Microsoft Has Promised to Fix Windows - WAN Show May 1, 2026

Summary

The WAN Show – May 1, 2026

Episode Title: Microsoft Has Promised to Fix Windows
Hosts: Linus Sebastian, Luke Lafreniere
Date: May 2, 2026

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Overview

This episode of The WAN Show dives into a surprisingly good news-heavy week in the tech world, focusing on Microsoft’s ambitious K2 initiative to overhaul Windows 11, notable right-to-repair news, a legendary emulator resurrection, controversy around digital DRM, creative new hardware, and spirited tangents from the hosts. Linus, Luke, and Dan break down the recent shift in tech company strategies, the user impact of OS changes, failures of Canadian icons, and more — punctuated by signature banter and real-world reflections.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Return of ZSNES Emulator ([00:06])

• Linus opens with the announcement that ZSNES, the legendary SNES emulator, has been rewritten from scratch by original developer ZS Knight.
  • "ZS Knight, original developer of Z SNES is back. Z SNES is back. Completely rewritten from scratch.” – Linus [00:06]
• The new Super ZSNES is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. No AI-generated code ("no Vibe coding"), with features like GPU acceleration, uncompressed audio, and per-game enhancements.
• Early build is buggy and lacks specialty chip support, but generates community excitement.
  • "I want to try it. I’m spoiler. I want to try it." – Linus [55:02]

2. Microsoft K2 Initiative: Fixing Windows 11 ([03:51],[11:00])

• Linus and Luke discuss Microsoft's internal "K2" initiative, described as an admittance by Microsoft that "Windows 11 is a giant boatload of suck."
  • "They have finally admitted to themselves that Windows 11 is a giant boatload of suck." – Linus [04:00]
• K2 aims to rewrite performance pain points: Start Menu (move to WinUI3 for 60% faster response), File Explorer (benchmarked against 3rd-party File Pilot), eliminate Start Menu ads, and make updates less disruptive.
  • “Start menu is being completely rewritten… make it 60% faster and more responsive.” – Linus [10:45]
  • File Pilot, a third-party app, becomes their performance target: “Filepilot is one guy, dude. Catholic, Croatian husband, father of five, one extremely busy guy just donking on Windows.” – Linus [16:07]
• Windows Update will aim to require only a once-per-month restart.
• Microsoft takes SteamOS as its gaming performance benchmark, especially with next Xbox reportedly running Windows 11.

Discussion: Can Windows Win Back Its Users? ([17:52])

• Luke: Most users haven't left, just are frustrated; some (like him) have switched to Linux.
  • “It isn't completely too late... if this bar shifts and it makes more sense for me to use windows, I'd probably just use windows, but that is not currently true.” – Luke [19:06]
• Linus: The user experience is key, Windows has become convoluted in update, driver, app management.

Related: Windows Update, Pausing, Forced Restarts ([22:35])

• Windows Insiders can now pause updates in 35-day increments, but only on dev/experimental builds. Real solution should be smarter update handling, not just allowing indefinite pausing.
  • "Pausing updates is not the solution, better handling of saving all of my work, saving my state and then restoring my state... is a way more elegant solution." – Linus [22:59]
• Both hosts complain about fragmented, inconsistent Windows experience — especially around drivers and app management.

3. Corporate Downfalls & Tim Hortons Rant ([04:56])

• Linus goes on a tangent comparing Microsoft’s wakeup call to Canadian icon Tim Hortons’ decline after being sold to private equity.
  • “Why don't you make edible food as a way to connect with your Canadian customers?” – Linus [07:28]
• Corporate focus on nostalgia marketing over quality is lambasted for both Tim Hortons and Windows.
• Analogy: Companies often focus on surface-level fixes (“make it more Canadian”/“add more features”) rather than quality foundations (“fresh food”/“make it suck less”).

4. Intel Cancels Discrete Gaming GPUs ([29:12])

• Rumor: Intel reportedly cancels “Celestial” discrete gaming GPU, focusing only on data center/workstation.
  • Linus: “I really do believe the innovation on the gaming side makes the enterprise and professional sides better and stronger... you gotta give us hardware to run it on.” [32:19]
• If Intel leaves, GPU prices go up, competition weakens.
  • “...answer is it goes up.” – Linus [30:41]

5. DRM Panic: PlayStation's 30-day License Check ([62:45])

• Users panic after spotting secret 30-day timers for digital licenses; Sony’s chatbot and silence fuel confusion and backlash.
• Eventually Sony clarifies: one-time online check required for permanent offline play, but a “15-day” anti-fraud window aligns with refund policies.
  • “Sony rolled this out silently and let the panic build for a freaking week before saying a single thing.” – Luke [65:15]
• Comparison with Steam highlights that always-online fears are not unfounded, as both PS and Steam have periodic license checks.

6. OpenAI’s Alleged Smartphone & Hardware Push ([101:44])

• Market rumors suggest OpenAI will launch an “agentic,” app-free smartphone in partnership with Qualcomm and MediaTek by 2028.
• Hosts universally skeptical:
  • “Sounds terrible. I would never want to buy this.” – Luke [102:52]
  • “Can you think of any reason to want this over a phone from someone with decades of experience?” – Linus [104:08]

7. Surveillance Pricing Ban (Maryland) & Data Ethics ([106:01])

• Maryland passes the first U.S. law banning “surveillance pricing” in grocery stores—no personal-data-driven price setting.
• Criticism: big loopholes allow discounts that negate intended protections.
• Linus/Luke agree: shouldn’t be dynamic pricing within same national market; discuss LTT Store’s minimal individual data collection and ad tracking ethics.

8. Right to Repair – Colorado Law Survives ([124:16])

• Attempt to gut Colorado’s digital device right-to-repair loses narrowly. Cisco/IBM argued “critical infrastructure” needed restriction due to cyber risk—rejected by House Committee.
• Cybersecurity experts: real risk is not local repairs, but remote attacks—repairs needed to keep critical gear online.

9. 3D Printing: Wave Overhangs Slicer ([96:40])

• Wave Overhangs, forked from OrcaSlicer, lets users 3D print 90° overhangs with no supports, using concentric “wave” perimeters for strength.
  • “That isn't—that's an overhang and a half. That's wild.” – Linus [99:22]
• Hosts marvel at open source rapid innovation.

10. Misc. Good News Highlights

• LibrePods Progress ([127:28]): AirPods-on-Android project can do more without root.
• Noctua Publishes Fan CAD Models ([125:59]): For community use/3D modeling.
• LTT Labs Linux Gaming Distro Testing ([82:40]): Candid benchmarking; ChatGPT/LLMs often recommend Pop!_OS for newcomers.
• Tesla Semi Truck Production ([114:54]): Mass production line finally active; 290K USD for long-range, focus on local logistics.

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Memorable Quotes and Moments

• Linus on Windows 11 "They have finally admitted to themselves that Windows 11 is a giant boatload of suck." [04:00]
• Comparing Tim Hortons Demise to Corporate Myopia “Why don't you make edible food as a way to connect with your Canadian customers?” [07:28]
• On Microsoft Benchmarking Against a One-Man App "Filepilot is one guy, dude. Catholic, Croatian husband, father of five, one extremely busy guy just donking on Windows." [16:07]
• Luke on OpenAI Phone “Sounds terrible. I would never want to buy this. Oh my god.” [102:52]
• Linus on K2 Update Promises "We want to beat the performance of an operating system that the games literally don't even run natively on..." [16:49]
• Luke on Steam Licensing: “I guess I've never been offline long enough to notice as someone who actually… but I have definitely run up against this.” [66:35]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Time | Segment | |-------------|------------------------------------------------| | 00:06 | Opening & ZSNES returns | | 03:51 | Microsoft K2: Overhauling Windows 11 | | 13:39 | Start menu responsiveness, UI layers | | 16:07 | File Pilot vs File Explorer | | 17:52 | Can Windows win back users? | | 22:35 | Windows Update pause, user experience | | 29:12 | Intel gaming GPU cancellation | | 55:02 | ZSNES no-Vibe-coding philosophy | | 62:45 | PlayStation DRM 30-day check panic | | 96:40 | Wave Overhangs slicer & experimental 3D print | | 106:01 | Surveillance pricing ban & data ethics | | 114:54 | Tesla Semi Truck mass production | | 124:16 | Colorado right to repair law defended | | 127:28 | LibrePods AirPods-on-Android update | | 125:59 | Noctua shares CAD models for community |

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Recurring Themes, Tone, and Community Engagement

• Tone: Chatty, playful, critical, and occasionally rant-oriented. Linus and Luke mix sharp tech insight with relatability, poking fun at themselves and institutions alike.
• Engagement: Shoutouts to chat, reader messages, “After Dark” Q&A, recurring inside jokes (“tall pants,” “cringy pop music,” "Shipstorm sale,” “Tim Hortons trauma”).
• Language: Mix of casual, irreverent tech speak (“donking on Windows,” “suck complete butt”), deep-dive analogies, and earnest user advocacy.

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Notable After Dark Q&A ([154:49+])

• Why isn't pro badminton as lucrative?
  Linus: Poor viewing experience—boring long sets, bad camera angles, lacking drama (“not fun enough to watch”—[163:00]). Suggests set/point reform for more upsets and tension.

• Biggest pet tech interruption?
  Luke: Rabbit chewed TV cables.
  Linus: Rats destroyed car wiring harnesses.

• Vibe coding in real life?
  Luke comments that more creators are using AI code generation than they admit; using AI as “proof of concept” before real devs step in.

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Sponsor-Free Summary

If you missed the episode: This WAN Show is an energetic catch-up on Microsoft's big internal push to repair Windows 11’s reputation, the foundational value of user experience, and the importance of real quality over nostalgia and marketing. You’ll hear the inside scoop on industry pivots (Intel’s GPU drama, right-to-repair battles), candid Linux distro picks, hardware innovation (3D printing, Tesla semi), the perils of digital ownership, and frank (often humorous) takes on what it means to be a user in today’s tech ecosystem. Expect plenty of memorable tangents—especially Linus’s reflection on the death of “Canadian” Tim Hortons.

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Next WAN Show: Only on the WAN Show channel — subscribe and join the discussion!

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

Hello world and welcome to the WAN show. Happy Friday everybody. We've got a great show lined up for you. It is the first day of the second month of good news WAN show. That's right. The ratio of good news to bad news has to be. I forget what we settled on, but it's pretty much mostly good news this week. Starting with something that is like a blast from my childhood past. The one and only ZS Knight, original developer of Z SNES is back. Z SNES is back. Completely rewritten from scratch. I actually haven't tried it yet, but I intend to this weekend. I'm super excited to talk about that. Also, we've got to be talking about. Oh no, I don't want to talk about that. Oh, this one's good. Microsoft has committed in something that they are codenaming K2 seemingly as an acknowledgement of the mountain they have to climb. A concerted effort to fix Windows. Very excited to talk about that. What else we got?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I took mine.

[Dan Siegel]

Toyota.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, I try, baby.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Toyota did what people have thought about for a really long time, which is they took a chair from a car and they put it on a stand with some wheels on it and they called it a computer chair. Toyota's limited edition 3500 Dollar Crown Gaming Chair has heating, cooling and USB C seat seat belt buckle. Didn't even know that part. It's so expensive.

[Linus Sebastian]

But cheaper than a real Toyota.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's true. Maybe not much more than a used one. And I don't know. We've got stuff. There's other stuff. We sponsored a drift car.

[Linus Sebastian]

Really? You went with that? I don't know. Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's all better when right under is what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

The show is brought to you by Vessi, odoo, Squarespace and Ninja1, along with our rap partner dbrand and our laptop partner, Razer and our chair partner also.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Razer, if you were a famous musician, what genre would you.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's the most annoying genre?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I think it's called noise. No, I think it's called noise.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is that a thing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dan, tell me something. What do you think?

[Linus Sebastian]

I would.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dan knows way more, infinitely more about this than either of us.

[Dan Siegel]

I'm going with sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would definitely be cringy. Cringy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Agree.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'd be cringy pop style music for like moms at this point. I think. I think that would be. That would be my best shot.

[Dan Siegel]

I don't know. Taylor Swift,

[Linus Sebastian]

if I could. If I had half the talent that Taylor Swift has in one thigh Then I could hope to be, you know, more like Taylor Swift. But no, no, I'm afraid I might have thighs, but they're not talented. Let's jump. Right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hold on one second. Noise music, or simply noise, is a subgenre of experimental music that is characterized by its use of unwanted noise as a primary musical element. So that's. That's. I think that's probably the most annoying one. It's just terrible. Often featuring little or no melody, rhythm, or harmony

[Linus Sebastian]

that just sounds like someone was taking the piss.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just terrible.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then it just accidentally. A whole genre. All right. No, no, we're not. We're not doing this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's important that everyone knows about noise. Okay. Sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Microsoft has created an internal initiative called K2 to F Windows 11.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Apparently, it's been going on for a while, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

They have finally admitted to themselves that Windows 11 is a giant boatload of suck. And according to sources inside, Microsoft is using the K2 initiative to fix the operating system's biggest pain points and win, pun intended, back user trust. The company is also reportedly intentionally pivoting away from. From shipping new features as fast as possible and refocusing on quality. You know, it's kind of amazing how every time a company is, like, having big, big problems, the idea is, hey, why don't we stop intentionally sucking? Actually, I wish that was often the solution. I went on a rant about this recently, but not on camera. So here you go. Ready for it? Here comes the Tim Hortons wan show rant.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, hell. Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

This made me so angry. I was talking to an American or something, and they were basically like, well, yeah, yeah, right. You know, right. Like Bud. Like Tim Hortons. Right? Y' all Canadians, Y' all like the Tim Hortons, right? Bud.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Instantly triggered.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I was basically, like, instantly triggered. Okay, let me clarify, because, yes, I do like Tim Hortons, but there's a bit of a temporal issue with that statement, because while it was once true for me and every proud Canadian, it is no longer true. Tim Hortons is now owned by Restaurant Brands, which. Seriously, did they go to the. To the LTT Store school of naming. We're gonna have a company that owns Restaurant brand. What should we call it? Let's call it Restaurant Brands. That aside, okay, Restaurant Brands is owned by, like, BlackRock and some Brazilian conglomerate, like a bunch of private equity. There is nothing Canadian about Tim Hortons anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not anymore.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And after all of that happened, Tim Hortons went, at least here on the West Coast. I've been told that on the east, on the eastern side, some of them do still bake the donuts fresh in store.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, really?

[Linus Sebastian]

So here on the west coast, they went from baking the donuts fresh in store and every day. Their slogan used to be always fresh, always Tim Hortons. That was their slogan. Now they're still always Tim Hortons, but they're a gross, messed up, not fresh version of it. Like, you could get a brand new, like, the freshest donut in Tim Hortons. It'll taste like it's three days old these days. It's so bad. It's absolutely disgusting. How did I get on the subject of Tim Hortons?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I literally, to be honest. Oh, right. When companies start sucking.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right? Okay, so this was a while back. This must have been, like, a year ago at this point. But it, like, it made its way into my newsfeed that Tim Hortons was experiencing less than stellar growth and customer engagement. And on a shareholder call, okay, on a shareholder call, they're literally acknowledging soft sales, and they go, yeah, so here's our plan. We're gonna really, like, double down on the Canadiana in our marketing and, like, you know, little kids skating on outdoor hockey rinks and Maple Leafs and beavers and all those very Canadian things. In order to connect more to our Canadian, here's an idea. Why don't you make edible food as a way to connect with your Canadian customers?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I used to when I would travel abroad. So when I'm at airports, basically, I had a routine where every single time I would go to Tim Hortons. So, like, the last thing I did in Canada was, like, one of the most Canadian things you could do, which is go to Tim Hortons.

[Linus Sebastian]

Go to Tim Hortons. Get some chili.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Haven't done it yet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Get a sandwich.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Get.

[Linus Sebastian]

Get a donut. They all suck now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I haven't done it in years.

[Linus Sebastian]

They even up the chili. How do you f up chili? It's literally just like, meat and tomato paste and beans, and then you just put it over heat. Okay, the chili's fine, but the problem is the bun sucks, though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The chili has gotten worse as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Has it really?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, Think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

I haven't had it in a while.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, it. I might just be like, dude, annoyed.

[Linus Sebastian]

The bun tastes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So use the bun as a spoon.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah, that's the whole point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Being way worse may have impacted my opinion of the chili.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Because, like, I used to go and get Tim Hortons chili for my lunch. Like, seriously, this is embarrassing, but, like, two to three times a week when I was working at ncix, I'd get my chili, I'd get my bun. I'd get. When they had them, I'd get the blueberry fritter. Oh, the blueberry fritter. The only problem with the blueberry fritter was how often they ended up undercooking them. Which, looking back on it, is maybe why they stopped baking them in store. The point is that doesn't matter. I would get my blueberry fritter, I'd get my lemon iced tea, and that was it. The lunch of champions. That lunch took OCZ as a product line from like, $3,000 a month to $300,000 a month. Okay. That's what Tim Hortons chili did in his prime. Now, I wouldn't feed my dog that bun. I don't even have a dog anyway. So, yeah, I wish that every company came up with the idea of how about making the product suck less? But restaurant brands couldn't do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyway, I. I genuinely think Tim Hortons was so important to Canada's national identity that that sale should have been blocked.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. I actually strongly agree.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It, like, actually was. Like, our Prime Minister would talk about it globally. Like, this was. This was. It was not a.

[Linus Sebastian]

This was not just some random, like, restaurant.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like. Like going to Tim Hortons in the morning for breakfast is, like, was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Might as well be the canteen of Canada. Like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just. Yeah. And it's ruined now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I'm trying to think of, like, what would be any, like, I don't

[Luke Lafreniere]

know of a single example.

[Linus Sebastian]

It would be, like, Ford, like, not be. It would be like, Ford selling to, like, company. Yeah. Or to Geely or something. Like, imagine as an American, if you're watching this right now, if, like, fucking Ford did not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was not American, I don't think Ford is as tied into the American ID as. As Tim Hortons was in the Canadian Depends.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, like, like, built for tough. Like, dude, is there a country on earth that loves the F150 the way that America does? Like, let's. Let's be real.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But still, let's be real here. I still think. I still think it's more like, what would be.

[Linus Sebastian]

What would be like, what would be like, like, like a German equivalent. Like, what would. What would be so, so offensive to, like. Guys, guys, hit me. Hit me with it. You know what? No, we can move on. We can move on. Okay, so coming back to Windows on the performance side, the start menu is being completely rewritten in Microsoft's own WinUI 3 framework, which is supposed to make it 60% faster and more responsive. That is such a. See, that's such a baffling one to me is like when I open the start, what are you even doing? Like, there's, there's a. There's. There's things that I do on computers that just completely bewilder me how they can take as long as they do. A perfect example of this is we were running a benchmark on set yesterday. We were performance testing. Oh, we ran SLI. We grabbed some 3090 tis and we like ran like modern games that would still run. It's not really SLI, it's more of like the DirectX 12 multi GPU thing. But hey, we ran them and in the best case scenario, it was actually pretty competitive with a 5090 and like 3Dmark, it was pretty crazy. Anyway, the point is, when we were running 3dmark, I was just like, I was losing my mind because it's just always bothered me. You know how it does that thing where it's like detecting system configuration and it takes like a minute to do what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like how long does Steam Hardware Survey take?

