Even though they might really want to,
Linus Sebastian
man, I don't know. I don't know what I would do 40th.
Luke Lafreniere
As far as I can tell, most of the things that you like doing are the things that you do all the time.
Linus Sebastian
I mean, you know, it's funny.
Luke Lafreniere
Host a badminton tournament.
Linus Sebastian
Plasma channel. I only met him once. I forget his real name.
Dan
I'm so sorry.
Linus Sebastian
Was it Jay? I think it's Jay.
Dan
He.
Linus Sebastian
We were. We were ripping around in go karts and on, like, a gravel, like field just because, like, you could just drift, like, so easily. And we were like. We were like on our way back. He was like, man, you gotta. You gotta. You gotta live a little. Because, like, we'd. But no, like, like, verbally, ironically. Yeah, he kind of. It's funny because, like, I think I created a very false impression of myself in my life because they kind of dropped in almost unannounced. They happened to be in town, and I was like, sure, yeah, come on over tonight. I got nothing going on, which doesn't happen very often for me. And then they. They caught me at a time when I had, like, really good food in the house. My, my, my aunt had just made Ukrainian style borscht. And so I, you know, was able to like offer them some, you know, food from my heritage, which, you know, was cool. So we enjoyed that. And then we, man, we hung out doing something while the go karts charged. And then we like went out go karting. And then we played, we played Ultimate Chicken Horse. And then. And yeah, basically, like, I think I feel like his impression of me was that I have a social life and like, I like hang out doing cool stuff. I was like, I feel like, I feel like I've given you a false understanding of my life because I was joking with Yvonne. I was like, when's the last time, like the boys have come over and we've like, oh, we played croquet while we waited for the go karts to.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, I said, pokey. Yeah, okay.
Dan
Croquet.
Linus Sebastian
And like with the family, like, my kids joined us. They all happened to be available, which doesn't happen very often. So, like, all these stars aligned for me to just seem like the coolest guy with the coolest life. And he happened to be just like hanging around with me for the evening. But it's funny that you also say that, like, the things that I would like to do are the things that I do anyway, because that is stuff that I, I would do anyway. Last night we had, we had family game night because the kids are finally out of school, which is nice. And we played golf with friends and it was like chaotic and frustrating and annoying. And I realized that we had the game setting such that if you run out of time, you get the maximum number of strokes plus two penalties. So I was like in the game until I like ran out of time because I didn't think it was that big of a deal. And I got a 14 stroke hole and I was like, okay, well I'm out now. And so, yeah, like, what would I do any different? I don't know.
Luke Lafreniere
It doesn't have to be different.
Linus Sebastian
I feel like it'd be kind of crazy for it not to involve the jet. Like, going somewhere would be kind of cool. Like before I get rid of it. It's not going to be much longer.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, sure.
Linus Sebastian
And it'll never happen again.
Luke Lafreniere
No, I'm thinking.
Linus Sebastian
But I. Where would I even go? I don't even travel for fun.
Luke Lafreniere
Even like, traveling. That's why I was like, that's what I'm talking about. Help you with an idea when you don't even like that. That's what I meant you do you, you like badminton. You built a badminton center. Like, you made the things that you like be near you. You don't need to fly. I mean, you can if you want.
Linus Sebastian
It's funny. Like, I like, I travel, I go places because usually because other people want to do it. And while I'm there, it's just like, what would I like to do tonight? You know, it's like, well, what I'd really like to do if I ever had any time to do it, is watch a movie in my own theater. I have the best theater.
Luke Lafreniere
Maybe it should just be a planned day.
Dan
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Where you do those various things. So maybe you have like a little badmintoney, you do a little barbecue.
Linus Sebastian
I would be socialized out by theater. I have a very limited social battery, even for people that I really like.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, I wasn't even talking like inviting people.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, I see.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
So my 40th birthday celebration, which is about other people and not me, is an excuse for me to have them not blow off whatever it is they needed to do, but actually go do what they find.
Luke Lafreniere
It's fine. I think that's fine. Oh, there can also be components to it. Like if you did a badminton tourney thing, like midday. Ish. There's other people at that doesn't like that.
Linus Sebastian
No, it's not that.
Luke Lafreniere
You don't have to run the tourney.
Linus Sebastian
I know. What the heck would I do? I don't know. We could just, we could,
Luke Lafreniere
We could do movie night. Yeah, we've missed a lot of movie nights.
Linus Sebastian
I know. Remind me. Sammy says floatplane exclusive. Linus does what he wants for his birthday. You assume Sammy, that shooting a video, it's what I always end up doing when I have nothing to do anyway.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, man.
Linus Sebastian
Sexy Putin 69 says, have you ever tried crack? I mean, hey, I, I've always told Yvonne that when I reach like my body is decaying.
Luke Lafreniere
Like I've said the same thing late
Linus Sebastian
into senior citizen years.
Luke Lafreniere
Load it up, brother.
Linus Sebastian
I, I, I'm, I'm gonna, I heard, I heard heroines really great.
Luke Lafreniere
That's really funny because very little life left to really do. Like nothing.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
And both had the plan to just like once I'm on the door.
Linus Sebastian
I had my 40 year doctor's appointment yesterday because I'm, I'm not going to be around for my actual like 40th birthday or something. And so Yvonne was like, well, I booked it a little bit early. Just, just go do it. Because I'm taking in the, the kids for their Stuff.
Dan
Sure, whatever.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. And so I was, like, sitting down with my doctor, and she. She's like, oh, yeah. So your blood results are. Your blood pressure is excellent. And I'm going through the thing like, do you smoke? No. Alcohol? No. Recreational drugs? No. And we're just kind of like, talking through the rest of the thing. And then I was like. I was yik. Yacking about something because I was shooting an AMD ultimate tech upgrade actually, for. Oh, man. Which one were we doing that day? Oh, yeah, it was for. For Robert from Creator Warehouse. And one of the big upgrades was a $700 espresso machine. And so I was. So I was joking with her about that and how, you know, I can't. I can't imagine, like, needing one of those in my own house because I like, if I eat a chocolate bar too late at night, there's dark chocolate. There's enough caffeine in it that I might have trouble sleeping. And she goes, but you don't consume caffeine either. I'm like, no, I'm really boring. She's like, no, no, boring is good. I'm your doctor. Boring is extra good. Like, no, but I'm really boring.
Luke Lafreniere
What do I want to do for my birthday? Nothing.
Linus Sebastian
I'm going to drink water. Chilled. Chilled water.
Luke Lafreniere
Chilled water is pretty good.
Linus Sebastian
Feeling. Feeling adventurous.
Luke Lafreniere
I do think that's a pretty normal. I'm a bit older now. Birthday for a guy, though, is like, I would like to drink water. No, I would like a break. Yeah, seriously, though, I think that's pretty normal.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, man. I don't think I'm gonna come up with this. Dan Chat. Lacroix has too much flavor. Yeah. So my. My. My go to. Like, I crave soda. I love iced tea.
