My Mac Transition Is Not Going Well - WAN Show February 28, 2025

Summary

Summary of "My Mac Transition Is Not Going Well - WAN Show February 28, 2025"

The WAN Show, hosted by Linus Sebastian and Luke Lafreniere from Linus Tech Tips, delves into the latest happenings in the tech universe. In the February 28, 2025 episode titled "My Mac Transition Is Not Going Well," the hosts navigate through AMD's new GPU releases, Linus's challenges transitioning to macOS, updates on their merchandise store, and insights into emerging technologies.

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1. AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT Announcement

Timestamp: 03:06 - 06:37

Linus opens the episode with excitement about AMD's upcoming GPU releases—the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT, set to launch on March 6th. He details AMD's claims regarding the new rDNA 4 architecture, which promises a "40% faster per CU" performance boost over its predecessor. The RX 9070XT is priced at $599, while the non-XT version is slightly cheaper at $549, both equipped with 16GB of RAM.

Notable Points:

• Linus’s Skepticism: Despite initial excitement, Linus expresses reservations about AMD’s naming scheme and the performance differences between the XT and non-XT models.

  Linus Sebastian (06:37): "The 9070 looks like AMD is doing that thing again where they launch a new, you know, series of cards and they have the one that makes sense and then they have the one that you'd have to be a big dumb idiot to buy."

• Luke’s Agreement: Luke concurs, highlighting potential sales issues if consumers opt for the more expensive XT variant without significant performance gains.

  Luke Lafreniere (04:52): "I hope they have like 50 xts for every non xt because."

Conclusion: Linus and Luke anticipate that AMD is positioning the 9070 XT as their flagship while offering the non-XT model as a budget-friendly alternative, albeit with notable performance compromises.

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2. Linus’s Transition to macOS: Challenges and Insights

Timestamp: 42:03 - 65:54

Linus transitions the discussion to his personal experience shifting from a Windows-based workflow to macOS. He outlines several hurdles encountered during this switch:

Key Challenges:

• Charging and Docking: Linus appreciates the seamless charging when docked but finds the setup cumbersome when using multiple Macs.

  Linus Sebastian (42:59): "The whole thing is really seamless in theory."

• Display Configuration Issues: He struggles with macOS’s handling of external displays, particularly with resolution and scaling settings.

  Linus Sebastian (46:39): "I cannot find an obvious way for me to deal with that."

• Scroll Direction Inconsistencies: Changing the natural scrolling direction for both mouse and trackpad simultaneously proves frustrating.

  Linus Sebastian (50:57): "Why? That's pretty like why. They are not the same thing."

• Software Limitations: Difficulty in using native screenshot tools and inconsistent behavior with window management.

  Linus Sebastian (54:43): "Something that is inconsistent experience."

Notable Quotes:

• Frustration with macOS Design:

  Linus Sebastian (42:03): "MacOS is great unless you try to use it as a desktop operating system."

• Desire for Improvements:

  Linus Sebastian (55:03): "Apple, seriously, this is a genuine conflicts of interest be damned. Apple."

Insights: Linus emphasizes that while macOS offers a robust ecosystem, certain user experience aspects need refinement to match his workflow requirements. He candidly shares the lack of native solutions for common tasks, pushing him to seek third-party applications to bridge the gaps.

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3. Frame Generation Technologies in Gaming

Timestamp: 19:34 - 22:43

The hosts delve into the realm of frame generation technologies, discussing AMD's FSR4 and its competitors like Nvidia's FrameGen and Intel's XCSS.

Key Points:

• AMD's FSR4: Linus expresses optimism about AMD's new AI-powered frame generation, which promises smoother gameplay at lower frame rates by generating intermediary frames.

  Linus Sebastian (20:25): "FRame gen is part of the FSR4 package."

• Comparison with Competitors: They highlight that all major GPU manufacturers are investing in frame generation, making it a staple in modern gaming.

  Linus Sebastian (22:28): "All three major graphics players are invested in frame gen. It's not going anywhere."

• User Experience: Linus shares his positive initial experiences with AMD's frame generation, noting improved performance in streaming scenarios.

  Linus Sebastian (10:07): "I was able to encode it '8K 80 FPS or whatever, you'll get one. Effectively, your limit is one.'"

Notable Quotes:

• On AMD's Driver Support:

  Linus Sebastian (11:32): "Their Crimson drivers were a hot, steaming pile of garbage."

• On Frame Generation’s Necessity:

  Linus Sebastian (20:46): "Frame gen is here to stay. You don't have to use it, you don't have to like it, you don't have to endorse it, you know, but it's, it's not going anywhere."

Conclusion: Both Linus and Luke agree that while frame generation technologies offer significant enhancements to gaming experiences, they also bring complexities and dependencies that users must navigate. The hosts remain cautiously optimistic, anticipating further refinements in this space.

