I Need A Mac To Go With My iPhone - WAN Show November 1, 2024

Summary

The WAN Show: "I Need A Mac To Go With My iPhone" – Detailed Summary

Released on November 2, 2024, "The WAN Show" episode titled "I Need A Mac To Go With My iPhone" delves into the latest advancements in technology, focusing primarily on Apple's new Mac Mini, the integration of AI in gaming, and updates on hardware modifications. Hosts Linus Sebastian and Luke Lafreniere engage in insightful discussions, offering their expert opinions and inviting audience participation throughout the episode.

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1. Apple's New Mac Mini with M4 Processor

The episode kicks off with an in-depth analysis of Apple's newly released Mac Mini powered by the M4 processor. Linus expresses high enthusiasm, stating, "The new Apple Mac Mini looks absolutely flipping outstanding to the point where I am starting to wonder if you're a non-gamer, is there any other computer that matters?" (00:35).

Key Points:

• Processor Upgrades: Apple introduced not only the M4 but also the M4 Pro and M4 Max processors, enhancing performance across the Mac lineup.
• Connectivity Enhancements: Macs equipped with M4 Pro or Max now feature multiple Thunderbolt 5 ports, an upgrade from Thunderbolt 4, which Linus is "extremely excited about" (03:22).
• RAM and Storage: The base model now starts with 16GB of RAM, aligning with modern standards. However, storage remains a contentious issue, with the base model offering only 256GB SSD, which Linus critiques as "a terrible value on a component level" (07:54).

Comparison with PC Builds: Linus and Luke engage in a live Mac vs. PC configuration challenge, comparing the cost-effectiveness and upgrade potentials of both platforms. Luke builds a PC for approximately $1,800, highlighting the flexibility and scalability PCs offer versus the Mac Mini's more fixed specifications. This segment underscores Apple's strength in providing a robust entry-level machine while PCs excel in customization and future-proofing.

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2. AI Integration in Gaming: Descartes' Minecraft Model

Transitioning from hardware, the hosts explore the novel approach of AI in gaming. Linus introduces Descartes' latest AI model, "Oasis," trained exclusively on Minecraft gameplay, enabling users to play the game without the traditional game engine (00:59).

Highlights:

• AI-Driven Gameplay: "Descartes' Descartes... has released a playable AI model that was trained on Minecraft, allowing you to play Minecraft without actually playing the game of Minecraft" (01:22).
• User Experience: During the show, Linus and Luke experiment with Oasis, noting its "trippy" results and current limitations, such as lag and restricted playtime.
• Future Implications: While the technology showcases impressive advancements, the hosts agree that widespread adoption is still months away, emphasizing the distinction between AI-driven experiences and traditional gaming.

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3. Modding Spotlight: Beth Deck Handheld Gaming Device

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to hardware modifications, specifically the "Beth Deck," a custom-built handheld gaming device centered around Framework's modular mainboard.

Discussion Points:

• Design and Assembly: Beth Lee has designed a handheld that is "entirely solderless," promoting ease of assembly and disassembly. However, initial versions faced issues like speaker performance and joystick responsiveness (29:34).
• Community Involvement: The project includes sharing 3D print files and components lists, encouraging the community to participate in refining the design. Linus mentions plans for a "1.5 version" and a "2.0 version" with enhanced features (30:28).
• Future Content: The hosts express interest in creating a short circuit-themed video with the Beth Deck, highlighting the collaborative spirit within the tech modding community.

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4. Spotify Car Thing Custom Firmware

Another intriguing topic is the development of custom firmware for Spotify's Car Thing device. Jeff Geerling introduces three firmware variants: Desk, Glance, and Nocturn, each extending the device's functionality beyond its original scope.

Features:

• Desk Firmware: Integrates Spotify Car Thing with PC functionalities, allowing users to control music playback from their computers.
• Glance Firmware: Adds control pad shortcuts reminiscent of the Stream Deck, enhancing user interaction.
• Nocturn Firmware: Restores the original features of Car Thing, ensuring basic functionality remains intact.

Challenges:

• Scalping Issues: Jeff reveals that Car Thing devices are being resold on platforms like eBay at double the original price, complicating access for enthusiasts (36:30).
• Ongoing Development: The Nocturn firmware is not yet officially released, with ongoing tweaks and improvements planned for better integration and performance.

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5. Merchandise Update: WAN Show Corkboard

The hosts introduce their latest merchandise offering—the WAN Show Corkboard—designed for pin enthusiasts.

Product Features:

• Design: "Nothing shows your passion for tech more than a snazzy new cork board that lets people know you watch two big nerds talk about it for hours every week" (38:05).
• Functionality: Comes with six push pins pre-inserted, keyhole slots for easy hanging, and magnetic cable management power bar holders.
• Community Interaction: Linus humorously notes the absence of specific LTT pins in the product images, suggesting users personalize their corkboards (38:51).

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6. Floatplane Platform Updates

Updates regarding their Floatplane membership platform are shared, including upcoming episodes and interactive segments.

Announcements:

• Why Is WAN Late Episode: A monthly behind-the-scenes segment showcasing Linus and Luke's activities outside of the regular show schedule.
• Elijah Week: A new feature set to air mid-November, focusing on content created by Elijah, dubbed "Don't Expect Any Backflips," indicating a more grounded content approach.

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7. Addressing the Congo Attack Ad Misunderstanding

The hosts clarify a previous misunderstanding regarding a "Congo attack ad," initially perceived as an actual external attack but later revealed to be a classroom exercise by a teacher using a mock scenario.

Clarifications:

• Teacher's Statement: The teacher confirmed that the ad was part of a media literacy assignment, aiming to educate students on the impact of misinformation.
• Impact: This incident highlights the challenges content creators face in controlling the narrative around their brand and the importance of media literacy in today's digital age.

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8. YouTube Algorithm Changes: View Counts and Upload Dates

Linus and Luke discuss recent YouTube experiments that involve hiding view counts and upload dates, debating the potential effects on creators and the platform's ecosystem.

Debate Points:

• Creators' Perspective: Hidden view counts may level the playing field for smaller creators, allowing content to be discovered based on quality rather than popularity.
• Users' Experience: Lack of upload dates can hinder users from identifying the relevance and timeliness of content, potentially leading to frustration (101:18).
• Platform Analysis: The hosts consider how these changes align with YouTube's goals of maximizing watch time versus providing useful metadata for content discovery.

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9. Higher Education and the Value of Reading

A reflective segment on the importance of reading in higher education and personal development.

Insights:

• Reading vs. Listening: The hosts debate the merits of traditional reading versus audiobooks, emphasizing the cognitive benefits of engaging with written content.
• Educational Practices: Concerns are raised about educational strategies that discourage deep reading, potentially impacting students' analytical and creative skills.

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10. Live AI Minecraft Gameplay

In a live demonstration, Linus attempts to navigate the AI-driven Minecraft model introduced earlier in the episode.

Experience:

• Gameplay Dynamics: The AI showcases unpredictable world-building, leading to surreal and disjointed environments.
• Technical Limitations: Lag and responsiveness issues are evident, underscoring the nascent stage of such AI integrations in gaming.

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11. Closing Remarks and Future Segments

The episode concludes with a teaser for upcoming segments and a light-hearted discussion on various topics, including subscriber interactions and merchandise logistics.

Final Notes:

• Community Engagement: Linus and Luke encourage listeners to participate in future segments, such as tier lists of viewer locations.
• Merchandise Logistics: Addressing stock issues with popular items like tall shirts, the hosts promise improvements based on community feedback.

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Conclusion

This episode of "The WAN Show" effectively balances deep technical discussions with community-driven content, showcasing Linus and Luke's commitment to delivering valuable insights while engaging with their audience. From Apple's latest hardware innovations to the experimental integration of AI in gaming, the hosts provide a comprehensive look at the evolving technology landscape, all the while maintaining their signature humor and interactive style.

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For those interested in the full conversation, listening to the episode will provide an enriched understanding of the topics discussed and the hosts' dynamic interaction.

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big roas man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn you'll be able to reach people who do. Get a hundred dollar credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com campaign to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com campaign. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn the place to be to be positive vibes, all of y'all. Happy Friday and welcome to the WAN show.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What the heck?

[Linus Sebastian]

We've got a great show lined up for you guys today. The new Apple Mac Mini looks absolutely flipping outstanding to the point where I am starting to wonder if you're a non gamer, is there any other computer that matters?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, you'll be able to play cyberpunk on it soon.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a strong statement. I know, but I might end up standing behind it depending on how our testing of it goes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm open to having my opinions changed, but right now I'm liking it a lot. We're also going to be talking about playing Minecraft with AI. That's right. AI company Descartes. Descartes, Whatever. It doesn't matter. The point is they've released a playable AI model that was trained on Minecraft that allows you to play Minecraft without actually playing the game of Minecraft.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

No textures, no game engine, no nothing. Just AI.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That sounds like the worst.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, we're gonna try it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

We get to try it. It's playable in a browser.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very playable. Doesn't it play it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no, no. You play it. Oh, you'll figure it out. He'll figure it out. What else we got?

[Luke Lafreniere]

IFixit figured it out and they have fixed McDonald's. They have fixed McDonald's soft serve machine problem. So that's good if you want ice cream and good if you care about right for repair for one particular extremely wealthy company. Also, multiple people did really cool things with hardware. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, we'll get it. Okay, not the wealthy company thing. We'll get to that later. It actually matters a lot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And we have someone who took. I can't find it here. Did it make it? Ah, yes. Spotify'.

[Linus Sebastian]

The show is brought to you today by Manscaped1, password and Squarespace, and of course by our chair partner, Secretlab, our laptop partner, LG and our rap partner, DBRAND let's jump right into our headline topic, which is of course the Apple Mac Mini with their new M4 processor. Apple began the week by announcing a new Mac every day to help keep the. I mean, doctor away, I guess. Right? Like that's gotta be the joke. Is that the joke? I hope so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I guess so.

[Linus Sebastian]

They began with the M4IMAC, followed, finally got a new Imac, followed by the redesigned Mac Mini and a refreshed lineup of MacBook Pros. In addition to the M4, Apple likewise announced the M4 Pro, which is available for the Mac mini and Mac MacBook Pro lineup. And the M4 Mac.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, not the imac.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, the imac was only M one last time around, if I recall correctly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why?

[Linus Sebastian]

I could be a little rusty on that. But if I recall correctly, it was only available because. I don't know, it's just. It's basically a screen with a basic computer in it. I think is kind of the idea. It's the Facebook surfing machine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

People would probably give them a hard time if it did have a high end processor in it because it would be priced so much for such a basic Facebook browsing machine. All right, anyway, hold on, hold on, hold on. And the M4 Max. Okay. And the M4 Max, which is only available in the MacBook Pros. Macs with an M4 Pro or Max will now have multiple Thunderbolt 5 ports rather than Thunderbolt 4, which I'm extremely excited about. We'll talk about in just a moment here. And for the first time, the newest generation of Imac will have support for two screens. All right. The Mac Mini though, is the one that I want to talk about because some of the. Okay. Notes are. We didn't give them much time to work on the notes today and unfortunately I really need to look at the. At the doc here. One second. Or at my spreadsheet where I added the topic M4. Here we go. Nope, this is a previous week. Oh boy. We're off to a really good start today. Okay, the Mac Mini. Luke, let's go shopping. Okay, that's what I want to do for this segment. So I'm going to be a Mac and you're going to be a PC. So I'm going to go on apple.com. i'm just going to pick another country or region.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, hold on. I. Blue screen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Got him. So I'm going to go to the United States and you're going to go on PC part picker. Okay, here we go. I'm gonna shop for a Mac. And you're going to try to build a PC for the same price as me. So for starters, here, let's, here we go. Mac Mini, pre order. Let's have a look at the price that you're going to be looking at. So we're gonna go with the, let's go with the starting Mac Mini that comes in at US$599, US$600. So Luke, why don't you put together a pretty decent machine for US$600? It's been a while since Luke has really, you know, shopped for computers. Shopped for a computer because he's gotten them for free since he started here, which was like 12 years ago before then. Yeah, I believe, I believe in him. I believe that he can do it. And guys chat. Feel free to pitch in. Feel free to pitch in and give Luke some ideas for starting points for things like, you know, CPU, if there's any.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How much are motherboards Chipsets?

[Linus Sebastian]

He should be looking at motherboards, my man. Motherboards have spiked in a big way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It kind of ruined this whole thing, to be honest.

[Linus Sebastian]

You used to be able to get a pretty decent board for like US$80, US$90 Canadian. You'd probably be looking at more like 115, 120. But now like a decent motherboard, you're looking at more like 120, 140 US dollars. Unless you're willing to make some compromises. There are lower end chip sets, but sometimes they can come with pre compromises, especially if you want a machine that you're going to be able to kind of upgrade for a While, add more M2 storage and stuff like that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So wait, how much do I have? 600.

[Linus Sebastian]

You have US$600. Yeah. And you're on PC part picker. I believe that's in us by default.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. Okay, so guys, feel free, feel free to pitch in. I don't see anyone trying to help you, which is a little discouraging. Get a 4090. Sure. Oh man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How much RAM does yours have?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So can I know some specs?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, absolutely. This is very exciting. For the first time I think ever, Apple has finally acknowledged that the year is now 2020 plus and they no longer are offering a base model machine with only 8 gigs of RAM. They have 16 gigs of RAM in that base model. So Luke, why don't you go ahead and find yourself a 16 gig? What are you doing? No, don't. Just don't, don't, don' do that. Build a Computer. Jeez. Okay, so find yourself a nice 16 gig of RAM.

[Dan]

Smaller too. Power buttons in the right place.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Memory. 16 gigs.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you need 16 gigs of RAM to match the base model. New Mac mini.

[Luke Lafreniere]

See, PCs are a little bit too based, which is part of the problem, because they automatically assume you want two times six.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you've got filters. You got filters.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You don't need that. You just need even more ram.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I suppose so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The problem with this whole contest is that we are lowering ourselves.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh my goodness. Okay, we're not actually competing. Just configure a computer, for crying out loud.

[Dan]

Are you a politician? You're too good at this.

[Linus Sebastian]

This guy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How much storage do you have?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, that's where things do fall apart a little bit. Assuming 1 TB I only get 256 gigs of storage.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can I even sel.

[Linus Sebastian]

I only get 256 gigs of storage. And that is a pretty frustrating thing that remains. Still about Apple's lineup is how much they charge for really small amounts of storage. And what's especially frustrating about it for me is I know that a big part of why they're charging so much for it is that the sweet spot for price to capacity has moved past 256 gigs. So they're charging so much for it because it's just a terrible value on a component level to build such a tiny SSD these days. The sweet spot for capacity is probably more like in the 1 TB range. Now with that said, I'm trying to think like how many dies would be on a 1 TB drive? Now is it 1 or 2? For the most part, I think it would be 2. I haven't looked that closely at them in the last probably year. So apparently you can do them with one. Yeah. So that sweet spot is definitely more like in that one terabyte range. So you are, you're basically just like wasting silicon to make 256 gig storage. So that's. That's gonna, that's gonna kind of impede Luke because he's not gonna get a great deal on his SSD.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it was 18 bucks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whereas if I start. Oh, okay, that's pretty good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not that bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's still pretty good actually. So it looks like there's a really broad sweet spot these days then, because you'll probably pay. Oh, yeah, no, no, yeah, no, yeah, that's a bad deal. Because the thing is, there's a certain amount of cost that is just in the cost of making anything at all. And Shipping it and QA ing it and developing it. So there's only so cheap that you can make something. That's why you can buy a hard drive, like a modern hard Drive, for $250. And you can't buy one that is 1 20th the capacity for $12, because you just. You still have to put a motor in it. You still have to ship it around the world. You still have to pay someone to assemble it. There's just fixed costs that are associated with bringing a product to market at all. Okay, sorry. We're back on Luke's laptop. What do you got? What do you got?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do I need to buy an operating system?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, I mean, the Mac comes with one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's what I thought you were going to say.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, with that said, we have a video coming in a little while about how Windows doesn't necessarily. You can. It can be obtained for a lot less than $120. So why don't you leave? You know what? I'm nothing if not gracious and benevolent. Yeah. So leave out the operating system.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is where I'm at currently.