Dan
That.
Linus Sebastian
That's. That's a weakness of mine. I haven't had one in over a year, but I love it. And my. My methadone is bubbly or bubbly or whatever it is. So we get the. The bulk pack at Costco. And whenever I go to the fridge, because we keep our fridge stocked with all manner of soda pops and alcoholic beverages and stuff, just because guests come over, Right. And you want to be a good host. So I, like, crave a drink and I go to the fridge and I'm like, I really want that. Take this one instead. And it does two of the three things that my iced tea does.
Dan
Does.
Linus Sebastian
It's cold. It's carbonate. Well, iced tea is not carbonated, but like a, you know, a fizzy soda pop or whatever. So it's cold, it's carbonated, and it tastes like. But at least it does two things, right? And that's. That's like good enough for me to get fluid in me and not be thirsty anymore and not drink the thing I actually want. That doesn't answer your question.
Dan
I don't know.
Linus Sebastian
What would I do?
Luke Lafreniere
Ride your bike.
Linus Sebastian
I can ride my bike whenever I want to.
Luke Lafreniere
Somewhere cool where people leave you alone when you do it.
Linus Sebastian
My bike's not that comfortable to go on a long trip on. It's more of like a street bike.
Luke Lafreniere
It's like, take your bike to the track.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. It sounds like a lot of hassle.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't think it is.
Linus Sebastian
It's definitely a lot of hassle.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. Yeah, I don't think it's that much hassle.
Linus Sebastian
I mean, I have to drive to the track. I'm a homebody.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. So he's not leaving the house.
Linus Sebastian
Sounds great.
Luke Lafreniere
This is what I'm saying. Then just have like a. Have a day where you give your phone to Yvonne and that's.
Linus Sebastian
There's no way I want that.
Luke Lafreniere
Why?
Linus Sebastian
I like my phone.
Luke Lafreniere
This was. This was self serving. I wanted this to happen.
Dan
What if you do something like gardening?
Linus Sebastian
Gardening.
Luke Lafreniere
That's.
Linus Sebastian
No, what if. What if I. What if I did something like call up Dr. Kevorkian gardening? I mean, you could. Plant some flowers. Yeah. Ain't no way in your pool. To be clear, I'm willing to do that kind of stuff. Like we did. We did hanging baskets for Yvonne for Mother's Day, which was fun because I didn't have to do any of the flower stuff because the irrigation system was clogged. So I diagnosed that. Basically I did water cooling while everyone else did gardening and it was perfect.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, that makes sense. Water cooling plants. Yep, intermittently water cooling plants, pretty much.
Dan
Geez, I don't know. Do you have any hobbies besides work?
Linus Sebastian
Gas racing says go get a massage. Crystal pipes in with. He doesn't like people touching him, which is so true.
Luke Lafreniere
You said, do you have any other hobbies besides work? And it's like badminton, which he basically said he doesn't want to do.
Linus Sebastian
Well, it's not that I don't want to do, it's just. It's not special. I do badminton all the time.
Luke Lafreniere
No, I know, but it's not about it being special. It's about it being a good day. Craft a good day. It doesn't have to be special.
Linus Sebastian
Craft a good day.
Dan
I couldn't do that even if I like, like I could do that. I don't do that. I have no practice doing that. How does somebody do that? If you could craft a good day for your 40th birthday, why don't you
Linus Sebastian
craft a good day?
Dan
Why isn't everybody.
Luke Lafreniere
I thought I just did for you. Go play bad sleep in a little bit. Go play badminton in the early mid afternoon area. Come home, I don't know, hang out by the pool, have a little barbecue thing and then go watch a movie and then go to bed.
Dan
Have a nice tea.
Luke Lafreniere
Have some good two iced tea. Have as many iced teas as you want. Day.
Linus Sebastian
That's crazy.
Luke Lafreniere
And have some meals planned out.
Dan
That's.
Luke Lafreniere
Plan some meals out that you think you'll like so you have good food, you have good activities, you don't over exhaust on social energy. And you sleep.
Linus Sebastian
Okay. Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
It's a good day.
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
And it's not an insane day.
Linus Sebastian
And when I'm done with everybody in my house, I can tell them to get the out.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Okay. Yeah.
Dan
They can go somewhere else.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. You can even give like. You can even like get a Vaughn to police that or something.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Dan
Okay. All right.
Luke Lafreniere
Or even just pre schedule. If you do have people over and you said you wanted to watch a movie in the theater room, so just pre schedule when the movie's done, everyone's leaving.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, I'll think about it.
Dan
Give them a little handout card so that they.
Luke Lafreniere
Your shoes are by the. The back door.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Dan
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
So that the exit is like as fast as possible.
Linus Sebastian
I'll think about it.
Luke Lafreniere
I hope you enjoyed the movie. Get out.
Linus Sebastian
Stay. The path says it's your house. You can always do that. It's not that simple.
Luke Lafreniere
It's not that simple.
Linus Sebastian
There's social. There's social pressures. It's.
Dan
Hey, children, I love you, but dad needs you to go somewhere else.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, it doesn't really. It doesn't really work like that. At least I try not to. I try not to work like that because it's not polite. All right, I'll think about it. I. Or maybe I won't think about it at all. And I will just let the day pass and. And maybe that will be the way that I want to. Maybe by. Maybe ignoring it is what I really want to do. I don't know.
Luke Lafreniere
You didn't even plan your own schedule. I. I think I know what's going on.
Dan
All right.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Dan
Have Vance plan it for you.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's fine. Anyways. Open source. Nvidia NVK Vulcan driver now. Supports dlss. The community built open source NVK Vulcan.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, I. I thought I had actually kicked this. This topic. It's pretty cool but the features like buggy and it's for the. The drivers that are like the not proprietary driver that like doesn't really work very good. So it's like progress. Which is cool.
Luke Lafreniere
I've used some.
Linus Sebastian
But it's. It's. We're a ways off from this being something that you're gonna run. So the headline I think is good enough for now. It's a lot of like. Like this. This whole topic is pre compiled binaries and MVK underscore experimental.
Luke Lafreniere
It is thick.
Linus Sebastian
It's not well enjoyed by an audio podcast. So we can.
Luke Lafreniere
We can leave it Ado said Luke is an example. He doesn't kick anyone out of his house.
Linus Sebastian
This is fun though. Here's a channel you might want to check out. It's called Bud and Pal. Really? This.
Luke Lafreniere
You like the logo, bro? A lot of work went into that logo. You know what that is? A bonafide guaranteed no AI logo.
Linus Sebastian
I mean that's fair.
Luke Lafreniere
That's what that is.
Linus Sebastian
So Sammy and Luke started a channel. You guys might want to check it out.
Dan
Out.
Linus Sebastian
It's not self promotion if I'm the one who does it. So.
Luke Lafreniere
Have you watched any of it?
Dan
Nope.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I didn't think so.
Linus Sebastian
I don't watch videos. You know that.
Luke Lafreniere
Have you read the comments?