[Linus Sebastian]

How long does it take to get a string of characters for the identifier of a piece of art? Like we, we run at billions of operations per second on modern computing devices. You've got to be kidding me. Or like when a WI FI access point takes like forever to authenticate the password. It's like it's literally eight bits. I know it isn't. Okay, I know it isn't, but. But it's. It seems so trivial. And in the same way the start menu is like, what are you even actually doing? Like, all of this has got to be pre cached. What are you doing? You're not doing anything. Why is there like a delay? Well, hopefully there won't be any more.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know enough of the difference between what is it winui or whatever and React Native. As far as my understanding goes, React Native was calling winui. The start menu right now is a React Native app. As far as my understanding goes, if they're just removing that layer and stepping down one and going to winui. I don't know how this stack works. I read quickly that apparently, at least sometimes it is calling winui. So I'm assuming they're just stepping down a layer. Like maybe you gained a bunch of performance there. The fact that any part of Windows Native UI is React Native is wild to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, this is great. Gfreak has another good one. I hate it. When Windows takes forever to tell me my password's wrong, I accidentally pressed enter instead of enter anything like just immediately when you do it like six or seven times or whatever. That can be a security feature where it's like delaying you being able to put it in again. But when it just like takes a while. Dude, it's like a handful of characters that either the hash matches or it doesn't for crying out loud. Anyway, Microsoft is also reportedly removing ads from its start menu. Again like a bold move. Bold move. This is like restaurant sales falling. They come up with the bold idea of making food fresh. And then for gaming Microsoft is treating. This is crazy. This is probably the best nuts marketing for Steam os. Yeah. That Valve could have never afforded with all their billions and billions of dollars of. I'm Gabe Newell. Rather than buying a yacht, I will literally buy the company that makes the yachts. All of the money that they have could never have purchased. Microsoft is treating Valve's steamos and as a performance benchmark, they want Windows gaming performance to be comparable to SteamOS on identical hardware which they say is critical because the next Xbox is reportedly going to run Windows 11. Oh man, they were doing really good up until.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have they hard confirmed that there was going to be another Xbox?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, Project Scorpio I think it's called. Like the new CEO is Keely. Heli. Helix Helix. Helio something. Helix Helix. Thank you Lightning XCE Chat. File Explorer is also getting major performance fixes with a third party app called File Pilot being used as the performance benchmark they're shooting for. This is like embarrassing. Who makes File Pilot? Like no offense, no offense, you're probably.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, it's, it's. I mean it's the opposite. It's a huge brag. If you're File Pilot that's amazing.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I don't even know who you are. And the fact that Microsoft, a multi trillion dollar company is looking at this going yeah, these guys are crushing us. We need to do, we need to do better. Okay. Who are you? Manifesto fast dude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A search for system commands. This is actually sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on, we're getting it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is File Palette dope.

[Linus Sebastian]

Filepilot is one guy, dude. Catholic, Croatian husband, father of five, one

[Luke Lafreniere]

extremely busy guy just donking on Windows. Look at that.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's awesome. What am I looking at here? Oh, this is File Pilot. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He's selected a bunch of things and select a system he can search. Yeah, I never even like thought about that. That's awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

Finally, Windows Update is being reworked too with the goal of making Windows 11 reliable enough that you only need to restart once a month.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, file Pilot's cool. You might. If we're doing that thing, you should maybe include Microsoft.

[Linus Sebastian]

Microsoft setting the bar. Okay, we want to. We want to beat the performance of an operating system that the games literally don't even run natively on. We want to beat this one, dude, in Explorer, like the most critical thing in Windows that literally is like Windows 3.1. Okay? And we want to only have to restart your computer once a month. They put the bar here. Come on, you guys. Also, the taskbar is getting back the ability to put the bar somewhere moved and resized. K2 is reportedly not going to be a single release, but an ongoing initiative that started in the second half of 2025, with most changes rolling out through the end of 2026 and into 2026. 7 Discussion question. And for this I need you to put away the chat, close your eyes and search deep inside your feelings. Search your feelings, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, channeling the force.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry. Do you think Windows can win back its users and you're searching your feelings because you know, you at least used to be a Windows user? Or is it too little, too late? Search your feelings, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, I think. I think so. And the reason why I think so is I think most of them haven't left yet. I think most of them are very vocally angry, as honestly they should be. And this is why you should be, because we're seeing action come of the rage that the community has had. I think some people have left. I've left. I'm not stopping using Linux. When the Linux challenge is over, there's a spoiler. I'm going to continue using it, but it isn't completely too late. The approach that I'm taking right now is what is the most appropriate tool for me to use to have the least frustration, the most good time, whatever you want to call it, and be able to operate and get stuff done without significant, like, inability to do the thing that I want to do.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And right now that is almost always pushing me to Linux either. Mint on my laptop cache, OS on my desktop. I do plan on ending with a dual boot setup on my desktop, but it's honestly completely unnecessary on my laptop. And I will be continuing to run Mint. If this bar shifts and it makes more sense for me to use Windows, I'd probably just use Windows, but that is not currently true. And like I'm trying to be honestly, like, pretty what I say about that objective.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And like I whipped I went over to my Windows drive because I still have my Windows drive in my desktop. It's just been sitting there untouched for like two months. I jumped over my Windows drive just to like, okay, like, is it going to function? I haven't even booted into it for two months. I don't know. Like, did I corrupt it in that time?

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe I better know where this is going.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've ran Windows Update for a while, got annoyed by a few things, booted back into Cache and was like, nice. It took, dude. It took. And I know I haven't updated in a while. Okay, okay. All right. It took forever to update. It was so long. Super, super long time. I. It felt so stupid that, like, the control panel seems like it wants to fight me. Like, there's just. There's just like. I'm trying to do multiple things at once and it's like, no, no. I'm just gonna, like, redirect, I guess you just have one of me open. It's like, what do you. What are you talking about? Search was just annoying again. Just like everything. It was just like, it felt gross. So I went back.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, let's jump into Windows Insiders.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Actually, sorry, there's an interesting question from Chat Said. Have you tried macOS recently? If not, would you give it a try? I'm more open to trying other operating systems now. I recently learned Mint and Cache.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you want to borrow my neo? I'm not using it right now. It's on my desk.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't necessarily think so, but what I was going to add is that I was using my mom's Neo for a bit and it was totally fine. I do find macOS a little weird. I don't know if I would fully get used to it.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I still don't think it's for me, really.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's some stuff that I find just completely unnecessary and irritating about macOS. The fact that you have to click on a window first to make it the focus window before you can interact with a thing. I see it both ways. Like on Windows, sometimes you can. Like, if a window like pops up and you're like about to click something, you can, like accidentally interact with something that you didn't mean to. And I can see how the Mac OS way kind of prevents that. But also it's just. It just creates a second click. Like anytime I'm switching between things. And I do not find that to be great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a couple. Yeah, there's a couple little things like that. There's A couple things that feel a little clunky to me just because it, I don't know, it's just not really my style. I do think, however, at this point in time, if there was a killer app on Mac os, I wouldn't flinch using it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which I think is not true as of a year ago. So like if I was an editor and it was like, oh boy, I'm going to have to use Final Cut. It's like, okay. I mean if I have a Mac. Yeah, sounds good.

[Linus Sebastian]

More Windows news though. Windows Insiders can now pause updates indefinitely in 35 day increments. Windows Insiders can. Oh, and there's no cap on renewals. This is Windows crying out loud. Okay, we need to do a thing where the, the title and the first line are not the same because.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, no, I completely agree.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also indefinitely for 35 days.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So for as long as you want, you can keep saying 35 days later. 35 days later. You can also restart or shut down without being forced into an update and restart. Previously you got five weeks max before Windows would force these updates. This is only available in the experimental channel which replaced the old dev and canary channels. Microsoft's own description features here may change, get delayed, or not ship at all. So the people testing this are the ones who opted into the most bleeding edge pre release builds because they want updates as early as possible. Regular Windows users who've been getting forced restarted mid meeting for a decade don't have this yet and there's no timeline or confirmation for a general rollout. Now our discussion question is how did it take Microsoft over a decade to let people decide when their own computer updates? And my crazy hot take responses I actually don't like this. Crazy people should probably update their computers. I when I did my first macOS challenge. So the first time I switched to macOS I think it was on the 5k. Imac was the first time I like used nothing but nothing but macOS for 30 days or 60 days or however long it was. The thing that was most life changing about it for me in a positive way was the way that macOS handled updates at that time. And it still does actually. And that is that it would say hey, there's an update like little, you know, little thing. And then you'd be like K and then you would come in the next day in the morning and everything would be exactly where you left it and your computer would have installed all the updates and then opened everything back up right where you left it. Pausing updates is not the solution, better handling of saving all of my work, saving my state and then restoring my state and just doing the update when I'm not using my computer is in my opinion a way more elegant solution. Like I get, I get like, I get agitated when you know, someone hands me their phone or their computer to use and I see that they're running like a year old build of whatever operating system they're on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Something I've really started to enjoy is I actually system update way more often on Linux than I did on Windows. But I really like that it just updates everything. Like that's awesome. Like I'll get discord updates, I'll get any other software that I have. It'll just update my entire system all at once. I'm not individually updating programs, but.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you asking for the mic? I mean the Microsoft Store is the thing that exists and Windows can manage your updates for you, but I think most of us just make it not terrible though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But honestly I think that's really the solution. Games for Windows would have been fine if it wasn't dog crap. Microsoft Store would be totally fine. People like package managers on Linux, they just don't always suck complete butt.

[Linus Sebastian]

A lot of the time they suck.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The first one that I had on Cashy sucked and then I went with KDE and now I actually really like it. But um, and the one that comes packaged with Mint is like fantastic to be honest. But it's, it's very up and down. But the Microsoft Store in my opinion is like the problem.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And the fact that Windows Update and the Microsoft Store are not integrated.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like crazy. Like if the best way to install stuff on Windows was Microsoft Store because Microsoft Store wasn't an annoying piece of crap. And also because that way it would just auto update along with Windows Update and just made everything really smooth.

[Linus Sebastian]

And like why do I have to go digging for a driver update? And I know that Microsoft has actually done a lot of really good work around like automatic driver management, but the fact that some of it is over here and some of it is like it'll never update unless I like go and get it. And some of it is handled by like Armory Crate and some of it is in Windows Update and like the fact that it's everywhere is. It's one of those things where the first thing that someone would tell me from Microsoft or even a viewer would tell me is well, that's not X's fault or that's because of this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And that might be true freedom of choice.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you know What? Those things are super, super true. But you know what? As a user, from a user perspective, I don't give a flying whose fault it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it doesn't matter.

[Linus Sebastian]

It doesn't matter. What matters is that it's a terrible user experience and somebody needs to fix it. Like the way that this is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

While you think of that.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, go ahead.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is what I'm talking about, like all the time when I talk about how it's actually, it's not even here right now, so I keep gesturing at it. But my, my laptop, when I talk about how it's actually easier and like less annoyance and more productivity to use it, this is what I'm talking about. I don't have to go around and update all these individual apps. I'm not like partway through working on something and then I need to open another app to do something and oh my God, now that needs an update. Whatever. No, I just update once and it does everything and it's fine. And it works. It's great. Everyone, everyone freaks you out when you go to any arch based distro because they're like, oh, it's rolling. You're gonna update, it's gonna break everything. When I go to update on cache, it checks Arch news. Oh, and it'll be like, oh, no, this one might require manual intervention. You might not want to install this right now. And it's like, okay. And I just close it and then I wait until it doesn't. Just do it that way. Like it's.

[Linus Sebastian]

Harry G made a good point. The driver nightmares. Because of third parties, they don't want to ship their drivers via Windows Update because they can't bundle their bloatware with it. So then Microsoft should just straight up stop wickle certifying anything that requires bloatware to be shipped with it. Like, these are things that Microsoft flex

[Luke Lafreniere]

your muscle man does.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like they flex their muscle to do the wrong things. Like they're flexing their muscle to put stupid Candy crush in my stupid operating system. No, flex your muscle to do things that enhance the user experience and make Windows more secure and faster and more powerful and more usable. All right, let's jump into. Ooh. Okay, this is one of our bad news for this week. Intel has reportedly canceled discrete gaming GPUs in the upcoming XC3P Arc Celestial family. According to intel leaker JK, intel canceled their discrete GPUs. So these are the add in cards for Celestial. Long ago, that means that the arc B580. So this is their battlemage generation will remain Intel's latest gaming GPU with no clear Successor in sight. XE3P will show up in data center and workstation products, just not gaming cards. The next gen XE4 druid architecture is expected late 2027, but whether it gets a gaming GPU, in J Kin's words, is up in the air. Intel has not confirmed or denied any of this. Our discussion question here is if intel quietly walks away from gaming GPUs, what happens to GPU pricing? The answer is it goes up. However.

[Dan Siegel]

However.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The answer is nothing.

[Linus Sebastian]

However, unfortunately, I. I really want to keep the faith. This is something that me too, former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger allowed to continue Intel's discrete GPU ambitions. And I really hope that Liputan does not kill. I know that there's a lot of like issues with the consumer cards that, you know, like being low margin and catering to a super noisy, high maintenance customer base. Let's face it, gamers are not the easiest customers to deal with. But I really do believe and if they're the strongest argument that I can make for this is, so does Jensen Huang, who is the CEO of from time to time, the world's most valuable company. I really do believe that the innovation on the gaming side makes the enterprise and professional sides better and stronger for all the work that they do and also gives you a volume market that you can dump silicon into to help fund all the development that you need to do. Like you, I don't think it makes sense to build a GPU business that doesn't have a consumer arm. If you've like, you've already done so much of the work for Alchemist and Battlemage to fix the backwards compatibility and to refine the architecture, please, please just give us a bigger desktop version of what you're already shipping amazing technology on on like laptop. Like please don't let it die.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And if you have to skip Celestial, fine. Don't skip Druid.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't skip Druid. We need more options and gamers. It's like the Windows thing. Like gamers are. They're mad at Microsoft, they're mad at Nvidia, but you've got to give them a better option or they're just going to begrudgingly stay there forever. And like, oh man. Like intel continues to put in the work on the software side. You gotta give us hardware to run it on. Let's go. Yeah, you know.

[Dan Siegel]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk, Dan. What are we supposed to be doing?

[Dan Siegel]

You can Keep doing topics. Or we can do the CW announcements.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I feel like I should probably talk about the CW announcements. Do you want to. Do you want to fire up the site?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

This a huge week for creator Warehouse. Is Shipstorm still running?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, looks like it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I believe so. So the Shipstorm sale is still running. So now is an amazing time to pick up, I mean, basically anything at LTT Store. So we've got buy more, save more on our blank T shirts. We've got deals running on our scribe driver, bolt action pen and pencil as well as our long sleeve T shirts. And then. Hold on, hold on. Let me see if I can find the details. And we have some super cool new items. So Shipstorm a free shipping across Canada on orders over 150 and worldwide on orders over 225. And then on the US site. Oh, no, I wish I had these details ready. I'm so sorry, you guys. And then on the US site, Shipstorm is. Yeah, free US wide shipping on orders over 150. And then floatplane, Supporter Plus. So if you're on floatplane at the Supporter plus tier, it actually goes down to just US$100. So it's a great time to join Floatplane. Also, we have some new arrivals, so. Yeah. Luke's laptop. We have some new prints for our party shirts. Yeah, these are flipping amazing. Want to give us a close up of that? Are you serious right now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Laptop.

[Dan Siegel]

Zoom.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This touchpad is a little weird. It's not the site, it's the touchpad Cursors.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some of them are hourglasses.

[Linus Sebastian]

How cute is that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hands. Some of them are pointers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And then we've also got. Okay, this one's. This one's sick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let me just.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you okay?

[Luke Lafreniere]

There we go. That works.

[Linus Sebastian]

There we go. So this is like a very kind of 90s and like 90s screensaver and computing and also, I don't know, work from home. It's got a whole bunch of different, like, vibes. Like work from the beach kind of. Yeah. Like the palm trees and stuff. Just like, don't mind me here chilling on my like, CRT laptop or whatever. And then this one's meant to just be like a very wearable lollipop. Lollipop print. Totally not inspired by anything else that looks like that. It's lollipops, it's candies, it's umbrellas. It definitely is not a beach ball. 100% not a beach ball. We've also got the Spinning Wheel of Death Pin Set. Okay, well, now we've really gotten rid of any plausible deniability that we could have had around where that design inspiration came from. So here's our pin set. That is, yeah, definitely not a beach ball. Except for the one that definitely is a beach ball. So we've got candy umbrella as well as a lollipop in there. What else do we got? Yo? Yeah. So you can get yours at LMG GG Partyshirt and LMG GG WheelofDeath. If you're looking for something that's a little bit more low key, We've also got two new polo colors plus a restock on black. So soft cotton blend with a bit of stretch so it's comfortable without feeling. Sloppy, clean, simple look that works whether you dress it up or keep it casual. These are just easy to put on pieces that go with pretty much anything and that you can wear pretty much anywhere. And you can shop at LMG GG Polos. We also do this kind of fun thing where we have like a little kind of splash of accent color down there. There you go. Polo shirts, dress blues, brilliant white and black. Look how much happier plouffe looks. Come on, Reese. Would it kill you to smile? Love that guy. We did an upgrade for him yesterday. We're bringing back setup doctor and his setup needed some doctoring. He. He streams, he games, he does like unboxings of fancy shoes. He had so many shoes. So we helped a little bit with the organization of that. We got him like a new desk set up and he tufts does like carpet tufting. And so we got like a, like a much more ergonomic, space efficient setup in his little room where he does all those things. So that was, that was a fun shoot, guys. Don't miss that one. Lots of good vibes also. Okay. Yeah, that's pretty much it. So yeah, now's a great time to get an order in. Also. I think that a lot of people probably missed it, but hold on. Where are they? Yeah, cables. So we did have a small restock hit our U.S. distribution hub today for true spec cables. Okay. Yeah, Many of the sizes are already out of stock. Again. The only way that you're gonna have a shot of getting these guys is to make sure that you get the notify me because when they hit, they're gone. So there's nothing I can do about that. It's in priority sequence. You guys gotta. You gotta get in there. So, yeah, we had an order hit today. And then you can actually. You can actually see in the dashboard where it hits here. Check this out. This is hilarious. G. Luke, can you tell me where the cable restock was?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I mean, maybe we're there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe where the snake ate the deer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Um, yeah. So. Yeah, so make sure you do that. All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Two comms.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, right. So if you're placing an order now, it's a perfect time because we have what we call checkout messages.