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4. Floatplane and LTT Store Updates

Timestamp: 12:37 - 36:33

The episode transitions to updates regarding Floatplane (a subscription service by LTT) and the LTT Store, announcing milestones and new merchandise.

Key Highlights:

• LTT Store Milestone: The LTT Store celebrates reaching 1 million orders, a significant growth from previous years.

  Linus Sebastian (30:57): "Here you go, guys. This is what it. This is the box that comes in."

• Merchandise Promotions: They announce the Tax Write-Off Sale, offering substantial discounts on various items to clear inventory.

  Linus Sebastian (25:46): "You can save on our tax write offs on, well, inventory that we have that we need to get rid of."

• Floatplane Enhancements: Announces hiring for new roles to support Floatplane’s development, emphasizing sustainable growth and improved content delivery.

  Linus Sebastian (36:06): "LTT store has grown a lot. Adsense makes up a shockingly small amount of our revenue."

Notable Quotes:

• On Revenue Streams:

  Linus Sebastian (36:38): "Have you seen the pie? I'm not going to show you guys the pie chart because I'm going to make you wait for the video."

• On Store Success:

  Linus Sebastian (35:21): "This is it, guys. This is what it. This is the box that comes in."

Conclusion: Linus and Luke express immense pride in the growth and success of the LTT Store and Floatplane, highlighting their strategic moves to diversify revenue streams beyond traditional ad-based models. They encourage the community to engage with their merchandise and Floatplane for exclusive content and benefits.

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5. Threat Locker Sponsorship

Timestamp: 26:03 - 37:14

The hosts introduce Threat Locker as the sole sponsor for the episode, detailing its cybersecurity offerings.

Key Features of Threat Locker:

• Default Deny Model: Blocks all unauthorized software from running, preventing malware and data breaches.

  Linus Sebastian (26:22): "Instead of being reactive, they lock down your business with a default deny model, so only the software you approve can run."

• Endpoint Protection: Includes Allow Listing, Ring Fencing, Network Cloud, and Cloud Control for comprehensive security.

  Linus Sebastian (27:21): "Allow Listing, Ring Fencing, Network Cloud, and Cloud Control."

Notable Quotes:

• On Phishing Protection:

  Linus Sebastian (26:14): "Is your hand hovering over that phishing email again? Okay, Dennis, that is not how that works."

• On New Features:

  Linus Sebastian (27:23): "Learn more about how ThreatLocker can protect your business using the link in the description."

Conclusion: Threat Locker emphasizes proactive cybersecurity measures, aligning with the show's focus on current tech trends. The hosts commend the sponsor for their robust security solutions, which are essential in today’s digitally vulnerable landscape.

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6. Developer and Community Engagement

Timestamp: 37:14 - 111:58

Throughout the episode, Linus and Luke engage with their audience through various questions and discussions:

Key Discussions:

• Twitch’s New Storage Limits: Highlighting Twitch’s implementation of a 100-hour storage limit for highlights and uploads, causing concern among streamers regarding data loss.

  Linus Sebastian (112:02): "Microsoft is shutting down Skype for good. This confirmation comes after users poked around..."

• EA’s Command and Conquer Source Code Release: EA releases source code for classic games under the GPL license, sparking enthusiasm for game preservation.

  Linus Sebastian (128:43): "EA released the source code for four Command and Conquer games... available from EA's GitHub page."

• Monolith Productions Shutdown: Warner Bros. closes Monolith Productions, affecting the legacy of the beloved Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor.

  Linus Sebastian (132:05): "Monolith Productions alongside two others... Their the Nemesis system... will now live in legal limbo."

• Technological Innovations: Introduction of the TMR (Tunneling Magnetoresistance) sticks by Bitdo for improved precision in controllers.

  Linus Sebastian (135:03): "Bitdo is releasing the ultimate two non-C wireless controller and they have ditched Hall Effect sticks..."

Notable Quotes:

• On Twitch’s Policy Changes:

  Linus Sebastian (112:02): "Any good Skype memories?"

• On EA’s Contributions to Gaming:

  Linus Sebastian (128:43): "This is wild. EA Next you're gonna tell me, like, Activision Blizzard did something good. No, I'm kidding."

• On Monolith’s Legacy:

  Linus Sebastian (132:05): "The Nemesis system... will now live in legal limbo."

Community Engagement: Linus and Luke address listener questions, offering insights into software development practices, cybersecurity, and the broader tech ecosystem. They encourage active participation and feedback, reinforcing their commitment to being a valuable resource for their audience.

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7. Conclusion and Final Remarks

Timestamp: 111:58 - 167:56

As the episode wraps up, the hosts reflect on internal company dynamics, team management, and the importance of maintaining a balanced workflow. They discuss the integration of new team members to alleviate workload pressures and enhance creative output.