[Linus Sebastian]

Take the operating system out. Okay, so we're going to. Luke laptop. Okay. What do you got? What do you got? Walk us through it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ryzen 5.7600x, which is the first thing I chose, so I didn't really spec it in too much. One of the cheapest motherboards I could find ended up being MatX. 16 gigs of acceptable RAM. A SSD that you shouldn't buy, to be completely honest, but it fits the storage thing of your side. A relatively cheap MATX case.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. But like, attractive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it's all right. It's not bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're going up against Apple. You're going to have to have a reasonably, you know, decent looking case. Yeah, it looks nice, like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I didn't go for just a piece of junk. And I found one of the cheapest 600 watt power supplies I could find, which is overkill wattage wise. But I didn't really want to get like, something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Something that Lucas would warn you is gonna blow up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. This one was decently rated. It's sort of. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, sure. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I've got a little bit more money to play with.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you've got some more money to spend. With that said, you might have some. You might have some things to kind of deal with here. Do you have WI Fi? Because I do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you sure?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think this board has it, actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I'd be pretty surprised at that. Price point?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nope.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so you're probably gonna need some WI fi. Why don't you go get some WI fi? Okay, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I also need a cooler.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, that should come with a cooler.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are you sure?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you should be good to go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It looks like the Slim box.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, shoot. Oh, that's a 7600. Yeah. Yeah, you're gonna need a cooler. Yep. You'll need a cooler. You'll need a cooler. You'll need some WI fi. I might have some other things to inform you that you're gonna need, but why don't you go ahead and add those first and see how it goes for you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do I just get a cooler that I know won't fit in this case at all? Not worry about it?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no. I think you're probably gonna need a cooler that fits in your case.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I could get something huge and it would be cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you could just hot rod it. You know, stick out the side of the case.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I won't get something way too big. But I also just like don't actually know what would fit in here.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. Maybe you guys can. Maybe you guys can help them. Maybe you guys can help them a little bit. Like a low profile am. $555 for an October cooler? Yeah, I don't think we're gonna be doing that. I think PC part picker has clearance.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Assume that this one fits.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. You know what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not mad at me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Good enough. Okay, go find, go find a WI fi card.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Or do I just upgrade the motherboard?

[Linus Sebastian]

You could upgrade to a motherboard with onboard WI fi. Yeah, totally.

[Luke Lafreniere]

100 bucks. Let's see if I bonk that out. What I can get.

[Linus Sebastian]

You bonked it. You can filter by having WI fi.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think this is only like 20 something dollars more. Is there a wifi thing?

[Linus Sebastian]

Probably. I would think so. They've got pretty good. Pretty good filters, onboard Ethernet, onboard video, I believe. Hey, look at that. Oh, yeah. You're gonna need like pretty good WI fi, by the way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Your Wi Fi 7 or what?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just gonna check real quick, but I think so. It's either that or 6e. You know what? I'll allow 6e, but I'm gonna double check what kind of. What kind of wifi I have. Ugh. I mean, Apple has its own issues with shopping. It doesn't even freaking say.

[Luke Lafreniere]

60 apparently.

[Linus Sebastian]

60. Okay. There you go. Okay. So you can have wi fi6e.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. What are you at? How you doing for pricing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Saves me $10.

[Linus Sebastian]

560. Wow. PC is $40 ahead. You're gonna need Thunderbolt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, can I sort by that? I doubt this thing has.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll tell you what I'll allow. I'll allow no Thunderbolt. I'll allow no Thunderbolt. But you will. What you will need is some USB C ports. You got any USB C ports?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so. Does the case have any? That's not the right picture.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep, you've got USB C. At least one. You've got at least one. Does your motherboard support it? Does it have a front header for USB C?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

What do you got? What do you got, Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Trying to see.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. USB 3.2 Gen 1 headers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you got it. You got it. If that's. If that's the specs for the board there. Wait, you have an ITX board?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And now we have an MATX case. You're making me change things on the fly, my guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just trying to help.

[Luke Lafreniere]

RAM still fits everything.

[Linus Sebastian]

Still, technically, I'm just trying to help you beat me. You need a 10 core CPU language.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't actually say a word. I just made a sound.

[Dan]

If it's gotta have Thunderbolt, then it needs to be intel, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, he gave me a pass on that one. And USB 4 is in some ways functionally the same.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't mention the graphics. Shut up.

[Linus Sebastian]

So, okay, where's your 10 core CPU at?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hold on. Is there a core count? Yeah. There we go. Oh, wait. No, other way around.

[Linus Sebastian]

Technically, every word is just a sound, so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hey. Well, we don't need to get into technicalities.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

See, I actually can't, because I can only get better than that. Unfortunately, also, not all cores are made the same.

[Linus Sebastian]

Your cores are gonna need to be pretty good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I mean, we don't need to. We don't need to get into that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Also, you're gonna need a pretty decent gpu. Okay, why don't you throw. Just for the sake of argument, why don't you throw like a 3050? Why don't you throw a 3050 in there?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's what you're saying is a pretty good gpu?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it's on board. You're gonna need what would be an extremely good onboard GPU. California 909 says 10 core arm isn't the same as 10 core. X86. California 909 needs to get caught up on some tech tips. Because ARM vs X86 is not the whole story. It's it's. It's down to the actual design of the cores and. No, that is not the case.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do we have to do the 10 core thing? Because there's actually just like not very many of those.

[Linus Sebastian]

Tell you what, tell you what, as long as you have a really solid 8 core CPU, I'll allow it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Current gen? Yeah, yeah. You're not going to be 7,000 series.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, that's not current. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now that he's working on Labs, he's going to be such a liability on the WAN show. Oh man, that's great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, so isn't that the processor that I had?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, you had a 7,000 series. You're going to need 9,000 series, my guy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, but no one actually likes those.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it doesn't matter. You're going to need a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're not very good.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're fast and efficient. I mean, I'm gonna draw way less.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Power than you even.

[Linus Sebastian]

Fine, as long as you got eight cores, I'll allow it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I genuinely think that processor was fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. How you doing over there? Good gravy. Goodness gracious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The GPU is really the problem.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, the whole thing is really the problem. Now I'm. Now it's my time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Does she have integrated graphics?

[Linus Sebastian]

Now it's my turn to shop. Yeah, but like, not good enough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They don't compare.

[Linus Sebastian]

Check this out. For $600, I'm getting a 10 core CPU. Whatever 10 core GPU means. But their onboard GPU on M4 is quite, quite nice. 16 gigs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What if you make that storage a respectable amount?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, we'll get to that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What happens to the competition then?

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll get to that in a minute. First up, I'm getting 16 gigs of unified memory and 256 gigs of SSD storage. Which, honestly speaking, I actually don't mind as much as them nerfing the ram, because as someone who's going to use a NAS anyway and who doesn't need storage on my PC, honestly, we tried to roll out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry to cut you off, but we tried to roll out some new standardized laptops. Dan will know about this too. To the business team. And we got viciously screamed and yelled at by your employees because of not having enough RAM. No, they were fine. But 16 gigs of RAM, they didn't like it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Really?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Who? Sorry, What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Capping out too many tabs.

[Dan]

So many Chrome tabs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Too many tabs.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is hilarious.

[Dan]

We've been through two or three laptops for some people because they have so many tabs that Just explodes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Interesting.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, so let's go, let's go back to my customizing my Mac Mini.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Configure your RAM up and your and your storage up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah, but you only have 16 gigs of RAM, so that would affect your budget too. Hold on, we'll get to it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I suspect yours will go up more.

[Linus Sebastian]

The point is I don't mind the SSD that much because I'm using a NAS for storage anyway. All right. I got three Thunderbolt 4 ports. I have an HDMI port, a couple USB C ports in addition to my Thunderbolt ports. Headphone jack. Okay, hold on, hold on. We're going to get to ram. We're going to get to RAM in a second.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't want to talk about this.

[Linus Sebastian]

First of all, for my NAS, I'm going to need 10 gigs. I don't really need Final Cut Pro or Logic Pro.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's fair.

[Linus Sebastian]

The point is at the starting at the base configuration, this good enough for most people is an absolutely killer machine. Is the only thing that I think that I would recommend for like Grandpappy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Needs a computer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mac Minis have been killer for a long time and this is honestly a very good jump, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's definitely gonna be some stuff for us to talk about in the review. Like the fact that they put the power button on the bottom. Why?

[Luke Lafreniere]

How often are you turning off your computer?

[Linus Sebastian]

Why? Yeah, but who cares why? It's like aesthetics.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know.

[Linus Sebastian]

They redesigned the mouse again and they put the charger on the bottom again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is there an apple logo on the top of it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Again? They put the charger on the bottom again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is there an apple logo on the top of the Mac Mini?

[Linus Sebastian]

Like it's just. Oh, here we can see the whole gallery.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They should have just made that the power button look.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it should glow. It should glow like the old MacBook.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, why?

[Linus Sebastian]

Not sure.

[Dan]

Where am I gonna put my coffee then?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh my goodness. Anyway, the point is, the point is that I don't like that this thing is absolutely killer until the second you want to upgrade it. So this is where things do get a little bit more complicated. You can see that baby. The eight hundred dollar configuration changes only that you get 256 gigs of storage trash. So for context, let's just fire up the old newegg dot com. What would 256 gigs actually, you know what? No, let's see what 2 terabytes of storage would cost me over on Newegg.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Look, gotta be. Basically I wouldn't Say a minimum, but.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like pretty normal these days for $154.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And that's a nice WD black drive. Like there's a cheaper Samsung one right below it.

[Linus Sebastian]

And even that is a nice western.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One is even cheaper.

[Linus Sebastian]

Brand name drive. Yeah, that is a 990 EVO. That is a really nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm Fairly certain for two terabytes you can get under 100 bucks.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a nice SSD. So Apple is literally charging an order of magnitude more than commodity SSD pricing for a storage upgrade. Speaking of which. Oh shoot, I forgot to have this added to the dock. But someone, someone like hacked together Apple SSD upgrade harness or something. Oh no, I can't find it. I can't find it. If someone can find it, send it to me. But someone made a way to upgrade the SSDs in Macs like some hardware hardware hacker. And then things don't get much better. A mere eight gigs of memory. Okay, so that appears to be the only upgrade going from the $800 configuration to the thousand dollar configuration. I get eight more gigs of RAM. That will cost me another $200. For context, for context, here's 32 gigs of DDR5. Sorry, sorry. For context, here's 64 gigs of DDR5. Whoopsie doodles for $200.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So go into the.

[Linus Sebastian]

People just can't resist.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Luke, we don't need to do 64 gigs. Let's not.

[Linus Sebastian]

They can't resist, brother.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But let's go to 32 gigs on the Apple configurator and a 2 terabyte SSD. And how much does that cost?

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, all right. Let me start with my base. Let me start with my base configuration.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So the business team would not accept.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're going to make me go all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The way to accept 16 gigs and.

[Linus Sebastian]

A 2 terabyte SSD.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I think 2 terabyte SSD is fair.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just as a reminder, guys, just as a reminder.

[Dan]

Oh my gosh.

[Linus Sebastian]

We just spent okay. On Newegg for 64 gigs of memory and a 2 terabyte SSD. We just spent about $350. We went from a $600 machine buying half as much memory. Half as much memory and the same. And actually less storage. A slightly less storage because we had the 256 gig to start. We went from a 600 machine to an 1800 dollar computer. That's how they get you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a rip. That's a rip right there.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's how they get you. Apple gives you the first hit for cheap.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Now I can just like get whatever I want.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, you can have whatever you like. So I think that our review of the M4 Mac mini is going to be a little bit complicated because as a basic machine, that kind of does 98% of what any non gamer. So we're talking non gamers. It'll probably do 98% of what 90 plus percent of people would need, and it'll do it for a long time. Apple supports their products with software for a very long time, and that used to be a major strength for the PC platform. But I feel like it's actually been a little less. Things have been a little bumpy with trusted platform modules with vulnerabilities that are only getting patched back a couple of generations. So you've got to give credit to Apple for the things that they do well at that entry level price. This thing absolutely slaps. But as soon as you start tweaking anything, Luke's sitting over here building an $1,800 computer right now. I guess having fun. Is that what you're working on? Okay, well, let's see how you're doing over here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I upgraded to 7800x3D. Upgraded to a 4070.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I haven't changed the SSD or the RAM yet, but that honestly won't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. I think you owe Apple a motherboard with like some USB 4 ports.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's something.

[Linus Sebastian]

If we're going to be somewhat fair to Apple here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I barely even really started.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, people want to see like a 4070 or something like that. Like, let's outperform this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was a 4070.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, did you. No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that was a 4070 in there. Motherboard shopping. Oh, boy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's fine. Just use filters. You got this. He's got this. Not to mention that you're going to have all the PC, like DIY PC benefits of PCI Express slots that you can expand. And if you go AM5 in particular, which AMD has committed to support until, I believe it's 2027, you may. Sorry, I had something in my eye there. You may see future upgrades to the CPU that Luke has chosen, for example, that might offer measurable performance improvements potentially. Allegedly. What you got there? Did you find them?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thunderbolt, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, no, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're not doing that.

[Linus Sebastian]

As long as you got USB 4 and you got a decent number of USB C port.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If it's pretty legit, then for. In regards to features.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, all right, cool, cool. What else you got. You got.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably get a better cooler.

[Linus Sebastian]

You could probably get more RAM if you wanted. What are you even at for your price?

[Luke Lafreniere]

1360.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're at $1350. Wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's get. Yeah. 32 gigs of RAM. Why not? That seems pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's less than 100 bucks, by the way.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think we've made our point on this topic. We can move on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I got a four terabyte drive. Just for fun. I'm still under your budget.

[Linus Sebastian]

You got to rub it in like that. Hey, all right. I see how it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I get. Yeah, I could get a sick noctua cooler as well. Still be under budget.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, well, your computer is, like, huge, so the Mac MINI is mini. So get wrecked. Yeah, get wrecked. Get right. I win. I declare victory for Team Apple.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I unapologetically declare victory.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, what do you want to talk about next? Plastic victory.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's do some of these modder things. This was a really cool week for modifications. Do you want to do the car thing or do you want to do the Steam Deck framework?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right. Steam Deck framework.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I wasn't answering your question. Okay, whatever. You pick what you like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I picked one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. The Beth Deck.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, this thing is really cool. Do you want to go for it?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Modder. Beth. Lee. Lee. I'm going to go with Lee has designed her own gaming handheld built around a framework 13 laptop main board.

[Linus Sebastian]

If she worked on textiles instead of Tek, she could be Bethlehem.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bethlehem. Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. All right. You're not gonna ding him. All right. There we go.

[Dan]

Sorry, I'm still in shock.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was intense. Yeah. Anyways, it's called the.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm trying to show a picture, but we talked about this a little bit on the pre show.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, it's so how impossible it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

To use the Internet now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It looks so cool. Oh, my goodness. Anyways, they posted 3D print files for the handheld case to Printables and designed it as a part of an ongoing competition on the site to make a cool Framework mainboard case. Included with the files is a list of necessary parts in the description.

[Linus Sebastian]

What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No way. That's awesome. Like screws and an 8 inch 900p touchscreen. All the listed parts apparently cost around 200 bucks before shipping, but that doesn't include the Framework main board, the framework battery RAM, SSD, or a WiFi card.