[Dan Siegel]

We.

[Linus Sebastian]

When we stream, we don't want you guys to just throw money at us for nothing. We want to work for it. That's right. Me, Luke, and Dan, we all want to work for it. So instead of having people just send, like, twitch bits or super chats or whatever, we created what are called checkout messages or comms. All you got to do to send one is head over to lttstore.com, add something like, ooh, our new flex pants to your cart, and go to the checkout. There it is. You can choose to have it displayed as a checkout message. You can make your name anonymous, or you can show your name. You can send a little message, and then you can choose your color and whether or not you want to opt in to email communication about your message. This will help us follow things up with you, if you want. All right, then you go ahead and place your order, and it will go to producer Dan.

[Dan Siegel]

I already waved. I don't know what to do now.

[Linus Sebastian]

You'll have to come up with something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wave with the other hand.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice. It looks weird. I'm not used to him doing that.

[Dan Siegel]

It hurts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, it'll go to producer Dan, who will reply to your checkout message or will pop it up down here or up there or who will curate it for me and Luke and often Dan to respond to Dan, do you want to do a couple for us?

[Dan Siegel]

Yeah, sure. Hey, dlo. Currently visiting Vancouver with my wife and kids. I had no idea it was so beautiful. Capilino park is awesome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan Siegel]

Do any of you guys go hiking or anything like that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Not as much as I should. Literally. We were, like, flying over the, like, outer Vancouver region, and I was like, luke, did you have any idea that there were this many hiking trails in this area?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I knew there was a lot, but it looked like a. Wherever we particularly were at the time,

[Linus Sebastian]

we were like, chilliwack or whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's very likely.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It looks like a video game map. Like, there was just so many trails. It was crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

And they weren't. They didn't seem to be, like, dried riverbeds, like, they seemed to be hiking trails.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

The entire area was just littered with them. And I was like, how have I never been on any of these?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some of them are pretty great.

[Linus Sebastian]

Absolutely ridiculous.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cheam is pretty legendary, so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we should. Have you ever done the grind?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I've always gone the other way.

[Linus Sebastian]

Gone the other way?

[Dan Siegel]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's the other way?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Isn't the grind north van.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I've always gone like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I thought you meant you've always, like gone down it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I take that. Yeah. I take the gondola up.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're literally not even allowed. Like, it's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That would be. That would also be the one way that would be really bad for my knees.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is to go down.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Well, if you ever want to do the grind, I'll do the grind. It's called the Grouse Grind. It's on Grouse Mountain. You can like hike up the mountain.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's pretty savage. Wait till you're near.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's more of like a workout than what you might expect from a traditional hike.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is fair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just like an incredible amount of stairs, which is awesome. There's people that do it like literally every day. Like, it's. It's great. It's just. It's a quite a bit of a different experience from what I've heard. My brother shot up there recently.

[Dan Siegel]

I wan dll first off, San update win. I'm a storage and backup engineer and that is my daily bread and butter. Second, did you consider any centralized backup solution? Also, why know why so few tall?

[Linus Sebastian]

Now I can see why you curated this one, Dan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a really good question.

[Dan Siegel]

We are.

[Linus Sebastian]

We are expanding slowly our selection of tall merchandise. We just. We have to be. We have to go slow and steady. Sure, this may be a surprise to you, all of you, but physical goods are an extremely cash flow sensitive business. They. Every new product requires a brand new upfront investment that may or may not pay off. And we just have to be careful. We have to go slow. We have to be careful. We don't. We're not taking private equity. We don't have outside investors. So every time we launch a new product, that's the product team working with me and working with our other leadership and going, okay, here's all the chips. These are our chips here we are betting them. Let's hope it pays off. It doesn't always. We've got to be careful. It's. It really is that simple. And also complicated.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think. I think the new. The new war is going to have to be over pants.

[Linus Sebastian]

Tall pants.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know when, when not even necessarily tall pants. Just when you guys launched the flex pants, I was really surprised. The inseam length was 29. And then on, on, on an Internet forum, somebody posted like, wow, LTT store really makes me feel really tall. And it was in relation to those pants because they're like, wait, inseam 29 is, is all they. Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pants are tough, man. There's. Yeah, you have to have all the waist sizes. Ideally you would have all the inseam sizes. We've done as much as two inseam sizes for a pair of pants. I believe the cargo pants we have two inseams for. And it literally double. Like, you got to think about it in terms of SKU count. You literally double your SKU count. And if we still had everything consolidated at a single distribution center, that would be a little bit easier. But every additional layer of complexity you add, it's a multiplier. It's not additive, it's multiplicative.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So was that like. I'm just genuinely curious. You've sold pants before. So was that like, did we have. Was most of our orders 29 or like, how did we land on 29?

[Linus Sebastian]

We landed on that as sort of a, like a best middle ground for most people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Okay. Yep. And what we would have probably done if we had another skew is we would have gone longer. Yeah, but that was one of those

[Luke Lafreniere]

ones where like the tech pants are 30 and 32. People also got a kick out of you guys calling Tall32.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's degrees of tall.

[Dan Siegel]

I'm a 32, so. Yeah, yeah, it's tall.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan's pretty tall.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What do we call?

[Dan Siegel]

Maybe it's stumpy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like Jonathan and Conrad and Lucas and those guys.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean Lucas.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean towers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, like, okay, SAN update. I am still not convinced that SAN is the right solution for us. I've. Every time I've asked someone who's very pro storage area network why we should have one, they have not given me a satisfactory answer. NAS seems like the way to go for us. We don't have the same kind of like resiliency and like, like cross org access complications that, that you might have if you're like, I, I don't know, flipping like multinational or if you're, or if you're like, you know, you're running a data center that has, you know, CPU compute over here and GPU compute over here. So you need to have like a storage network that they all access. Like, we don't have any of those use cases. We just have individual users accessing file level resources that are centrally stored. Can someone explain to me why we

[Luke Lafreniere]

need sane has San?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, floatplane does.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But do we have no ceph?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think you're using ceph, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Do we have no CEPH locally? I don't think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think there was a reason to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was a pitch at one point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then we didn't go that route.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's all redundancy. Yeah, but we don't need that much redundancy. We have the one share that is like the current projects actually redundant and replicated places share and then everything else. We made a conscious decision and it's been, you know, it, it's, it's funny for me seeing people sort of go, oh, remember that time they lost data? Yes, yes, yes. We, we've. Other than, okay, when we lost Whonnock, that was bad. But the time that our vault had some data loss, we had made a conscious decision that this was non essential archived data and that if we lost it, we had decided that it was not worth the additional expense of replicating that storage. And that's especially true today. Man, storage has gotten so expensive. And so we've made the decision that we only really need the projects we're working on and every other like random snippet of footage. If we lost it, we lost it, it doesn't really matter. And so going for something more complicated, more expensive, that requires more administration. I just, I don't, I don't see the point. Oh, are you talking, Are you literally talking to AJ in chat right now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

And Jonathan, they're both in here. We do have Seth on Prem. It's just in the lab and it's just an MVP right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And there's only a few things kind of running into it. But the thing is, when you take A.J. and Jonathan and you throw them in the pool of it people that do stuff for lmg, they come from Ceph and Kubernetes land.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So like it? Why not? It becomes, I think, a lot more reasonable. It's, it's a right tool for the right job, for the right person type of situation. We have AJ and Jonathan, we might as well do this thing. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's a recommendation for everybody.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like TCL987 says, I would think you'd want San for running VMs so that a storage node going down doesn't take down the VMS too in terms of like Critical on the media group side and the creator warehouse side, which make up the majority of our revenue. I can think of like a couple of VMs we run like. Sure. On the floatplane side. Yeah, yeah, sure, you're 100% right. Like you want that redundancy built into that storage network that everything else is using. But yeah, for video editing we don't, we don't have nodes of storage. We just have a storage server that every periodically backs up to another one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If floatplane was on prem, you need it. Flow plane has it anyways. Yeah, I just, I just said yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. Faint locket asks, can you explain what SAN is? So basically the idea is that instead of having your storage in each machine, right, like this and this and then like allocating, you know, like, instead of putting like a drive into your computer and going okay, here, virtual machine, this is like your drive. SAN is an entire, an entire separate network of machines whose entire job is to provide storage for all the other machines on the network.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Big pool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So whether their job Is to run VMs or whether their job is to serve media, or whether their job is for the editors to access it, all of these compute resources will just. Instead of having local storage over the network, they will access this storage network which is entirely separate boxes that maybe don't need a ton of compute, but do need a butt ton of storage. And then this storage network is going to be built with redundancies and safeties that make it so that if one of these machines goes down, all the other machines that are doing all of your web serving and all of your, your compute or all of your research or whatever it is they're doing are still able to access their storage as if nothing happened. So it's a way of distributing your storage to make it so that a failure will not impact your operation at all, rather than taking down one of your nodes. But we have so few nodes outside of the floatplane side and so little critical. Critical infrastructure that I just, I'm just not convinced that it is relevant for us. Yeah. Torpedo Bench describes it as kind of like RAID, but at a much bigger scale. And that's kind of a way of thinking about it. Instead of your one machine having multiple drives, one of which could fail, all of your machines have like a bunch of machines that have a bunch of drives in them and an entire machine could fail and then they'd be able to still access. It's kind of a, it's kind of a neat way of thinking about it. And then NAS is More like a storage area network that. Only it's not really a network, it's just a standalone resource that all of those things can access over the network that might have some redundancy in the form of RAID for instance, but it doesn't have multi machine level redundancy. That's about the kind of simplest way that I can summarize it. Okay, yeah, time to do more topics. No Legendary Z SNES Nintendo emulator has been rewritten from scratch with GPU acceleration. The original developers of Z SNES or Z SNES or ZS snes, whatever you want to call it, ZS Knight and Demo are back together for the first time in nearly two decades with Super Z snes a complete ground up rewrite of the legendary SNES emulator that dates back to the DOS era and the first Super Nintendo emulator that I ever used. I have personally played through Final Fantasy 6 on this emulator. Chrono Trigger on this emulator. Like man, I have very fond memories of using this oftentimes uncooperative but quite, quite treasured piece of software.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was what, yeah, it was what everybody used for a long time.

[Linus Sebastian]

The last major Release was almost 20 years ago though, so big change. Here is a GPU powered PPU core that enables high res mode 7 widescreen support in supported games. Overclocking for games that were notorious for slowdown, uncompressed audio and per game visual enhancements that the devs are calling Super Enhancement Engine. It also keeps the classic Falling Snow ui. It's available now on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android with iOS coming soon. And the devs made a point of listing no Vibe coding as an official feature. Everything was handwritten the classic way. Now with that said, I have heard that it's a little buggy. It is an early build. Special chips like chips like the Super FX are not supported yet. But in a world where Vibe coding is everywhere, is no Vibe coding a selling point for this for you? Would you want to try it? I want to try it. I'm spoiler. I want to try it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if like no Vibe coding is particularly a selling point, but I'm going to try anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

I want to, I want to, I want to hear you talk about that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If stuff is properly like I. I know people that use Vibe coding stuff in a way that I would consider properly and I know people that use Vibe coding in a way that I would hyper aggressively not consider properly. If these two guys said that they used AI assisted tools, I don't think I'd be too concerned about it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting. So to you it's more about having who's wielding the tool, having the skills and having the street cred to take

[Luke Lafreniere]

shortcuts and know to like review it and make sure that bad stuff doesn't get through still. Because it also, it also depends. Like, did they say no. Okay, so no vibe coding specifically. So, okay, maybe. Yeah, maybe that is particularly a good thing. But like AI assisted.

[Linus Sebastian]

So here's the quote. The quote. No vibe coding, classic development style. But that's pretty ambiguous.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because like classic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, to them 20 years ago might be just no assistance.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, I don't think it's that they haven't been doing work. They just haven't been working on Z snes. No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's fair. But yeah, I mean, AI Assisted coding has been a thing for a super long time. Yeah. Peter said this, and I mean I've said this on Wednesday like a billion times and I just still agree with it. The buck stops with the one who commits the code 100%. It goes back to that IBM thing that I've also shown on WAN show before, quote, a computer cannot be held responsible. Find the slide here. A computer cannot be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision. And a management decision is to commit code. So like, from the vibe that I get from this team, these two people. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't particularly be too concerned about it, but there will be people that will Vibe code something and they'll tell me that excitedly and I know who it is and I know how much work and development they've done and I'll be like, oh boy. I'm excited to see how many different ways this breaks. I wonder how many security keys are like hard coded and publicly readable like things like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why do you have to call me out like that? No, no, that never happened.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh no, no. Security key for your Google sheet. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Speaking of the Linus Vibe coding challenge, the problem project is officially dead, unfortunately.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

In the form of a video. But I'm still trying to. I'm still trying to turn it into at least if it can be. If it can be cobbled together relatively easily, a float plane video or something. So the problem is not that I was not able to Vibe code a solution, I was. And it's actually been in production since I vibe coded it, which is like six months ago now or something, which is the problem. By the time we would be releasing this video, everything that I did is so far removed from the Current state AI and Vibe coding that. It just doesn't make any sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You'd have to redo the entire thing, like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. Which I could probably do. In fact, I could probably do way faster with better tools, and now that I've done it. But the entire premise of the video for me was, as someone who's never done this, what does that look like? And we would no longer be answering that question. The other thing that it wasn't killed because of is our real developer. Our real developer was able to create a solution, but because of scheduling and stuff and people being busy, I still haven't seen it. So what I was hoping that we could still do is have, like, have me sit down and, like, have it shown to me. And then, like. Yeah, Dan could just kind of walk me through it.

[Dan Siegel]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then we just do that on camera.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then we can do that as. And then I could do, like, a short little summary.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He already walked me through it on camera.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, perfect. And then we. And then we can just throw that up on floatplane or something like that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Sorry, are you done?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I just. And then I probably. I probably need a little bit more of his time, though, because I need it to work for mixed doubles and singles as well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also, ultimately, I mean, you. You pay his check so well.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, but. But then why did we have to do this whole Vibe coding? So the Vibe coding challenge started because I needed some development resources for something that didn't really matter, but then it mattered because it was a video. But then now it's not a video. I feel like it would have been better for us to just say, hey, can I have some of Dan Siegel's time?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's. It's easier now and more appropriate now, I think, so if you want.

[Dan Siegel]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It makes sense. I wanted to say one more thing on the Super Zed Schnes thing. Yeah. I think there's also a. Like, can I classify this as a cry wolf problem? I don't know. I watched a short clip last night before completely tearing down my entire computer setup of Shroud, going back to Counter Strike because I was interested, because what I've heard is that Counter Strike is covered in cheaters. And the title didn't say anything about cheaters. It just said, trout goes back to Counter Strike in the first time in years or whatever. So I watched it. In the first two games he was in, there was two blatant cheaters. And it's. It's. It's this thing where, like, modern, especially FPS, Games, but modern. Every game basically. Don't kid yourself there's people like cheating like rocket League and MMOs and everything you can imagine with, with cheaters freaking everywhere. Something that has ruined. Something that has ruined. It's a weird sentence, whatever is defeat. Because it, it often feels like there's

[Linus Sebastian]

a built in excuse for everything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes. So if you don't think that people are cheating or if it's. They're probably not. Then it's like, oh man, that guy's really good. I want to watch this replay and try to learn from them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But if it's like, I don't know, there's usually at least one cheater per lobby. Then it's like that guy's just cheating. Screw that guy. And it like, it, it loses a lot of the, like the interesting nature of losing. If that makes.

[Linus Sebastian]

How do you, how do you, how do you get motivation from loss? If the. How do you get like the competition was never fair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How do you get like a rival?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like you know, back when there was dedicated servers and you jump on a server and there was always that frickin guy who just.

[Linus Sebastian]

Who'd get you like every time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And then, and then you, you train and you get better and you beat that guy and then it feels good like that, that type of stuff is just kind of gone from cheating. And I think something that they're dodging here to bring it back to super snes, Super Zed SNES is they're saying no vibe coding. So if it comes out and it has a bug, you don't get to go, ah, it's probably just modern AI junk spaghetti code.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right. They're saying no, no, if there's a bug it's because we did that part. I think we haven't fixed that yet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That part I think is kind of cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that's super cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Want to pick a topic?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. What do we got here? Sony finally responds to PlayStation DRM panic says only a one time license check is needed. No 30 day requirement. This was confusing if you weren't on top of this news because you're a PC person. There was a mysterious 30 day license timer showing up on PlayStation Digital Games purchased after March 2026's firmware update. So people were freaking out. What is this 30 day thing? Modders on Twitter spotted it first, but things spiraled when PlayStation's own AI support chatbots told users that they'd lose access every 30 days unless they were online. Which is just not true. To be clear that's just what the chatbot said. Nobody sure what was real. Players started just testing stuff, trying to see what was going on. YouTuber Spawn Wave pulled his PS5 CMOS battery to simulate a timer expiring and watched his brand new digital purchases just refuse to load with a license. Error.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What actually happens if you miss the window is that the game stops working until you connect back to the Internet. It doesn't delete it or get revoked permanently or anything like that. Once you're back online, access is restored and I believe once it does that actual check in, you do get a permanent token. Sony says that if you launch the game once While connected, a one time check kicks in and the 30 day timer won't apply at all ever again. It's fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But testing from Resetera user and shrew found it's not quite that simple. There appears to be around a 15 day delay before the console actually converts your temporary license into a permanent one. A permanent offline one. Until that conversion happens, going offline for 30 days will lock you out. That 15 day window lines up suspiciously close to PlayStation's 14 day refund period. Suggesting that this might have been an anti fraud measure because apparently some people were buying games going offline having their offline version refunding the game.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, Sony hasn't confirmed that part, but apparently that has been happening. So yeah, makes sense. Sony has now officially responded to GameSpot saying a one time check is required to confirm the game's license, after which no further check ins are required. The DRM is real, but it's not the always online nightmare that people feared. That said, Sony rolled this out silently and let the panic build for a freaking week before saying a single thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

As a company. God, it's kind of annoying that sometimes is has things fester in the community. I understand it both ways. I can understand why it seems crazy that Sony didn't say anything for a week and then I can equally understand all the like mechanisms and checks that external comms need to go through, especially in the midst of a crisis and why it can take a while. I. I'm. I'm gonna firmly stand on both sides. Going wide. Yes. Strong firm stance. Oh,

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't love this. I understand their whole trying to dodge the fraud thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Honestly, it seems better than Steam and we, we hold Steam up on this like this pillar, this, this pedestal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Better. How is it better than Steam?