Key Takeaways:

• Team Management: Emphasis on mutual respect and effective communication within the team to ensure smooth operations and sustained growth.

  Linus Sebastian (173:08): "Mutual respect is the best way."

• Sustainable Growth: Highlighting the shift from ad-based revenue to diversified income streams through Floatplane and merchandise sales.

  Linus Sebastian (36:06): "LTT store has grown a lot. Adsense makes up a shockingly small amount of our revenue."

• Future Plans: Discussing upcoming projects, product developments, and continuous improvements to their platforms and services.

Closing Remarks: Linus and Luke reiterate their dedication to providing high-quality content and maintaining robust support systems for their community. They encourage listeners to engage with their platforms, purchase merchandise, and subscribe to Floatplane for exclusive updates.

Linus Sebastian (247:11): "Subscribe. Buy some merch."

They conclude the episode with gratitude towards their audience, reflecting on the journey and anticipating future milestones.

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Final Thoughts

In "My Mac Transition Is Not Going Well," Linus and Luke offer a candid exploration of both industry developments and personal challenges within Linus's tech transition. Their blend of technical analysis, personal anecdotes, and community interaction provides a comprehensive view of the evolving tech landscape and the inner workings of Linus Tech Tips.

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

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[Luke Lafreniere]

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[Linus Sebastian]

Of award winning antivirus and identity theft protection. All for just $39.99 for your first year. Visit mcafee.com cancel anytime. Terms apply. What is up everyone? Welcome to the WAN Show.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Such a mellow introduction.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, we've got a great show lined up for you guys today and I don't want to, you know, scare anybody off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Welcome to the Wan Show.

[Linus Sebastian]

You can be my hero. AMD man. The RX9070 and 9070 XT announcement. I have to admit, I completely forgot to make fun of the silly naming scheme because these cards look genuinely exciting. I can't wait to talk about that. I'm also going to be talking about my recent transition to Mac os. Luke, I am not having a good time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I had a meeting in the office next to his while he was, as far as I can tell, just using his computer.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I was trying to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it was incredibly distracting because he was screaming like half the time. Wait, that was with you? Yeah, that was with Dan. So Dan remembers that.

[Dan]

That was a lot of yelling.

[Linus Sebastian]

What do you mean he remembers it? It was like two days ago.

[Dan]

Yeah, no, I only got about 96 hours and then it just fades.

[Linus Sebastian]

What else we got lined up today?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, we didn't have a huge thing before the intro, so I didn't prep anything at all. More companies are apparently releasing the source source code for video games.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, this is so cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So EA released source code for four Command and Conquer games.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is so cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was not on my estimates for what would happen this year.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's called a bingo card.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But yes, sure, there we go. What else should we talk about?

[Linus Sebastian]

Bloody hell, Luke. I'm gonna just roll it. I'm gonna roll it. You're gonna lose your shot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whatever this is. Psionic launches new advanced ability hand for humans and robots. Question mark. Or whatever that is.

[Linus Sebastian]

The show is brought to you today by Threat Locker. That's right. There is one sponsor for the WAN Show. Threatlocker.com WAN Show. You can check them out. Threatlocker. They are. It's like a WAN show takeover. I mean, we also still have our chair sponsor, Secret Lab, and our rap partner, dBrand. But Threat Locker is the one sponsor of this WAN show today and we have like a special like read for them and I think Luke is doing it or something. Sure. Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's get right into our first topic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do we do linus switches to macOS or should we talk about the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's, let's save the rage for later. Let's talk about AMD this morning.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, this morning AMD announced that the 9070 and 9070 XT. And yes, I've said those model numbers a lot of times because I'm trying to burn them into your mind. These are the option that you might actually be able to buy. They are going to be launching March 6th with what AMD called. Dang it. I can't find the exact wording but it was something along the lines of wide availability, which I think means that they walk endlessly down hallways and they get wider and wider as they go. They're gonna be coming in at pricing that AMD claims will be 549 and 599 respectively and are going to use their brand new rDNA 4 architecture that they are claiming is about 40% faster per CU than rDNA. They are alleging near native quality in performance mode with their new FSR4. Their new FSR4 upscaling. And both of these cards will have 16 gigs of RAM at their 549 and 599 pricing respectively. This is pretty exciting. Well, at least one of them is pretty exciting. Yeah, the 9070 looks like AMD is doing that thing again where they launch a new, you know, series of cards and they have the one that makes sense and then they have the one that you'd have to be a big dumb idiot to buy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I hope they have like 50 xts for every non xt because.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then it doesn't sell at all. Yeah, and then AMD is like what? Haha. That was our plan all along. 90 70s now 20% off discount. Woo. AMD. If anyone from there is watching, maybe just don't do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That'd be pretty sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