Dan
Nope.
Luke Lafreniere
I just assume now I'm actually offended
Linus Sebastian
it's you and Sammy. I just assume it's good.
Luke Lafreniere
That was fun. What's wrong with the. I don't know how much I can talk about it because like you said self promotion, whatever. But.
Linus Sebastian
No, you can talk about it all you want.
Luke Lafreniere
A lot of the goal with this was to classic.
Linus Sebastian
Classic. The only thing that would make this better would be Comic Sans.
Dan
I'm disappointed.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I'm actually pretty disappointed that it's not Comic Sans. All right, I'll read the comments for you.
Luke Lafreniere
You don't have to read the comments.
Linus Sebastian
I'm even going to leave a comment.
Dan
Hi. Oh.
Luke Lafreniere
From Wed show. A big part of the goal is to just get out of the normal. Like make something different.
Dan
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
And this was very different to anything I've ever made. There was a lot of back and forth debate. Debate on what it was even supposed to be while we were making it. But it was fun. I. I described it as a like wrinkling brain exercise.
Linus Sebastian
That's a very deep cut. Luke used to have or not Luke. Ed used to Have a folder on our. On our work NAS called Wrinkling Brains. That was just a disorganized dump of random stuff that wasn't organized at all and drove me absolutely crazy every time I saw it. I'd be like, why the. Is the Wrinkling Brains folder still here? There needs a place for everything. Everything in its place. We can't have data. Disorganization will destroy our company. Don't do that. And then it would always still be there. So Wrinkling Brains.
Luke Lafreniere
That isn't actually what I was mentioning, though. Oh, it's like keeping your brain wrinkled.
Linus Sebastian
Oh. Like not smooth.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Dan
All right.
Luke Lafreniere
It's. It's trying to get me to do things that I'm not used to. There's that whole thing where a lot of loss of neuroplasticity comes from just doing the same thing all the time. So this was like. I do travel in fairly chaotic ways, but not like this. And I never really make content like this. And like, I think Sammy and I's approach to making content is very different.
Linus Sebastian
Yes.
Luke Lafreniere
So having us try to do something
Linus Sebastian
together, Sammy's and anyone's approach to making content is very different. Yeah,
Luke Lafreniere
but it was. It was. Yeah, it was fun. And honestly, the fact that we came out of it with something that was watchable was crazy. But people seem to be liking it. Comments seem pretty good.
Dan
Sam is a wizard like that.
Linus Sebastian
Then did you just. Just. Seriously, you couldn't have been a little more constructive. He just did this from the official account. You're making us all look bad, Dan.
Dan
I signed it.
Linus Sebastian
I know, but. Oh, gosh. Anyway, go check it out, bud and pal. The most Canadian. The most Canadian name Buddy for. For YouTube channel.
Luke Lafreniere
I love the description too. The description is two friends taking gaming to the Limited.
Dan
It.
Luke Lafreniere
Because we thought that was going to be the channel for a little while.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. And now it's just travel. Not at all.
Luke Lafreniere
This is what I mean.
Dan
This is great.
Luke Lafreniere
We don't know what's going on.
Dan
Oh my God.
Luke Lafreniere
We're just trying to mess around. I'm trying to learn things and. And explore and stuff. It's been really interesting watching the stats on it because, like, I tweeted it out and Sammy tweeted out and like I posted on Discord. We did stuff like that.
Dan
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
But a lot of the, you know, the audience that would go to it quickly from that don't know us for this type of content.
Dan
Right. Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
So the watch time was actually really low right off the bat.
Linus Sebastian
Right.
Luke Lafreniere
But over time, as I Think Sammy was theorizing this as like people who might actually like this type of content foundation it that aren't necessarily just like pre existing fans of ours. The watch time just started cranking and it's, it's been really interesting watching the, the like over time progression of how it's performed, working its magic with who and all that kind of stuff on, on a brand new channel making content that is very dissimilar to what either these people have publicly made before. The dbrand part. I thought the dbrand part was pretty funny. I, I had Sammy stand in the rain, told them that he was supposed to do a DBRAND segment and then we didn't record the audio and I just dubbed the audio of the DBRAND spot. So Sammy's just standing in the rain for no reason. And I thought, I thought dbrand would love it. And I got an email from, from a robot afterwards that was like, yep, nice. That was pretty great.
Linus Sebastian
Nice.
Luke Lafreniere
But yeah, it was fun. It was a really good experience. It's extremely insanely unsustainable to do these very often. I don't have that much vacation time and we're not going anywhere. So. Cool.
Linus Sebastian
So a travel vlog from someone who is not going to book travel explicitly to make travel vlogs pretty much nice. So it would be about like my family vlog which still hasn't published an episode.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Sam and I were talking today where it's like maybe we'll do something like that like once a year.
Linus Sebastian
Oh yeah. Cool.
Luke Lafreniere
And like maybe that channel will get some other content in between a little bit. But like this scale of thing would maybe be a once a year thing.
Linus Sebastian
It is harder to grow a channel with very dissimilar content being uploaded to it, I can tell you that much. So if the goal is to grow
Luke Lafreniere
the channel, then that strategy is mostly wrinkling brains.
Linus Sebastian
But if the goal is to just not let your memes be dreams, then
Luke Lafreniere
we had a bunch of conversations. We're making it of like what success would look like. And for I was like, hey, I don't want to make. I love Taiwan so I don't want to make Taiwan look bad. I don't want the video to just genuinely be bad.
Dan
But.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, hi Sammy. Why are you still here? It's eight for me.
Dan
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, right, right. That makes sense.
Linus Sebastian
I'm trying to get Luke to do
Luke Lafreniere
go on the Canadian railway, the longest
Linus Sebastian
railway in North America.
Luke Lafreniere
I just think it's going to be so boring. It's going be fun. Literally over half Is just going to be wheat fields.
Linus Sebastian
I literally have ridden from here to Montreal on the railway. Luke is right.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
What?
Luke Lafreniere
I can make it fun. See, this is. This is. This was basically us off camera the whole week.
Dan
Week.
Luke Lafreniere
Just arguing about everything.
Linus Sebastian
Luke's unc. All right, Sammy, why are you standing four feet away from a near field microphone?
Luke Lafreniere
I don't know how this works. Just put your face near it and talk. Hello.
Linus Sebastian
It's a microphone.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't.
Dan
I just.
Linus Sebastian
I just came to say hi. Dan. Could they even hear him?
Dan
Yes.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, thank you. See, this is why we have one professional here on the show. One out of four. Good job, Dan.
Luke Lafreniere
Somebody said, who is who? Who's buddy and who's pal? You'll find out next time.
Linus Sebastian
Is that like a season two reveal kind of or like cliffhanger kind of thing?
Luke Lafreniere
I think it's just gonna be a. Like, you'll find out next time, and then next time we say, you'll find out next time and then you'll find out soon. Yeah, they'll find out soon. You'll find out soon.
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. I don't know. The goal is to. To have fun and experiment with things and learn and. And have a good time.