[Linus Sebastian]

Steam checks like all the time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but if you go offline.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, then it works, which is fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Single player games.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Not always. They'll. They'll make you check once in a while. Oh yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I guess I've never been offline long

[Linus Sebastian]

enough to notice as someone who actually, it seems like it's been a little better lately, but there was definitely a period where they had cracked down on it quite a bit and we would really run into it like on set.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can you just run the executables out of the folder?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, because it'll still launch Steam and it'll still do a DRM check. So. So we'd run into this on set when we only had like one copy of a game and we'd try to like pull the ethernet cord and then launch it on the next computer and then pull the ethernet cord and then launch it on the next one and pull the ethernet cord. So obviously this is like not a, you know, classic use case, but I have definitely run up against this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. I haven't many times on Steam. I haven't done this often, but I have not ran into it. Opening Steam, when you try to just run the executable for the game, I've had it. Just launch the game.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. People in chat are saying they definitely do. Does it depend on the game? Because from my understanding, definitely see it depending on. It's not like Goggles, where part of the deal is that there's no online drm. Like with Steam, there's online drm. It's like a feature, not a button.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I bet you it depends on the game. It depends on whether the game uses steamworks, which is Steam's drm. That also makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

Koozkus Captain says can you keep your Steam deck in offline mode for just a limited amount of time? Yeah. From my understanding, it'll eventually need to phone home. But correct me if I'm wrong, like I said, this is something that I ran into more before and lately when we've been doing the Ethernet unplugged thing, now that I'm thinking about it, it's been a little more successful. TCL987 says Steamworks and Steam DRM are independent, blah, blah, blah. A lot of games use Steam library stuff for networking, voice chat, etc. Yeah. So it's probably going to be dependent on the game somewhat. Man, one thing that I find really annoying as somebody who has to set up a system for travel probably more often than most people, because when I'm traveling is often when I'll have time to like, oh yeah, I'm going to try out the Steam controller, so I need like to load A bunch of games onto a system before I go. I really, really wish there was a way to with one button, like do the pre launch crap for every game on my system. Because if I'm like, if I have no Internet or I'm somewhere remote with very slow Internet or whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, like installing stuff. Not shaders.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, like get the dot net, whatever, get the redistributable whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Install all dependencies.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do your DRM check. Install all dependencies. Because like it's pretty sick. It's become more and more of an annoyance over time. How many Steam games have other launchers or have random dependencies, especially on Linux, which I've been using more lately, where they'll have to grab like proton crap ahead of time. So if I. So if installing the game, installed the game so that I just click go and it goes, I would actually, I would love that. So if Valve is taking suggestions right now, that's something that I'd love to see Steam level up on ever so slightly. When I install a game, do all of it. Assume that my intention when I install a game is to play the game, not just. Not just enjoy it being in my ready to play filter. Okay. Ignacy says as a game dev requiring Steam is a toggle in the SDK API.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Game either confirms Steam is open and connected on steamworks initialization or it doesn't. So that explains why just tried to open different games. We both would have had completely different experiences because both are. Both are true.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That makes sense. It's not like a thing I do all the time, so I wasn't super confident.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, we should probably do some show sponsors. The show is brought to you today by Vessi. Earlier this week we did a fun breakdown of Valve's Steam controller, but today we need to talk about something that's even more important. A rain and moisture controller. That's right. Groan at the joke all you want, Luke. Oh, but Vessi makes shoes that they claim are 100% waterproof, meaning you can take back control of your dry socks. This is thanks to Vessi's dymatex material, which also makes the shoes lightweight and easy to pack on trips. They're weekend Neo shoes are a great choice for the spring, and their simple design means they pair great with most wardrobes. So regardless of whether it's just a commute to work or if you find yourself caught in some spring rain out in the city, Vessi has your back and your feet. Every pair comes with free shipping, hassle free returns, as well as a full Year warranty. So don't be like Meat Boy here. Stay dry, comfortable, and stylish. Get 15% off your weekend Neo or [e-mail] Wancho this is just me playing Super Meat Boy in the Steam controller video. I don't know what that has to

[Luke Lafreniere]

do with Vessi's, but sure, I mean, he's like splooshes when he lands, I guess.

[Linus Sebastian]

The show is also brought to you by Odoo. How many different applications and platforms do you and your team have to switch between in order to get a project over the line? Yeah. With our sponsor, Odoo, you can manage multiple aspects of your business all in one platform without needing to pay for a dozen different subscriptions. If you need to run a help desk to assist with solving tickets submitted by customers, Odoo's platform can sync with things like WhatsApp, email and live chats. Or if your business team needs help tracking leads and keeping organized on potential sales opportunities, Odoo's CRM tool is there for them. They can even provide essential tools to an accounting team like budgeting and payment tracking. And something that's really cool about Odoo is that if you need to use a single app within their suite, it's free. So use our link below to get a 15 day free trial or to book a demo with a member of their team to learn how Odoo can help your business.

[Dan Siegel]

Linus, we have a guest.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have a guest for the float plane announcements for the float plane. You just don't trust us to do it, right?

[Sammy]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, come on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is this?

[Linus Sebastian]

Do the announcements first. What's happening right now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You want us to do the read, Dan.

[Linus Sebastian]

Point at him. Show how he's being weird.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, what? Wait, what?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, he's like holding a monitor.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Look at that guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's up with that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Look at that guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't understand what's happening.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What's he doing?

[Sammy]

If you read the document, you'll know

[Luke Lafreniere]

he's up to something.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, I'm gonna read the document. I'm reading the document. You know what the L in Linus stands for? Oh, there's a lot of floatplane exclusives about me this week. In the first video, Sammy gave me such a wonderful welcome back gift to welcome me back to the office. He will be fired for this injunction. Okay, so first of all, Sammy, that's not really what injunction means.

[Sammy]

Is it not?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it's about Vibes. And second of all, you're not fired.

[Sammy]

Allegedly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, Anyway, this is the video. People really loved this video on floatplane. I came back to work and my entire office had been gift wrapped. To this day, this is still how I feel about it. Anywho, and if PC building is more your style, I went head to head against Elijah Jordan and Pankratz to see who can build a PC the fastest at Linus Media Group. Wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did any of you wear a horse head?

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, you filmed that ages ago. That video is just coming out.

[Sammy]

It took forever.

[Linus Sebastian]

We should do. Yeah, we should do a video on who's the fastest to edit a video at Linus Media Group because I think. I think you would not be in good shape.

[Sammy]

4 hours and 8 POVs. I have to edit and then I got. I have to do other stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

What kind of videos you editing with the POVs? Sick, huh? You disgust me. Get your mind out of the gutter. Anyway, so that exclusive went up very recently. Oh yeah, you guys are. You guys are loving this one too.

[Sammy]

Just upload that today.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I'm not going to scroll down to the comments because I feel like it's going to be somewhat debatable who won. So it's probably going to come down to commenters to decide who. Who did it best. What else is going on on floatplane? To wrap it up, we've uploaded the full interview with the creator of Pop os, Carl Richel. That's pretty cool. Tech Quickie has been doing a ton of interviews with interesting people lately. So if you want to hear more from our special guests, we'll be uploading them to floatplane. Very cool. Check out the sea of exclusives at lmg, gg, fpwan. And don't forget guys, that now is a better time than ever to subscribe to floatplane because at the Supporter plus tier you'll be getting a lower threshold for shipstorm free shipping. Now, Sammy has a special show and tell for us.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What do you want, Sammy?

[Sammy]

You can't get mad me, Linus.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're telling me I can't. I can't get mad at you. Can't stand here. Yeah, you can stand anywhere you want.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The foils.

[Linus Sebastian]

So you know you don't have a mic here though.

[Sammy]

How did we know this? This was last minute.

[Linus Sebastian]

I forgot.

[Sammy]

You're not here next to me. That's why. Okay, so you know, you know the, the. The chair you bought with David?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, you mean the chair. Yeah, hold on. Yes, I'll bring. I'll bring this up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So people commissioned machine gun chair.

[Sammy]

Yes, that one. So I.

[Linus Sebastian]

So here this Was. This was yesterday's video. It has actually one of my favorite intros that we've done in quite a while. Okay, that. That wasn't it.

[Sammy]

What are you watching?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What are you.

[Linus Sebastian]

There we go. No, no, we're good. We're good. But this is a gaming chair, so you can. Yeah. So we had.

[Sammy]

I love David crawling.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So.

[Sammy]

But anyways, solid effort, David. I'm not gonna take too much time today.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Sammy]

So I promised I would daily drive that thing for 30 days.

[Linus Sebastian]

I did not approve that. The ergonomics are, like, not safe, in my opinion.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is this a good monitor, you think?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you like it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You like that monitor?

[Sammy]

So the. The lumbar, I agree, is bad. So I was trying to adjust it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Sammy]

Did you know that thing has no limiters? Sammy, you can see my hand here when I visibly try to physically try to stop it. It did not stop. There's no limiter on that chair.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, I know.

[Sammy]

I didn't know that. So then it broke. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

I felt so bad.

[Sammy]

I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

[Dan Siegel]

Yeah.

[Sammy]

But I record for flow plane, so you'll see my reaction on there, where you see my. My. The horror in my face as I try to save this monitor.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's mangled.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's deep.

[Sammy]

You know, like the.

[Dan Siegel]

The.

[Sammy]

The keyboard board, like, plate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It went through it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did it occur to you to stop it? Not with your hand, like, by pressing the button.

[Sammy]

So the button wasn't responsive. It wasn't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no. The one remote doesn't, like, work.

[Sammy]

Yeah. I didn't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

You have to use the other. Did you think to watch the video before?

[Sammy]

I watched, like, I watched mostly through. I was like, I know enough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then. I didn't know.

[Sammy]

I didn't know this.

[Linus Sebastian]

You are the problem.

[Sammy]

I know I'm the problem.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Linus would have just read the comments.

[Sammy]

I'm sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And through reading the comments, I would have known all the critical information that he didn't have you. I will die on this hill. You are better off reading all the comments on a video than, like, watching the first 30% of it.

[Sammy]

I watched 50%.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. You know, I still maintain you're better off reading the comments on a video than watching only half of it.

[Sammy]

But I. I am sorry. But I have my reaction on full play next week, so again, some content.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Dan Siegel]

All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know that crazy expensive computer you built for him? I feel like you have to take the value of this monitor out of that computer.

[Sammy]

Somehow they took away my GPU already.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, really? I. I stood up for you.

[Sammy]

I know you did. I appreciate it.

[Linus Sebastian]

You saw me stand up for you. I said they shouldn't take it away. You know why? They took it your department.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh. Get on.

[Sammy]

Yeah. Be with you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Sammy]

Let's get mine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Get owned.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I don't think the two of us

[Sammy]

could take it with this broken monitor. I just might.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's very durable. All right. Thank you, Sammy. I'm very sorry.

[Dan Siegel]

I'm very sorry.

[Sammy]

I feel so bad. I'm sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man. That's a really nice monitor. I know.

[Sammy]

I'm sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's the. What's the model? That's not the 4K one, is it?

[Sammy]

It's like 800 Canadian.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm sorry.

[Sammy]

I did. It wasn't intentional. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

I feel so bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What monitor is it?

[Sammy]

It's a. It's an Alienware something.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know that you're the one holding it. Who can see the model number, right? That's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're going to have to find that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's always on there. It's going to drop it. See?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, that's fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

At this point, Sammy's one of those guys that we make video with him and then half the comments are like, why does this guy even work there?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're getting glasses.

[Linus Sebastian]

He's really good at other things.

[Sammy]

Where's the model?

[Linus Sebastian]

He is.

[Sammy]

Oh. Alienware 2725 Q. October 2025.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. I think that's the 1440.

[Sammy]

I'm so sorry. How much does it cost? It's 500 U.S. right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh my God. No, wait. No way. Oh my God. Is it really?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's the first what I saw.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is a 240Hz 4K. Yeah, this is like top of the line.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Holy crap.

[Linus Sebastian]

QD oled. Like one of the best monitors on the market. Wow.

[Sammy]

I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I honestly had no idea. When you showed me, I thought it was just like some random junk monitor. I had no idea. I had. No, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

We got like really nice monitors and we had that like sick alien or that like sick alienware gaming PC on it. It. It was like. That was like peak gaming other than the lumbar support in the headrest.

[Sammy]

But aren't you glad? I'm okay. I didn't get hurt, actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. That would have been worse.

[Dan Siegel]

Did you get blood on the monitor?

[Sammy]

You got my hand on it. See this, this, this, this, this hand sign shows War. I went.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or it shows that you were like banging in the depths of a steamship.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was like, that's another possibility. That's not the kind of banging I meant, but sure, yeah. What do you mean he's never seen Titanic? This is the problem with the kids today.

[Sammy]

I watched. No. Anyways, I don't take too much time, but.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, thanks, Sammy.

[Sammy]

Sorry.

[Dan Siegel]

Hasn't seen Titanic. Hasn't seen pov. Who is this guy?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's. That's more expensive than any monitor I've ever owned. Just a random, random fun fact that

[Linus Sebastian]

might be worth more than every multi monitor setup you've ever owned. 1300 cat probably.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I run three pretty good monitors. Yeah, yeah, no, I think it is, actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's. Wow. I would. I like, I. I honestly had no idea. He showed me in the lab and I was like, okay. I mean, losing a monitor, like sucks because we just always need monitors, but I'm sure it's just like some random generic monitor. I had no idea it was an alienware. I had no idea it was high end at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it's the highest of end. It's. It's like full downward dog. High end. Is downward dog the one where your butt's in the air?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. Sounds like it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yes. No, I was thinking of child. It doesn't get. It doesn't get much more high end than that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Upscale.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, well, subscribe to Floatplane so Sammy can continue to do the things he does. No, he does really good stuff too, I promise.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, that's.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Let's pick. Let's move on. Let's pick another topic. A really cool LTT Labs article this week.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, let's talk about that instead.

[Linus Sebastian]

We know it can be daunting to take your first steps into the world of Linux. We know this because we've been doing it recently. But LTT Labs is here for you. This article from Nick, tested by Sean and Steven is. We tried popular Linux gaming distros. I have not read this one yet because it just went up. But I am very excited too. This went up like two days ago. So Luke can maybe summarize for us.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We had some. Well, yeah, I mean, we're kind of benchmarking a bunch of gaming distros. And there's tests. If you go down, there's. There's standard, you know, labs charts with different games and how the different distros did. And as you might expect, they're pretty similar because it kind of goes that way every time. But we still looked at stuff. Kashi did pretty good. Let's go, Cashy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, look at that. Look at that. I managed to pick the one, the one that's bad. Specifically for Doom, the Dark Ages, the other games. It was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If we, if we do another Linux I Switch challenge in the future, you should just have to use whatever I pick.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, that's less interesting. No, I, like, I, I think it's really important to have the conversation around what information a normie is likely to be exposed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, that's true, that's true.

[Linus Sebastian]

That to me is a. Whether I end up making the right choice or the wrong choice is, is actually a fundamentally important part of the Linux challenge. And I intentionally will not just ask people. I could. Have we even said this in the first episode. I could literally call Linus Torvalds.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Literally have his digits and ask him what distro to use. But I'm not doing that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The only thing that really surprised me. And this would have led you to a distro that I didn't even recommend, but I had a gut feeling that you were going to go with what he said he used.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In the video you guys did together. That's what I thought you were gonna do.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no. So my, my part of my method is that I am, I'm, I'm looking at the entire switching experience and part of the switching experience is going out there and fact finding.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so, you know, when the community kind of comes and goes, like he did the fact finding wrong because he found the wrong conclusion. What we need to do is we need to look at, okay, what are all of these resources and why are they recommending this thing? If quote unquote, everyone knows that it's like not good. And honestly, we've already seen some positive change every time. Yeah, already. And so it's one of those things where maybe I just accept my role as the bearer of bad news and the reality check for people who are so knowledgeable that they don't realize what they don't. What they know, I guess is probably the best way that I could describe it. It's like a curse of knowledge thing to a lot of Linux community members. They don't realize how easy it is to make the wrong choice because to them it's so obvious. They know the right people to ask, they know the right resources to look at. But to someone who, to whom it's not obvious who's coming into it for the first time, it's very easy to end up on A different path.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And honestly, I do find this pretty interesting because I didn't initially use. I've used ChatGPT to try to figure out things that are going on with my system, but I didn't use it to pick my distro at all. But you did, and it spat out POP os. And then I did to see if mine would as well. And it was one of the options. I don't remember if it was number one, but it was one of the options.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think it was number one,

[Luke Lafreniere]

but it was there.

[Linus Sebastian]

I thought number one was cashy for you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't remember. I thought it was like Open Susie or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm sorry, I don't remember.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was a while ago. Yeah. But this time I just did this sitting here right now, not logged in. So it's not tailored on me. And best overall experience, POP os. So, like, you can say, we can say whatever we want, but a ton of people will use this. Yes. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And people can be like, upset about that. Right? You can be upset about that. You can think they shouldn't use it, but. And I said this, I said this in episode one. If I am trying to be representative of Joe Gamer, who's doing my own research today, and I didn't ask a chatbot, I'd be doing a complete disservice. That would be a completely unrealistic assumption that they would not use a chatbot because so many people are using them. And we know this. This is just a fact that we don't have to like, but we do have to deal with. We've got to deal with the fact that when Luke typed in what Linux distro should I use and then closed his tab right as I was about to switch back to his screen, it out POP os.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you know what's funny is I

[Luke Lafreniere]

know Bara and a couple other things, but it said best overall was POP os.

[Linus Sebastian]

I never actually switched off of POP OS on my desktop. I don't know if I ever actually acknowledged that on wancho.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't feel like I realized that

[Linus Sebastian]

I kept it because I did the vast majority of my Linux thing on my other machines which were not running popos. I was running steamos on the Media PC and then I was running Kubuntu on my laptop, which I actually ended up mostly really happy with. There were some issues, we'll talk about those. But yeah, I didn't actually end up using my desktop that much. And for the limited amount that I did use it, popos not only was usable, but it actually got better over the entire course of the challenge.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone in chat said, I asked the LLM search and Ubuntu admin was number one. I was like, oh, that's an interesting idea. I should just ask search, which I'd never do. Yeah, but I should just do that. And it's the exact same output. No borrow project. I am specifying. I'm switching to Linux from Windows and

[Linus Sebastian]

that's where a lot. So a big part of why it recommended popos for me was that I laid out what my requirements were. A huge part of the residual sort of branding for POP OS is that it's really good for people with Nvidia GPUs who want a turnkey gaming experience and are coming from Windows. That's like, that's the identity of POP os and also that it's not just for gaming. Like that was. That's. That's the kind of like branding in a nutshell for popos.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think. I think first of all, I think a lot of people have labeled me as like the Linux guy here, which I think is just not.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not true. But you're definitely, you definitely had more familiarity going into it than either.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh no, I'm just trying to qualify my next statement as like, I probably don't know as much about this as some of you seem to think that I do, but in my experience the whole better Nvidia driver native stuff is like,

[Linus Sebastian]

yeah, no, I know that hasn't

[Luke Lafreniere]

been a thing for me in like a long time. I think that's, I think that's an old. And it's, it's everywhere. So like it was talked about a lot in the past, but I think we're kind of past that problem at least in, in like everything I've used. Like Mint is much more casual and has no problem with Nvidia drivers. Mint for me can switch between intel and Nvidia graphics for like performance or battery saving setups and stuff and just has no problem with it. Like, I don't think that's a modern problem. Just as a note for anyone watching, I wouldn't get too scared about the Nvidia on Linux thing. It's. It's really not as big of a deal as it was before.