I do understand the appeal. Like I understand why they're doing it, because it's possible that with the market being the way that it is and availability of GPUs being what they are, that 9070s will just sell it regardless and they can make some money on this one while the XT is sort of their more aggressive play. So I get that. I follow that logic. I also follow the logic that Your xt, there's a lot more risk to like discounting it in the longer term in terms of the perception of your brand. If a bunch of people buy this thing for 5.99 and then, you know, it turns out that you ultimately have to adjust the pricing of it down the road. It's kind of like an FU to your, you know, flagship tier customers. Whereas the 9070 can be kind of like your kicker skew. You just like discount it without eroding the perceived value of what XT means in your lineup. Yeah, you get to show a big discount because it's 549msrp and you can get it for 499, you know, the MSI trio card, whatever. Right. I understand why they do it. But guys, we saw this with the 7900 XT and the 7900 XTX. The XTX got really positive reviews because at 1000 doll dollars in at that time that made a lot of sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Pretty killer.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then the XT for a hundred dollars less was way less performant. And that's a weird thing that the flagship gives you the better bang for the buck than the like step down, supposed to be more value oriented card. And I do understand that these probably use the same die. Like my understanding is that with rdna 4AMD dramatically cut down on how many dies they were building. They didn't even do a super high end competitor. I don't know what they have coming in the lower end, but they basically were like, okay, we need to focus this generation on the cards that we think are going to address the majority of gamers. Okay, so these are probably based on the same die. They're both using a 256 bit bus. They both have a similar number of CU's. Like there's no way they have two dies. One that's 64 and one that's 56. This is going to be 9070 is a cut down 9070 XT. So I understand too, that's that from a pricing standpoint, they essentially paid the same for this silicon. Right? I don't care. You need to have product stratification that makes sense. And looking at these specs, the 9070 is going to be a much lesser card compared to the 9070 XT. It is clocked like what, 85% as high. That's off the top of my head, so don't, don't quote me on that. But it's, it drops like over 10% of the AI accelerators. It drops over 10% of your ray tracing accelerators and drops over 10% of your compute units. And it's giving you a price that is. Hold on a second. Calculator. Okay, so 549 divided by 5, it only drops like 8 1/2% of the price. This is going to be a markedly slower card. So amd, please, please, no new media engine looks good. Very excited about that. It could possibly be like doable to stream to twitch on this thing. AMD is offering unlimited encode streams and sessions which. Okay, I have. Okay, hold on, we'll get to that. So I was talking to someone from the writing team and they were basically saying, well, does this really matter? Because realistically you're going to run into a limit like a, like a performance limitation before you're going to run into a session limitation. And what I said was, okay, you would think that. But if you're only encoding like relatively low bitrate 1080p or even like 720p, like if you're using this thing for like, I don't know, like I ran into this issue when I was setting up the cameras at that badminton club during COVID when I wanted to watch my son's tournaments. So I set up cameras on all the courts and I set up like an obs box that would, that would stream them all simultaneously and Nvidia cards. Even though I had. Because I was encoding at relatively low resolution and bit rate, I had plenty, plenty of headroom, a lot of performance in terms of performance. But because of the encoding session limit, I wasn't able to encode that many streams at once. So it is pretty cool to me that AMD basically goes, okay, yeah, like realistically, if you're encoding it 8K 80 FPS or whatever, you'll get one. Effectively your limit is one. But if you're encoding at a lot less, hey, you can just kind of like decide, I prefer this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm just surprised.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm very surprised. Yeah, I mean, AMD doesn't have a functioning professional card.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Lineup anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're not going to chew out their own market.

[Linus Sebastian]

So what's the point? Yeah, so I guess, I guess that's part of it. But like, yeah, I, I'm into it, especially if the quality is decent. Like I had to do this whole stupid workaround. I had to find like a hacked driver that unlocked it on Windows. I think it's easier on Linux, but I was running Windows because I was deal with it and it was just, they won't. It was just Such a. It was just such a hassle. And so just not having to do that would be great. AMD is also claiming that their driver support for these new cards will be the best they've ever had.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have they claimed this before?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't know if they've claimed it at launch before, but. Do you remember the Crimson drivers? He remembers the Crimson drivers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is why I asked the question.