Linus Sebastian
All right. Speaking of, Sami, our floatplane announcement. Lime day is still on. Don't miss your chance to save. And if you're a Supporter plus member, you can get free shipping on orders over $100 in the US or over $150 for Canada and worldwide. While you're on the site, by the way, check out some of the extras that went out this week on floatplane. Not only do we have an hour long exclusive from when I worked a full shift at Guanghai Digital Plaza, who would have thought a 10 hour shoot would result in a ton of unused footage? Lol. But we also have extras from Steve Chan's AMD ultimate upgrade. Fun fact. Both videos have the same windows problem where you try to set up a PC without making an account. And both times, Linus isn't his best.
Luke Lafreniere
What does that.
Linus Sebastian
What the hell does that mean? He's not here anymore.
Luke Lafreniere
What does that mean?
Linus Sebastian
What does that mean? Also socks. So Tatiana talks about the Forever Sock not actually going to last.
Luke Lafreniere
I like the naming. I think our naming's been getting better. True Spec was. Was wicked. Forever Sock seems really good.
Linus Sebastian
It's a team effort. True Spec, I think was Dave. Forever Sock was one that I don't think I came up with, but I pushed for it.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh.
Linus Sebastian
Because I thought it was like I was the One who? It was actually. We were naming it right around the time that thunder, whatever that Marvel movie came out. Thunderbolts. Yeah. With the asterisk on it. I was like, why don't we just do that? Let's call it the forever sock. And then just be like forever asterisk. It's not actually going to last forever. And that's okay because I think it gets across like it's the only sock you're going to want forever. And it'll last a really long time. We have a limited lifetime warranty. Blah, blah, blah.
Luke Lafreniere
Can I put you on the spot here?
Linus Sebastian
You can put me on any spot you want.
Luke Lafreniere
My God. Darn toughs.
Linus Sebastian
This was fun. Yeah, sure.
Luke Lafreniere
You said it's the only sock you're ever gonna want.
Linus Sebastian
I stand behind that. Darn Tough makes darn good socks. I mean, I think I've been very open with the fact over the last six years, me talking about us making a sock goes back six years. We found a one show clip. And a huge part of why we took so long was that I wasn't willing to make something that I would wear and go, I wish I had my darn toughs. And making something that I would be happy with after wearing darn toughs for so long was really hard. I have a ton of respect for them. At one point in our journey, we approached them about manufacturing the socks for us because I was basically like, I get up. Why don't we just see if darn tough will OEM them? And they weren't able. Whether it was capacity or just not their business model, I don't remember the answer. But they weren't able to do that. So we were like, okay, we're gonna. We're gonna keep chugging along.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't want to go on the train.
Linus Sebastian
Nah, it's a major pain reference. The point is that we kept. We kept chugging along and we eventually managed to build something that I'm really happy with. But I wouldn't even say better than darn tough. I think they're different than darn tough. We have KSPs that are different than them, and they're both really high quality products. I respect other companies that make high quality products. And just because we have a presence in a space doesn't mean that all of a sudden their product is bad or that I don't appreciate the things
Dan
that are good about it.
Luke Lafreniere
Dan's just on a rip this week.
Dan
I should be a copywriter.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Is that it? Are we doing?
Linus Sebastian
I think it's Time for After Dark.
Dan
Oh, my gosh. Button.
Luke Lafreniere
How are we doing in that regard, Dan?
Dan
Not too bad. Not too bad. It's interesting. I have gotten better.
Luke Lafreniere
Have you gotten vicious?
Dan
Vicious? No, I'm still gentle. It just doesn't affect me as much. I was looking at some of my previous statistics and, yeah, this would be overwhelming in the past, but just breeze through it.
Linus Sebastian
Wow.
Dan
Let's see. Well, I mean, the first one here is about socks. Darn tough enjoyer here. But they always wear prematurely just above the heel. Will LTD socks have any kind of reinforcement there? I'm hoping yes.
Linus Sebastian
So it is pretty typical for anywhere where you're changing the. The knit for you to have to join them and for those spots to be a little bit weaker. There's no getting around that.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
And there, you know, there will be places where eventually, like, it's forever asterisk. Like, it doesn't. It's not going to last forever. And there will be wear points eventually. I have also made that observation and I. I think we. I saw our abrasion resistance test report. It came back very strong. I think we're going to have extremely strong abrasion resistance, but nothing will be perfect forever. And it's really going to depend on the way you wear your socks, and especially it'll depend on your footwear. So I've noticed that with socks and sandals, there are different places that a sock tends to wear compared to if you wear more traditional footwear. Footwear, for instance. So your mileage may vary, which I know is such a. Such a corporate answer. But anytime we're talking about wear on a product, I think it's somewhat merited.
Luke Lafreniere
We've seen some pretty extreme scenarios that some of the audience has. Like that coal miner.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. We didn't think that the LTD backpack was going to be used for coal mining. Didn't see that coming.
Luke Lafreniere
We should send them a pair of socks and just see what happens.
Linus Sebastian
I didn't think that freaking Tynan from Creator Warehouse was gonna wear. Test the socks by wearing them outside in the gravel, Like, you know, just barefoot. It's a limited lifetime warranty. We're not gonna, like, cover hitting them with a blowtorch, you know, or scraping them. Walking without lifting your feet on concrete. You know, you gotta have common sense and all. All of this, right? Like, oh, man. Yeah. Because Tatiana told me that Tynan managed to wear a hole in some of his test socks. And I was like. Because it hadn't been that long. And she's like, don't worry. He like was going out of his way to wear a hole in them by walking around in gravel and on concrete hard.
Luke Lafreniere
And I was like, apparently a lot too.
Linus Sebastian
What a tiny thing to do that would be.
Dan
I had all my carpet replaced with sandpaper. Your socks are terrible.
Linus Sebastian
They rush through.
Luke Lafreniere
Like I made my floor a conveyor
Dan
living room 80 grit.
Linus Sebastian
So we're all just gonna have to have a little bit of. We're all just gonna have to have a little bit of common sense, you know, about all of this.
Dan
Hello, Wanda. Dealer. Do you think Nvidia partnering with intel to work on a chiplet GPU without having. Having to be. Without having to bet the farm like AMD has to do with Ryzen could lead to better yields and power draw than monolith? Quite a mouthful.
Linus Sebastian
No, it wouldn't lead to better power draw than monolithic designs, but it would almost certainly lead to better yields. Anytime you can do like a multi. A multi chip package or chiplet, a multi chiplet package that is going to help with yields. That's a big part of why they do them. But for me, the most interesting thing about, you know, something based on, you know, Panther Lake and you know, like an RTX 50 series GPU would just be the pairing of that incredible x86 compatibility performance power efficiency of like Panther Lake and then all the other, all the above for, you know, Nvidia's latest RTX GPUs. It would kind of put the. The best of all worlds in one place. For me, seeing now RTX Spark, I kind of doubt that that's coming, but I'd still love to see it. Nvidia seems completely invested in. In Windows on ARM now, but I mean, maybe not. Who knows, Maybe they'll just put their IP in anything as long as. As long as there's customer demand for it. It
Dan
Loving the Polos and screwdrivers. Linus, my wife wants to know what your favorite song on Taylor Swift's newest album is.