[Linus Sebastian]

Tim000x3 says okay, here's my counterpoint. Linus, Joe Gamer is actually going to also watch ltt. So they're going to say Linus has a lot of problems with POP OS and probably not use popos now. Are you taking that into account? Well, I can't at the time. There's a bit of a like temporal issue with your argument because at the time that I selected POP OS I had not yet made a video. Finding out that popos was problematic for me now. So it's. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And also the Chat GPT user base versus Linus Tech Tips viewers.

[Linus Sebastian]

So the Chat GPT user base is this big and the Linus Tech Tips user ba viewer base is this big.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like we. I've talked about this a fair bit but I think our regular viewers, especially our wan show viewers overestimate the importance of us and I'm flattered. You know, I appreciate that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If, if people that I game with figure out what I do, the most common question I get is what pre build should I buy? Because I'm not into this stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep. It was astonishing to me. I think much less so you, but it was astonishing to me to figure out how massive the pre built market was. I thought some of these companies were just kind of small. They've existed forever. Some people build computers or whatever. No, they're big. They're very big. They're huge. I didn't realize how much like Sway system integrators had as well because they're so massive.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I had really no clue.

[Linus Sebastian]

And because of how important they are, not even necessarily computers because I'm dumb. Even from a sales perspective, but from a marketing perspective, like when people are shopping for us for a gaming system, having your brand in everyone's configurator is in some ways like way more powerful than any reviewer that you could ever seed product to because that's where people with a very high purchase intent are going to be seeing your brand and are going to be exposed to your product. And it's, it's funny because I, I, in a lot of, for a lot of my career I sort of took for granted my experience as a product manager and working in sales and marketing as just like. Well yeah, but like everyone knows that the enthusiast side of things is just this like, you know, tiny little cute niche and understands that there's actually a much larger machine here that doesn't really care about us.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But then the longer I've gone, the more I've been like, no, actually that perspective was really important in trying to frame products in a way that, because I'm one of you, because I am an enthusiast, I can see the things that are important to us but also share the perspective that guides product decisions that we don't like and that is that 99 out of the 100 people that are purchasing it are not us and don't care. Like, okay, here. Here's something that I know is a bugbear for you. Boring. Modern graphics card packaging.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But look at it from Nvidia's perspective. Okay. GPU box. Here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, they were so cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God. Packages.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So boring.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That boring box.

[Linus Sebastian]

So this is what they used to look like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's so sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is what they used to look like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So much better, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here's what they look like. Here's what they look like now. So Nvidia mandates that you have to have, you know, this and on the side. Let me see if I can find a shot from the side. You've got to have. So you've got to have certain elements. I know, I know. Relax.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Overclocked.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, here you go. So you've got to have this on the side so that no matter how it's faced on the shelf, everyone can see the G force and the model number and, you know, whatever. And you know what? In fairness to Nvidia, I'm not that against that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that's okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

This was pretty hard to read. You know about this, right? This is like. It's like a table book. Did you. Did you order it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, remember this thing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah. No, I didn't. I should.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Did that ever. Noteworthy find from the. Did that ever, like, come to life? Publishers website for stock alerts overclocked. An archive of graphics card box art.

[Dan Siegel]

Can we.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's go. All right. This is your birthday present.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sick. Thank you.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I think having some amount of standard labeling so that you can tell what thing you're buying is fine. But then beyond that, I would like it if it was. If Nvidia would screw off and just let people do fun stuff outside of, like, you know, have your. We talked about it with thumbnails. Where there's like, the. The safety zones or whatever where, like, okay, this is. This isn't going to conflict with YouTube putting a timestamp or a hover over or something like that. Have those areas just be where Nvidia has their mandatory branding. Cool. No problem. And then beyond that, have some fun with it. It's a graphics card. It's supposed to do fun things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Somehow we ended up here. We were talking about this article on the Labs website. Check it [e-mail] it's just up here in the feed right here. Before you ask. Yes, we do have an RSS feed so that you can make sure that you see all these really cool articles that are actually coming out on a very regular basis that these days.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Go check it out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, let's pick another topic. Oh, this is cool. Here. Do you want to bring up the visuals for Wave Overhangs is a new open source slicer forked from orcaslicer that can print and this is wild. Fully horizontal 90 degree overhangs without support material. That's what I looked like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's confusing. I'm not a big 3D printer omega brain, but that's confusing to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, you've got the visuals up now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. So here, let's draw. Okay. This is cool. Yeah. Can you like. Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. Yeah. There we go. So instead of laying plastic into thin air and then just hoping for the best. Okay. It generates concentric rings of material that each grab onto the cooled ring that was laid down before them in the same layer, propagating outward from the supporting, from the supported edge like a wave. So we're looking at the one on the right over there. So you can see that it. It kinda. It kind of goes a little farther. A little farther each time in order to. In order for that overhang to have something to grab onto. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This concept isn't brand new. Arc overhangs first appeared back in 2022 as a proof of concept that using overlapping circular toolpaths could achieve the same basic idea. The difference is arc overhangs were never integrated into a real slicer and required manually extracting coordinates, running a separate script, and then pasting the G code back into your sliced model.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wave paths do look a lot more simple.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not exactly the kind of thing that most people are going to want. Want to bother with. Wave Overhangs then is the first time the technique has been built directly into a usable slicer with a GUI toggle with tunable settings and two different algorithms to choose from. It is still very experimental. There are around 20 tunable parameters and no presets yet. And warping on larger spans is a known limitation. But the developers are asking users to be part of its development and upload test prints to a community [e-mail] to help figure out what settings work best across different printers and materials. So be. Be part of the change you want to see in the world. Let's have a look at some stuff from the gallery. Like, oh. Oh. How cool is that?

[Dan Siegel]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty sweet. I like It. Less supports should mean less wasted plastic, more warping observed. It's always.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on a second. No, wait a second. Oh, wait. What am I looking at here? This looks like a. No, forget this one. Hold on, hold on. Let's find what. Yeah, here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Here we go.

[Dan Siegel]

Here we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

That isn't. That isn't. That's an overhang and a half. That's wild. Being able to print that. Like, yeah. Not perfect, but, like, that's crazy. There's the print bed right there. Man. Dang. 3D printing. You crazy. Look at this. Best print so far on this very challenging test. Print pattern, zigzag. Wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's definitely some warping.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. But like, this is how. This is how these things get to the point where it's like. But am I click and forget.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Am I wrong that this would even just be a good idea to do, even if you did have some supports to help stop the warping? Because wouldn't it be stronger once you remove the supports as well? Or am I just totally tripping?

[Linus Sebastian]

Possibly?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because what I'm seeing in the. In the demo imagery, the. The thing that was most interesting to me, I'm gonna jump over to mine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look at that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, wait, we can look at that. Look at that. Look.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look at this, Luke. Look at this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

No supports, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's crazy. This is the base, guys, for context, this is what was stuck to the base of the print bed. Yeah. So this gives us a look at what it looks like from the bottom. Like. Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So what I. What I'm seeing here is, like, in these example images, the detached lines here, just removing those and making it so that your. Your, like, your. Your path is all the way from back here. So you have all the strength from back here on these. Like, these parts here, which seem like they might be more breakable. I don't know. I'm not 3D printer brain guy, but it seems like potentially using wave paths in combination with supports, if you can't afford to have any deformation, could be a cool option for strength. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

James Unknown says, I've been 3D printing for years now, My own business now, and this is huge. Not just saving material, but also what Luke is saying. I can see that being way stronger.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool. Okay, sweet. I mean, that. That seems awesome to me because you might even end up with a combination of both. You might not need as much support if it's not going to be as much of a. As big of a problem. So you can save some material and it can be stronger. Like what a win.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, I got a funny one. Qualcomm's stock surges in response to a report that it could make chips for an OpenAI smartphone. And then it lost much of those gains on subsequent trading days. According to a report from well known tech analyst ming Chi Kuo, OpenAI is working on its own smartphone in an effort to compete with the iPhone with mass production targeted for 2028. Kuo. Yeah, we'll get to it, we'll get to it. Just a sec, just a sec. Hold on, hold on. Relax, relax. Kuo says that OpenAI has partnered with chip makers Qualcomm and MediaTek to develop the smartphone's processors with Luxshare Handling System Co design and manufacturing. The phone will reportedly have no apps and be a completely agentic workflow, whatever that means. This is another in a handful of hardware products. Hold on, hold on. Contain yourself. This is another in a handful of hardware products that OpenAI has announced but not yet released, including earbuds and that HomePod style smart speaker that Jony I've is reportedly working on. Okay, go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

First of all, just flatline, used no brain power, had a thought. Sounds terrible. I would never want to buy this. Oh my God. Okay, diving a little bit more into things. It uses no apps. Dang, that sucks a lot. So much of what I'm gonna need to do is using apps on my phone. Hopefully I'm not just like, you know that old guy that gets clipped in the future when people are like, oh, obviously we didn't need ever, but at least right now this seems genuinely bad. Also, isn't it called apps when you add like functions to agentic systems? Like when. When does that even mean when a.

[Linus Sebastian]

It used to be short for application

[Luke Lafreniere]

kind of what I mean, now it's

[Linus Sebastian]

developed, it's kind of its own. Meaning. I don't know what to tell you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When they added Wolfram Alpha as a thing to open AI's agentic mode, was that. Was it not an app? It could be called skills too. Skills and tools. Sure, whatever. Sounds good. Other than the product, the product sounds terrible.

[Linus Sebastian]

Remember that time that Facebook wanted to make a phone?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Remember how nobody wants or needs a phone that is not at least, at least a walled garden ecosystem that is accepting of pretty much everything else running on it as a platform. Can you think of any reason to want this over a phone from someone with decades of experience building hardware like Apple?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The western world is still going to want iPhones and the rest of the world is still going to want open systems that they can extend and modify and keep going long term. And this is neither. And I don't think it's going to breach the market basically anywhere. Maybe it'll be popular for sales in San Francisco and that's probably about it.

[Linus Sebastian]

So it's the. It's the smartphone for tech Bros. And tech Bros Only. Whoa. Okay, do you want to hear something kind of wild?

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's more viewers on.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's more viewers on the WAN show channel than there are on the Linus Tech Tips channel. I think it's gonna be time to cut it off pretty soon, guys. If you're watching on Linus Tech tips right now, you got to go switch over to the WAN show channel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We got to figure out that collaborative thing. Yeah, I think that's probably the way to go. Like moving forward.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Like a collab stream. Yeah, we stream on the WAN show and then we just collab with LTT for a while. I don't think we should do it forever because I don't want to be sending notifications on both forever. I think we should move to WAN show sooner rather than.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think it will if you're subscribed to both. I think YouTube is smart about that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I also. I also don't want to let people get complacent about it. They should subscribe to the WAN show in order to continue to follow the WAN show. So get on for streams. Get on over there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really, Sammy? YouTube collabs.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, moving on to our next topic. I'm gonna pick one. Maryland has become the first American state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores. Critics do say that the law has too many loopholes. But look, let's start with the good news side of it. The law was signed by Governor Wes Moore on Tuesday and bans grocers and third party delivery services from using personal data to set higher prices. If you're not familiar, surveillance pricing is a practice that uses some characteristic of yourself, like your zip code, for instance, or your ethnicity or just any personal, personally identifiable personal information about you and uses it to adjust the pricing upward because of what you can presumably afford.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's some camera thing and it's like all white people like broccoli. Let's increase the price of broccoli pretty much.

[Linus Sebastian]

It doesn't have to be a racial thing, but it could be. Let's face,

[Luke Lafreniere]

could be.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whether we want it to go to a race place or not, it often ends up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They'll Put it behind some machine learning thing and call it a black box and say they have no control over it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, what kind of box? Oh, my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think you're more intimately familiar than me.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, Listen. Colorado, California, Massachusetts, Illinois, and New Jersey are all considering similar bills. But while this is a win, consumer advocates are saying that Maryland's law is full of loopholes. The biggest one is that it bans raising prices based on personal data, but doesn't stop companies from raising prices for everyone, then offering personalized discounts that ultimately arrive at the exact same outcome. There are also exemptions for loyalty programs and promotional offers, which are some of the main vehicles that companies already use to do this. And there's no private right of action, meaning that regular consumers can't actually sue if they get caught up in surveillance pricing. Only the state attorney general can enforce it, which critics say guts any real deterrent. So it's a little bit of progress in that we're finally talking about the issue. We're acknowledging the issue, but it's very clear that there is a lot more that needs to be done. And, I mean, personally, I would just love to see this happen across the board. You know, why are airline. Why are airline operators allowed to do this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Actually crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, the entire vacation industry seems to operate based on this. However. However, I would caution that we don't want to go too far. Regional pricing on services like Steam, for example, I fundamentally support.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So this shouldn't be able to be done within a country. Is that fair enough?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that's a fair line to draw. Let's use those arbitrary lines on the map and let's make those the boundaries.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Would you go as far as, like, a province or a city?

[Linus Sebastian]

Would I allow different pricing? Because I'm pretty sure somebody had Alberta plates on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, right. Because it would have to be dynamic. No, it has to be dynamic. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. So. Because my mind is like. I mean, there is different pricing for, like, say, milk in Alberta versus here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. But it shouldn't be because of where you're from or because of who you are.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You shouldn't be.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. No, that's f ed up. Especially because it incentivizes these organizations to then collect the data on everybody.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then whether or not they actually use it. I mean, a lot of the. They're going to use it anyway.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Set your pricing. There might be market factors. It might be more expensive to get trucks to wherever you are. Maybe you're way north in Canada or something. It's Just a fact. But you can't, you can't change it based on who's in the store. Yeah, obviously that seems like it should just happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Fools and horses says Linus. Do you collect any trends or data from LTT Store? Where does the line get drawn? You know what, this was actually something

[Luke Lafreniere]

that use that to target pricing for specific users though.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, we don't. But Colton had actually messaged us about like what we do and don't collect on LTT Store and like where we think the right line would be. I don't know if we ever actually talked about that on WAN show. I can't actually, I can't find the email from him right now. But do you remember the one that I'm talking about? They're trying to figure out like what would be, what would be you know, an LMG friendly level of like cookies and data collection to determine whether some of the marketing efforts that his team is doing are actually working. Because right now we do some limited data collection but there are pieces of it that would be very helpful to them that right now they don't, they don't have enough to get it to get a clear picture. For instance, like one of the things they were looking at was like conversion of, of people on floatplane for subscriptions and stuff like that. What, what is, what's the right amount?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The float plane one was a pretty big line because we don't have a banner for stuff like that because we don't do like any of it. So we were like, we'd have to

[Linus Sebastian]

do oh like a gdpr like, like a cookie banner and like all that kind of stuff. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I, we just didn't do it at.

[Linus Sebastian]

ZIM says I avoid ads at a very high cost. Yeah, we're not, we're not talking about ads though. We're talking about like forms of tracking. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because like you, it's, it's. There are also other ways to do it though. And that, that was the counter pitch from flow plane.

[Linus Sebastian]

So how do we do it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can have like, you can have it so that it's a link and like the. Where did the URL come from?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So we can't track it on like an individual user basis but we can see like this many people clicked this link and this many people that clicked on that link did follow through and purchase a description. Now someone could screw that up for us because they could click on the link and then like navigate somewhere else manually and that manual navigation might get rid of the URL. Like there's There's. Yeah, there are other ways to do it. They're not perfect, but neither is aggressive cookies that you're also feeding to Facebook or whoever else because you're running it through their systems. It's another thing to keep in mind. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, well, let's leave it alone for now and then we'll go from there, I guess. I don't know, man. I. I understand why his team wants to do this stuff, but I also understand the hesitation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but like I said, there are other options. It's not like we're, we're saying. I mean, we, we might have said no at the time because we're such a small team. We can't just do everything all the time. But there's ways that you can track how well that campaign is working without being able to tie it down to a specific user.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, it is possible. You can, you can have flags in the URL that follow the process. And if, if one of those, like URL flagged people that goes through does a purchase.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just holding tallies. Okay, so you, like the advertising platform side should know how many people you served that ad to. Our side should know how many people came to the site with that in the URL. And then our side should know how many people checked out with that in the URL. And then you have your three data points and like, ideally that's enough. And then we're not feeding it through

[Linus Sebastian]

Meta or whoever else Amaker asks, are you just putting yourself at a commercial disadvantage by trying to be ethical about this? Yes, but like, we often do, and that's something we've decided to do and

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think, I think that should almost potentially reflect. I'm just gonna skip.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. In some other cool news, you guys

[Luke Lafreniere]

can come up with your own morality on that one.

[Linus Sebastian]

The first Tesla semi truck from their Gigafactory Nevada high volume product production line has officially rolled off the line. The semi is a little late. It was first unveiled in 2017 with an original promised production date of 2019. Okay, a little late, but it's here. It is worth noting this is not the first semi to be produced. A handful were delivered to PepsiCo in late 2022, but those were essentially like hand built on a pilot line. This time we're talking mass produced units with an expected annual production capacity of 50,000 trucks. Although it is worth noting that that will have to ramp up over the next few years. And it doesn't mean anything because Tesla lies constantly. But, but, but this Is as far as we can tell truthfully, the mass production line. These trucks have a range of 325 miles or 500 miles depending on whether they are the same standard or long range model. And that is apparently fully loaded. Though it's not clear in our notes what exactly fully loaded means. There's definitely degrees of loaded for semi trucks. They support Tesla's mega charger which is 1.2 megawatt charger. Could they not have done 1.21? They were so close. 1.21 megawatts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that would be pretty sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that round up, that'll restore 60% of the truck's range in 30 minutes cost on the long range model. And this is what makes this good news. Wan show cost on the long range model is expected to be US$290,000. That.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do we have a reference point for other semi trucks?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh they're really expensive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're so expensive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was my grandpa's job.

[Linus Sebastian]

And like the maintenance and the dealer network and just the like old boys club of everything. The financing, crazy loans. 290000 US dollars for something that is going to have sure all the disadvantages of an electric vehicle. Right. Like these batteries will eventually wear out and you have to charge and blah blah blah blah blah. But that will also have the advantages of an electric vehicle in that you're using simple electric motors. Okay, sorry. Not simple, but relatively low maintenance electric motors. Dude, this thing looks freaking awesome. I am, I am, I'm like kind of stoked on it. To be clear. I don't think that the Tesla semi is going to be taking over long haul trucking anytime in the foreseeable future.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ton of trucking that isn't long haul trucking.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And that's okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

And what's kind of cool about this is for semis I can actually see the range being less of an issue. Especially for companies that are somewhat integrated where they can build in charging infrastructure at the various docks that they're going to be visiting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because it said 60% in half an hour, right?