[Linus Sebastian]

Amd, I believe it was Crimson because they had a couple driver rebrands over the years back when they didn't have any new hardware. And I think it was Crimson that they, like, tried to get us to make a dedicated LTT video about. And I was like, brother, we don't. We don't cover a driver update, but tell you what. And then I was like, Luke, do you want to, like, look, I think it crashed like multiple times in the one day you were looking at it or something like that. I don't remember.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't remember the exact details, but I remember it was. It was rough.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it was a hot, steaming pile of garbage. But they say they've tested more hardware configurations in the lab. They've got AI integrated into their testing and a bug report tool directly in the driver. Their dedicated AI hardware looks pretty impressive based on what they've shown. However. However, the rumors of a 32 gig version of the card have been school squish squashed. That doesn't mean that they will never do it, but it does mean that we're not going to be expecting it anytime soon. Immediately. What else we got here? Reception has been massively positive to this card. I mean, it's hard to be upset when AMD is promising roughly 50, 70 ti performance for $150 less. And they are claiming wide availability. There it is. Okay, so that's in our notes. Wide availability, which just. Just, Just do it. They have to do it. That was the most pathetic slap that I have ever seen in my life.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You want me to go?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, you gotta make a sound at least.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, with the headphones on, I can't really do it.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was so sad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'll go if you want.

[Linus Sebastian]

You have to make a sound. Oh, wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was not going.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's my punishment. That's my punishment for believing AMD about stock.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't actually expect that to hurt. That was really. All right.

[Dan]

That sounded like a real one. Good job.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's my punishment. And. But I do. Do you know why? Because we saw ads for this card weeks ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

AMD intended to launch this weeks ago, what it seems like is they put it back in the oven driver wise. Right. But the way that, the way that production out time allocation works, just because they delayed the launch because they were working on the software, that doesn't mean that they stop freaking making wafers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

That doesn't mean they stop producing cards. So we know that they were planning to launch this weeks ago. We know that retail cards have been popping up already in the lead up to this launch like a while ago. Like a while ago. So I believe, and I deserved that for believing it, but I believe that AMD actually has some cards out there for a change and I am, I am cautiously excited. I don't believe that because I should. I believe that because I really, really, really, really, really really want to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I wonder what their expectations for sales are though. Like I don't know because like what if this. I don't necessarily know that it will because there's a lot of brand loyalty in this space.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, a lot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But say it goes gangbusters. Like do they really have enough even if they've been shipping for a while? I don't know because they have to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Make up not only for you know, AMD customers who have been itching for an upgrade to you know, their 7700 XT or like, you know, 6700 class card. Right. Or like a 5700 XT like desperately waiting for AMD to really have like a killer card. That's a great value, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

They not only have to deal with that pent up demand, but they have to deal with the pent up demand of Nvidia gamers who are like yo, where the is anything for me to buy? And that's like, that's 85% of the market.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's a lot of people.

[Linus Sebastian]

So unless AMD went like all in and produced 10x of what they would have normally forecasted.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's why I'm saying like I don't know, they might have shipped like more than you would expect for a launch and it still might not be enough and still might lead into scalping because like there's nothing from the other side. So I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And it's not, it's not just scalpers. Right? Like don't kid yourself. Mining is still a thing. Like I've seen so many people be like, yeah, it's all the AI. Okay, don't kid yourself.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mining's a lot less popular these days but it's still absolutely happening.

[Linus Sebastian]

Absolutely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And the Contacts that are, you know, getting miners access to these cards before the general public are still able to intercept them. If anything, I would think there's less scrutiny on them than before. So unless AMD like really is going to flood the market with these things, I would still expect pricing to be a little bit elevated, but I'm just hoping that it won't be extremely elevated. And with that said, I mean, hope. What does, what does hope even do for you? I mean, I've been, I've been bugging intel on like an every few days or so basis, going like, you know, hey, you know, what's the deal with channel pricing? Hopefully this can be fixed. Hey, inventory update. Are you ramping production? Do you have any idea what's going on with supply? Because B580 and BE570 to a lesser degree. But BE580 was looking like a savior for entry level, you know, affordable gaming. And you know what, it's still somewhat reasonable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know, what is, what is MSRP supposed to be?

[Linus Sebastian]

250 USD. Yeah, it's not 250 US dollars. They're all closer to like just under 300 from the last time that I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, this is Canadian.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's your problem. And, and there are still, there are still occasional cards that you can find for close to msrp. I saw some at I think Canada computers for about 370 CAD or 380 CAD which is about $250 US dollars. I also saw some B580s on Newegg that come as part of a bundle but are darn close to MSRP when you account for. Oh, it's out of stock now. Bloody hell. Well, this deal was in stock recently, so it was a B580 with a 650 watt power supply for US$334. That is actually not that far off. But no, the rest of them are all man. Some of them are even over 400. Now here's one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Channel pricing has been such a mess like across the board.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, this one's 359, which is again, it's too high. When The MSRP is 250, there's promo code. Oh yeah, for 20 bucks off, I need AMD now. You know, I was rooting for Intel. Intel's still figuring out their inventory apparently. So now I'm rooting for AMD to just flood the channel and make it unsustainable for the other players to be priced way out of whack. This is an opportunity for AMD to grab some serious market share, which will get developers to seriously focus on optimizing for amd, which could lead to gamers taking AMD more seriously as an option. Turning AMD finally into a player for the first time since like what, the early 2000s, if we're being honest, into like, like an actual other option, not a like consolation option.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean honestly, I haven't minded, I haven't minded rolling my 7900XTX. I don't, I don't really game on that machine. Right. Like, I also have my 380 like land rig, that's one of the like water cooled ones. But I haven't had any problems with it. Like the, the Radeon challenge wasn't really a challenge. Come on, let's go. What else we got to say here about the launch? The community continues to be very vocal about disliking frame generation technology. Lots of fake frames. Comments in the chat when AMD was live streaming their announcement.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You also can't go without it though. They can't launch the card without it. Like it's, you gotta have it.