[Linus Sebastian]

Muzzle that up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can get all that from Framework. The Beth Deck is entirely solderless except for the listed speakers, but they don't actually recommend them. Because they sound like I press the button. I did the thing, I was a good boy. And are too powerful for the small handheld. They claimed that the whole thing can be assembled in about 15 minutes and disassembled in less than 2min or 0 if you try hard enough. There are some issues with the design. Aside from the speaker, the left joystick is a little bit sticky. Apparently the battery can overheat and the power button flies off and out the window during disassembly. Due to these quirks and the design's popularity, they're releasing a 1.5 version on November 8th. To fix the smaller problems, Beth is also designing a thinner and lighter 2.0 version, which will apparently feature a custom PCB for the controls and better speakers. Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, this is so sick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It looks actually like really cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Investment disclosure. I'm invested in Framework. This is amazing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone said try this for a short circuit video. That actually be kind of.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know if that's a short circuit video, but they said it's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You make it in 20 minutes. I mean, the whole thing can be assembled in 15 minutes and it's solderless.

[Linus Sebastian]

I guess theoretically that's a lot of prep for a short circuit video, though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is true.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sourcing everything and all that. So no promises that it would be short circuit, but I feel like I'd be kind of down to try it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Could be fun on an ltt. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

The value proposition, maybe not amazing, not going to be great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But that's also potentially true for Frameworks.

[Linus Sebastian]

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

[Luke Lafreniere]

Par for the course with. With highly repairable things. Sometimes I think it's really awesome. I think it's super cool. Great work, Beth. Keep it going. I love that they're like making a second revision and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, this is more interesting to me than just a Steam Deck. I don't know. Seems cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, to be clear, there's still great things about the Steam Deck steamos.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Freaking awesome. This obviously doesn't have track pads. The audio is tuned really well on the Steam Deck. The new OLED one uses a beautiful OLED display with hdr. Like, let's be very clear, this is not the thing to buy if you just want a smooth, seamless, portable gaming experience.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But say you're in the Framework ecosystem, you're upgrading your laptop.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. This is a pretty legit thing to do with your old motherboard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's so sick compared to what most old laptops get used for.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, like. Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Either Nothing. Or a very small uncool task.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude. The number of like tech upgrade videos that we've done or off site shoots that we've done in people's homes, basically where their old tech is just a bandit in a bag somewhere or behind a shelf somewhere or whatever else.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Turn it into a handheld gaming machine.

[Linus Sebastian]

What if you could take it with you on the go?

[Luke Lafreniere]

So sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Very cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do we want to talk about the other one?

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. Yeah, let's do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's near the bottom of the dock, I think. Yeah, it's right above the sponsors Spotify's Car Thing has. I would say I watched this whole video. It was actually really good. I would say it's straight up saved. It says is saved on the dock, but like, no, this is actually amazing. YouTuber damnit. Jeff released a video this week discussing custom firmware for Spotify's car thing, a $90 device the music streaming company will be remotely bricking in two months.

[Linus Sebastian]

By the way, that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's really stupid.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, not cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So before then there's Desk Thing, a firmware that has its own companion app for your PC and that also has an app store for your Car thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is so cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's Glance Thing, which in addition is still controlling Spotify playback. It allows you to add shortcuts to launch apps on your PC. Similar to something like a stream deck.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's super cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then there's Nocturn, which isn't officially out yet and is the only firmware that managed to get the Car Thing's original features working, which is pretty cool. For now, it requires a host device for networking capabilities and whatnot. There's also other things you can do with it as well. Apparently modders have determined Car Thing will still be moddable after the brick date as well, which is cool. And honestly, I would really just highly recommend watching the video. It's actually just really cool what they've done with it. Jeff. Or dammit, Jeff also goes over, as you can see. Yeah, really cool ways to mount it. And like 3D printed little things. Like he has two different ways that you can just mount it so it sits on your desk. And then there's that one where it's actually magnetically held there.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is so cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it's held under his monitor, but you can just pull it off and move it somewhere else. Really cool. I think it's magnetically held at least. But yeah, really awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

Come on. Darn it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very cool video.

[Linus Sebastian]

The preview doesn't show. You see, if I click a preview My expectation is that it will take me to a frame that shows that. Anyway, the point is you guys should watch the video anyway. Don't look at us looking at the video. Look at the video for yourself.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fantastic video. Really cool project. I thought it was so cool that I was like, hey, maybe I actually want one of these things.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then you went on ebay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And found out that they're like over.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Twice as much as they originally were. What? Like our notes are like $90 device. Because it was. It was a $90 device.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is no longer a $90 device.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hot option.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like a $300 device.

[Linus Sebastian]

Spotify had no idea what they had.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What the heck?

[Linus Sebastian]

They didn't know what they had.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Damn it, Jeff. Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

His username could not be more perfect.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is why we can't have nice broken things, Jeff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're fixed in CPUs and motherboards. He's fixing car things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Typical Jeff's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's all ruined.

[Linus Sebastian]

Way to go. Jeff's. As a group, I just. I don't condone you. I can't condone you, Jeff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But yeah, super, super cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

All the Jeffs in chat apologizing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You should literally mid video, I paused it, opened up ebay and was like, car thing. And I opened up ebay Canada and looked up car thing and I was like, oh, they're just trying to scam people that don't know. I'll go to the American one. And it was just worse. What?

[Dan]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, well, anywho, it's time for us to explain merch messages. Yeah, we don't do super chats. We don't do twitch bits. We do merch messages through because of a combination of features on other platforms not actually working correctly. And also, we just think it's plain better if you want to interact with the show. Hey, why not throw money at your screen? And, you know, maybe producer Dan replies to you in the bottom here or just post your message if you have a shout out. Or maybe he forwards it to someone internally to get back to you. What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right, I don't. I don't know. Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or maybe he curates it and Luke and I respond. No matter what does or doesn't happen to your merch message, you will at least get your order in the mail. We've got all kinds of great stuff on lttstore.com including an exciting new product launch. That's right, my friends, it's here. The one. No, not that. The one. The only WAN show cork board.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow. Does it come with the pins?

[Linus Sebastian]

No. Oh, you have to get your own pins. Oh, but we've had lots of pins. I asked the team, I was like, do we have any new pins to announce with it? And they were like, nope. And I was like, oh, you could.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mount your pins there. That's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you. Are you for real right now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, I don't have cork boards or am I a pin collector? So I didn't really put it together, but I didn't put together putting store pins.

[Linus Sebastian]

You are for real.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, no, no. Look, look, look, look in the. On the store. They don't use it that way.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean. Yeah, I guess. I mean, you could scroll down a little.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do they end up using that? No, there's no. There's no examples of this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait, shut up. No, keep scrolling. Are there not more pictures?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, this is the last one.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's it. We didn't put any LTT pins on it in the pictures?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, well, we've definitely done pin collections in the past.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's also not in the related products.

[Linus Sebastian]

The inspiration for doing this was definitely for people to be able to put their LTT pins on them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, maybe we can put a picture of that somewhere. Cuz I looked at this picture and I was like, oh yeah, that's neat.

[Dan]

Piece not included.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is how I've used these types of things in the past. But I didn't think about it being like a collection thing. Like a Thanos glove. I blame Colton a Thanos glove for LTT score pins. Artie.

[Dan]

Oof.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, nothing shows. I'll read the thing. I'll read the thing. Nothing shows your passion for tech more than a snazzy new cork board that lets people people know. You watch two big nerds talk about it for hours every week. Yeah, it comes with six push pins which are already inserted into the side. And it is super easy to hang on your wall thanks to its two keyhole slots on the back, which conveniently we have put magnetic cable management power bar holders into because they will definitely work for that. But anyway, two little keyhole slots. You can just throw a couple nails or screws in the wall or you can use these and you can magnetically mount it, which would be super cool. What else? We got to talk. It's one power bar key is already attached. Available now at LMG GG Corkboard. We've got a couple of other announcements. Floatplane November update. We have a packed November for our floatplane members. For starters, we'll be dropping a new why Is wan late episode next Friday. It's a monthly behind the scenes of Linus and Luke's time after 4:30pm every Friday. We will also have a new person week airing mid late month. It's going to be Elijah week. Don't expect any backflips though. I have personally forbaden it. It is forbaded. Finally, we're asking our subscribers to send in questions for an Yvonne Q and A that says please click.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They should just do an Yvonne week here.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is such a terrible picture of Yvonne. Hi floaties. We're planning on shooting an Ivon Q and A. Leave your questions below, they may get answered. Good lord, that is a lot of questions. It's been amazing. Remember we talked about that concept, Luke of having like a. Like a hater wall posting like comments about how float plane will never work and will always fail and whatever else and like using it as inspiration for, you know. Yeah, Flow plane is definitely a thing. It's actually a. It's a great community. The comments and the interaction under the videos is like super POS most of the time. I mean anytime people are passionate about things, sometimes things can get a little bit heated. But it's a great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In general it's pretty good though.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a great community and we've got a great month coming up for you guys and all you gotta do is go to LMG GG floatplane to get subscribed and you can submit questions for Sammy to go through and select what else we got. Oh, okay. The last announcement before we do a couple of merch messages is our ex partner anchor is once again just. Oh wait, sorry, this post was deleted. Oh, okay. Well, why'd they delete it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. Apparently. Hold on. Someone says no, it doesn't list me there. So maybe they finally removed it for real?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I don't think it was in this slidey thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm going, I'm going.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was here that 90 used to be.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, okay. All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably got deleted because they updated it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe we're clear then. Okay, well anyway. Okay, good. Well that's good then. All right. Why don't we do a couple merch messages?

[Dan]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hit me.

[Dan]

Hey guys. Linus, have you seen the trailers for Claire obscure expedition 33?

[Linus Sebastian]

What now?

[Dan]

As a fellow turn based JRPG fan, I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'm super excited for it. Claire. Claire Obscure Expedition 33.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not even. That's not on my radar at all yet. What is this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I Don't know. It's coming in next year.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, from who? Interesting multi platform release. That's always nice to see. Cast Reveal trailer I mean, it definitely has a vibe so far, but no, this is, this is the first that I'm hearing of it, so this might have to be something that I'll. I'll have to throw on my list. Reactive Turn Based Combat Dodge Parry Encounter. Okay, I mean that doesn't necessarily like, mean that it's bad. I mean, Super Mario rpg.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, the reason why I reacted that way is when people say what the combat is and they don't show it, I always get suspicious.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it seems like it's pretty early.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's made by Sand Fall Interactive.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sand Fall? What are they known for?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Publisher Kepler Interactive. I have no idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sandfall Interactive Games list. What have you guys done before?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think this might be the first one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, good luck everyone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. CTO comes from Ubisoft. CEO comes from Ubisoft. This is an Ubisoft splinter company.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

As in, as in people from Ubisoft left and made this. Not. Not. It is an Ubisoft company.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, hopefully they're the, the good people from Ubisoft because they had to have gone somewhere.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My way too short video that I made was about how this is happening a lot now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I mean, there is obviously a period of pain right now in the games industry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But what I hope is that projects like this, totally. Companies like this are wildly successful and we see kind of a. The growth that comes after the volcano, you know, and, and to be clear, the people that are, that are suffering in the layoffs and the, and the upheaval, it's not fun for anyone. It's, it's, it's terrible. But if there was a good outcome that could happen, stuff like this, and the success of stuff like this would be it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I recognize the CEO's name. So I'm trying to look up what they've done and my Google Foo is failing right now. But I recognize the CEO's name and yeah, I mean, I hope it does. Well, I am hoping for basically any of these companies where people split off from one of these big developers that are failing pretty hard right now and they try to make something themselves. I have, I have big hopes for all of them. So I hope this one works out as well. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, one more. Hit me, Dan.

[Dan]

Sure. Third time buyer, first time messenger. Did you see Jeff Geerling's video on the LDT precision screwdriver? And how well, did you enjoy it?

[Linus Sebastian]

I did see his video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you watch it?

[Linus Sebastian]

I watched pieces of it. Like, I watched the sections that I thought were most relevant. I didn't watch, like, the fidget spinner bit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fair enough.

[Linus Sebastian]

Seemed pretty long.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think he's just having fun with it. But yeah, I agree.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that. How do I put this? I think that it's ultimately up to every individual user what features of a product benefit them the most. I didn't really fully understand some of the preferences. Like, as someone who has worked on small electronics a fair bit over the years, be they laptops or phones or game consoles or controllers or whatever the case may be, you know, I don't see a clear benefit to having a longer hex portion of the bit, whereas I do see a very clear benefit to having a longer blade portion of a bit because it happens so often that plastic housings will be. Will. Will leave a screw deeply recessed. And having a longer. Having a longer blade for me, means I'll be reaching for the dedicated precision fixed drivers a lot less often than I otherwise would have to. I was a little confused that more. Hmm.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, he compared it against their plastic one when they have a metal one. Right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that was the main thing that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Stood out to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't. Yeah. Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And their metal one doesn't have the bit storage. So I think he might have gone from a feature standpoint. So he went bit storage against bit storage instead of metal driver. Metal premium drivers is metal premium driver. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Something that, to me, as someone who has used a precision screwdriver a lot, something that would have been apparent to me very immediately about our driver is the superior magnetic strength compared to other precision drivers. It's one of those little things that we don't cheap out on that. Or I shouldn't even say don't cheap out on, because having a magnet at all means you didn't cheap out on the design, in my opinion, but that we. We spent extra time and we spent extra money to. To ensure that it was a really good experience. It's one of those things that we do that should be, again, pretty immediately apparent, but didn't really seem to draw much attention. So I don't know. I mean, look, the reality of it is, obviously, I think our product is great, or I never would have greenlit the release of it. So you can't really take my opinion. And as I always say, you know, you should get multiple. You should get. You should take multiple opinions anytime you're looking to buy a product. So whether it's reviews on our site or whether it's, you know, other creators that we sent creator editions out to, you know, all we ask for is the possibility that they will maybe consider talking about it with their own authentic voice and their own honest opinions. And so, yeah, you know, that what that means is that every once in a while we're going to send out a driver and someone's going to like it a lot. And every once in a while we're going to send out a driver and someone's not going to like it that much. And you know, that's, that's, that's how it works.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So as far as my understanding goes, the cheaper one that has bit storage, the cap doesn't spin, so you don't have that palm turn.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it spins a little, but not much. Like, not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, I haven't used it directly, so I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. It's, it's interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, what are we doing next?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The comments on that video are pretty.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have no comment on the comments.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have you read the comments?

[Linus Sebastian]

US judges are using algorithmic tools just kind of whenever they feel like it. Original article here is from the Verge, and both it and actually speaking of comments, the comment section on that video, or excuse me, on that article are worth having a look at because there's kind of an interesting debate and what side of the debate you land on. I guess it can be up to you to kind of see how you feel about it, but I think it's really worth a read. Dan, if you don't mind throwing the link to the Verge article into the various chats, I'd appreciate that very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you for everything. But here's kind of the gist of it. And an always time strapped court system in the US is increasingly turning to risk assessment algorithms as a way of guiding a judge's decision for whether to grant bail. So a bailiff, A bailiff inputs the file information and then the algorithm checks a vast database of past cases and assigns a score low, medium or high, or a number on a scale. And this, this system basically is supposed to algorithmically suggest what the risk of reoffence might be. These systems are intended to reduce the impact of personal bias from a judge, but there's a lot of questions about how well that's actually working. A recent study published in Social Problems found that judges report accepting or refusing the advice of these algorithmic tools selectively for their own human, potentially Biased reasons. Judges reported using these tools to quickly process lower stakes cases, even when they weren't confident in the output that was provided. So basically, it's an algorithmic armor. You know, it's like a, it's a shield against making a bad judgment call by just kind of going, oh, well, the algorithm said, imagine your algorithmic armor.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Had LTT pins on it.