Linus Sebastian
I don't even know what her newest album is called. To be perfectly. Oh, no. Life of a Show Girl. I did know that. Okay, that that's her latest. Okay, what are the song. Oh my God. Look how her one album has a longer Wikipedia article than most Wikipedia articles. Are you kidding me right now?
Dan
I mean, every Wikipedia article is longer than Luke's.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh my God.
Linus Sebastian
Got him. Okay, track listing. I know this one. I don't know. I don't. I don't listen to albums.
Dan
I just.
Linus Sebastian
I just find a song I like and then I go play Radio. So I guess I'll. I'm so sorry to let you down.
Dan
I'm.
Linus Sebastian
I'm a bad Swifty. Bad Swifty. I don't even prefer the Taylor's versions of things. Oh, her voice changed a little, and it's not the nostalgia that I want. Wow. So I listened to the Not Taylor's version once. Bad Swifty. Bad Swifty.
Luke Lafreniere
That's not good.
Linus Sebastian
I would not admit that publicly.
Luke Lafreniere
That's rough.
Linus Sebastian
I know you.
Luke Lafreniere
That might be.
Dan
Can we take this stream down?
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. That might be one of the biggest, like, threat things you said on the show.
Linus Sebastian
I'm going to enrage the Taylor Swift fandom.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, there's a lot of them. They can take you down like bees.
Dan
Just because you have the same thighs does not mean you can say stuff like that.
Linus Sebastian
I don't have the same ones. I have big thighs, but I think hers are better.
Dan
Maybe you're redeeming yourself. Hey, boogers. A phrase of Linus's that stuck with me is there are two kinds of ropes. Right, Right and right enough. At least we're one of those. Any other surprise phrases of clarity from the set?
Linus Sebastian
I don't remember saying that. Sorry. There are two kinds of right, right and right enough. And we are at least one of those. When the heck did I say that?
Dan
No, you got a timestamp.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Really?
Dan
I.
Linus Sebastian
What does that even mean? Sometimes I wish there was the possibility for back and forth with comms.
Dan
Luke, can we get, like, a chat service going?
Linus Sebastian
No, no. Key says give me M in ute. Couldn't even. Oh, it's not. It's not high enough yet. Hold on. I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna spam chat so that I can. There we go. Give me an Inuit frantically typing that into the keyboard. Oh, yeah, I'm imagining.
Luke Lafreniere
I'm imagining sitting with D a million times.
Dan
Oh. Cause move it over the pip.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, because it was below the thing.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, I see.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I just. I had to do the thing.
Dan
Nice save. Nice save.
Linus Sebastian
Don't ban me. Don't ban. Don't time me out.
Dan
Well, we'll come back to that.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, Linus got the Rocket League reference.
Linus Sebastian
Let's go.
Dan
Yeah. Yay.
Linus Sebastian
My son plays Rocket League.
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
And I come over and I say, are you winning, son? And then I see stuff.
Luke Lafreniere
You see him spamming. Nice save.
Linus Sebastian
I taught my son good manners.
Luke Lafreniere
So. Yes.
Linus Sebastian
So, yes. It's amazing how many, like, gamer habits I recognize he picked up that I definitely didn't teach him. It's just gamer Culture, man. It's a thing. It's a thing.
Luke Lafreniere
Not the words, though.
Dan
Okay, up next.
Linus Sebastian
Okay. Noki says there are 1927 references to write in Wan Show. Hold on. I'm trying my best. Boss man.
Dan
Oh, it could have been from an
Linus Sebastian
LTT and says, I think it's the August 2023 thing, but BRB. Oh, Lordy.
Dan
Well, you got a few more.
Linus Sebastian
Let's move on for now.
Dan
Hi, from Shanghai. My son. Son, 6 and I. Weird name for your son. Have been playing local co op games. Unravel two, It Takes Two, Split fiction. Lots of tape to tape. Any suggestions for some classical local co op?
Linus Sebastian
It sounds like you've already found a lot of the really good ones. I just heard about Peak because I live under a rock, so I downloaded it yesterday. It's on Steam summer sale for. For, like, $4 or something like that, so. So I picked it up. I'm planning to play that with the kids.
Luke Lafreniere
Among us is genuinely fun. Yeah, I find it's also really fun with kids. We were. We were down at PAX last year, and I was down with my brother and a buddy of mine that's been coming down to PAX with me for years, but most of my crew has fallen off ever since. COVID put a pause on all that. So there's just the three of us, but we ran into two of my brother's friends that I also grew up with and I'm friends with, and they had their sons there. So there was a. There was a bunch of us, and we went to the VR freeplay section, and they had among us VR. That's probably some of the most fun I've had playing games in a long time, because you're in VR. And I was trying to. I was trying to convince one of the kids to vote out his own dad, and the kid's like, six or something. And eventually I just started yelling, and I put my arms up in the air, and I was running after him in the game, and I could hear him, like, three seats over from me just start screaming and running away. And it was so funny. It was so funny.
Linus Sebastian
So just like when you made that little girl cry at a Mario Kart tournament.
Luke Lafreniere
Terrifying small children is very fun in video games.
Linus Sebastian
That's what we're gonna do for Luke's 40th. We're gonna get him a bunch of small children, and he can make them all feel bad.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, perfect, perfect, perfect.
Linus Sebastian
Pankrat says he thinks he found it. Okay, Dan, I've got it up, but,
Luke Lafreniere
yeah, it was funny. It was very funny. And I was yelling, you have to. You have to vote on your dad. You have to vote on your dad. And then eventually I got him to actually do it. And it was. It was great. It was. It was just fun. I was right.
Dan
Nice. Okay, we ready?
Luke Lafreniere
I think I was. I don't remember.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, let's see. And right enough. And we are at least one of them. Okay, hold on. Right and right enough. I got those holes right to the cart itself. And widening the holes. Okay, now we find out if I got those holes right. Well, there's two kinds of right, right and right enough. And we are at least one of them. Okay, I didn't think that was. I didn't think that was worthy of remembering for years. I guess.
Dan
What?
Luke Lafreniere
I was just hard to know. Whatever ones of your own phrases are worth remembering.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Luke 20:26. Can we please immortalize that?
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, my God.
Linus Sebastian
Can that be at the very top of his Wikipedia page? Speaking of which, where are we at on that? Hold on.
Luke Lafreniere
Nowhere, probably. Probably.
Linus Sebastian
I. I don't know. You're becoming quite important. You are, after all, the co host of the WAN show, which is. What did we call the company again? It's an important company.
Dan
What's.
Linus Sebastian
What's this company called?
Luke Lafreniere
Do you want me to actually say it?
Linus Sebastian
Are you not supposed to?