[Linus Sebastian]

With that said, you know, frame gen is part of the FSR4 package. So yeah, be ready for AMD to do some, some, some, some generation of frames. I guess all that we can really hope for is that they'll do a pretty good job and that you won't need it if you don't like it. Because I think that's something that a lot of the enthusiasts are struggling with a little bit. I think that it is really easy for us to take our own values and our own priorities and just kind of assume that everyone else's are the same. But when I think about the gamers in my life, not all of them are enthusiasts, not all of them are pixel peepers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Most of them aren't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Most of the people that I know, if I were to put an extra 40 milliseconds of input latency on something, they probably wouldn't notice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

If I were to have some weird image quality crap going on, unless it flickers or draws the eye in, some like lizard brain or Liz is going.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To look for it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or unless I say even if I set them looking for it, dude, sometimes you'll turn on HDR and people be like, sorry, did you change it yet? Like I, and I'm talking like content that like really pops, you know, and, and that's the thing, right? So you know, to our audience we're kind of going, okay, how does this perform? You Know without frame gen, but for a lot of people turning on frame gen and like feeling that additional smoothness and just seeing a higher number is going to be, is going to be fine. Dude. Like I'll always remember that like slack jawed guy in the beanbag chair that I talked to at PAX one year who was gaming on an Nvidia shield. Like the little, the little clamshell Android handheld. Not the, like the TV console, the little clamshell thing. And he was streaming over WI FI from a gaming PC that was somewhere else on the show floor playing like a AAA game on this thing. And I'm like, oh yeah, like how's the latency? He's like, huh? Yeah, that's cool man. Like he absolutely zero appreciation whatsoever for like what he was seeing like that and, and that, you know, whatever. Like I'm sure he's really passionate about like cars or something, but obviously you know, the image quality of like the gaming experience is, is not that meaningful. And so frame gen is here to stay. You don't have to use it, you don't have to like it, you don't have to endorse it, you know, but it's, it's not, it's not going anywhere. Nvidia is invested. AMD is now invested. It's a matter of time before intel has something. Do they. Wait, do they have frame gen as part of XCSS too? I don't think so. Xcss frame gen? Oh yeah, no, they have frame generation already.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I forgot about that. So XCSS2 has frame gen. So all three major graphics players are invested in frame gen. It's not going anywhere, but you don't have to turn it on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I suspect that the least invested in frame gen is probably Intel.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. XSS is pretty good. We were playing around with it the other day and it's like that video is coming. Actually we're doing, we're doing a battle mage challenge.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So both. This is hilarious. Both David and Plouffe are switching to battle mage.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was gonna do it, but you wanted the, the shot.

[Linus Sebastian]

I didn't want anything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, they told me you wanted it.

[Linus Sebastian]

What did I want?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Us to have our computers in here locally for the GPU swap. I was like, I don't have time to tear everything down.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was a Plouffe initiative. Oh yeah. I agree with him that like, like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was probably better than just like cell phone shooting at home.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, the, like the, the like it was supposed to be the Framing of the video is probably everybody brings in their computers and upgrades together. But like. Yeah, no, no, that's fine. I was like, okay, then Luke doesn't have to do it. But yeah, Plouf and David are doing it. So Plouf. Well, first of all, David is pulling a 7900 XT out of one of his computers and a 3090 out of the other one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, he's doing two.

[Linus Sebastian]

He's doing two because.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And he was like, dodge it now.

[Linus Sebastian]

He felt it wouldn't be fair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

To upgrade only one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's legit. That's very legit because he does so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Much of his gaming in his living room now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

On his 4K TV. Yeah. Anywho, so, so he's realistically going to be using upscaling. Right. Like there's, there's no way he's gaming at 4K natively on that thing. So it's, it's upscale city. And then Plouffe is pulling his 4090 out and his monitor, which he owns, by the way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He owns a monitor.