[Linus Sebastian]

However, they also, they also admitted that they were leery of accepting low scores in cases of domestic violence, for example, or other more intimate crimes, due to not trusting the weighing of the algorithm and also due to concern over their own reputations. To be clear, I 100% agree that in a case of an intimate crime or domestic violence, they should be erring on the side of high risk of reoffense. Not necessarily because the risk of reoffence is necessarily higher, but because the stakes are so high. If the risk of reoffense for shoplifting a pack of gum is high, that I don't, I don't care. Whereas if the risk of reoffence of, you know, assault with a deadly weapon against your spouse is low, vehicular manslaughter, I'll take, I'll take a 99% risk of reoffense for the gum over a 3% risk of reoffence for spousal assault. You know, like, I get it. I just mean you don't get to selectively decide if the algorithm works or not based on your own feeling in the moment, because that's basically just your own feeling in the moment. With extra steps. The judges reported using the apparent authority of these systems to defend unpopular decisions as well. All in all, the judges were using their own moral views as a ruler to determine whether or not the algorithm was legitimate and would shift how they felt about it from case to case. Other studies have raised questions about how accurate this system is at predicting whether a given prisoner will reoffend because they have found garbage in, garbage out. Problems where biased training data would cause certain demographics to be rated as more likely to reoffend. Even when the individual in question doesn't have a significant past criminal history.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The demographics are included.

[Linus Sebastian]

In theory, no. But the problem with any algorithmic system, AI included, is that if you tell it, hey, you can't factor in race, for example, it will find proxies like location, the area you live or your income. Yeah, yeah, so dystopia. Yeah, dystopiacracy, that's going to be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But hey, you won't have to pay as much taxes because you won't have to pay The Judges for as many hours.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I guess.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Until they just press that button and then sit in the office and Judge Dredd.

[Linus Sebastian]

It is super amazing how fast. How easily dismantled the whole taxes are theft argument is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, boy.

[Linus Sebastian]

And how. And how quickly. How quickly people change their tune if. If the public resources available to them that they need are not there because they didn't pay for them.

[Dan]

Lucartaxis here if you want to get going.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

With that said, I am 100% angry, as everyone should be about the way my tax dollars are wasted. They are not efficiently used.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But weather taxes as a concept, dude, should exist. It's like. Well, yeah, but the problem is corruption.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I told you the whole. Was it invasive deer? I think it was on that one island. Have I told you this story?

[Linus Sebastian]

The invasive deer. Sorry, what now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let me try to find this up. Look this up. Hold on. BC Island. Helicopter. Sniper.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You told me about this. Okay. All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Tax dollars are spent extremely well. There are. There are no problems with tax dollars. Tax dollars are fine. We need to get rid of some invasive deer that the hunters would really, really like to go to the point where they would pay you to take these deer out.

[Linus Sebastian]

So why don't we spend over three quarters of a million dollars, let's get.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some Americans to come up over the border, bring a helicopter and go hunting with sniper rifles in the air to take out 84 deer. And let's spend almost a million dollars on it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's go. Trigg says that's only $10,000 a deer.

[Dan]

Luke, isn't it like the emu war in Australia?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was a little bit more real. They deployed the army and still lost.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is. This is 84 deer. Dude. Hunters used to just hunt for them, please. And it was fine.

[Dan]

Don't bring this up again. It makes me irrationally angry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You could gain tax dollars instead you spent them.

[Linus Sebastian]

As someone who pays a lot of taxes, I promise you that this makes me far more angry than my currently calm, composed demeanor would suggest.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's so inf. I can't. Like, it actually hurts my. Yeah, look, look, hold on. Sorry. The cost of the first phase, which includes the helicopter and marksman from the US and New Zealand, for some reason, is about 834,000. It's about that much. And that's only the first phase. The eradication is part of a nearly $6 million multi year project to restore the land. Okay, that's cool. Sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Meanwhile, do you know what's going on in Surrey schools?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Dan]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Instead of having a fixed school day, like you know, 8:30 to 3:00pm or.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whatever, I've heard about this.

[Linus Sebastian]

They have staggered school days. So some students, and therefore teachers start earlier and end earlier and some start later and end later, vastly extending the potential school day. Making after school care and after school, like activity planning for parents a flipping nightmare. Not to mention inconveniencing teachers who.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What if you're on the high school basketball team?

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The school that you're playing against does late hours and your school does early hours.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's student by student. Yeah. So you might. And this is because we don't have enough capacity. It's a whole thing. Yeah, basically. I don't have to explain this. People in the chat are picking up what I'm throwing down pretty quick here. It's a nightmare. But thank the maker, we got rid of those deer. And to be clear, this is Parks Canada. This is federal, this is provincial and municipal. It's not, it's not actually necessarily the same. The same coffers that were robbed to go on a little shooting expedition. You got it. You gotta assume that, you know, like someone was buddies with someone to get the assignment to go. People. Do you know how much people would pay to go helicopter deer hunting?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah. Like, oh yeah, dude. Oh yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You could turn this into a tourist attraction.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Turn this into a huge event.

[Linus Sebastian]

The number of millions of dollars of tourism dollars that you could generate for the province by just making this a tourist attraction over the next few years, you're spending $6 million. Are you kidding me?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just tell, just tell the hunters of North America because I'm sure people would travel for this. Hey, we'll give you a hundred bucks a deer and you don't have to pay us anything.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, no.

[Dan]

You know why they shouldn't do that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Problem entirely.

[Dan]

Oh, you know why they're not supposed to do that? Snake. Rats. Yeah, yeah. You know, but if you only gave a license to the parks, like only people who can kill these deer are sanctioned by us and all of them have to be accounted for. Maybe that, maybe that would be fine. But if you paper head, then yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No viper head argument. Let me see if can find this.

[Linus Sebastian]

I haven't heard of this. We're about to get a lesson.

[Dan]

I also know it as rats. I think it's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've heard this story a bunch of times. I don't know if any of them are actually like might be snakes.

[Dan]

I don't know what is the original.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't remember exactly. Oh, yeah, Viper snakes.

[Dan]

Yeah, I think that the snakes was the original one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I don't know either. Either way. Cobra heads. That's it. Yeah, cobra heads. Indian cobra head. Problem. So the, the government wanted to get rid of. Or the local government or whatever wanted to get. I might say this slightly wrong. I'm sorry. They wanted to get rid of cobras.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So they were like, okay, well, we'll put a bounty on cobra heads.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So if people find a cobra and they kill the cobra, they can hand in the cobra head and they make money.

[Linus Sebastian]

What if they put it in a Romanian jail?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cobra. Okay, I got you. That's pretty good. But they, they. People just started breeding cobras so they could farm cobra heads.

[Linus Sebastian]

Got it.

[Dan]

And then you always forget the. You don't forget the end bit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. So apparently last year locals called 2,000 deer at no cost. And apparently 25% of the 84 deer that were called were actually local, non invasive deer.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, great. Probably because they were up in a helicopter.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Trying to identify a particular species of deer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I. It's. It's actually like it. I. It actually causes me physical pain. I, I believe the world is worse and humans are worse for it. Having known that story.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The cobra head story depresses me a lot less.

[Dan]

You got to finish.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Didn't I finish it?

[Dan]

No, there's an end part as well because everybody's been breeding these cobras and then the government goes, oh, people are breeding them. And then they get rid of the bounty and then they just release all of the cobras. So now it's even worse than before.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You think they just killed them?

[Dan]

No, but like, you gotta keep. Like, why would I bother now? They're. Snakes are gross.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah, but I honestly, I would think it's like kind of a hassle.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To release a cobra, I'm assuming because.

[Linus Sebastian]

You'D have to be near it, you know, or something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just dump it off. Toss it at the window.

[Dan]

Yeah, dump it off a building.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I guess. But like, wouldn't it be easier to just not do anything and just like, let it die? Like, I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. I feel like it's a bit of a protest. Give us our bounty back. I could see at that point it's a business for people, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I could see my business.

[Dan]

Yeah, I can't put up on planes. Thanks, Travis.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also, the quotes about the 2,000 deer, whatever that was from Great Warehouse, Sebastian. I don't know if I mentioned that or not.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Thanks, Sebastian.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I just like. My goodness. I don't know how we got onto that topic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's talk about sponsors. Let's talk about our business. Yeah, like from Manscaped. You might be drooling over the turkey on the dinner table, but don't forget, there's one other bird that really needs some attention. Where are we going with this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I get it. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Our sponsor, Man's Game is here to tidy up the bird's nest. Check out their Performance Package 5.0 Ultra. It includes the Lawn Mower 5.0 Ultra for some below the belt trimming with its two interchangeable blades, and the Weed Whacker 2.0 for your ears and nose. It even comes with their crop soother and crop preserver lotions for your after cut. Care to make it even better, Manscaped includes their boxers 2.0 and shed 2.0 travel bag for free. Make sure your grooming isn't forgotten this season by checking out the Performance Package 5.0 [e-mail] wanshow just make sure when you do, you use code Wanshow to get 20% off and free shipping. Huh? The show is also brought to you by 1Password. This is Dennis working from home, logging in from his personal laptop using a random app our IT team has never heard of. Little does he know, that could be where our next security incident happens. Oh, but that's the reality of today's workplace. With remote setups, personal devices, and unknown apps popping up everywhere, there are more security gaps than ever. That's where our sponsor 1Password extended access management comes in. It brings all those unmanaged devices, apps and identities under control, ensuring strong and protection protected user credentials, known devices and visible apps. 1Password Extended Access Management addresses issues that traditional IAM and MDM can't handle. And it's available now for companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra and is in beta for Google Workspace customers. Check it [e-mail] Wanshow Okta or Okta never heard it out loud.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okta. If I remember correctly, so many of these things, people get pissed when you pronounce them wrong, but then I only ever see them written. So it's like, I don't know, nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Octa. People say octa.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Arbiter K says it's pronounced quote okta, end quote. Thank you. Very useful. The show is also brought to you by Squarespace. Let's come back to Dennis's scenario for a moment. Oh, let's say he's working from Home. But during work hours. He wants to build an online portfolio for a job interview. Wait, what? Why is he doing that during work hours? To save time and boost his chances. He should probably use our sponsor, Squarespace. It's an all in one website platform that uses AI to help anyone build a beautiful personalized website with ease. They offer a variety of award winning templates, helping you get your site up and running quickly. If you have an online business, you can send invoices and accept payments from your clients through debit, credit, ACH and more. Plus, with Squarespace, you get access to analytics so you can track your site's performance and see what works best for your business. Squarespace is easy to use, which is why we use it for our site too. We actually have a redesign coming that is a lot more modern. I'm embarrassed we show this still. But anyway, the point is you can also pick from tons of domain names with built in privacy and security. So start building your website today and receive 10% off your purchase by visiting squarespace.com LTT why don't we do a merch message if you want?

[Dan]

Yeah, sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are people enjoying the cork board? It seems like a weird, it seems like a weird thing to.

[Dan]

Oh yeah, if only we sold pins.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What a weird, unexpected, unique use case.

[Linus Sebastian]

You never, you never know. You know, when you, when you develop a product, you know if it'll ever make it to the finish line, if people will like it. Oh, people like cork boards. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Speaking of the scenario that Dennis just gave us.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you were interviewing someone, you're not the interviewee, you're the interviewer.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And they show up on camera. You know, you do the webcam thing. Oh, this is a remote interview, to be clear. Yeah, yeah, they show up on camera. They're webcam thing. You can tell they're in the office like at work and they booked a meeting room.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's a, it's a bad vibe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a bad vibe.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I definitely. That puts me. Because it's like, I don't know, it's like, it's like meeting your new man when he's still with her, you know. And I'm not saying that you should have the kind of loyalty to an employer that you would have to a significant other. Definitely not. But yeah, it's not a good vibe is all I'm saying. Yeah, like have the, have the class to like, you know, be somewhere else. Schedule up for a time when you aren't, you know, Clearly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What if you can tell.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. That.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They'Re like in their car.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's fine, that's fine.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So they might even still be like they basically just went outside.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Flappy here says it might be their lunch. In which case it should be no problem for them to step out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And yeah, because they're technically using like they're in a meeting room. Like they're using company property.

[Dan]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which maybe it was a rental office. I doubt it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I understand what they're saying. It could also be a co. Workspace.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But usually you can tell.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Most office spaces I've, I've, I've seen this happen in. Usually you can tell there's like signage in the background or there's the name of the meeting room on the wall.

[Linus Sebastian]

We've got a segment for next week's WAN show.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so we're gonna do a tier list. We are going to rank places that people are calling us from. So Dan, how's the merch message load this week? Do you have a little bit of time to keep an eye on the, on the chat for a bit?

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, cool. So if you want to kind of put them together. And we're going to do a tier list next week. And so guys, if you want to hit up the float plane chat for Dan and he can kind of take some of the good suggestions that he sees and then next week Luke and I will rank and we can, we can have some, you know, honorable mentions for ones that are funny.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

But in all seriousness, let's rank how good of a foot it puts forward for locations that, that you. That what you would think when. Yeah, I think this will be kind of fun if we could have a board that, if it's possible, allows me and Luke to rank things on our own without seeing each other's answers. I don't know, we'll find a fun way to do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But you could just take that metal board Sammy had and just like tape a foam thing in the middle.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, something like that would probably work fine. And then if we just had like little, little print out magnets or labels. We could even just have labels. They don't even have to be magnetic. We just peel them off after the show. But we could just put them on just with the words. That'd be kind of fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know, when I hired Yuki, when I called him to offer him the job, effectively, he was making sushi at the time. And for the entire duration of that conversation, he did not stop making sushi that's kind of.

[Linus Sebastian]

Chad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was pretty sad. I remember when I, when I finally hung up, I was like, huh, all right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Multitasking.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know about the swastika that Dennis had on his wall, right? During his interview? Dennis Liao.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. No, this actually now rings a bell. But he didn't know what it was.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, he was at a protest. He was protesting a policy that the sign. Because I couldn't read the sign because it was in Chinese. So the sign was like this policy is like Nazism.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I remember this now. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I had to ask.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, you know, what's that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Because back then, you know, that kind of stuff hadn't made its way into mainstream acceptance again yet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if it's acceptance.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, depends where you go. Fair enough. Anyway, yeah, so I definitely had to ask. But yeah, he was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, that. Yeah, no, no, no, no. It was either a swastika or was a picture of Hitler. I can't remember. But either way it was. It was not a good. Was not a good first impression.

[Dan]

How many of these do you want? I have 31 now.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that's more than enough. So why don't we do another merch message?

[Dan]

Yeah, sure. Give me one second sec. Okey dokey, merge messages. Hi, Linus and Luke. I have a question for you both.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Dan]

Me and a friend have worked on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Building a game for a friend and I. You're welcome. Your grammar has now been corrected and thank you for sending in your merch message.

[Dan]

I was going to correct them for them and I thought I wouldn't. They've been building a game for 7,000 hours. How do we know when it's ready for public beta? When you're late.

[Luke Lafreniere]

10,000 hours.

[Linus Sebastian]

What? What do you even.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a base level of a skill, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

10,000 hours?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, that's not what they're asking. Like milestone wise.

[Dan]

About 6,990 hours ago, to be perfectly honest. Fail fast, fail early. Is your financial history game fun even though no one's played it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Come on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Both of you are being supremely unhelpful right now. Supremely.

[Dan]

Now. Do it. Do it right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. What you want do now?

[Dan]

Unless it's in alpha and it has been for a while and it's like actually all together.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Send it to us now.

[Dan]

Where's my key? Yeah, I'm an influencer. I'll give you a shout out to my 75 followers if for public beta. I mean, you can do rolling betas with Steam.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Now I would try to get some friends that you can trust to not puffery you and see if they actually have fun with the game. And if they actually have fun with the game, then yeah, do a public test or do something else.

[Dan]

If it's in private alpha or private beta, go public beta. Do it in small rollouts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

As far as my understanding goes, it's pretty common in the indie small time game developer kind of space thing for people to pass their stuff back and forth and get feedback from each other and do things that way as well. So maybe join like a forum or a discord, probably a discord these days and see if there's people that are interested and willing to do a little play test of your game. Do that Tesla Waters. Because there might be something that like you and the person that you're working on it with think is just fine because you've done it a trillion times. But then someone with a new perspective might, might run into it and be like, I don't get this and it might be fairly easy to fix. So I would do it that way first and then try to hit it with something else.