Luke Lafreniere
No. I don't know.
Linus Sebastian
I don't remember what it's called.
Luke Lafreniere
Isn't it Adequate media?
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, yeah. Adequate media.
Luke Lafreniere
It's probably good enough.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Co co owner of adequate Media. Wikipedia. Okay, hold on. Let's see. How close are you?
Dan
We.
Linus Sebastian
Luke's Wikipedia article. Okay, here it is. Draft. So can we get that. Can we get that as a quote at the. Oh, my God, look at all this. Oh, people have been. People have been on it. People have been as recently as a few months ago, trying to. If you'd like to continue working on the submission. Okay. Okay, here we go. So, yeah, we need to. Known for his. Known for his frequent wisdom, come up with a brick. Comb it with a brick.
Dan
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
No key says, why didn't I remember that? Oh, yeah. Pancraz used Filmot. This Filmot is crazy. Yeah, it is so useful. I don't know if you guys have seen this tool before, but basically you can just search for a channel. Oh, are we one word? I think we're one word. Whoops. Check tips. There it is. That's the one. So you can just do that and you can search for socks. And this was how I found
Luke Lafreniere
your oldest reference. Was like super long time ago.
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
On WAN show.
Luke Lafreniere
What is this? I haven't seen that one.
Linus Sebastian
Wait, what?
Luke Lafreniere
Doesn't make any sense.
Linus Sebastian
Place one of the items.
Dan
Verify.
Linus Sebastian
Well, it doesn't make sense to a bot like you, but I'm a human, so I pass it got him. So, yeah, I. So basically, I just went through and I found the oldest WAN show that I could find where I talked about socks and some of it is not related. We're doing holiday shopping with squelching socks. And if you want to be wet, our sponsor, Vessi. So more results. It's an amazing way to find that one time that we talked about something really cool. Great tool.
Luke Lafreniere
I was that way. I showed thumbnail. Just me.
Linus Sebastian
Which one Here?
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Occasionally. You hosted the WAN show alone?
Luke Lafreniere
Some socks. They all feel great. It was.
Linus Sebastian
It's an hour of just. Luke, you don't remember that I occasionally hosted my socks. I'm saying that my socks are not.
Luke Lafreniere
I always thought I brought a guest on conditions. I remember I brought a lot of guests on. Like, I brought my brother on. I brought my mom on. I brought Me too.
Linus Sebastian
I tried, too. It didn't always work out. Huh.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, there's. I mean, there's a crazy amount of stuff we've done that I have no memory of, but I don't remember solo hosting. Wayne.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. That's a thing.
Luke Lafreniere
Cool. Way to go.
Linus Sebastian
Good job.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Dan
I short, tall and. Dan Linus, how often do you use your VR? With my Quest 2, I spend half the VR time troubleshooting issue. I hope the steam frame will be less frustrating.
Linus Sebastian
I'm gonna be honest. I pretty much haven't touched my VR setup since I tried the steam frame. Now that I have glimpsed the future, high quality displays, higher resolutions, super compact form factor, nothing excites me anymore that isn't the Steam frame and its wirelessness and, like, incredible freedom of motion. I just have not felt compelled to go into a virtual world, and I'm just patiently waiting right now.
Dan
Luke, have you tried your big Screen beyond yet?
Linus Sebastian
No.
Dan
God damn.
Linus Sebastian
What?
Dan
The frame's gonna come out before I know if I should buy a PSB or not.
Luke Lafreniere
We were, like, just finishing having organized the place, and then I went on the big trip, and then I've been sick, and then. Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Wow. BSB will always mean Backstreet Boys to me. By the way, Dan, that makes it better.
Dan
I will continue to use that abbreviation. The Backstreet Boys have just been sitting in your closet this whole time.
Linus Sebastian
In my closet? Oh, they go in my Media console. They have a little drawer to give
Dan
them in the can. Wendell teaches a course at Eastern Kentucky University on software development.
Luke Lafreniere
True.
Dan
If you could teach a college course, what would it be about? Out.
Linus Sebastian
Man. I don't think I could teach a college course on anything. Yeah, the stuff that I know, kind of special wrong. Like, I could teach a business course, but, like, I. I don't. I don't know a thing about proper business. I just kind of like it.
Luke Lafreniere
I think. I think we could probably both. But like a seminar.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, College course.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't think either of us are doing that.
Linus Sebastian
Like, I told the. Like I told the. I told the middle school, the local middle school that it came up in conversation. I told them I'd be happy to come in and talk about sort of like the behind the lens of social media and like, what the influencer industry is actually like. And they were really interested in that because I was just like, I was talking to the principal of the school and I was basically just saying, like, you know, one of the things that I talk to my kids about a lot is what you see on social media is what people want you to see on social media. It's not what's. What's real. You know, you got someone posing on the beach with their fancy drink, with their little umbrella and whatever, but what you're not seeing is, like, all the setup and how actually they're just sitting there editing away on their laptop top for the vast majority of the time. And it was just that one second that they snapped the shutter, that they actually looked like that. And, you know, talking about all of the players that are vying for your attention and in some cases your money and, like, how it all works, and they were like, oh, yeah, that's really interesting. And like, yeah, I could do a. I could do a session on that.
Dan
But a master class, I think what you're describing is a master class.
Linus Sebastian
No, no, because it's more like. It's more like, like a warning than an actual, like, actionable thing. It's like. It's like, here's all the things.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, but no, I watch out for unlike.
Dan
That's a master class.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I've never watched a master class. Only read the comments. No, I haven't done that either. I've never signed up for masterclass.
Dan
I.
Linus Sebastian
That's not a ding, Dan.
Luke Lafreniere
My mom got us masterclass subscriptions for Christmas one year. And there was like, if I remember correctly, there was like a reason for everybody, like a suggested thing that we go check out and she suggested Gary Kasparov's chess thing.
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
Dan
For me.
Luke Lafreniere
And that was actually pretty sick. I didn't resubscribe. But I did the whole Gary Kasparov thing within that year and it was. It was cool.
Linus Sebastian
Mr. McQueen says a class on being an on screen Persona again though, that would be like. Okay, so that has the same problem as like running a business. I run a business. Obviously it's been reasonably successful. Obviously. But that's not because I like am good at it or know anything. Like, I do a lot of things that I do intuitively and instinctively. It's not. I don't know it. And it's hard to teach something. Just because you're good at doing something or reasonably good at doing something doesn't mean that you understand the theory and you understand the fundamentals and you can teach it in a way that is structured that other people can follow along with.
Dan
With. I mean, from what I've seen about master classes, it's not necessarily. You're teaching it to people who don't have any idea what's going on. You're teaching it to like more akin to peers of some kind.
Linus Sebastian
Sorry, I'm still hung up on college level course. Like I. Yeah, maybe. I don't know, maybe I could do a masterclass on that. But I. I wouldn't consider myself a master of that anyway. I'm okay at it. Like I sounds like master talk.
Dan
That's exactly what the Messiah would say, you know.