[Dan Siegel]

Mm.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you're doing an unload or load,

[Linus Sebastian]

well that wouldn't get a lot of charge. You wouldn't have a mega charger at like your warehouse. But if every time you docked you would be able because I mean you like your transformer for your, for your warehouse building like simply will not have that level of. Unless you went out of your way like you're not going to have a mega charger.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, sorry. Specifically mega charger.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I guess it won't do that rate. But still you could plug into something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, but the way that I see it is as long as this thing is charged in the morning, as you're going around to, you know, you're bottling, let's use Pepsi as an example. Just because they were one of the first customers for the Tesla semi. So you're going around to your various ports of call, you're going to like the bottling depot. Here you're dropping off some, you're making some drop offs at a distribution hub. Here you're going back to the bottling depot. If at every one of those, or at, or at some of those, at the ones that you own, you're able to plug in while things are loading and being unloaded a little bit more, you can juice yourself up a little bit over the course of the day. And if you're mostly doing local distribution runs, this is just going to be so huge for everything from noise to urban smog to just convenience for operators. Like driving a big rig like man, do you know that some of them have two stick shifts?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't know what the two. Yeah, I didn't know you can like slip gears on purpose and there's all

[Linus Sebastian]

this like, like driving a truck is non simple. If it could be, if it could be one, one pedal driving semis. Like if we could lower the barrier to entry for, for operating these vehicles, lower the mental load of operating them so you can be more focused on the road.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The barrier entry thing spooks me because of the amount of opened tin cans we've had in B.C. of people hitting bridges.

[Linus Sebastian]

When I say, okay, when I say lower the barrier to entry, I don't mean that we need people who are less cognitively capable operating them. What I mean is that fewer distractions.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just, I see this as an absolute, I see this as an absolute win.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it seems cool. I always have like a little bit of skepticism because of their track record on being able to hit their targets and stuff like that. But these things just rolling off the line. Sounds great to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Tim Sweet asks, how about maintenance? I mean look, a diesel engine is a super reliable engine, you know, like a, like a Cummins diesel that you might find in a large truck. It's going to be pretty flipping reliable. Like those Volvo trucks, they'll do a million miles, you know, and that's not even like, that's not even like, whoa, you should get a free truck because it did a million miles, you know, like remember that first car that, that like traveling salesman or whatever who put a million miles on his car and the company gave him a new one. Like that's not, that's not even like that remarkable. But actually. Okay, Hayago Ego says diesels used to be super reliable, but now they are not as good. Interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, classic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, no, many such cases. No comment on that. I, I, I was not aware of that. From my understanding, big rigs do tend to be pretty reliable. Edison motors. Hold on a second. But yeah, from a maintenance standpoint, I know that my experience with electric vehicles has been that it's relatively low and I would imagine that especially on braking, these would just be so much better.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One of these must be insane, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm missing something here. Feel free to tell me if I'm missing something. But regenerative braking would be amazing. Amazing for trucks and they spend so much time idling and stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just relative. What if it takes so much energy to get them going that it's, it's relative? I'm not sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Either way, neat. Cool. To be clear, see it when it happens.

[Linus Sebastian]

Tesla's not the only player in the game. We actually, I really, I still need to go. These guys shipping, check out these guys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can you buy a semi truck from them?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so hybrid. So diesel and battery. So hybrid trucks could be a better approach to idea, to long range trucking. And Edison Motors is a company that they, they, they're doing like an investment drive right now. Like I don't know what kind of shape they're in right now. So this is not like an endorsement of the company or anything like that. I don't know enough to say one way or the other, but I do, I do love the idea of what they're doing. VNG Supernova says, I thought semis used pneumatic braking so region braking wouldn't be that useful. Does the Tesla semi not use regen braking?

[Dan Siegel]

Braking

[Linus Sebastian]

uses powerful regenerative braking across all three electric motors. Yeah, yeah, no, no, yeah, regular semis do use pneumatic. A lot of them use air brakes. But no, the Tesla should be, should be using regenerative braking. Yeah, yeah, use the regenerative braking. So that's kind of like the whole point of the Tesla semi is that it is doing things differently to bring advantages that traditional semis do not. Kitsune Sensei says most of your wishes for trucks are already reality outside of North America. This is, this is true. Electric trucks in like, I remember seeing like a crazy number apparently in the last year, there were more electric trucks produced in China than the entire total addressable market, like the entire annual market for fossil fuel and electric trucks in North America. So, yes, electric trucks are definitely a thing. But guys, it's good news. Wan show. Can we just let a win be a win? Okay, there's more electric trucks on the road. All right, what else we got? You want to pick one?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. Let's jump through here.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think I know what you might pick. I'm gonna be ready for it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it just the next one?

[Linus Sebastian]

Whatever you want.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right to Repair Repeal Repelled What a. What a title. Colorado's consumer Rights Continue Kick rocks corpos. Colorado's consumer rights right to repair digital electronics equipment law took effect in January 2026, providing access to documentation and tools to repair or modify electronics. However, a new bill was proposed that would create an exception for critical infrastructure, a term that advocates that advocates feel is too loosely defined. The bill was supported by lobbyists for Cisco and IBM and passed unanimously through the Colorado Senate. Really? But was shot down in a 7 to 4 vote by the Colorado House's State Civic, Military and Veteran Affairs Committee. The core arguments from Cisco representatives claimed that there was potential cybersecurity risks. To what? What's to stop bad actors from using those tools to reverse engineer Internet routers?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, lots of. Okay, carry on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cybersecurity experts pointed out it doesn't really work like that. The vast majority of hacks are carried out remotely, and it is more likely the victims of hacks that need to make changes on the fly without acquiring permission from manufacturers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Dan Siegel]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool. Oh, man. Our discussion question here is, is there? Is there? Oh, okay. No, I misread it. I thought it was wanting us to get into whether lobbying should be a thing or not. No, we're definitely not approaching that on the WAN show today.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

I thought you were going to do this one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, where is that one?

[Linus Sebastian]

Up a little higher.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I see it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This week, Noctua announced that they now offer public 3D CAD models for all their fans. You can find the files directly from their product download section, just like any fan. Sorry. Just find any fans such as the classic NFF F12 PWM. Oh, one sec. Go away. If you want to download a step file to check it out, Sammy might have a 3D printed one for you to check out, which is here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. It is worth noting that this is not going to allow you to make your own Noctua fan. This fan that Luke is holding is not really a fan so much as it is a. There's no motor model of a fan. Yeah, there's no motor in it. And Noctua says that they intentionally adjusted the geometry a little bit so that cosmetically it looks like they're fans. But if you were to 3D print your own fan and actually put a motor in it, it would not achieve the same performance characteristics. You know, obviously that wouldn't prevent anyone from just buying a real Noctua fan and scanning it or whatever. A sophisticated enough counterfeiter would be able to make it without this anyway. But this is more for community members to have realistic looking Noctua products in their, you know, their renderings or whatever else.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

So yeah, I think. I don't know, I just. I just. I just thought it was pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Exactly. In other sweet news, Libra Pods no longer requires root for some features so Libra Pods, if you're not familiar, is a way to use AirPods on Android and have some of the Apple exclusive features accessible. The app now works without root privileges on Google pixels running Android 16 March update or later with the latest Play system update. Google pixels running Android 17 beta 3 or above. Okay, hold on, I'm a little confused by those two. Do I have a problem with my notes control f Pixel? Okay, well mileage may vary on those two OnePlus devices that are running Oxygen OS 16 and above, Oppo devices on ColorOS 16 and above, and Realme devices on Realme UI 7.0 and above. You can now get the following features without noise control modes, ear detection, battery status, head gestures and conversational awareness. There are a few more features that librapod supports but still require root and that's hearing aid mode, customized transparency mode, and multi device connectivity. Honestly they've nailed down most of the stuff that I would think I would need. The app is free on the Play Store but does require an in app purchase of 5 Euro in order to unlock all functionality. I think I actually bought it a while ago. I just need to check it's my my Galaxy phone is still not on the list but I am very very ready to have more more Libre Pods. Goodness man, it's amazing how many updates like modern platforms make to make them supposedly faster and yet they are so slow. Like I remember when it's a lot

[Luke Lafreniere]

of updates are not for speed.

[Linus Sebastian]

YouTube updated their dashboard. They claimed it was all about speed. It is still slower than it ever was like the creator dashboard and like graphs and everything like hello, can we can look can I search for Something, anyway. Not right now, apparently. What else we got today?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's see. Boink pentathlon. The LCT boink team will be competing in the seventh boink pentathlon running from 17th. That makes more sense. Running from May 5th to the 19th. In this event we'll go up against other tech communities contributing computing power through BOINC to support scientific research and progress. Last year LTT placed in second overall. Our goal this year is to take home the gold. If you want to join the competition to support science, you can find the details and sign up on the thread on the forum.

[Dan Siegel]

Oh, I finally have a use for my computer. I'll compete this year with you guys.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here's all the details. There will be prizes. Oh wow. There's community donated prizes.

[Dan Siegel]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Steam keys. Yeah. Well, we're providing some prizing too, right? We better be. Well, we're on it. We'll find some prizes. Don't worry about it. Let me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't see us in there, but we usually do.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't know. We'll get it done. Heck yeah. All right, cool. Heck yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

LTT form and Xbox Mode begins rolling out to players on Windows 11 PCs. Scroll today, Microsoft is expanding what used to be called the full screen experience on handhelds like the ROG X Xbox Ally to all Windows 11 PCs, laptops, desktops, tablets, etc. Xbox mode is a full screen controller optimized interface that puts your game library front and center while minimizing background distractions, rolling out gradually in select markets via Windows Update. You can toggle it in Settings, then enter it with Windows and F11 from the game bar or by pressing the Xbox button on a paired controller.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, so three different ways to activate it. Discussion Question Is Xbox Mode what Windows Gaming should have been all along?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, probably.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I mean it's. It's basically the game folder from Windows Vista, but like, way better. Overall, I like it. Ish. In some ways it feels like it can be a little unnecessary because my entire game library is in Steam pretty much. But if I was someone who had a game library that spanned multiple launchers to a greater degree, then yeah, having the. The Xbox mode experience consolidate them all would have more of a value to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I definitely have multiple launchers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean you might like it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I might. Especially with new Assassin's Creed. Not new Assassin's Creed, the new Assassin's Creed remaster coming and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's definitely a little bit, you know, full of game pass and stuff, but you don't have to click those buttons

[Luke Lafreniere]

so as they're there, they'll probably annoy me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, let's see. Let's see. Hey, speaking of things that are there and might not annoy you, Toyota's limited edition $3,500 Crown Gaming Chair. I mean, is here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know, what does annoy me about this is. I've. I don't know, man. I don't fit a lot of chairs. Just being honest. I don't. So I saw this and was like, no way. Let's go. I want the purchase page right now. And then I saw the price, and I was like, well, someone will have fun with that.

[Linus Sebastian]

It looks pretty fancy. I love that there's actually USB C.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't notice that when I first looked at it. That is actually so funny.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry. My. My zoo. My zoom is being a little funky here. Hold on. I'm 100%. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why is it 3, $500 though?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's like the Crown collection, like the

[Dan Siegel]

price of two monitors.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's so painful.

[Linus Sebastian]

Heating, cooling sounds pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cooling sounds incredible.

[Linus Sebastian]

The cooling sounds amazing. I don't know what I would do with this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know, my chair at home is

[Linus Sebastian]

right now charging, I guess, because it wouldn't be data. Like, it wouldn't be connected to my computer.

[Dan Siegel]

Don't answer that. Luke. We got a merch message for later. Wait.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, wait. For some reason. What's in the caboose?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that all the, like. Is that the, like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, does it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Stuff for the heating and cooling the junk.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait, like, this needs to be, like, plugged in.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I'm sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right. Which makes sense. Yeah. Heating and cooling. Wow. You know, I want to try it. Is it Japan only, though? I think it's Japan only.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just, you know, there's only about 70 units being made. Why, man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. My question is, if you're gonna put the work into creating it, why so few? You know, there's more than 70 people who'd be like, toyota gaming chair, and just do it. 3,500 more than 70 for sure. Come on. Toyota fanboys with money and the Toyota Crown, you know, they didn't spend that much on their car, so the Toyota

[Luke Lafreniere]

Crown is one of those, like, super fanc cars, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

I actually.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm pretty sure it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't know. What's a Toyota Crown?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought they were really nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it. According to AI, the Toyota Crown Hybrid sedan starts at around 55,000 Canadian dollars, so. No, not even. Like I said, they bought a Toyota, so they clearly didn't overpay for their car. So they can afford. So they can afford a fancy chair, I guess.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. Is this a plug in hybrid,

[Dan Siegel]

is it?

[Linus Sebastian]

What, the chair?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, the car.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Toyota hybrid system.

[Linus Sebastian]

If it doesn't say plug in hybrid, then it's just a regular hybrid powertrains, limited models, blah blah. Hybrid system, turbocharged hybrid, Max. Yeah. No, no, they're hybrid, not plug in hybrid.

[Dan Siegel]

Damn.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, Luke. All right. The show is brought to you by Squarespace. Whether it's a business or a hobby, if you want to share what you're doing with the world, a website goes an awful long way and our sponsor, Squarespace is still here to help you. You can do it yourself without the stress or headache of coding or figuring out the business aspect of running a site. With Squarespace, they're like a partner. That way they've got a ton of templates to help you get started. Or you can even use their design intelligence tool to create something personal by just answering a few questions about your business. You can also run your business through their platform thanks to direct invoicing with payment options like Direct Debit, Apple Pay and more. And even if your brand name is followed by dot com, or even if your brand name followed by dot com is already taken, Squarespace can help you pick from millions of domains so you can get something that's both searchable and easy to read, Remember? And once your site's up and running, you can keep track of its performance with a variety of analytic tools that Squarespace provides. So start building your website today and get 10% off your first purchase by visiting squarespace.com wan finally, the show is brought to you by Ninja1. If you manage more than a handful of machines, you probably know that it can be a bit of a nightmare keeping everything patched, monitored and under control without that becoming a full time job on its own. We'll. Well, our sponsor Ninja 1 lets you handle endpoint management, patch management, remote access, and. And what I assume this is backup. Must be from a single console. Okay, they. They do that, so that must be it just says back in my notes. Yeah, from a single console. Whether that's for Windows, macOS, Linux servers or mobile devices. Ninja 1 was built for IT teams and MSPs who were tired of metaphorically duct taping a bunch of tools together. It's been rated number one by users across 14 IT management categories on G2 in the spring of this year, and is used by over 35,000 customers across more than 140 countries. And the best part? You don't have to take my word for any of it. You can try it for free with no credit card, no sales pressure. Just go to ninja ninja1.com or click the link in the description to start your free trial. Got a couple more topics still too do we A bank robber is trying to get out of his conviction by claiming that geofence warrants are a violation of his constitutional rights. This is down in the States. The Supreme Court is hearing this case on whether a geofence warrant violates the fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Is that the case? Well, here we'll get to it. The case stems from a 2019 bank robbery in Richmond, Virginia where a man made off with $195,000. Police had no leads until they served a geofence warrant on Google, which handed over location data for every device that was in the area around the time of the robbery, which eventually led to the man's arrest when they found a bunch of cash with them. So context of geofence warrants if you need it Police draw a virtual circle around a crime scene, pick a time window, and then ask a tech company like Google to hand over data on every device that was inside that circle during that time. Practical usage tends to follow these stages. Initial sweep gives police anonymized location pings and timestamps for every device within the circle identified only by numerical IDs. Police then flag any devices that look suspicious based on movement patterns and go back to the tech company with a follow up request to unmask those specific accounts, getting the email addresses, phone numbers and usernames that are tied to them. In the case of Google, this data comes from Google's location history feature, which technically requires you to opt in. But most people who use Google Maps or other Google services are already sharing this information. So the plaintiff's lawyer argued that even anonymized location data acts like a type of fingerprint, since your specific movement patterns can be used to identify you. The DOJ countered that location data just represents public movements that anyone could observe, so the Fourth Amendment defense shouldn't apply. The discussion question here is that the justices seem split and generally reluctant to wade into how the Fourth Amendment operates in today's world. Oh, this one is complicated.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, why do criminals keep bringing identifiable phones to crime scenes?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but then also a very complicated

[Luke Lafreniere]

question but then also will never understand

[Linus Sebastian]

but then also also why am I able to be tracked in a personal, personally identifiable way by something that supposedly cares about my privacy Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

But then counter, counterpoint, if you're a ne' er do well, taking money that ultimately, you know, we all pay for. Like, I'm not an American and I don't bank at that bank, so I have nothing to do with, like, that specific case. But at the. The day we all pay for crime, like, societally, do I. Do I mind if ne' er do

[Luke Lafreniere]

well, everyone there got their information flagged and taken by the government.

[Linus Sebastian]

But then counter, counter, counterpoint. Yes. To Luke's point, that's exactly what the

[Luke Lafreniere]

lawyer's arguing and who's defining how big the circle is? So what if they're like, there was a bank robbery in North Vancouver. What if. What if we circled the entire greater Vancouver area and just grabbed everything and used this data for multiple other things going on? And also so I can track my wife's phone to see if she's going somewhere that I don't like or I'm not gonna tell anyone that I just did that.

[Linus Sebastian]

What if there was no bank robbery? What if there was a protest?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now all of a sudden, it can become a tool for government crackdown. I actually do not envy the Supreme Court justices as they navigate this one. To be clear, I have no pity for Buddy, who got busted stealing a bunch of money from a bank. Just desserts. However, the methods do matter if you want to even maintain the branding of having a free society, and this one is complicated.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're just exercising their freedom to all of your information and data and knowing where you are all the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's what you think freedom is?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just. It's just freedom. I don't know what you're talking about.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, man. Freedom is. She's a complicated. She's a complicated concept. I read a really interesting essay recently, recently on the. The ways that the word and the concept of freedom have been kind of perverted from the way that a lot of people kind of intended them in the. In the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In the.

[Linus Sebastian]

In the creation of sort of the. The Western model of free society.