[Dan]

Or you have to redesign the entire thing, which happens a lot too. Something that you are okay with, nobody seems to be okay with.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Genesis says that's been a source of hacking too. Yeah, of course. Any time that there's file sharing in any community, it's a source of hacking. You can open it in some type of secure system, whatever. Doesn't pirate software help with this kind of thing? I have no idea. That sounds like it would be an incredible amount of work considering the size of grader that he is.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, hit us with one more. Dan.

[Dan]

Hey, you guys did a sponsored video on sleep buds?

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure did.

[Dan]

How are they? Are you still using them? Also saw the announcement video has 21 million views. Insane for a product launch like this.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, a couple things here. So first of all, even in a sponsored video, I won't say anything that I do not genuinely believe. First of all, it's against FTC guidelines. Second of all, it would completely nuke my credibility. That doesn't mean I've never said anything that has turned out to not be true. But what I do make a point of is separating things that are talking points from the brand and are clearly provided by the brand and things that I think. And I won't say anything about my own opinion that isn't actually true, regardless of whether it is sponsored or not sponsored. This has nuked many a Sponsored Deal caused many an issue for our poor business team, the hard working souls that they are. But it is not something that there's any flexibility on for us. And I have even very recently actually lectured other hosts and writers about making sure that they hold their ground and do not allow any words to be put in their mouth that they do not agree with. One of our writers was told by someone in the production chain, hey, can you just record this as a pickup in case the brand requires it and hopefully we won't have to use it. And it was something that they weren't 100% comfortable with. Not because they didn't like the product or because it was wrong. It was just a little more enthusiastic than they were. The tone was not how they actually felt about it. I overheard this conversation and I basically said, look, I got a really good piece of advice once on a shoot for a car commercial that I did like years and years ago. And I was told to say something about the definition of the screen and the center display. And I said, hey, well, okay, what's the actual pixel count? Because I'm not going to say those words if I don't know that. It's like something that aligns with those words, like I'm a tech guy, that's my entire identity is that I wouldn't say high definition unless it actually had a pixel count that could correspond to high definition. If you just mean like reasonably fine ppi, then I'll have to say that, like I have to say what it actually is. And they like gave me a really hard time and they asked me to do the same thing. They asked me to record it both ways. The way that I wanted to say it, that hedged and the way that was exactly their words. And then they would find out and they would, you know, make sure before they do the edit. And I said, no, I'm not going to do that. You have like 30 people here. I think you guys can figure it out. This is going to delay us like five minutes. Just call somebody and find out what the pixel count is. And the DP who was shooting it after they like stormed off because it was kind of, it got kind of heated. And I was like, I'm not going to do it. I need you guys to figure this out. The DP leans over and he's like, look, I'm on their payroll today, but good job. Never shoot something that you don't believe that you don't want to be used because they'll use it based and because that's the thing right, is my contract entitles them to everything I shot that day. I didn't get it in writing that they wouldn't use it. So, like, from a legal standpoint, unless I can prove we had that conversation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Absolutely will.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. It's not. It's not. It's either not binding or it's not worth me pursuing. At that point. The easier thing to do is to just never shoot it. So, long story short. Long story short, the brand got it all figured out and it turned out their talking points were fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. It doesn't matter though.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I just needed to know. I needed to know. And so coming back to your question, everything I said in the video was true. I have been using them. I haven't been using them every single night. There are definitely advantages to my regular AirPods Pros. In fact, I used my AirPods Pros last night. They're just convenient because there's no pairing process or anything like that. However, with that said, my AirPods Pros fell out last night and I woke up. And then I woke up really early this morning and they were dead. So I couldn't put anything back on. So. So the sleep buds would have fixed both of those problems if I had put in the effort as I was going to bed, of bothering to pair them and put them in. So, yeah, no, they're. They're pretty sweet. As for the however many. What was it you said 14 million views on the announcement? What was this? Oslo. Hold on, I can't even. I can't even find this video. Oslo Sleep. I do not see anything with 21 million views. Oh, here it is. Never mind. Popular. Okay, so this channel has 1,000 subscribers. This video is from 11 months ago, has 21 million views and has 12 comments. Yeah, so these are paid views. So that's how it has 21 million views, which is fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You say that. I think a lot of people are going to interpret that as bodied views.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no, not that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He means it was ran as an advertisement on YouTube. Yeah, and when a advertisement is ran on YouTube, there is a video that you can go find that it actually is. They're really just playing a YouTube video before your YouTube video. So you can find the ad. That's the ad. But people don't comment on the ad. So there's almost no comments on the video.

[Linus Sebastian]

In fact, I can show you guys a really fun example of how that works, because that video that Elijah and I worked on for Yvonne's movie Night in the Pool, the analytics look super funky for it. Oh, no, that's right. You can't go back and look at historical real time. Ugh. Okay, well, shoot. Yeah, it's been too. It might have a. Did I take a screenshot? No, I didn't take a screenshot. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People showed me. But I think, anyway, the real time.

[Linus Sebastian]

View used to look like a really high spike, and then it went like this, and then it went. And then like another decay and then went. And then it went like, flat like this. That is not normal. Normally when you first release a video, it starts high and then it kind of just tapers out. And then over time, eventually it might kind of, you know, have some spikes and dips and that kind of thing. But instead, this followed a super weird curve compared to our typical. You can actually see here. There you go. You can kind of see this was it petering out. And this was the first ad spend that hisense did. And then it tapers off a little bit, and then here's some more ad spend, and then they stopped. So it actually reports as normal views in your dashboard. But you can see this estimated revenue is more reflective of a video that got like a million and a half views, not 3.8 million views. So those extra views compared to usual.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it did well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Were purchased views from hisense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It didn't do as well as it looks.

[Linus Sebastian]

And what's unfortunate is it kind of mucks with your analytics because this retention looks really bad because most people click off of ads. So that's something which I think might we also notice channel performance went down a little bit after this video. Like, I think that may impact, like, our, like, channel momentum and stuff too. So we don't really have. I don't think we have a clear policy for whether someone is allowed to buy ads against our videos when they sponsor a video. But maybe that's something we'll have to look at because it seems like by juicing this video, we got a lot of, like, abandonment of this video. And given that they're going to be targeting our demographic, if that counts as abandonment of LTT videos, that might mean it's less likely to serve them the next ones, which is, like, legit, except that it was an ad, it wasn't a video that they navigated to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So that kind of makes sense because I expected the case video to do better, and I expected the secret Shop in My Own Store video to kind of kill.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we might have to ask Brand. Oh, you know what we could do is we could have a, like a garbage channel and we can ask Brands to use the like garbage channel version of the video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dan, that's an interesting idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you mind actually sending just a note to actually me and I'll follow that up next week. I'll suggest that to the business team.

[Dan]

Because then would you like it scheduled or do you want me to send it to you?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, just whenever. It doesn't matter.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, my inbox is basically my to do list. Yeah, we know the intro is cringe black smoke rise. It was on purpose.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Brit did a video on this. And serving a video as an ad does affect it in the algorithm.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I understand it will affect that video. But what I'm wondering is whether it affects the profile of that viewer that abandoned an LTT video and makes it less likely to serve them ltt. Because given how hard fought, how hard won momentum like that is, to lose any of it over something like this feels just unnecessary and frustrating. I don't know that it did, but silicoid says how cold was it actually in the pool? It seemed you guys were really in there for a while. The pool was great. Being the top half of us. Being outside the pool was miserable. In fact, I'd never experienced this before, but with how cold my skin got outside the pool in like rain and cold. When I finally did jump into the pool, which was still heated, it was crazy because you know, we keep our pool like quite warm for a pool, but it was still pool temperature. But I got in, it felt like a hot tub because I've never tried that before. So that's a thing that if you've, if you've like done that before, you'll know. But now I know for a few.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Months I was doing hot, cold cycles and wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I would imagine that would be painful because if a pool felt like a hot tub, a hot tub tub would have been like pretty unpleasant. I would think it was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It wasn't a hot tub. It was a sauna. But yeah, it was hot. It was really hot as a cold bath and a sauna.

[Linus Sebastian]

Apparently with spiffing Brits video, you purposely placed the worst audience and interests, I.e. senior book readers on a video game video. And that'll nuke all the channels analytics after the spike from ad serving. Oh, interesting. So yeah, maybe that. Maybe we do need to do that. Okay, cool. Well, we'll get that. We'll get that sorted out and we won't do that again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yoiks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Want to talk about McDonald's soft serve machines?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Because I had read an article on this already and it was Misleading. I have read our notes now, and I now understand what's going on. What I said at the beginning of the show was wrong.

[Linus Sebastian]

In response to a petition from iFixit and nonprofit public interest group Public Knowledge, the US Copyright Office has granted a partial exemption to the DMCA that allows restaurant owners to diagnose and repair their own equipment. And where Luke got a little bit confused. And maybe it goes to show you how full of misinformation the Internet can be these days.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I read an article that said the partial exemption was for McDonald's.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like I. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, so Luke kind of thought, oh, this is like, what, to help pad McDonald's pockets? No, in fact, this is to go against. If you. If. Man, the McDonald's soft serve machines are such a rabbit hole. It's fascinating.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is actually very interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Very interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But what this does instead is it actually removes the incentive for McDonald's corporate and their partners to not allow franchise owners to repair their own equipment, because it turns out those service calls are extremely lucrative. And if they let them repair their own equipment, it could be done cheaply and faster, which means more chili treats for you in the summer, since the machines will be far less likely to be broken. And it mostly impacts franchise owners, who a lot of the time, are not huge corporate fat cats. They are people who have a lot of their monthly revenue being paid to the huge corporate fat cats, but actually are just in the restaurant business, which can be a very challenging business. So this decision is a blow to Taylor, the manufacturer of these machines, which has historically made a large part of its income from repair calls and has fought third party attempts to repair its purposely finicky machines. That's a big part of the rabbit hole, is that it does appear as though the machines are intentionally obtuse and difficult to deal with. Sick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Freaking love it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, there's lots of good videos. People in the chat are recommending Matpat's video on it did the whole ice cream machine fiasco. I've seen other. Other good ones. I wish I could remember right now, but there's definitely really good ones.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know, this is a. This is weird aside, but I was talking to my brother. My brother's a firefighter, and they cook. It's like a culture thing. They. They cook all their own meals. So the kitchen in the fire hall is, like, really important. The. You know, the people that are on probation have to make muffins all the time and all this kind of stuff, and you're expected to like actually be able to cook pretty well because it's going to cycle around who's cooking? And you're cooking all the meals for all the firefighters that are on shift that day, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it rotates who does it. So you're like, you're actually expected to like know what you're doing and be pretty good. He was practicing. At home they have special ovens that will turn off when they get fire calls.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's super cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's like kind of sick actually. So clearly they, they have this other problem where the like control panel or something is where all the steam comes out. So the control panel like fries itself constantly. But then they like have to use that one oven because it turns itself off when the. So it's like, ah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyways, there's a lot of good comments about this. Clapped for 24 accord. Clapped K. 24 accord. Okay, it doesn't matter. The point is they said fast food equipment in general is ridiculous to repair. Way too expensive. Apparently it's 30 $500 to replace a control unit in a Tim Hortons oven. This is all, this is all hearsay. And then Nicholas Cage says, I work maintenance for corporate 711 and the maintenance game is bullshit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They've been in full playing chat forever. Any, any time someone says their name.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just like what whiz tick says, I'm high as I love floatplane. You guys are awesome. Maybe a little unrelated.

[Dan]

Same here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're on shift. Oh no.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is actually a perfect segue. So you know, having a little bit of healthy skepticism when you read something on the Internet. I should have had more skepticism last week. We've got an update on the Congo attack ad. So remember that thing last week where the teacher supposedly was blaming me for resource mining or whatever else? Yeah. We have since learned via a post from a second student that was in the same class that that was a mock up example in a media literacy assignment where students were expected to make similar pretend attack ads. The teacher describes himself as a big LTT fan, which is how he became aware that his attack ad had escaped his classroom, which was the only place it was intended to be seen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So unfortunate.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have gotten in contact with the teacher in question and asked them, hey, do you want an opportunity to tell your side of the story? And he graciously agreed to send us a pre recorded video statement. Let's go ahead and play it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which is so cool.

[D]

I was asked to create this video to respond to the Reddit post. So here I am. So I'm gonna Go ahead and read the statement that I wrote. A student recently took a photo of a lesson component out of context and posted it online, where it was shared widely. The isolated image misrepresented the intent and content of the lesson, leading to a false and hurtful characterization of my views. The lesson was based on a poem by Derek Walcott's poem elsewhere and focused on highlighting atrocities happening around the world. Then students were asked to create political attack ads bringing awareness to said atrocities. To illustrate these concepts, I created an example ad, which the student then posted online. It's crucial to understand that this example was for illustrative purposes only and did not reflect my personal views. Linus himself is really good at encouraging people to buy used and refurbished electronics and isn't. Isn't anywhere close to problematic. In my eyes, he's. The Note 9 goat post was anonymous. It has caused some significant distress for me. It's disheartening to see my work misconstrued and used to create a misleading narrative, especially since I'm a big LTT fan and watch the channel all the time, which is how I found out about this to begin with. So to put this whole thing to bed, I don't think Linus is solely responsible for what happened in the Congo. It was just an example, that's all. Signing out.

[Linus Sebastian]

What an absolute Chad. Okay, the version that he recorded is a little different from the written version that I read.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did it not have the Note 9?

[Linus Sebastian]

He added some flavor.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Honestly, I think, like.

[Linus Sebastian]

And he added the bit at the end about how I'm not solely responsible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

For it, which I also thought was pretty funny. I think it's a cool, engaging project to do. I don't know. He seems like he's probably a fantastic teacher.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Ninja Man Away says send that man some merch. Yeah, I think we need to get him a package. I think we need to get him a care package. Dan, do you mind noting that down as something to maybe flag that for? Mr. Ap? Speaking of people who are goaded, our customer care lead over at Creator Warehouse. Let's get. Let's get something over to him because we clearly. We clearly need to make up for all the damage that we've done to the Congo.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Honestly, in a way, it's a super success of the project because it showed the efficacy of this type of stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Absolutely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So his lesson plan just worked way too well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. He demonstrated how powerful, you know, outrage culture can be and how. How much reach something can have when it elicits such an emotional response in the viewer. Yeah, yeah. Great job. Great job. I'd love to send him something like, super cool. Like maybe we could get him. We have a handful of photo samples of the new backpack. Oh, I don't know. I don't know if they're gonna let me have any of those, but we'll put something together. Yeah, the commuter bag.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was like, are you leaking something here?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, no, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. We'll figure something out. We'll figure something out. Okay, we'll figure something out. But it'd be cool to get him something like. Like one of one or something that's like, you know, early or something. Something cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just think it's cool because, like, I mean, I'll be used stuff. I had lot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Stuff we didn't need anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I had.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't want to hurt any more kids in the Congo.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That could be kind of cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

By the way, I have still been carrying the Note 9 even though I'm reviewing the iPhone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is this type of thing what we could use the remaining Lambo beanies for?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no. We have a plan for them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. It's not a great plan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's. I think it's cool. I don't know. I had such a rain. I think everybody does. I had such a range of teachers when I was going to school. I had the teacher that, like, would literally just sit there with the textbook and read it, or they would put scans of the textbook on the thing and just tell you to read it when you have the textbook. Like, it's just. They might not. They might as well not even be there. There's no point in going to their class.