Linus Sebastian
Thanks. Thanks, Brian. Of course. I actually rewatched it not that long ago.
Dan
You would be surprised how many people have not seen that.
Linus Sebastian
No, I wouldn't. What, The Life of Brian. Nobody's seen the Life of Brian. The only reason I even know what it is is because my mom was a. Was a Python fanatic.
Dan
I see.
Luke Lafreniere
The Life of Brian.
Linus Sebastian
Did you get the reference?
Luke Lafreniere
No.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
What did you even say?
Dan
I didn't. That's what the Messiah would say.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I don't think I did. Yeah, I would get some references from it, but I haven't seen it a long time.
Linus Sebastian
Life of Brian is. It's a movie that is. That is hard to appreciate because it would be, in my opinion, it's. It's actually.
Dan
This is.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, this is. This is going to ruffle some feathers, but I actually think it's the kind of movie that would benefit substantially from a remake. Like a reimagining with actually good actors and like.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
No, I'm serious though, because a big part of like the premise and the script is so ridiculous and it's so funny. But it's hard for people who are not python heads to enjoy because it's just full of Monty Python isms. And, like, you can just say North Americans.
Dan
They all liked the. What's the. The knights one.
Luke Lafreniere
The knights who say knee.
Dan
Yeah. What's that from?
Luke Lafreniere
Knights of Knee.
Linus Sebastian
That's from the Holy Grail.
Dan
The Holy Grail, yeah. North America loved that one.
Linus Sebastian
They did. Life of Brian was a little more python and a little pythoney.
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. And like, the bits, like, they drag on for too long, which is funny.
Luke Lafreniere
That is funny.
Dan
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
If you're into that and is pretty off putting if you're not.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. But I think sometimes you can make things for a particular type of people and not worry that it doesn't spill over.
Linus Sebastian
No, you can, but it's. If you want something to be easier, it's like a candy coating. It's like, yeah, you can make a medicine that, you know, makes people feel better.
Luke Lafreniere
Buckley's.
Linus Sebastian
Sure. Or you can put a candy coating on it and more people can appreciate it. And both are valid. But I like Buckley's, and that's fine. I just think that that's a movie. Life of Brian is. Is one of the Python movies that I think could benefit from being a little less Python. Whereas, like, Holy Grail is unapologetically Python all the way through. And it doesn't even really have much of a point. Like, the point of it is that there is no point. And spoiler alert at the end, it turns out it wasn't even set in the past anyway. Like, it's just. The whole thing is just utter camp and silliness purely for the sake of utter camp and silliness. Whereas Life of Brian actually, like, is, like, it's. It's, like, deeply funny. It's. It's an amazing premise and it's. I think it's even funnier today than it was when they released it. Not that I was around when they released it, but just looking at how utterly out of place, you know, the actual, you know, second coming would be today. Like, how. How challenging that would go. Yeah, I think it just gets funnier over time.
Dan
I still remember the opening. Blessed are the cheesemaker, the Greek shall inherit the earth. It's, like, great, because they were standing way at the back and they wouldn't be able to hear.
Linus Sebastian
There were no AV systems back then.
Dan
Yeah, that was great. Yeah. But I think. I think it is a little. Maybe dated, but it's also not very North America. Centric It's a different. Different style.
Linus Sebastian
It's definitely a different style. And like, I. I watch all of Monty Python. Like, when I was in. In high school, I was like, monty Python's funny, right? I'm gonna watch it all. And I'll admit, a lot of it did not resonate with me like I did. It's like, honestly, it's like any sketch comedy show. Like, you watch Upright Citizens Brigade or you watch Whitest Kids. You know, you watch Monty Python.
Dan
I mean, hell, Tim and Eric.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. A lot of it doesn't hit, or at least it doesn't resonate. Not every.
Luke Lafreniere
Every.
Linus Sebastian
Not every sketch can resonate with every viewer. But I do think that watching it all primed me for enjoying Life of Brian more than I otherwise would have.
Dan
I think that's. That's a very good way to put it.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Kids in the hall is another example of just like, a lot of it is, like, not very funny, and then occasionally it's like, this is absolute gold, platinum, frankincense, and myrrh all rolled into one. Like, it's amazing.
Dan
Up next. Hey, Sebby Laffey and Bessie. What helps you with big life decisions? I want big upgrades to the house. It's a pain in the a. Zoning restrictions. Find a different house in the city with features, more money, move back to the rural and drive is easy.
Linus Sebastian
What helps you with big lift? I mean, talking through. Talking it through is huge. You know, I think in a lot of ways, people around you can know you better than you know yourself. And so when you're really stuck on a decision, you know, sometimes I'll just tell Yvonne, and she almost never actually does this, which drives me crazy, but I'll just tell her. Can you just decide for me? Because realistically, even if what. Even if what I want right now.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. With whatever it is.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. And even if what I want right now feels like this, you probably know better what I need. So it would be swell if you just tell me what to do. Big upgrades, two house equals pain in the butt, zoning restrictions. Find a different house in a city with features equals money. Move back to rural and drive equals. Was easy.
Luke Lafreniere
I think there's some things that I would consider is, like, if you. If you move back to rural and drive, like, go do that drive and then really, seriously think in your soul, do I want to do that every day? And then do the math of, like, the amount of extra driving for moving out there, compound that over a year and figure out how much time is lost and be like, is that okay with me. Am I the type of person and you know, maybe it is. Am I the type of person who kind of likes a long drive alone? Am I going to happily just listen to podcasts there and back every day and this isn't a huge deal for me. It's a way for me to disconnect socially and get some of my introverted alone time or whatever. It's fine. Or do you finish that drive and just feel like you just lost part of your life and you'll never get it back? And that might help you aim a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Find a different house versus zoning restrictions is maybe try to do the things and if you get full blocked, consider moving.
Linus Sebastian
Speaking of mostly shows that I found unfunny but had like particular bits that really resonated with me. If you've never seen the Ass Pennies sketch from Upright Citizens Brigade.
Dan
Oh my God.
Linus Sebastian
It's one of my personal all time favorites.
Dan
I thought that was an isolated sketch. I didn't know that that there was stuff around that.
Linus Sebastian
Well, there's nothing around it. It's just. It was Upright Citizens Brigade. It was a sketch comedy show.
Dan
No, but I mean I thought that was just like a one off. Oh no, I think that's a very old from like proto Internet. I just assumed that was a joke. Somebody.
Linus Sebastian
No, it was on Comedy Central. Crazy Upright Citizens Brigade back in the day, man.
Dan
Hey there, Triumvirate. You've mentioned using Odysseus for Triumvirate. Yeah, sure.
Linus Sebastian
Correcting pronunciation is not something Luke gets to do often.
Luke Lafreniere
Nope, it's true.
Linus Sebastian
Let's let him bask in.
Luke Lafreniere
I'm not gonna lie. Right after I said it, I was like, oh wow, I got the. That's not normally me.