[Linus Sebastian]

He does own a monitor. One of those fancy 4K 240Hz displays from Alienware. So that's something that he'll be driving with a B580. So he's going to need all the fake upscaling nonsense that he can get. So it hates that stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Intel's kind of climbing uphill with this one, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. But what I like about both of those guys as participants here is unlike me, they play a wide variety of games. So we are likely to, you know, find some edge cases.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh wow. It was actually fine in this one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I gotta say, you're gonna see this in the video obviously once we upload it. But both of them were quite impressed by what they could achieve with it. When we did our quick test here in the studio before they embark on the. The 30 day B580 challenge.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Good cards, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

They are good. They're legitimately good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just wish they were actually 250 bucks because then you could build a sick entry level gaming PC for like 500, $600 and it would put up, it would put downward pricing pressure on basically everything else in the market. We just need these bloody cards to be available. Still not getting a response on that. Speaking of 30 day challenges, I. Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, I think we have to do a sponsor spot. This is another topic.

[Dan]

Put that away.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think we have to do a sponsors.

[Dan]

Put that away. It's gross. Get out of here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, what are we supposed to do?

[Dan]

We got a sponsor spot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, I am doing this one. Are you playing the thing?

[Linus Sebastian]

Am I? Am I? It's got a read.

[Dan]

I have no idea. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, if we didn't, I thought. Well, I thought Luke. I thought it was a special Luke one. Yeah, I can do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It doesn't matter. Okay, this one is either of us. The second one I think is me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, super secret segment.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, not that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, let's get the sponsor spot done. The Threat Locker is the sponsor of the WAN show today.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, look at you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is your hand hovering over that phishing email again? Okay, Dennis, that is not how that works. The screen doesn't explode and break.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're pretty sick of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did or did an employee get tricked into clicking a malicious file? You can't blame them. Phishing emails are everywhere these days, and they are harder than ever to spot. That's why our sponsor for the WAN show today, Threat Locker, takes a different approach. Instead of being reactive, they lock down your business with a default default deny model, so only the software you approve can run. Everything else is simply blocked. This helps prevent malware, remote access attacks and data theft. They have an entire endpoint protection platform and a whole suite of products, with four of their most powerful ones being Allow Listing, where ThreatLocker will automatically learn what's running in your environment and help you decide what applications to expressly permit. Ring Fencing, which controls how applications interact with each other. Your files, data, or the Internet. This helps prevent attackers from weaponizing legitimate tools like PowerShell to exploit vulnerabilities. Network Cloud, a host based firewall that can be centrally managed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Network control.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did I say that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You said network cloud.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice. And Cloud Control, I was reading ahead. Which keeps your Microsoft 365 data protected by identifying whether a connection from a protected device originates from a trusted network. Plus, you can take all this control on the go with their mobile app. And they just rolled out new features at Zero Trust World 2025. Or as I call it, the World 2025. Learn more about how ThreatLocker can protect your business using the link in the description and keep tuning into today's show to hear more about the new features they just announced. Yeah, all read. Do this right after Threat Locker. Super secret segment. Shh. It's a secret.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Luke and Dan.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't tell Linus.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I literally have no idea what this is.

[Linus Sebastian]

What are you guys talking about?

[Dan]

Just. Just me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, what?

[Linus Sebastian]

What's going on? Sherrod is here. And Nick Is here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have a special delivery that a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Friend is gonna come in and deliver.

[Linus Sebastian]

To you right this second. So if you want to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What? Come in and pass it over.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's make sure the camera can. Can see what you're looking at here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I genuinely have no idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

It says Source Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What? Yeah, but I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

It says Source Luke right here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And Dan, I. I don't know. You knew about it at one point.

[Linus Sebastian]

But you probably forgot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's okay. I believe you. But I have. I have zero memory of what this is supposed to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry. Who knew about it at some point? He did. Or I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Apparently I did.

[Linus Sebastian]

You did, but I didn't.

[Dan]

No, you.

[Linus Sebastian]

You.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You want me to hold it for you?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. No, I'm good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Whoa.

[Linus Sebastian]

Does it have money in it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, I know. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, it's finally here. Oh, that's so cool. Wait, why does it have the meme picture on it? Oh, it's from dbrand. Wait, why does DBRAND have our million order thing? What does that have to do with anything?

[Luke Lafreniere]

They hacked the postal system.

[Linus Sebastian]

They act the postal. What? What is this? What is this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's for the lights.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, for the lights. Okay. Okay. So there's a whole. It's a whole thing. Okay. All right. Thank you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Betterlt.store.com.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, dbrand bought that domain a while back. Nerds. Ow. My fingers. Oh, that is so cool. This is it, guys. This is the Shopify equivalent of a YouTube play button.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Much more exclusive, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Congratulations, LTT Store on reaching 1 million orders, December 30, 2024. Wow. It's. It's freaking solid metal. At least it. I mean, it's got some solid metal in it. No, there's got to be. Oh, yeah, no, that is hollow metal, but it's metal. It's that. It's definitely some metal. Dude, that is so really cool. I'm gonna put it on my wall. You have to leave that one here. I have to leave. What do you mean? I have to leave this one here.