[Linus Sebastian]

We had one that literally wasn't there a lot of the time. He would go to the cafeteria. If he had the block before lunch, he would assign everyone silent reading. And this is in like grade eight, when you don't need to do silent reading in class. No, he would assign everyone to, like, read and he would disappear for like 20 minutes at a time out of a 50 minute block, and he'd go to the cafeteria and, like, sample food ahead of time because he was like buddies with the people in the cafeteria. I was like, this is ridiculous.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is ridiculous. But then you have great teachers, like this guy seems to be, that'll like, go out of their way to create cool projects and engaging ways to, like, actually learn. Because at least for me, when I was going to school, if it was just book work, like chance that's getting done is not super high. But if it was like some weird, engaging, different, not necessarily expected project, way to engage with the learning in a different way, stuff like that, man, I would be all over that. So, I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

This seems like a very creative assignment, and I'm really glad that he was kind enough to put himself out there and come talk about, you know, how he actually felt like about that. You know, honestly, I think we. We probably haven't talked enough about how important it is to articulate the damage that this kind of cyber bullying can cause. I think he did a great job of just talking about, like, how it made him felt and what the impact was. You can tell this is someone that has a lot of experience dealing with, like, which, let's be honest, a lot of high schools or high schoolers are high school teachers and, like, explaining in the simplest possible terms why, like, doing a bad thing is bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it was. It was well read as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. Did a great job.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, what else do we got this week, Dan? What are we supposed to be doing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Instagram head.

[Dan]

Yeah, I just don't run out the rest of your topics.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Instagram head confirms they lower the quality of unpopular clips. In a recent video, AMA head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri stated that the platform demotes unpopular clips to a lower level of video quality. However, this will reverse if the video gains traction again. Mosseri claims that it is only a small bump in quality doesn't make competing harder for smaller creators.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, that makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How would they know?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A really difficult thing to measure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Everyone would start as a small creator. So theoretically, it's a level playing field, I guess.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fair enough.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, no, but, you know, also kind of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a free platform, guys, and at.

[Linus Sebastian]

The end of the day, content is king. A a difference in video quality on a platform like Instagram, where quite frankly, the video looks like butt anyway, no one cares, unfortunately.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I wish they did. Floatplane would do better if they did. They don't. It is what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Our discussion question is, would you do the same if you were in their position?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, probably.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, see you later. What else we got for today?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a free.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, Dan won't be telling us.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What I would especially do is really old clips that haven't been accessed exist in a long time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's definitely a thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, you go back, like, way far back on, like, your Facebook timeline or whatever and you, like, try to, like, open a photo. It takes a second.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, but that's not necessarily you can.

[Linus Sebastian]

Tell it's grabbing off a hard drive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but that's not necessarily the quality level of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, this is just bandwidth conservation. Yeah, sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it's also probably affected by storage too, because anything higher quality or more viral is. They're going to be caching it way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nearer to you storage and. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that too.

[Linus Sebastian]

At the end of the day, architecting this stuff at the scale that they operate at is extremely complicated.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And little changes like this, which I actually believe. Adam Mosseri it probably doesn't really make much of a difference to almost anybody, but who it is going to make a pretty big difference to is probably them when it comes to their bills. Like on the scale that Instagram is doing, this will probably save them tons, but unlikely to make any real difference to users or creators.

[Linus Sebastian]

ScrappyDP asks, do old floatplane clips lose quality? The answer is no. Floatplane is not growing at, or even targeting, growing at the kind of exponential rate that your VC funded businesses, big tech businesses are expecting. And so even though storage costs are only falling a little bit these days compared to how they used to, our storage costs and our storage needs are kind of doing okay. So we can maintain everything the way that it was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We do. Derank. Like, we have ranks of storage, but not of quality, effectively. So if something's not accessed for a long time, it's going to fall back to hard drives. If something starts getting feverishly accessed, like a flow plane exclusive LTT thing or something like that, that'll sit in higher tier storage so it can be pulled easier is what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Want to play some AI Minecraft?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

AI company Descartes has publicly released sort.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Of like a duck call.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't know, my throat was weird. Has publicly released Oasis, which is a playable AI model trained on Minecraft. Currently, you can only play for a few minutes at most and it's only playable on Chrome. The results are Description Trippy. Okay, do you want to play or should I play? Or like, oh, I'm gonna need a mouse probably. I mean, it's Minecraft. Give me a sec. I got one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Okay, you play then. Do they call it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's trained on Minecraft Is this stupid.

[Linus Sebastian]

Metal board that Sammy had for the stupid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yikes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whacked me in the shin.

[Dan]

Please don't get blood on this set.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, my head bled from the shoot I did yesterday with David. I stood up and I hit my head on his Borg computer. Oh, those are words that'll make sense once you watch the Video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Zoo Kaku says Borg Computer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not Bork. Not Bork.

[Linus Sebastian]

Borg computer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Good, good, good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, we did. We did a bit of a different extreme upgrade or ultimate upgrade or, you know, whichever branding we're using for it right now. David paid for everything, so instead of having a sponsor for it, it's just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, no, I like this idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think just a video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We were talking about doing this at some point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's just a video where just, like, David's doing an upgrade. Any. Excuse me. Anyway, and we make a video about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It, get some labor.

[Linus Sebastian]

The quid pro quo was a. That I and Rhys would like, help him with it for the day.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Reese, not Elijah. Maybe I'll go down this route.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you might not end up with too many extra holes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So Rhys and I were there for the day, helping him with things. So, like, I built his SOS computer and, you know, helped with the mounting of his custom painted USS Enterprise and stuff like that. And also that we did that video promoting him selling his collection, which was actually. Which got it extra exposure, which helped his budget. So it was like. And then in return, you know, he's giving us his space and, you know, his upgrade, and he probably spent some money on things that he probably wouldn't have to make it a little more interesting. Anyway, dude, I should.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I should con you into painting my place.

[Linus Sebastian]

The space ends up super cool. I did no painting, which was nice, and I hit my head. Oh, I forget where I was going with this. But in fairness to me, I recently hit my head. So anyway, Oasis.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Okay, so it's muted.

[Linus Sebastian]

You are about to enter a first of its kind video model.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is there sound?

[Linus Sebastian]

A game engine trained by millions of gameplay hours. Every step you take will shape the environment around you in real time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So are they going to get sued to all crap?

[Dan]

You might have to mute other stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on. I'm on it. Mute which one?

[Dan]

There's a volume thing in the top left of Oasis.

[Linus Sebastian]

What are you talking about, Willis?

[Dan]

Yeah, mute that. Okay, cool. So that is only coming from that then.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so we're good.

[Dan]

VMix C. Unmute.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here we go, boys.

[Dan]

This.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ooh. Okay, what do you want? What do you all want to see?

[Luke Lafreniere]

If we go for rugged coastline and just go bc.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. A sheer drop from towering peaks crumbling into the ocean below. Trees balance over the water and waves crash over rocks. Ready for adventure. Waiting for your turn.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Written by A.I.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Waiting for your turn.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dang it. Did all of y'all jump on here? Hold on, hold on, hold on. Positioning queue 29. ETA 12 seconds. Oh, okay, we got this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Does the positioning queue go down? There it is. Nice, Nice. It's your turn. Do it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can you press button? Like, can you select the different items that you. You have?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I don't know. I'm just doing stuff here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it super laggy?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, it's definitely a little laggy, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What? Yeah. What happens if you limit your frame of view and then look up?

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on, I'm doing this thing here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think you are.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so I look up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no, I mean, I meant, like, out in the world. Like, did it change? Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Trays. Interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think it's able to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Huh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So like. Yeah, stare away.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, where'd it go?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What the heck? Is that thing moving?

[Linus Sebastian]

This is like your Minecraft game on. Dropped attack. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Huh. Okay, what's gonna be over this? Honestly, it makes the exploration kind of fun. Can I. Can I build a path for myself? Like, is that possible? Can I. Is that how this works? Is that how any of this works? Okay, yeah, I can.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe with this, Starfield wouldn't have been a useless pile of junk.

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's up there? What's up there? I wanna. I want to get. I want to see what's supposed to be there. Are you kidding me?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, there's a structure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whoa. Whoa. Am I. Whoa. Dude. I kept going up to, like. But I made my way away from the. The mountain that was. I was on. There's no, like, did you see what happened there?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was just turn. Everything's changing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Climbing a mountain and looking up and it became just like whatever was in front of me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is some Inception kind of stuff, dude. Village gone.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is crazy. Who needs drugs when you can just play this game?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, wait until they have this kind of stuff for VR.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. Okay, I think I've had enough. So this is just a glimpse into the future of interactive AI experiences. What's next? Just imagine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

As far as my understanding goes, they have it. They have some of it running on ASIC cards. Yeah. The playable model was made possible by super fast inference thanks to an ASIC card with the model's transformer architecture physically recreated on the chip by Deckard Partner etched.

[Linus Sebastian]

Our discussion questions are, what do you think of the game? Well, I mean, it's obviously just Minecraft because it's trained on Minecraft. How close is it to actual Minecraft? It asks. I mean, in terms of, like, how it felt to Play. Other than being super laggy, it like felt like Minecraft, honestly. Yeah. Like the movement and everything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Does it take much to get you there?

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe not. Maybe not that much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Jump Attack is a hold button.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I didn't try to run. I guess I could have tried to do more things. Our next question though is how good is its object permanence? And there I would say things fall apart a little bit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's the whole reason why the demo is fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah. How bad it is is sort of the most interesting thing about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

With that said, it's also kind of.

[Linus Sebastian]

Crazy, the fact that this exists at all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

With no game engine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

With. No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because it's. It's bad because it's not very playable, but it's also amazing because it exists.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. The fact that this is a thing at all is mind blowing. With that said, it is very clear that we are an awful long way away from our GPUs just being neural processing units and this being a gaming experience that anyone would want.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

I give it six months.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Would be kind of cool. If that ended up being an add in card though. I'd be down and go back to multiple add in cards. That'd be sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Get your physics card in there, get your sound card in there, get your neural card in there. If Nvidia has their way, the GPU will eventually morph into a neural neural pu and then it'll just like have a GPU component on it because you'll always like need to output and you'll always need to play legacy games and stuff like that, but. Pretty cool. Lucky Falcor says it's like the impossible staircase illusion with that mountain. Yeah, that was. That was trippy because I was trying to look up the mountain and I made my way to like a landscape in front of me somehow. I was like, okay. I mean, yeah, I guess. And I guess there is no up in video games if you think about it. So why would it. Right. Because you could move a mouse up infinitely. Theoretically. Right. Like there's no gravity in a video game. Like. Like it's all. It's all. It's all artificial.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like we create up and we create down. But. But this AI model is not constrained by that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What's up in real life?

[Linus Sebastian]

Exactly, exactly. It's away from the center of the earth. But.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because what if you're not on the earth anymore? Where's up now?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I just. No, I'm trying to make a point right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Up in the video game is away from the center of your thing. So you have the game world.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but it stopped having a center. Yeah, yeah. So like, so theoretically, this. This AI model is not constrained by that. You could just. You could just keep going up. You could have more than 360 degrees. Like, it's just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm just screwing with a modest panda. Don't worry.

[Dan]

It's like Xbox.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, very cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm more of a down guy. I'm a down enjoyer myself.

[Dan]

Like naturally sourced or artificial.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what you might enjoy is using a convenient app that is readily available to track world leaders.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

According to journalists at French newspaper Le Monde, it is apparently possible to track the location of President Emmanuel Macron by identifying his bodyguards, many of whom have public accounts under their legal names on Strava, a fitness app with social networking elements. This means that they have been publicly posting their running routes, including geodata, which means where are they? Where is the president? Yes, problem. It is also apparently possible to do the same with other world leaders, including the US President and both presidential candidates. This is not a new problem. In 2023, a Russian submarine commander was killed while jogging. The commander had a Strava account under his own name, which his assailant may have used to track his regular routes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, so this one wasn't bodyguards. It was the actual guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Andre B. Says, wasn't there something about soldiers identifying secret bases the same way? Yes, I believe that did happen with a. With a secret US Military installation of some kind.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a lot of these types of problems. There's even more subtle ones that I don't think people really properly consider. Because, like when this. When the. When the 2023 thing happened with the. The Russian submarine commander, I think that brought to light to a bunch of people like, oh, maybe I should consider this one that I point out fairly often when I meet parents of kids and those. The. The kid likes playing Pokemon Go and the parent is just like, you know, being supportive but doesn't really understand what's going on is. I like to point out that when you give gifts in the game, the gifts come with a postcard of where the gift came from. And you get gifts in the game by spinning stops, but you are most likely to spin the stop that is closest to your house most often so people can figure out where you live based on being friends with you on Pokemon Go. Yeah, I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

CH5609 says. This is like people figuring out that deep was going down because of a higher number of pizza Orders to the Pizza Hut slash dominoes near the Pentagon.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a long term thing. They. There are actually like trackers for that and stuff because it's like a reliable metric that doesn't seem to be becoming less reliable.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Washington Pizza index. Yeah, exactly.

[Linus Sebastian]

The pizza index.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is like totally a thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

YouTube users have been reporting missing view counts and upload dates. There's a Reddit post from four months ago. Some users recently though, found that there were no longer view counts or upload dates on YouTube's homepage. This led to reporting that YouTube might be performing another experiment. YouTube, however, has responded and says this is actually a bug that is typically experienced by users with certain browser extensions enabled. The company suggests disabling these extensions and making a report if the issue continues. So our discussion question here, this just came up because someone flagged it for me recently. Do you think this is a YouTube experiment or another attack on AdBlock? Would you find that it would degrade the experience of YouTube for you if you didn't know the upload date and how many views a video had?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm going to play devil's advocate, although.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I understand why you wouldn't want that, because it could potentially really help small creators.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm gonna. Why I wouldn't want what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why you wouldn't want it to show view counts?

[Linus Sebastian]

Why I wouldn't want it to?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, because if you're a really small creator, you don't want people to not click on your video just because it has 200 views.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, no, that would be. I could see how that leveled, how that could level the playing field in a big way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. Upload data.

[Linus Sebastian]

What would I not want though?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Huh?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I thought you said. You said I wouldn't want it. What would I not want? I was just trying to figure that out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't remember the exact reference of the moment of when I said that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. I object to this mostly as a user. I'm not really thinking about it as a creator. However, I'm going to play devil's advocate against my own argument and I'm going to kind of share an observation that has materialized for me over a while. It's bothered me a lot for years that Netflix doesn't show the popularity of things like not in a. Not in a. In a universal way. They'll have like, popular for people like you. You know, they'll have stuff like that. They don't show things like critical acclaim or like a Rotten Tomatoes rating or anything like that. Basically, they just merchandise the movie or TV show or whatever it is, with photos and descriptions and kind of present it to you and algorithmically track what kind of what works for you and what you like and what you don't. And they kind of. They make that whole thing work. Right. And one of the things that I've observed is that my family watches almost nothing on Plex and gravitates towards Netflix far more than Plex, even though the library on Plex is actually much larger. And I realized for myself that when I go to try to find something to watch on Plex, it's really hard. And one of the reasons that it kind of. I had kind of a light bulb moment. One of the reasons is the data. Having the data of how good something is makes it so much harder to find something that, you know, what I might actually end up enjoying, even if it's not good. I will almost universally enjoy something that has super high critical acclaim. And also, audiences love it. Like, the Wild Robot is outstanding. Just go watch it. Don't question it, just go watch it. It's just a great film. But there are times when I will enjoy something that is not critically acclaimed. For example, Major pain got a 29% rating on the Tomatometer from critics, and even 68%. Like, if you know the film, you'll know that 68% for a film of this genre is actually pretty good. It's a pretty polarizing film. And I was thinking about how if I saw something that was rated 29% by critics and 68% by audiences in my Plex, I probably wouldn't bother watching it. And so I guess where I'm coming back to in all of this is maybe the metadata that they give us coming back even to, like, dislike ratio.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Crazy that some things have a relationship when it comes to audience score.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean, I think the critics are probably right on that one, but. And maybe part of it is that you watched Hackers when you were young. Yeah, and I watched it as an adult, and I watched Major Pain when I was young.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I also think I'm. So there's a subject matter.