Dan
The wrong bass language. Hey Triumvirate, you've mentioned using Odysseus for some of your AI prompting. Have you made use of any coding specific models and how has that gone from you?
Linus Sebastian
I am still working on getting it all set up, so I'm gonna go with. Let me get back to you on that.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, unfortunately. Honestly, I think Dan might be the best option for this because I have been waiting to use models like that until I build my local stuff. My local stuff is not done. I've sourced some of the hardware, but I'm still waiting on other bits and I'm trying to get it very One of the GPUs mostly. But also.
Dan
What are you putting in there?
Luke Lafreniere
Everything else. I have one GPU.
Dan
You which what kind?
Luke Lafreniere
A 4090 okay, the plan is two of them, but that plan might fall through if one that I'm trying to source for cheap doesn't come through.
Dan
I got a spare that I haven't blocked yet. You can either play with or borrow. Nixon mashing doesn't seem to matter. Borrow.
Luke Lafreniere
I've been trying to keep an eye on use market for some. What is it? Zen? Three thread rippers? Was that it?
Dan
I've got one of the original threadrippers sitting on the floor of my office that I'm too ADHD to sell.
Luke Lafreniere
But yeah, I have too many computers. I've got some. A bunch of used market components that I've been trying to keep an eye out for. It's. It's rough out there, kids. So it hasn't been going too fast and I haven't been like, you know, I've been traveling. I haven't been like super chomping at the bit to get it done. So I've been trying to snipe out some deals. There's been a couple messages I've sent and just hasn't really worked out because I. I lowballed probably too hard. But it is what it is.
Dan
Last one I got for you. Hi, Luky Poo. If you were the president CEO of Technology of Earth and you could change one standard, what standard would you take? Change?
Luke Lafreniere
What standard would I change? That's an interesting question. Yeah, combination might be good. I'm going to think of something, but I think I have mine. How do I have to say how I would change it? Or can I just point at it and be like I want that to be better?
Dan
Yeah, yeah, I think that's fine.
Luke Lafreniere
That's fine.
Dan
You can, you could submit it to your committee. You are a CEO. I wouldn't expect you to do real work.
Luke Lafreniere
Well, I'm the president CEO of Technology of Earth.
Dan
Yes, exactly. You would definitely delegate.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
So DNS.
Linus Sebastian
Interesting.
Dan
I would get rid of it completely. Okay. I think just manual lookup tables.
Luke Lafreniere
If we could make it really, really good.
Dan
But then we wouldn't have any problems. All computers would work all the time. There'd be no more tech issues.
Luke Lafreniere
Wait.
Dan
Yeah. You're gonna get rid of an entire industry. Use every product.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, that sucks. Actually.
Linus Sebastian
Destroy everyone's jobs.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I take it back.
Linus Sebastian
I actually do have an answer. I was gonna go with a pretty low hanging fruit I would standardize on.
Luke Lafreniere
I thought DNS was low hanging fruit.
Dan
That's pretty specific and monumental.
Linus Sebastian
No, I'm going even lower hanging fruit I would standardize on a Very safe, high voltage, universal power standard.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, that's pretty good.
Linus Sebastian
Nobody. So that we could have. Have thinner conductors and so that nobody would ever have to carry around an adapter to plug into a power outlet ever again.
Luke Lafreniere
You have to include a bunch of junk with any international products that you're selling. That's pretty good.
Dan
I like that. 780 volts.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I was just. I was just. Yeah, someone in chat mentioned it. I was actually doing that. Putting Jeff's shirt side gig out of business with that one. Luke. Yeah, I was. I was. I was channeling Jeff Geerling right there. But I didn't want to put his shirt business on.
Dan
You know, he's just destroying multiple industries.
Linus Sebastian
All right, we got one last. One last comm here.
Dan
Hey, Dll.
Linus Sebastian
Hey.
Luke Lafreniere
Hey.
Linus Sebastian
Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you again next week. Make sure that you are subscribed to the Wan show yt. Show yt? Yeah, I'm just bringing it up on screen here. No, not that. What the hell is that?
Luke Lafreniere
Wait a second.
Dan
It's Wan show yt.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, there we go. This. Make sure you're subscribed or you will likely miss the show next week.
Dan
Yeah, we're not streaming. We're only streaming here next week.
Linus Sebastian
We'll see you again next week. Same bad time, completely different channel. You need to be over there.
Luke Lafreniere
Hi. Nobody fell for it.
Dan
Bye.
Linus Sebastian
You can't get me.
Luke Lafreniere
I'm a professional. I thought I'd get someone. Nobody even flinched. That was actually pretty impressive.
Dan
Thankfully, everything that happens to me has 500 milliseconds of latency. My doctors are very confused.
Linus Sebastian
This episode is brought to you by Google Health. Stop chasing someone else's definition of health. What matters is what's healthy for you. Google Health offers a new kind of coach built with Gemini for effortless track tracking, sleep insights and holistic coaching tailored to you. Visit Googlestore to learn more and start
Luke Lafreniere
a new relationship with your health.
Linus Sebastian
Requires Google account, Google Health app, Internet and Google Health premium subscription.
Luke Lafreniere
Features subject to change.
Linus Sebastian
Availability and results vary. Not intended for medical purposes. Works independently of Gemini apps. Check responses for accuracy.
Hosts: Linus Sebastian & Luke Lafreniere
Producer: Dan
Episode Date: June 27, 2026
This episode centers on the much-hyped launch of the Valve Steam Machine—a PC-console hybrid that has polarized the tech community, partly due to its price and performance claims. Linus and Luke take a deep dive into why, after additional hands-on time, Linus finds himself loving the Steam Machine far more, but for unexpected reasons centered on its desktop experience, not its gaming prowess. The broader discussion spans Windows update woes, SteamOS as a desktop contender, YouTube content trends, modern privacy, AI’s societal role, and several quirky tech stories.
[00:34 – 29:20]
[29:21 – 37:15]
[38:51 – 43:39]
[43:44 – 46:41]
[109:00 – 115:08]
[115:16 – 119:15]
[122:31 – 146:47]
[130:38 – 133:55]
[163:52 – 168:18]
Sponsor shout-outs (AMD, Red Tiger Dash Cams, Shokz OpenFit Pro Headphones) – Skipped in this summary as requested.
Product Announcements
This episode spotlights how the Steam Machine’s true value may lie beyond gaming, serving as an unexpectedly refined Linux-powered PC with usability and cohesion rarely found outside Apple. At the same time, it explores the minefield of modern software—especially Windows’ faltering updates—and the shifting landscape for both open-source and proprietary operating systems.
Broader discussions reveal the hosts’ anxieties and hopes about privacy, the future of YouTube and content discoverability, and AI’s messy integration into everyday life. The recurring lesson: user-focused, curated tech experiences—and not just raw specs—are what win hearts (and maybe even some tech skeptics).
For further details, or if you want to see the cake-eating challenge in action—or join the hosts as they debate the growing pains of modern tech and plain old turning 40—catch the full show at the WAN Show YT channel.