[Dan Siegel]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

And how they've become kind of divorced from the responsibilities that accompany that freedom and how we're not sure if that freedom will survive an unwillingness to also exercise the freedom responsibly and be a part of. Be a part of that functioning free society. It's a really interesting essay. I wish I could find the link for you guys, but. Yeah, fascinating. It doesn't come to a conclusion because it's. Because it's complicated.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Archangel of Death. Said, as the saying goes, your freedom ends when the freedom of the big corporation and government starts. Or something like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes sir. Just so that everyone's clear, Archangel of Death meant that with a big fat slash. S okay, relax.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sometimes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah, but your freedom to have

[Luke Lafreniere]

your IP not ripped off just got obliterated by every single AI company on the planet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yes, Luke, it's good news. Wancho.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right. Okay, calm down. Next topic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Android developers are revolting against Google's 2026 sideloading registration mandate starting September 2026, Google is fundamentally changing how sideloading works on Android. Right now, installing an app from outside the Play Store is as simple as downloading an APK and tapping install. Sort of. You have to enable unknown developers, whatever, whatever, whatever, but sort of under the new rules, every developer, even hobbyists and open source contributors who never touch the Play Store must register with Google, verify their identity with government issued id, register their app signing keys, agree to Google's terms, and pay a $25 fee. If they don't, their app gets silently blocked from installing on any certified Android device. Google says that power users can still install unverified apps, but the new advanced flow requires enabling developer mode by tapping the build number seven times, navigating through multiple settings screens, and waiting out a mandatory 24 hour cooling off period. Over 37 organizations including the EFF F, Droid, Proton, Nextcloud and the Tor project have signed an open letter demanding that Google reverse course. Fdroid calls the mandate existential since its entire model relies on volunteer and pseudonymous developers who have no reason or desire to register with Google. The rollout starts in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand with a global expansion plan for 2027. Custom ROMs like GrapheneOS and LineageOS are unaffected. Discussion Question if installing an app on your own phone now requires a 24 hour waiting period in Developer mode, can Google still call Android and open platform?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, I think they can still call it whatever they want, but is it one? I don't know. I think this is something that would kind of push me to do the same thing I'm doing with Linux right now on my phone, which is just try alternative options.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let me pitch you some food for thought with this change. Would you be more comfortable recommending an Android phone for your grandpa or grandma? No, really, I would. Straight up 24 hour waiting period for random APKs. The way that scams work. Zero question now. Does that mean that I support the move? Not necessarily. I see lots of problems with it, but I also can see a good Faith argument for why Google wants to unmask developers on the platform. And they are still offering a way that you can install anything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know what I would like a

[Linus Sebastian]

24 hour waiting period would functionally kill the like oh yeah, grandpa, just go here and install this and click through this. And click through this. I'll wait on the phone with you while you dump all of your life savings.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A lot of those scams are multi day long.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Not all that's totally fair. It would make it so much more work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, it definitely would. I, I would like to see this as a feature that is like family management controllable.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting. So like a fleet management feature. But okay, so here's my question though, because who is the administrator of that though? Like as, as a, as a head of family, like techie dude, I hear that and I go, oh yeah, that totally makes sense. That's how I would manage it through Family Link. And I would do this and I would do that. But most people's structure is not necessarily like that. Like I can, this is one of those ones where on the surface I

[Luke Lafreniere]

can see this feels like sacrificing freedom for security. It does that I do not like it does. But I think if you put that in the power of users.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You'll still lose some people because they're not going to have that type person in their family or whatever. But in my experience of my, my grandpa living far away in a retirement village effectively.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There was like an IT person thing. I don't even know what I would call it. It was like the person that everyone in that town because it was, it was a pretty sprawling area but it was. And everyone had their own homes and stuff. But it was a retirement focused area. I don't even know. I'm sure it has a name. I don't know what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Retirement community.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. And I don't know if this person's shop was like on site in that community or not. But like just everybody knew who he was and he had a particular way of dealing with everyone which was actually like kind of neat because it was like the only person everybody really used. Word of mouth was everywhere that like if you were having like if your laptop was screwed up he would just exchange you and then fix yours and like sell it to somebody else or whatever. Like he was pretty good about just like keeping people going.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And he had basically like team viewer on everyone's systems which I know. But he could tap in if he like needed to help you with something because there would often be like, oh, there's something going on with whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's what our change of Death says. 24 hours is enough time for my elderly family members to call me just to check if they're doing the right thing. I'm still fundamentally against it for other reasons. And I think that actually summarizes is sort of where I'm at right now. I haven't had a lot of time to think about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My reason for this very long story.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, sorry, carry on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is whoever that dude was could maybe enable this thing for these people.

[Linus Sebastian]

But he was a good actor. What if he wasn't? Yeah, then disaster.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And if you're not a good actor and you're in that Dude's position, this 24 hour window will not stop you.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is true. Fools and Horses has a really good point and asks asks the question, has Android gotten so large that the risk of being called negligent for allowing these things and for not putting obstacles in the way is greater than the risk of their disgruntled customers over this? Loss of freedom, loss of openness. How much of the market would they really lose? And I think that's got to be the question that Google's asking themselves as they navigate this decision. And I suspect the answer for how many people they're going to lose is extremely small.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah,

[Linus Sebastian]

and that's not like, that's not me saying that I support the decision. I'm just saying that that's the reality is that most people are not even watching the WAN show, not even aware of this, would have never sideloaded an APK anyway unless some rando told them to do it, in which case this was probably a thing. So G freak asks why is this also required? Okay, sorry, they're responding to someone else. Yeah, nevermind. Yeah, NM White says it won't be zero, but yeah, it will be small. Leaving one's most experienced os. And just like switching is like kind of a pain. Like honestly, that's why Yvonne's still on iOS. Not because she prefers it, but just after she did the iPhone challenge she's just like, oh, switching phones is such a pain in the butt. It really is. And just I do think it's going to be pretty negligible. R Come in says leave to what iOS. I mean graphene os is an option iOS. I saw that. I saw. Cool. This was cool. This was not really good news enough to be good news WAN show, but Windows Phone Android launcher someone is working on or made. Oh no, apparently this is old just an Android launcher That looks a lot like Windows Phone, which I thought was pretty cool. Anyway, that's it. That was a little highlight for that. I don't think we're gonna reach a conclusion on this one because I don't think that it's cut and dried. I do appreciate Google's position that they are still allowing side loading with these caveats. And for me, for my use of Android, the handful of times that I've needed to side load this would have been good enough. This would have been a minor inconvenience.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Where does the slope end?

[Linus Sebastian]

Are we on the slipper? So.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So. And I can't tell. I don't know that we are. I'm not trying to claim.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't either. We are. I don't either.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There are times where I have been like, this is a slope. I don't know that this one is, but it smells like one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, okay. In a vacuum, I would push back. If this was the only change that Google had made to Android over the last five years, then I'd be like, luke, come on. They've been good stewards. They've done this, they've done that. In the context of everything that Google has done, though, with Chrome and with Android, with their products in general over. I mean, the last while, it's a lot harder for me to do that. They've lost my trust. Yeah. And I think that's a big part of it. It's like they've. There was a time when Google might have done this and said, trust me, bro, I got you. And I said, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I would have. I still have a little bit of that with them, but not as much as before. I feel like they check in on Killed by Google. I feel like they've been slowing down, but I'm not sure. Okay, so 2026 and beyond is these.

[Dan Siegel]

Oh, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's actually not that much compared to. I mean, 2024 being like, what all of this.

[Linus Sebastian]

The post Covid time was a big. Was a time of a lot of consolidation for the big tech companies. Team sizes shrank, projects were abandoned. It wasn't just Google at that time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow. Mass meeting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. The Google is like the corporate embodiment of throw things at the wall and see what sticks, man. Yeah. And this next After Dark segment is the embodiment of throw questions at us. And producer Dan, he's a Rubbermaid bin shelf now. Oh, there he is. Throw questions at us and see what sticks.

[Dan Siegel]

They have become square. Let me get us changed over after dark and I have to push this button too. Sorry, that came out of nowhere. I was unprepared.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You good?

[Dan Siegel]

Hey, lld, I've been thinking about this lately. Badminton is super popular around the world, but most pro players, aside from the very top, don't seem to make nearly as much as athletes in other big sports.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think about this a lot. So take this for the semi informed rant that it kind of is. I think it's a number of problems and I think that bwf, so Badminton World Federation is doing some things right to address it. For instance, they actually just recently changed the scoring format. So in the, in the olden days. So I guess this ended, ended in the 90s or early 2000s. I think badminton was done with service point. So that is that you can only score a point when you begin the rally with the serve. Okay, so it was service point sets of 15 and then best of three sets. The problem with service point is that the games would sometimes drag on forever. It was an enormous burden on the athletes. And when you consider that oftentimes during tournaments they're playing back to back to back across subsequent days, it could put you at a major disadvantage if one of your sets dragged on for a really long time because you have to win by two. So a service point win by two means that you could just defensively carry things forever. And it really rewarded endurance and less aggressive play. So it was changed to rally point so you can win a point on any service, whether it's yours or the other players. So I believe in the, I believe in the 2000s, don't quote me on that, but I believe it was the 2000s to encourage a more aggressive style of play. But to make sure the matches weren't crazy short, it was changed to 21 points per set. I think the 21 point service point, or excuse me, 21 point rally point format, still best of three was horrible for the game, not for the players. The players like it and they actually, from my understanding, still mostly like it. And there's a lot of resistance to the new scoring format, which is 15 points rally point. But why I think it's so detrimental to the sport is it's really boring to watch a 21 point match. I mean, tell me how important in hockey, how important is the first goal to you as a player?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right? Yeah, extremely, extremely important.

[Linus Sebastian]

From the opening face off, from that moment, the entire game could be riding on the line.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's also a significant amount of like fear at any point in time that something might happen which could result in a goal. Okay, like if you see, if you're, if you're, you know, if the, if the enemy team is in your team zone and you're a fan, you're shaking in your boots at most stages of the game.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. Okay, so counterpoint. What if a hockey game was played to 21 goals, then the first goal are you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Almost doesn't matter.

[Linus Sebastian]

So what's happened?

[Luke Lafreniere]

And especially you got to set the tone.

[Linus Sebastian]

Especially in a format that is, is like a seeded bracketed tournament where your top seeds are playing against your bottom seeds up until you reach realistically like the round of 16 or quarterfinals. You end up with a lot of boring play that no one cares about. Because the first like little bit of the game is everyone just kind of like settling in. And then after that you've got like a very obvious who's going to win and who's not going to win. There's very little upset in the rally point system because a better player will just win more points and there's less like, oh, but hold on. He could defend, he could defend their service, regain the serve and like, like, like scrape his way back into the game. You don't really get as many momentum swings and you get, don't get as many upsets and you get a lot of the game that's just kind of like people are, the players themselves are kind of tuned out. They're not going as hard. And I think it's really boring to watch. The other thing that contributes to badminton being boring to watch is the camera is the broadcast. The camera angles suck. They do such a poor job. I remember showing someone like a really high level badminton match at one point and I'm going, well, why are they just like lobbing it to each other? And I'm like, bro, if I hit those shots to you on a court and you like properly understood from the actual movement how far they're going, they travel way farther in way less time than top level tennis players. But you don't know that from watching it. You can't tell like the sheer athleticism of the game is not apparent from.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think that's true.

[Linus Sebastian]

Way farther. It's not even close. You cannot think it's true, but it's

[Luke Lafreniere]

in the amount of time. I think you're totally right.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it's not even close. I promise you. Men's. So it's a men's singles to men's singles, like top level Olympic match comparison. Someone did the math.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Total distance move.

[Linus Sebastian]

Total distance moved.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, I think, yeah, I think we're talking about different things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Total distance moved is higher and it's in less time. Both of those things. It's crazy. Like what they're doing out there and the explosiveness of the movement. It's a great game. It's a wonderful game. You can't tell the angles. Do it. No service whatsoever. And especially the English speaking commentators, they might as well be commentating golf. So I'm coming around to my point. Finally.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You should commentate a game. It'd be fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not experienced. I'm not like I. It would still be very amateur and like crappy and boring.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bring one. This is how game casting does it. Bring one person on who bring one of the people from badminton insights and you. And then you have like, you're the energy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

And they're the next person.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what? That's kind of an interesting idea. It's kind of an interesting idea. I kind of. I kind of like the idea. Anyway, I'm coming around to my point here. So you ask why the players aren't paid as much and it's because, in my humble opinion, I see a lot of resistance from the players to rule changes that would make the game more entertaining to watch. Where does money come from?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

It doesn't necessarily come from people playing the game in their backyards. They'll go and they'll buy a racket from Yonex or Victor or whatever. So there's revenue coming into the companies that are sponsoring these events, but it's not necessarily attributable to the players. It's not attributable necessarily to the broadcast, except like you said, to those very top players where the matches are interesting, where anyone could win. So I would actually like to see them go even farther in the reduction of points per set. I'd like to see something that's closer to like a tennis scoring system. So for badminton, because the rallies are generally shorter, what I'd like to see is maybe like best of five sets, but playing service point to like five points or seven points. So very, very, very short sets, but that have service point in order to give an opportunity for upset victories. Because realistically, even if I'm a much better badminton player than you, I could make three mistakes if you know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I'm kidding.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but. But I could make three mistakes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure, sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now the pressure's on. Yeah, yeah, right. You create tension. I want tension and I want excitement the whole time I'm watching. Think about sports that are fun to watch, that keep you on the edge. Of your seat the whole time you're watching. Anything could happen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's a. Yeah, it's always tension.

[Linus Sebastian]

Badminton doesn't achieve that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All the ideas. Your idea is very interesting. All the ideas I've been trying to think of while sitting here, I don't think work for the players at all. I had one where, like, if your rally gets far enough in, it starts. It becomes like, worth more or something. Oh, but like that now you have no players, like, counting on. Course it doesn't work. Yeah, it would be kind of fun as, like a video game, but it doesn't work as like a sport.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Like. And then. And then if you get enough multiplier bonus, you could have. You could nuke your opponent from orbit with the GEO positioning laser.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you. If you go six, six, rally back and forth, you can like, double jump.

[Linus Sebastian]

You could do a special. A special combo move.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Helicopter hit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So there. Sorry. That's my extremely long answer to what I think is wrong with badminton is it's not. It's not fun enough to watch.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A lot of sports have that problem.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. It also has the problem of, like, being very, very multinational and therefore it being hard to get, like, good common language interviews for your various geographies of audience.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah,

[Linus Sebastian]

it's tough. Like, it's. It's a funny thing because in general, I find myself not liking the corporatization of sports. Like, it. It kind of sucks that Macklin Celebrini doesn't play for the Vancouver Canucks. Given he's from here and he's like the most exciting player in hockey right

[Luke Lafreniere]

now, that'd be pretty freaking cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't think I would mind that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That would be awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

And like, the fact that Connor McDavid doesn't play for the Toronto Maple Leafs is, like, you know, kind of ridiculous. Where. Where's. Where's Sid from? He's from. He's from Nova Scotia, I think. Right. So the fact that the Hartford Whalers don't get to still exist and Sid plays for them, like, come on, man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was like. Okay, so. Yeah, but this is very true with hockey, where, like, Americans will be like, oh, well, we beat you. And it's like, yeah, your team has a lot of Canadians on it. But then baseball, you look at the Toronto Raptors, it's like, all the Canadians finally made. It was like, kind of.

[Linus Sebastian]

Were there, like two Canadians on the team or something?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's kind of a lot of Americans. So.

[Linus Sebastian]

So as much as I. So as much as I don't love the corporatization of, of sport where, like the Vancouver. Vancouver Canucks is just a brand. It has no meaning. Like, there was at one point there was more Swedes than Canadians on the team, which I don't mind. I have nothing against Swedes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just historically been a big thing for Vancouver to have a, like, disproportionate amount of Swedes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Basically the Canucks were Team Sweden at one point. And so I don't like that. But what that does a really good job of is like getting people excited about, you know, like their team. Whereas when it's like the national team, if you don't happen to have a star player, especially in a more individual sport like badminton, there's like nothing, kind of nothing to cheer for. Whereas if you just, you know, had the, you know, the Malaysia Aces and you know, the Canadian Geese or, you know, like you had, you did more branding around it, then. Yeah, I think there's, then I think there's a chance to.

[Dan Siegel]

To.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's also arguments long term fandom. Yeah. Like people will identify. Like, they'll wear the hat. You know, like, I'm a, I'm a Chargers fan. You know, I'm a Raptors guy.

[Dan Siegel]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nobody. Nobody. Very few people do that except like on the court. Like, they'll, they'll wear like, you know, a jersey or whatever for their favorite player. But there's not that, that team branding. And it works. It works. I don't make the rules. It works.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is an ignorance thing. Is most of the world as interested in sports at all as North America is?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, dude. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like as a viewer, as a fan. Dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like cricket in India.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that them having a massive population.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's just crazy. Okay. And like, dude, at soccer. Soccer, South America. Yes. Spectator 100 p. The Brits hundo p. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Pretty huge.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Huge. Oh, yeah, yeah. Agent Renzo said Japan loves baseball. Dude, the way that Japan just kind of was like, oh, this American thing. Nope, it's a Japanese thing now. By the way, the greatest player on the face of the earth is Japanese. He's an absolute God at absolutely everything. Like, Japan just exploded into the baseball scene. That's been, that's been wild to watch over my lifetime.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just like whenever I'm traveling, literally anywhere that I've gone, I've never been to India, but anywhere that I've gone.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You don't see it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's what I mean. Like if, like in Canada you go basically anywhere and you're going to see somebody wearing something to do with some sports team in America. Same deal.

[Linus Sebastian]

Would you necessarily recognize their sports attire?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not necessarily, but usually sports attire has kind of a vibe.

[Linus Sebastian]

It does.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Solid color, big logo.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I wouldn't. I wouldn't necessarily.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There are definitely there. I guarantee you there are cricket teams. I would have no idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah,

[Luke Lafreniere]

yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, hit us, Dan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And sometimes some soccer jerseys just look like an advertisement.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is true.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can't tell.

[Dan Siegel]

Hey, DLL, loving the cables. Do we have any news on DisplayPort or HDMI?

[Linus Sebastian]

The news is that we're working on development, but realistically, even if we got our golden samples and signed off and said go, there's no production capacity for them until we can somewhat catch up on USB C and USB A. So we're working on it. We're going to do it. They're not going to be the same, so they're going to be a little bit more rigid just because the conductors are so thick. So they're going to have like a bit more like memory to them, but they're still going to have the same outer sheath. So those be super UV resistant and they'll have that kind of. That nice feel to them. And obviously the signal quality will be a top priority, but they won't have quite the same flexibility, so that's something to watch out for.

[Dan Siegel]

Hello, dll. Steam Frame hype.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I know.

[Dan Siegel]

If it ever comes out. Any opinion on the way Valve has handled the release so far? Has Luke tried the controller?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have not.

[Dan Siegel]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You should. You should borrow one just to try it out. It's different. It's definitely better for people with big hands than for people with my size mitts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When I saw the imagery of it, I thought that'd probably be true. She's a thick boy, the big pads man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. As for how Valve's handled the release so far, I don't think Valve had a choice. Obviously Valve would have loved to have the Steam controller and the Steam Machine and the Steam frame come out the at. At the same time. I'm like, no question.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But rounds are starting in the warehouse for the controllers. Got to start moving them. Yeah, I. I saw in your review the. The thumb collision thing. I suspect I'll have an issue with that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right. You don't love the symmetrical thumb sticks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Neither do I. I really hate it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Neither do I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really hate it.