[Linus Sebastian]

Have you seen Major Pain?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. And you thought it was, like, dumb or bad?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I thought it was funny.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. So the problem with, like, dislike when YouTube removed that was that there's a lot of content where it's really important to be able to see that kind of rating because they don't have a community notes system. They don't have anything equivalent. If a guide for how to repair your dishwasher is like not very good. Or if a moon landing conspiracy video is a conspiracy video and is something irrelevant that we shouldn't be watching, they don't really have an equivalent for that. And so the like dislike ratio was at least a useful barometer of potential usefulness or quality. But view counts upload dates.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Upload date might be upload date depending.

[Linus Sebastian]

On what you're looking for. If what YouTube seeks to be is just an entertainment platform where people watch as much as possible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why do they seem to be killing evergreen content? If they're going to get rid of.

[Linus Sebastian]

Upload dates though, I don't know that they're killing evergreen content.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It doesn't seem to be doing as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

We could probably have a much longer conversation about that. I think some of our evergreen content is struggling a little bit. We upload a lot. We are tech centric, which can make.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Even our less relevant.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, even our evergreen content I think is less evergreen than say. Well, I was going to say comedy, but comedy can sometimes it ages like fine milk. But depending on the content, some things are more evergreen than others. The guide for how to repair this dishwasher model is evergreen because that dishwasher model will always be that dishwasher model.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, less people have it.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is true. This is true. Unless it's a really important one and people would restore them. Maybe it's the. Maybe it's the firehouse one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure, sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

And people always need to fix it anyway. The point is that maybe they could expand people's horizons, which could be a benefit, even if it comes with some trade offs. And they could improve their own internal metrics, which are increasing watch time by actually giving us far less measurable empirical data about a piece of content. Thoughts? I might enjoy my plex library more. What I'm trying to say is I might enjoy my plex library more if I didn't know how good something was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think there's too many things that I watch on YouTube that the like think about WAN show. WAN show vods. You're watching a WAN show that's two years old.

[Linus Sebastian]

It is out of date, sort of. We have a lot of conversations that are useful, you know, for the history of tech and that are not on topic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, history of tech though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So what if. What if we have a WAN show and the title is like Google, kill the company again. And then you're like, oh, what did they kill this time? And then you're like, wait, how long does it take you to figure out that this happened years ago? And they're not talking about the 87 things that they've killed in between then and now, I guess. I don't know. It leaves you to, like, you have to sit there and watch the video to figure out if this is actually a video that you want to watch or not. Instead of being able to just look at the date and be like, okay, got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which is good for the platform, or.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It gets people to just leave the platform form entirely because it's annoying.

[Linus Sebastian]

I came across this video in my shorts feed, actually, speaking of this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Kyle.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was Kyle from Bitwit. And the reason it. The reason I noticed it in my shorts feed was because the thumbnail had this frame of me in it. And I was like, sorry, what? When was. When was Kyle from Bitwit talking about me? And I clicked on it and I realized, like, how obfuscated things are now. So, okay, we've got likes. There's no view count. So this is already, like, happening. This is already the direction the interface is going. I can't see how many subscribers Kyle has. In fact, what drove me. Oh, this is interesting. Oh, weird. The. This has the channel name, but the I sw. Oh, my gosh. I swear. I swear. The screenshot that I sent to our rep earlier today did not. Oh, so trippy. Okay, so when I navigated to this. Not from his channel. Kyle. Kyle, Luke can confirm.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, confirmed. I know what you're talking about.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's no channel name, no subscribe button. There's no way for me to get information about who he even is. Which sort of flies in the face of YouTube's claims that the shorts feed can be like a funnel for your. For your vodka.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's the opposite of that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it was like, I. I was like, what the heck is this? I have no way of. I have no way of finding this. Anyway, my point is, I think it would be a terrible thing for YouTube because of the vastly different way that people use YouTube compared to a movie library. But in general, maybe less data could be a good thing. That's all I'm trying to say. And I guess my question was, would degrading the experience in this way make you less likely to use an ad blocker? If this was one of the levers that they decided to pull? If you're an ad blocker, they just, like, remove other elements of the page.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, probably.

[Linus Sebastian]

Would that harm your use of the platform?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think for a pretty considerable amount of YouTube viewing that I do, it would do that. Yeah. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Corey, as the name says, I find Myself judging fictional books intensely. If I see their rating prior to reading, I think about that rating throughout the process of reading the book and I end up losing some of my focus on the content itself.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, date isn't a rating though. Like I understand what you're saying with the, with the like to dislike side of things, but a date is not a rating. A date is a. I don't know. Sometimes a very old video can communicate that it could be a very quality thing. And sometimes a very new video is kind of a requirement. If you're trying to keep up to date on what's happening in US politics and you look up something to do with, with Trump for example, and running for election.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. What if the 2020 election.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like it sounds super annoying to be completely honest. Like there's. There's certain things that are just timely. What if you wanted to find something from the 2016.

[Linus Sebastian]

What if they used AI to determine whether a video really needs a data on it or not? Naz Freak says YouTube has confirmed it's not testing removing it. It was a side effect. I know, it just prompted a conversation, that's all. I just wanted to talk about side.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Effect of certain add ons or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Side effect of your face. Yeah. Extensions. We said that earlier, but they might be tuning in.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They say. What kind of extensions? No. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Who knows what kind? Dan, I think that's it for the topics on the WAN show this week. Do you want to switch us over to After Dark?

[Dan]

Okay, I can do that. Absolutely.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's do it. Wow, there's so many of you watching today.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A date is context. Yeah, like I don't know. I think the date matters.

[Linus Sebastian]

I get it. No, to be clear, I want the date. Yeah, but like would I be more likely to watch It's a Wonderful World if I didn't know that it was like old, maybe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

See, I think it could add value though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or like tootsie, you know, because like the fact that. Whatever. Just like some old movie.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The fact that we both know the name It's a Wonderful World means It's a wonderful life. Sorry. It's a Wonderful Life, I think. Isn't that.

[Dan]

My bad?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, it's just a turn of phrase.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, that's the what a Wonderful World. That's the song.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, sure. Basically, I don't know either of them is what we're coming to on conclusion, but I know the, the phrase. So if I saw that and I saw the date, I'm like, oh, I know this name. It's super Old, that probably means it was amazing. So I'm gonna check this out.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it could go either way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, if you hear someone in modern times say, hey, Schindler's List is like an amazing movie.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, okay. And then you see that it's old, it might go like, oh, it was amazing enough for them to still care about it despite it not being a new release. Maybe I'll watch that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Could communicate value.

[Linus Sebastian]

Different people have different perspectives. Like Yvonne, for example, doesn't like watching old media. She just finds, especially the audio quality. When you go back, a certain amount isn't, like, not good enough for her to enjoy, like, their, Their. Their sound recording techniques. If you go back to, like, the 70s, early 80s were not as good and it's not as clean as it is now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Doesn't bother me. I think it adds some charm, but I. I can understand having a different perspective on that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan, do you want to hit us with some merge messages?

[Dan]

Yeah, sure. Hi, LDL. Recently my desktop YouTube page has reduced the amount of thumbnails to three per row, leaving me with six videos on full screen, forcing me to scroll more. Do you have any thoughts on this trend?

[Linus Sebastian]

I've seen some people complaining about this. I personally am a huge proponent of higher density. I mean, but maybe part of that is a generational gap thing. Like, when I was a kid, screens were small and resolution was low, and every upgrade was so that you could fit more stuff on the screen and so the screen would be bigger so you could see more at a time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A very interesting rabbit hole to go down is North American versus Japanese web design.

[Dan]

Oh, man. They're like, violently opposite.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's crazy. But they are successful in their areas. It's not just that, like, you know, Japanese web designers just feel like doing it some other way. No, they just.

[Linus Sebastian]

They just don't give a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. It works better with Japanese audiences. And then when you. When you try to put American web design in front of Japanese audiences, they don't. They don't like it as much. They don't engage with it as much. I don't remember all the details. Then when you put Japanese web design styles in front of American audiences, they're.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, you get a reaction like this. Del Main in floatplane chat says, I legitimately cannot stand Japan. Japanese web design. It's insane to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah. But they work really well within their cultures. It's very interesting. It's actually a genuinely very interesting rabbit hole.

[Linus Sebastian]

Part of my feelings about it could also be a Generational gap. Oh, wait, did I already say that part? Well, okay, I have another supporting piece of this because Yvonne was talking to some other people internally here, like younger people, Gen Z people, and she was talking about booking a trip and they were like, oh, well, you know, whatever. And Yvonne's like, oh, well, yeah, I can't look at that right now. I'm not at my computer. And they go, well, but you don't just book flights on your phone. She's like, no, who would do that? And they're like, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is inferior. Yvonne is correct.

[Linus Sebastian]

It is vastly inferior. Yvonne is 100% correct. But apparently that's a. This is objective big generational gap thing, is that millennials will the new generation is wrong go to the computer to do certain things and booking travel is one of them. Whereas Gen Zs will absolutely just use their phone to do stuff like that, even though they obviously cannot do a good enough job of it in comparison shopping and without using spreadsheets. But that is very much an R generation thing to even think of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, we're wrong about a lot of things. We're correct about that.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a screen big purchase to even think about using the desktop, going to use the computer, you know. But yeah, 100%, the bigger the purchase, the better the chance that I want to use a big screen to do it.

[Dan]

Sure, it's the same accounts, but it feels weird having money go through my phone. Do you know what I mean? Like, I'm on the Amazon app on my phone, but money has to go through it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Dan]

Even just like buying a little thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't mind that I. If I just like need something right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Arty's base.

[Linus Sebastian]

What did Artie say?

[Luke Lafreniere]

As a zoomer, I agree with PC being superior for big purchases.

[Linus Sebastian]

And like, there's certain things where I'll use both depending on the context. So if I'm just like browsing houses for the lulls, like I'm looking at the most expensive houses for sale in Vancouver right now. I'll do that on my phone.

[Dan]

I don't care.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just like doom scrolling like nonsense. I'm looking at people's fancy houses. If I am shopping, dude, research phone.

[Dan]

Are you curious?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sometimes I'll go look over at North Van and just slide that. That willing to pay scale up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just be like, you know, if I just had a helicopter, I could just fly into work.

[Linus Sebastian]

That I don't mind doing on my phone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, exactly.

[Linus Sebastian]

But like If I'm actually shopping. No, I gotta be on my computer, man. I gotta be on my computer.

[Dan]

I'm a gamer, slash gardener and just got an OLED TV LG C3 and want to get, get an QD OLED monitor. But I'm worried about the purple hue. I have grow lights on 16 hours a day and never use my computer in the dark.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's very unlikely to bother you. I mean, the first example I have of this is my old Aperture grill crt. Okay. It had these two little lines across the screen for the like alignment wires. And I read reviews and people were like, oh yeah, it's like, it's annoying. It's this. And then other people were like, oh no, yeah, you forget about it. And I got it, I brought it home, I unpacked it. And I was like, they're really annoying. They bother me so much. They're visible, especially on white backgrounds, which, you know, going back to the early 2000s, mid 2000s, it was basically every webpage, right? Like everything was. There was no dark mode and I was on the brink of returning it and paying it like a 15% restocking fee at NCIX or whatever it was. I think it was 15%, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so. That sounds correct.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then I gave it a little bit longer and then I forgot they were there. And the purple hue is kind of like that. Yeah, you'll notice it. It'll be super noticeable when you know about it and then you'll be playing a game and it'll be like half an hour later and you'll be like, oh, I haven't thought about the purple hue in a while. I wouldn't stress about it too much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I remembered something about the Japanese versus American website design thing. It had something to do with like obfuscation of information and desire for comfort versus knowledge. And the Japanese web design leans more towards information overload and the American web design leans more towards comfort. And you know, you're just going to trust that this is going to be legit. Whatever. It's interesting. I don't remember all the details. It's actually like a fairly deep topic if you guys are interested. But that was. I remember that being sort of one of the, one of the concepts.

[Linus Sebastian]

By the way, enjoy your grow life and maybe try that weird AI Minecraft thing. Theft dude. Can't even imagine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

G'day boys from down under. I'm planning to build a new PC and pretty sold on the 9000x3D series. Do you think the 9800x3D is going to be the best bet. Should I hold out for something better?

[Luke Lafreniere]

How are you pretty sold on that already?

[Linus Sebastian]

No comment.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What's going on?

[Linus Sebastian]

We know too much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

To answer this question, you shouldn't be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sold on something before independent reviews are out. I would encourage you to watch ours. I would also encourage you to watch others or read others.

[Linus Sebastian]

Neat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Linus, when you were on the yard, how close were you to walking out when they did their DJ intro?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I was. I was warned by Luke what those guys were like. It wasn't my first time. Like. Like, we were. We were there. We did the. We did the bro versus Bro first. So I encountered a bit of a primer Ludwig by that point. Wait, did we do the bro versus Bro first?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think so. Now.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't remember. No, no, we did bro versus Bro after.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. No. Okay, well, never mind. Anyway, I knew who Ludwig was, and so I was surprised but not shocked. I was. I was. It was unexpected but not surprising. I don't know. I don't know how to phrase it. But, yeah, no, they did their intro. I think to go back and do the yard again, I would probably lean more into their bullshit rather than, like, kind of be the skeptical, you know, outsider. But maybe that's sort of part of the. The. The deal of, you know, having a guest on a show like that. Maybe everyone kind of goes through that a little bit. I wouldn't know. I don't watch the show. I have a couple people that were, like, very mad about me not knowing who anybody was and not listening to the podcast or watching the show or whatever else, because, I don't know, it made me seem arrogant or something, but I was just. I was just trying to be honest. Like, I'm. I'm so sorry. I actually don't know any of your name names, because we all introduced ourselves, like, three minutes ago before I walked in here. And then I sat at the top of that slide for all of that time while you guys were DJ racist or whatever. And so I just was like, yeah, no, I'm sorry. The only one of you who I know is Ludwig. And that just kind of is what it is. And I'm sorry, but some people took that really negatively. But, I mean, you know how things are. There's actually one of my. That's. This is one of my favorite sort of yardsticks for, you know, how marketable my face is, is how content performs when I'm on someone else's channel, because how our videos Perform is like this is your house. Yeah, this. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like how, how marketable of a name is ltt. So I'm going to do this live, but I'm going to go and have a look at like how you don't want to look at anything from like a day ago, like a week or two ago, you know, how did I do so Georain. Bold. Pretty. Pretty appealing guest. So that, that's pretty cool. Let's see who are. Who are some other folks. Hive mind. TV was apparently a pretty good one because I don't really like. I don't watch YouTube. So this is one of the ways that I'll. I'll figure out like, okay, who's like a big deal. Like the Sea Dog Va guy seems to be kind of a big deal. So that's. That's pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Rainbow is, is pretty based. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. There you go. Here's one with just the crew. Okay. 500,000. So that's kind of the high end of if they don't have a guest on what else we got.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you already know the answer to this?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh no, I did pretty good. Yeah. 800k.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you already know the answer to this?

[Linus Sebastian]

Already know what answer to this? To what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

How well you did.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You already knew the answer to this?

[Linus Sebastian]

I didn't. I haven't looked at it in like, I don't know, two or three months.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I knew that it was like an above average.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was wondering how performative this was.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no. I just haven't looked at it in a while.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, so it's, there's. Oh yeah, Hank Green. Hank Green crushed me. But that makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hank Green.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Yeah, they had Hank Green on. So it's, it's. It's one of those things. It's like it helps me kind of figure out, you know, where everyone's stock is at kind of at. At whatever time they were, they were on another like another person's channel and helps me figure out if like if like I did okay Day. You know, like if anyone, if anyone cares outside of just our like hyper, hyper geek sort of bubble that we live in.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

There were, there were a couple other cutie Cinderella crushed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean that makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah. 100 makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

She's a great host and she's rather affiliated with that crew.