[Dan Siegel]

Read Badman AEF dll, It's great to watch live from the uk. From your limited experience with it, would you say that the Steam Machine will be worth the wait or Bite the bullet and upgrade my i7 7700k at today's prices.

[Linus Sebastian]

There are some deals to be had on dram right now. I don't know how long they're going to last.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's funny looking at them be like oh it's whatever percentage off.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's like yeah, yeah, don't ignore that. Just look at the price. If you can snag a deal, I would snag the deal. You can snag and I wouldn't wait much longer. I7. 7700k is old enough that there are modern games that are going to benefit from a big upgrade for you. I would go for it.

[Dan Siegel]

Hi Linus and team. Are you still running an LG TV OLED as your work monitor? Any annoyances you've come across and how did you fix them?

[Linus Sebastian]

I am not anymore. The biggest annoyance has got to be the auto brightness control. As you go from, from windowed applications to full screen applications, there's not a ton that can really be done about that. The monitor that I'm using for work right now is the one that we did a sponsored LTT for. This thing is absolutely knocking futs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whoa.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's 52 inches 6k and the way Dell markets it is as like a 4K. What's the size of the 4K they they compare it to? I don't remember but Basically it's like 6144 by 2560 at 120Hz this thing is wild. So it's like having a 4K display and then like two 1080s flanking it. And it's 52 inches across, it's curved, it's got a built in Thunderbolt hub. So I just roll up with my laptop plug in and all my peripherals are ready to rock. My webcam, my mic, everything good to go. It's IPS so there's no tomfoolery around like auto brightness and dimming and anything like that. It's like 4,000 Canadian dollars. So it's like three grand U.S. i

[Luke Lafreniere]

was going to say. I think I'll keep my, my three monitors.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's the nicest monitor that I use but could never recommend. You know what I'm saying?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean that's fair enough. And hopefully you know that you're seeing prices like of standard class monitors, I don't know, 1080 1440pmonitors right now constantly coming down. Stuff like that will come down eventually

[Linus Sebastian]

and for the, for the price I would solidly recommend the 42 inch TV instead. That's even with the distractions and annoyances. I remember we did a video a while back on how you can get like a service remote for the LG and there's more stuff you can adjust. I don't know that that's true. The newer ones though, I think I was on like a C2 at the time.

[Dan Siegel]

Yeah. I've got a C2 as my main monitor. 52 inches. Nice. And they're pretty damn cheap. Let's see what else is next. Hey Luke, how are you liking Tarov 1.0?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was having a pretty okay time with it and then.

[Linus Sebastian]

You sound so enthusiastic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We. And then we Linux challenged. I do want to escape from Tarkov. I want to like complete the game, which is possible now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hit me up. Hit me up. I'll join.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll be your boat anchor.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We'll see how that goes. Especially because like I was playing decently close to launch and doing okay. But if I jumped in now, everyone's gonna have like crazy gear. So it might make sense for me to wait for a wipe again and then try to beat it then. But we'll see.

[Dan Siegel]

Hello, DLL from the Netherlands. Question one. My company is looking to give non techie users to Vibe code in house. Apps users think will help them with their work. What's your thoughts? Also, when's the LTT Vibe code video coming?

[Linus Sebastian]

I talked about that earlier.

[Dan Siegel]

Oh, you did? Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

So yeah, it's. It's dead. It'll maybe be a floatplane exclusive with like sort of roughly cut together. But it's just. It's been so long since I did the challenge that it just doesn't seem that relevant today.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I'm going to hear your question and take it in a slightly different angle. But an interesting application for Vibe coding that I've thought of recently that I've kind of pitched to somebody internally who was trying to vibe code their own thing. But something that would be pretty sketchy to Vibe code was how about you try to vibe code it on your own and use that as the request?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So like make this but not crap.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Basically because one of the most difficult parts is actually getting out of someone's brain what they actually want. You'd think that wouldn't be that hard, but it's really, really difficult sometimes.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was what I expected to be the conclusion of the Vibe coding challenge.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Was that the best use of it for someone like me was to make a proof of concept that I could then hand to a developer and go, this is what I need it to do now. It does everything I need it to do, make it not suck.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I'm not gonna lie, if you handed your version to Dan and he got to start with that instead of your notes, I bet you would have done a better job. And your notes weren't even, like, that bad. Like, compared to most people pitching things, your notes were pretty good. Some people will give you just nothing.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it's like, I tried to put a lot of thought into it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I. What I tried to do was I tried to provide Dan with the same prompting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

That I would give to an LLM.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because if, you know, if the LLM can't do it, then he can't do it for sure. Or, like, if he can't do it, then the LLM can't do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's what I was going for. So he would have to have all the information. So I tried to actually try, like, tried to be extra super serial, like, thorough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So, like, I. I think that can be kind of neat. Like, let this person brainstorm with themselves effectively and come up with like a. Yeah. I mean, this thing doesn't necessarily work, or maybe it's like a just absolute nightmare for security reasons or whatever else. But this is kind of what I want it to do. You can poke around and see the intention and then take that and actually make a thing out of it. Sounds pretty cool. A company really encouraging their employees to do that. I mean. Yeah, sounds like security problems, depending on what your company works on. I've also seen people do some really cool stuff with Vibe coding. I. I'm pretty sure. What's his name? Hank green. Hank green. YouTube. Let's go to his channel. He has a video, the Artemis photos you didn't see yet. And then in here, he Vibe coded a website called Artemis Timeline, and you can go through and see the. The photos that were taken and the, like, time of day and which camera took it and what they were supposed to be doing at the time and all that kind of stuff. And he put this together with some Vibe coding, and it didn't perfectly work, and he had to step in and make some changes to it and improve things and fix data and whatnot. But, like, he got part of the way there with Vibe coding, and if it. If you're not Hank Green and you can't take it the rest of the way there, maybe within your company, you can hand it off to somebody who can.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. It's funny you bring up, like, creators using Vibe coding. I was at Creator Summit recently and I spoke to at least one. I'll just put it that way. Creator who uses Vibe coding very regularly in their projects and just doesn't disclose it. Yeah, because they just don't feel like dealing with the hate. Because at the end of the day, all the viewers care about is, like, the end result of the product. They're never going to audit the code. It doesn't matter because they're never going to ship it to anyone and they just love it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know multiple creators personally that. That use it and don't disclose it, but they're also not like, shipping.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

These are tools for themselves. Yeah, yeah. Like, and Hank Green did, but he disclosed it, I think, like multiple times in one video. Like, he wasn't.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a Hank Green thing to do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, sure is. What's a cool site? Oh, sorry, Sorry.

[Dan Siegel]

Go. What's up, boys? Luke, what specific chair do you use at home when sitting at your computer and gaming?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Had the name in my head earlier and I don't remember. Let me see one second.

[Dan Siegel]

I took that from you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can. I can find it pretty easily. Do to do computer. Oh, my God. Uter chair. The Marcus. The IKEA Marcus. That's it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice. Solid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's cheap. It's not that good. Nice.

[Dan Siegel]

Hello, legendary Lords of Devices. This question mostly goes to Luke. Wow. Three in a row. But Linus is free to answer as well. I've heard you mention playing Baldur's Gate 3 before. What's your favorite class to play?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think Linus is going to have one of these. I don't think you've played it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I always play mage chicks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Mage Chicken, World of Warcraft or Dragon Age or like, whatever. I'm just. I'm just. I go straight for the mage chick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I personally think those are cooler in divinity because the. The interaction of all the spells with each other. Being able to do that kind of stuff. Fighter,

[Linus Sebastian]

Classic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're just so sick in Baldur's Gate. They're crazy, dude. They're nuts. Attacking like six times in one turn is just crazy.

[Dan Siegel]

Jumping all over the place.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, they're nuts. One of the designers for Baldur's Gate must have looked at D and D and been like, fighters are boring. What if we just gave them crack? Just like, what happened?

[Linus Sebastian]

Worked for the Germans, basically.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So I don't know. Those are fun. I like tons of stuff, though. I've played a bunch of different classes, but. Yeah, just Just send it. Just full sending. Lae' zel down fighter is. Is sick.

[Dan Siegel]

All right, Dll, if LTD could pivot to a completely channel unrelated topic for one week, what would you cover? Also thanks for the new shipping perk. I upgraded to floatplane plus because I did the math and I would actually save money.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. If you order a fair bit from ltt store, it's. It's kind of a no brainer. The float plane perk includes always free shipping. I have clarified with the team that is apparently forever. So free shipping over a threshold but during ship storm the thresholds even lower.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, okay. It would probably be okay. This is going to sound crazy, but I think it would be like going to garage sales if it was just for a week. Just like a throwaway thing. I would. I would probably. I would. I would probably like thrift or like go to garage sales. I love hunting for deals.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Garage yard wars.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it'd be kind of fun to like not have to bother with computer deals for a change. I'd like. I think that would be a blast. Linus and Luke just go to garage sales. I would watch. I would watch the crap out of that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was thinking, I don't feel like this is my personal vote, which I think everyone's gonna get pissed about, but my personal vote is that we maybe don't even do a scrapy wars this year.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, we're not doing one this year.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Okay. Everything's just kind of a mess. But I was thinking next time we bring it back, I think you and I should be teamed up. Oh, I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

You just want a trophy. Maybe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know what the. I don't know what the challenge is. I don't know why it makes sense, but I think it would be fun.

[Dan Siegel]

It's going to be two adults beating up toddlers at that point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, we've done it before.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we. We lost once when we were teamed up, I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nope.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did we not?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We did. And then figured out that they cheated.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's right. I remember that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. But they did. They did super well. And I think they only really cheated cuz their part like died. Which was unfortunate. But we still win.

[Dan Siegel]

Hello, Linus, Luke and Dan. What has been the biggest tech interruption caused by pets? Once I had our dog rip a DSL cable which took down Internet and television for a few hours.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When I was a kid, we had a pet rabbit and they chewed through all of the cables behind the tv.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then my brother and I didn't think quite as highly of the rabbit.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can imagine you two not being into that. Not a pet, but I had rats destroy both our minivan and Yvonne's SUV recently, making nests in them and chewing through wires. They both had to go in for work over the last like, few months.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yikes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pretty not impressed by that. So I have to like, I have to like, rodent proof my garage now, which is just, you know, the kind of thing I love doing on a weekend.

[Dan Siegel]

I had that problem ages ago. In an effort to be green, they made the wires out of cellulose. Let's just make.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, really?

[Dan Siegel]

Yeah, it was some derivative or something. Let's just make all the wires in the car out of rat food.

[Linus Sebastian]

Great choice. Okay. As much as. As much as it's like a champagne problem. I was talking to my uncle about sort of green initiatives in manufacturing and how they sometimes have unintended consequences. And he was saying that in some ways an older era frame is actually more desirable than a newer one. And the reason is that the EPA mandates the use of more ecologically friendly primers on the frames now that just crack and fail after not that many years compared to the old paintings.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like crazy expensive because I don't know, it flies.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so the one from 1990, he was. Was telling me it's actually more economical to carefully remove only the paint and then just touch up the primer with the. Because you can't use the old stuff anymore. So you just like touch up the spots where you like accidentally went through it than it is to like strip it and reprime it because of how often you'll have to completely strip it and reprime it now. And everyone knows this and just, just keeps doing it. And it sort of raises the question, how much eco friendly paint do you need to use? Before it would have been better to just paint it once with the not eco friendly paint. And I don't know the answer to that question.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I also wonder what about it is not eco friendly and. And how not eco friendly it is. Because it could be that that original primer is just like really brutal.

[Linus Sebastian]

It could be as bad as painting it six times.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

But unless we, unless we know for sure that math, which maybe someone has done, but I just, hopefully I just doubt it. Like how many times do they have to manufacture the cable harness in mine and Dan's car before it would have been better to just use the less eco friendly cable harness.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. What if it's rat food?

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what I mean?

[Dan Siegel]

I mean, the Potential of the manufacturing of the product could also be super, super brutal. Like, maybe not so much for wire, you know, insulation, but, meh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Eh.

[Dan Siegel]

Sometimes these have unintended consequences.

[Linus Sebastian]

Bro. A bro.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

I just got some good news. What? I just got a tracking number. Oh, no. Or here, Here, I'll bring. I'll bring it up here. I'll bring it up here. I told these guys at ces. I guess it was. Did we even make a video?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cat os, stop tracking people.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think I made a video. Did I do a short?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bro, what are you talking about? You gotta tell me what you're talking about.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, okay, okay. Do you remember Roar Systems, the guys who did that, like, air jet thing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. At ces, they showed off something called liquid jet. So traditional cold plates, right, like, water blocks, are made by taking a plate of copper, and then you either you, like, mill a design in it, so, you know, like little pins or whatever, or. Or, like, a lot of modern ones use what's called skived copper, where you take a blade and so you take that flat piece of copper and you, like, shave a sliver of copper and then, like, fold it up and then make another fin and make another videos of making heatsinks. Skive copper.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, that's the traditional way. Your geometries are pretty limited because it's subtractive or like. Like using the malleability of the copper to reshape it. Roar is using more like. More like. Like. Like silicon manufacturing. So they're using, like, metal deposition. Like, you would. Like. You would make microchips. So by using copper deposition, they can make geometries that are, like. Like, out of this world, more thermally efficient than even skyved copper.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not a good.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not what I'm getting. That's not what I'm getting. I'm getting just. Oh, no, no. You can keep that up, though. I'm getting just the, like, cooling engines at the top, right? I'm getting two. So we're gonna try putting one on a gaming gpu.

[Dan Siegel]

Cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

And just, like, seeing how fast she go. This stuff's so cool. So I was. I've been working on this since January, and I was like, yeah, I don't see the point of me making. Yeah, I remember now. I was like, I don't see the point of me making a video about, like, here's a demo on a GPU no one will ever own. But I'm really excited about this, and I really want to work with you guys, but I Want one. And it's taken until now to kind of give them all the reassurances that like, you know, we're not going to judge them based on that. The, you know, the VRMs are going to be hotter because it's not a full coverage solution and just like. No, no, no, guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're good, we're good, we're good. I'm. Dude, I'm stoked. I'm so stoked to check it out.

[Dan Siegel]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice. That's sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan Siegel]

Howdy. From Texas. Mechanical manufacturing engineer here. What manufacturing methods do you use in the production of your products or any product in general that still fascinates you today?

[Linus Sebastian]

Injection molding.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was going to say it's all kind of fascinating.

[Linus Sebastian]

Casting, 3D printing, machining printing. I mean, lots of different things. Laser engraving. I mean, we have a lot of like small scale stuff in house, but realistically, you know, we're, we're, we're using industrial scale manufacturers for a lot of the stuff that makes it to LTT store. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to produce in any meaningful volume.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm very fascinated by manufacturing technology, but unless you asked me a specific product, then I, I wouldn't really be able to. I wouldn't really be able to narrow it down too much, I'm afraid. Sorry.

[Dan Siegel]

Linus and Luke. About to quit my job to be an executive at a startup.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, huge step.

[Dan Siegel]

Mall business focused on home services. After seeing many businesses rise and fall, what are the biggest indicators of success? Tips.

[Linus Sebastian]

Culture. You have to have a culture that's hungry and wants to win. At times we've had a very hungry, winning oriented culture. And at times we've had a very complacent collect a paycheck culture.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And at times we've had mixed.

[Linus Sebastian]

And at times we've had a mix that has been at various levels of health. And I would say that if there's anything that I could tell you to focus on, it's have a culture that is laser focused on just winning and being hungry and, and failure is not an option.

[Dan Siegel]

Hey, Lip Lap Dap, you mentioned a while ago that you were going to hold a smash tournament as a middle finger to Nintendo's crazy guidelines. Any update to that for the future of Whale Land?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We got yelled at.

[Dan Siegel]

Love the L coin by our own people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we basically. I'm not going to tell you my wife said no. But my wife said no. And she was right. She usually is. Sometimes she's not. Hypothetically, I, I imagine sometimes she's not. But usually she. Usually she's right. Sometimes she can be very, very conservative in terms of like cya, you know, covering our butts. But that has, you know, and there are times when it's very annoying to navigate that. But then we'll get audited and we like, pass our audits. And I'm like, right, good. Good job, you know.

[Dan Siegel]

Do you have any recommendations on what I should use on my PX13 for the memory module? I plan on repasting my CPU to get the get rid of the liquid metal before I kill my unit. I plan to use BTM7950 for processing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ooh. It's less a matter of what you should use and it's more a matter of what thickness you should use. You may want to try checking with asus. They may be willing to tell you. If they're not willing to tell you, then, man, your best bet might be to just take it off and measure the thickness of those thermal pads and then make sure that you're not putting in something that is thinner or thicker than what's already in there. Or you could just keep using the thermal pads that are in there. I mean, realistically, are those gonna be a real problem for you? Is your memory overheating? There's no liquid metal on the memory. So I, if I. If it was me, the convenient way would be to just reuse my thermal pads. There. That's gonna be. That's gonna be my. My low friction recommendation.

[Dan Siegel]

What's your opinion on the online belief that the Steam Machine will include a controller on launch? I'm interested, but the price worries me also. What's the status on the physical Linus coin shipping?

[Linus Sebastian]

Status on the physical coins is they are in manufacturing and if you check your order confirmation, it should tell you like when they're expected to be being minted. As for the Steam machine, including a controller, from my understanding, it should include a controller. That was what Valve.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Pretty sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Told me when I went down there for the announcement or the unveiling. If something changed due to the way the market is right now, I wouldn't actually hold Valve to the coals over it. It's a tough situation that they're in, but from my understanding, that is the intent.

[Dan Siegel]

Hello from Toronto. I just finished Sea of Stars and I'm looking for my next fix. Got any recommendations for more Retro vibe Fun times. Already finished. Cross code from your WAN show recommendation. Ooh,

[Luke Lafreniere]

is it retro or is it JRPG? Because you could you recommend Expedition 33.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, Exposition 33.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not. Not retro looking, but JRPG, not technically.

[Dan Siegel]

It's not retro vibe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fun time French RPG.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, they want a retro vibe fun time. Chained Echoes. Chained Echoes is another one I played and really enjoyed. The story gets a little sort of weird, but that's kind of typical of the genre. Toward the end, Chained Echoes was my answer. Dan. Oh, there he goes.

[Dan Siegel]

Sorry. And last one I got for you today is. Hey, dll, is there any plan to make a windbreaker coat love from la Belle province?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think so. I actually don't know. I'm so sorry. You might have to message support and I think I'm gonna message support that it's time for the end of the show. We'll see you again next week. Same bad time, different channel. You want to head over to the WAN show channel? We're gonna. We're gonna have to transition over there pretty quick because this whole streaming on both is not working. We might have to figure out the collab feature.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. Apparently that isn't a thing. Maybe, but you could collab launch the vod.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

See you later.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bye.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have to fly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah,

[Dan Siegel]

Sa.