[Linus Sebastian]

Rather affiliated. Amaranth. Amaranth Crushed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

But yeah, I was, I was actually a little surprised to see how much overlap there was. Like I wasn't expecting their Audience and our audience to have a lot of overlap. That's another thing that it gauges. So it's not just like, oh, higher number on someone else's channel. Automatically you're like a big deal in mainstream or whatever. Like, no, but it can tell you how much overlap there is between people who watch that and people who watch. And there's too many variables to draw any concrete conclusions, but it's an indicator.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What's an audience that you don't think you would perform well with because of overlap issues? Because I feel like, you know, I went through a few in my head and one that I landed on was like, makeup. But then, no, I feel like if you went on a makeup channel would probably kill.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think so, actually.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so. Because all the dude bros would be like, what? I actually bet you it would do pretty. All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think so. I don't think so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It might do bad for them because their algorithm is going to be all screwed, but I feel like the one episode might do it right.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. This is a tough one. If you have any kind of public space where it's just like a mixing pot. Like that. The fact that that school had the teacher and two students who knew enough to go find this on the subreddit and, like, knew who we were and like all that stuff, that's, like pretty. That's pretty solid. But that's just mixing pot. Right. Whereas, like an actual space where people are selectively there because they have an interest. Like, I would think. I would think if you. If there was a ceramics studio that had a channel, like, and I went on there, there'd be like, there'd be nothing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think I might do. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

No one would care. I don't think the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think you do enough weird, random, off the wall stuff on this channel that something like ceramics would do fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's that like a math education channel.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no, that would be super high overlap. You think people who are into math education and people who are into technology. Get real.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, fair enough.

[Dan]

They did well on Veritasium. It's mostly like pretty crazy stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I wasn't thinking like that, though.

[Dan]

I was like three.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Three brown. Oh, three brown one or one? Three.

[Dan]

Three brown. One blue.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that too.

[Linus Sebastian]

To be clear, Blue, one brown.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. Whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

To be clear. Veritasium. I. I completely ignored that one though. And the reason for that. No, I shouldn't say I ignored It. I watched the video and, like, Derek and his team did a great job and everything, but I. I wasn't gonna read anything into that one because his video performance is like, like so spiky and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which seems weird to me because they all seem quite consistently good.

[Linus Sebastian]

You never.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, it's so hard sometimes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Even a master of YouTube packaging and. And content creation is not gonna knock it out of the park every single time. Unless your name is Mark Rober. Even he. Even he doesn't get the same number of views on every single video because not everything can appeal to absolutely everybody. And that's the way it is.

[Dan]

We should work on that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I mean, we're trying, Dan. Everybody's trying, Dan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, no more, Normie.

[Dan]

No, no, no, no. I mean, you need to find the video that appeals to literally every single person.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure.

[Dan]

But then, I mean, that's like, not possible, is it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nope.

[Dan]

Okay. Up next. Hi, Dll. I'm in my senior year of engineering undergrad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, good.

[Dan]

In my opinion, at best, 96 of the 128 credits are relevant to my success. How would you pitch higher education to your children? And do you have hot takes?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Part of the original idea of the credit system and getting people to take credits that were not in their actual direct courses was to prepare people for being an adult and needing to, like, communicate with others about things that aren't just their one singular niche. They were trying to prep you for, like, the world. Yeah, I don't think it's as relevant these days.

[Linus Sebastian]

They forced Yvonne, stuff like that. They forced Yvonne to take one accounting course as part of her pharmacy degree.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thank goodness.

[Linus Sebastian]

You never know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I guess there was classes that annoyed me when I was in school that I have absolutely used. Like, yeah, there's even. There's even classes that I took back in school that. That I still would have thought would have been useless two years ago and have since become useful. Like, I don't know. Learning stuff is just good and useful.

[Linus Sebastian]

And part of it is forcing you to learn. To learn.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And push yourself to learn something that you're not inherently interested in and that you might not see the point of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because you never know, understand other perspectives, and to be less generally useless. If you are more generally competent, you are less generally useless, which is awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's really tips right there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's really fantastic, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Speaking of higher education, I was reading this interesting article about how college professors are, like, we don't really know what to do because they assign reading to and they just don't students, and they just, like, don't read. Like, they literally arrive in college going, yeah, we've been assigned, like, excerpts to read, but we've never been assigned. Just, like, read this book.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And come back in a couple days when you're done.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Students entering Harvard that have never once read a book.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is flipping wild to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know how to deal with that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Y'all gotta, like, read, like, a bit and stuff, literally.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Me. Artie, you've never read a book.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, you got a job without it. I guess I've read a book, maybe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, that's better than.

[Dan]

Parents still read.

[Linus Sebastian]

AJ Says I've only read eight books my entire life. The Harry Potter books, plus House of the Scorpion or Sorpion. Sorpion. I don't know what House of the Sarpion is.

[Dan]

I read Grapes of Wrath, and I really wish I hadn't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I genuinely, like, think a thousand pages that you should read. And this is even someone who has a hard time with it because I think it's good for your brain to just sit there and have to imagine Artie's trolling.

[Linus Sebastian]

I've read books, but not many in university.

[Dan]

What about. I mean, are we okay with, like, Harry Potter's and House of the Dragon and all those sort of like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, Harry Potter's a book.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a book.

[Dan]

Like, we don't have to be, like, you know, they don't have to be proper novels kind of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Harry Potter is a proper novel.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, but for young adults.

[Dan]

I mentioned grape. Grapes of Wrath. Right. Which is like a classic. A classic American.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've read a book. I've read Grapes of Wrath.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. Honestly speaking, I. I think a lot of what makes something classic is that it came first. Like, quite frankly, the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn kind of suck.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The coming first part matters, though, in my opinion.

[Linus Sebastian]

And like, to be clear, they don't suck. You know, I'm sure they're full of, you know, rich pros and all those things and stuff upset some people, but I didn't care. Like, I read them as a kid and I was like, seriously, this is what qualified as, like, good kids books those days? My God, nothing happens, you know, So I. And. And so I. I think that. I think that, you know, just because something is more modern and just because it's full of plot holes and what.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No story about it and.

[Linus Sebastian]

And. And like, flawed world building, you know, talking about Harry Potter here right now, yeah, yeah. That doesn't make it. It not valid. Okay. What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just. People are quoting me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Quoting you?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I avoided that one because the coming first part matters.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my goodness.

[Dan]

Does fan fiction count? Like, I don't know, my immortal and stuff like that. It was seriously his name.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I don't know. I think the literal mental exercise of having to create a world in your brain to try to visualize it instead of just. Just watching video and having that done for you in the modern day is actually very valuable for flexing your creativity muscles and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

I promise you, nobody has made any video content that you enjoy watching. I'm talking, like, films, TV shows. Nobody made those without reading. It's an important part of being able to create and not just consume.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I listen to audiobooks all the time.

[Dan]

Tree hallucinations.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I get a lot of benefit from that as well. Yeah, but just still have to imagine.

[Dan]

Just listening to it, like, because when you're reading it, you are solely focused on the page. If you're just listening to it while you're cooking dinner and, like, you're not hallucinating properly. Now, am I being a novel purist? I haven't read in years, so I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think reading is objectively more based than listening to an audiobook. I just sometimes, you know, if I'm driving, I'm gonna listen to an audiobook, and I'm still.

[Linus Sebastian]

You don't just read behind the wheel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A full, like, hardcover.

[Dan]

Hardcover. And then you have your phone taped at the top of it for Subway Surfers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice. Good, good, good. Yeah, because you can't. You shouldn't read without Subway Surfers. Yeah, you should.

[Dan]

You know, and I got podcast One ear.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, right. Good, good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Corey, as the name says, there's something to be said for books that break the mold and redefine entire genres of literature. They may be weak in comparison to modern equivalents, but those equivalents wouldn't exist if not for the OG and that's fine if you're, like, a literary historian, but I'm just saying for people who just, like, should practice reading so they can flex their reading muscle, I don't necessarily consider that to be the best use of their time.

[Dan]

We're not talking about learning literature.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wuthering Heights also f. Sucked. I'm sorry. It sucks. It's not good. I didn't enjoy it. I'm sorry again. It's, like, boring. It moves at a glacial pace, and it's like. And it's a high cognitive load to read it because it uses kind of archaic English. And it was not enjoyable. I'm sorry. And you're not going to get anybody. I had a. This was. This was a really good. I forget. I think I overheard this conversation or. No, it was relayed to me by Yvonne, and it came from one of. There's a. There's a kid that Yvonne and I both know who goes to a. Like a religious school. And basically you can get some really. You can get some really interesting opinions on what kind of literature is okay to read from people who have, you know, their doctrine and their belief system and who are educators, and they can kind of end up prescribing a really restrictive diet of literary materials. And I was quite surprised, based on what I knew about this particular teacher from context, that what they basically said is the best thing for a kid to read is anything that kid will read.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Literally anything. I don't care. It can be Witchcraft or Minecraft or Minecraft or. Did I say Minecraft?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What's about. More Minecraft?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, whatever. It doesn't matter. The point is, it can be anything. Just make sure that they learn to bloody read. And so, you know. Yeah, I think if you. If you. If you go and you give kids like. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'll go. I'll come back to. To my example. Okay. Oh, here's one. I loved the Secret World of OG by Pierre Burton when I was a kid. And I went and I tried to read it to my kids and they just tuned the math out. It was the. The language was not just maybe at a bit of a high level for what they were ready for at the time. So that was part of the problem. But not just that, but it was just. It was. It was written in an older style and. And they weren't engaged with it. And I could have insisted, but what would I have done? I would have just created a negative. Yeah, a negative reading experience. Why. Why are we doing this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I never liked reading at all. You know, I've always had problems with that type of stuff. I was really bad at spelling all those types of things. My mom was trying to get me into it because it would have benefited me, fairly obviously. And I don't think she had ever read it before, but she picked up the Hobbit. If I had to make a guess, she probably picked up the Hobbit because I liked, like, video games and fantasy games. And she's like, well, I don't know, let's try this. And loved the Hobbit. She read the Hobbit to me and I was super into it. And the Hobbit being so good. Not the movies. If you're a youngin who hasn't read, the movie sucked. The book was fantastic.

[Linus Sebastian]

The movies were just butt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The Hobbit being so good drove me to want to read Lord of the Rings. And that was really hard. Not just because of age, but reading ability, but it was. The story was so good that I really enjoyed that. Then I got into the Harry Potter books and then I started expanding beyond there. And now reading became like a thing for me. And despite it being hard, I would take an entire Saturn Saturday and just chill and read because I'm like, this is great. I love these worlds that I'm disappearing into.

[Linus Sebastian]

Man, I wish I had Saturdays like that as an adult.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, yeah.

[Dan]

Fox in a Box suggested scps Scary stories on the Internet. Does it necessarily have to be a book? Can it be like fan fiction level stuff? Can it be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it being a book has value because you want very long. Yes, I think that has value.

[Linus Sebastian]

I also think there's something to be said for it maintaining a certain bar of quality, consistent voice. Like, Yvonne has this app called Dream with an e at the end. And basically it's like independent writers and I think they get a commission from people buying the next chapter of their stories and stuff like that. So it honestly seems pretty constructive for amateur writers. But oh my God, like, they're just. It's just full of like, grammatical errors and, and typos and just like, like, you'll just, you'll. It's written by people who have never read. So you'll. It'll be full of like homonyms that are just like. You read it out loud and the sentence makes sense, but it's just like, it's just wrong. I think there's. I think there's something to be said for. I'm not saying that language isn't evolving and shouldn't evolve. It absolutely does, and it absolutely should. But you know, in the same way that you don't get to take artistic license with a painting until you like, understand fundamentally how to paint. You can't really take artistic license with language until you understand the basic structures and know how to use them. And in a lot of cases, you know, you, you get carelessness described or disguised as creativity. And I, I think there's some value to consuming content that has been edited for clarity and correctness.

[Dan]

This is.

[Linus Sebastian]

What are you writing fan fictions in the floor plane chat Dan.

[Dan]

This is like the most classic, most.

[Linus Sebastian]

Famous one is This a copypasta?

[Dan]

No, this is a like a massive fan fiction based on Harry Potter. And my immortal is known very far and wide for being a work of non.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not gonna lie, I thought it was a joke. No, I've never read that before.

[Dan]

This makes it a lot better because it is actually stupid, unfortunately sincere. It's like a the room kind of situation.

[Linus Sebastian]

My name is Ebony Darkness Dementia Raven Way. And I have long ebony black hair. That's how I got my name. With purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears. And a lot of people tell me I look like Amy Lee. And if you don't know who she is, get the hell out of here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Get the hell out of here.

[Dan]

There's a lot of authors.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can't get your name from your long ebony black hair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that doesn't really work out because.

[Linus Sebastian]

You were a baby.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You didn't have.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're an actual idiot. So anyway, there's that. Yeah, Internet historian apparently did a read of it. Okay.

[Dan]

Phenomenal video. Yeah, this is probably. That's probably the best way to conclude Consume my immortal.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It sounds like it. Probably.

[Dan]

I was not expecting that to happen tonight. I am so sorry. The entirety of the Internet. Oh boy. Lake Linus Dune. I'm working towards my doctorate in philosophy, aiming to work in tech. Do you think my time would be better spent in research and development or policy around implementation? Also second role for Essie Hood.

[Linus Sebastian]

Probably no more SC hoodie. We do have a hoodie based on that pattern coming soon. You might like it. As for what you should be working on, I mean, policy around implementation seems like something someone with philosophy training should probably be working on with all this AI stuff going on. But whether anyone's actually willing to pay you to do that when they'd rather just go in like a wrecking ball, I don't know. Good luck though, and I hope you can make a positive difference in the world.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There are actually companies hiring that role.

[Linus Sebastian]

Good. Well, they should.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, a lot of them are doing.

[Linus Sebastian]

But then they should actually listen instead of just hiring the role and so that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh no, a lot of them are doing it in order to try to improve their lobbying efforts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, Cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, carry on.

[Dan]

Hi, I work in tech retail and we get a lot of clients looking for the cheapest systems, not understanding or wanting to understand that they won't get the functionality they want. How do I explain it?

[Linus Sebastian]

You won't be able to explain it. The way to handle it is be enthusiastic and be excited about the things that you know are going to actually make them happy. Take time to ask questions. It sounds like you're doing that though. Like you've taken the time to understand what they want, the functionality thereafter. Um, and so, so you just have to improve your salesmanship. Be excited about the things that will work. Be extremely unexcited about the things that won't work. Warn them, tell them you don't want them to waste their money because buying something twice, even if it's only two thirds of the price, costs more than buying something once that actually works and actually fulfills their needs. So you just have to kind of try to try to break it down and do your best. Every once in a while someone's going to come in, they're going to have some kind of expectations and what you got to do is you got to say, look, this isn't going to work work for you, but it's clear that it's what you want and you can give it a try. Here's our return policy and if you come back in, I'd be happy to, you know, chat with you and help you find something that works out better for you. But maybe you'll try it. And, you know, maybe from our conversation I've misunderstood exactly what it is that your expectations are and it'll work just fine for you. Just leave the conversation open.

[Dan]

And let's see here, last one. I've got LTT number one Precision Bits and PTM 7950. When.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. Logistics are a challenge. I saw someone in Floatplane chat earlier saying PTM7950, it should be in stock. I mean, surely there couldn't be a shortage from Honeywell or whatever. But it's more of a logistics thing. We were really working on trimming down our stock on the store and I think we kind of overswung the pendulum that way and too enthusiastic. Yeah, we need to do a better job of just maintaining a little bit more stock of just the, the run rate items that people are after. Like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Tall shirts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like tall shirts? Yeah. Are they all like these out of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Stock, the tall shirts?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Oh, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Smalls are in.

[Linus Sebastian]

We've small and we have nothing else.

[Luke Lafreniere]

For long sleeve, you have a few options for short sleeve. It's only small. I have been tracking this often.

[Linus Sebastian]

The microfiber shirt sold out. So I think we got the order quantity about right on that one. But yeah, well, we're going to keep getting better at it. I think I hope. We'll keep trying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I think that's it. We'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bye. Christ.