[Dan]

We have a cardboard one for you to take home.

[Linus Sebastian]

What do you mean, cardboard one? No, I want a gold one. Can I get a gold one? I want a gold one can.

[Dan]

You can spray paint the cardboard.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's that? What's that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

These are yours.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's going on?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You don't have to open.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's the same thing. What?

[Dan]

Oh, they're in the box. Oh, that makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. It's not just a cardboard.

[Dan]

Oh, I was gonna get the Sharpie.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Well, he's opening it anyways. You guys want unboxing version 2?

[Dan]

This is in short circuit boxing peanuts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's go.

[Dan]

Free snacks.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can't open it.

[Dan]

Don't hurt your elbow again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You've been doing cardio activities at the gym, but maybe it's time to incorporate.

[Dan]

We don't give Linus things.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why is the cake so fine? You break it, smart guy.

[Dan]

He's just gonna shear it in half. That's shocked by quality.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. I softened it up for him.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was nothing, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

I loosened it up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can. I can give you an idea.

[Dan]

And be nice to him. So do I. Oh, yeah. Minus. You're weak.

[Linus Sebastian]

I loosened it up for him. Okay. Okay. What's in here? It could be different.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Peanuts everywhere could be different.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. The packing peanuts are everywhere.

[Dan]

I'll clean him up later.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's this? What's this? Hold on. There's two things in here. Okay. All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

More than two things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. There's some other stuff. Oh, oh, oh. We get the whole unboxing experience this time. Okay, cool, cool, cool. So here you go, guys. This is what it. This is the box that comes in. Oh. Oh, you get a. A money moves sticker pack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You get a very close to Mogul moves.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I noticed that, actually. You get a. Whatever the crap this is. I can't tell if. Oh, yeah. Okay. There you go. You get a little, like, milestone card signed by Harley Finkelstein, who? I mean, yeah, sure. Probably less. Probably less controversial than Toby these days. Something special awaits. Okay, what else we got here? Professional unboxer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm. Well, look, normally, as a professional unboxer, I have a bloody table to, you know, put the thing on. There you go. There's our. There's our silver award. So I asked if, like, YouTube, you can pay a little extra and get an additional copy of the award in case your narcissistic CEO needs to have one at his own house. And the answer, it turns out, was yes. Is it really, you know, a proper award if you have to buy it? I don't know. I think so. I still think so. How much. How much do we have to pay to get another? Oh, wow. Product care. Look at that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, 150 or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow, what a racket.

[Dan]

All right, I. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't. I don't remember. Okay, we apparently don't remember. We don't remember how much we paid for it, but there it is. Ltt store. Silver and gold, baby. Do they have a higher tier?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Would there have been an amount that.

[Linus Sebastian]

You wouldn't have paid?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like how much would you have not bought it at? I think that's why he probably doesn't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, there's nothing. So we reached 100,000 December 20th. Wait, really? Wow. It was exactly four years apart. December 28th, 2020. And then a million December 30th, 2024. So how many people have one of these? Does anyone know? I don't know. You don't know or you're not allowed to say? Ah, okay. Oh, someone from Shopify is here. Okay, cool. Yeah, Toby's controversial. And are you allowed to say how many gold people?

[Luke Lafreniere]

How many?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, but can you say, can you say. Can you say if it's fewer than like YouTube gold play buttons?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I would think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice. Yeah, nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I would think by a lot, to be honest.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Also, it's okay. I have a terrible boss too.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I'm not his boss. I don't care.

[Dan]

Oh, no, he's deflected it. No, no, it's bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Technically that didn't.

[Linus Sebastian]

And if I am your terrible boss, it wasn't me. Wait, no. Or I. You deserved it.

[Dan]

I. Yeah, we're bad at being narcissists.

[Linus Sebastian]

I forget how it goes. Speak for yourself. I'm great at it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thanks, Nick.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thank you, Shopify.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, thank you very much.

[Dan]

Thanks so much. Nice to meet you.

[Linus Sebastian]

I still have one. Yeah. Okay. Ah, so cool. I can't wait to put little shelves on my award wall and put them on it. I'm. Ah, that's so cool. A million freaking orders.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty nuts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wild, dude.

[Dan]

Didn't we have something like less than 100 in 2018? It's come a long way.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that probably sounds about right.

[Dan]

No, in 2018, like we started the store basically 2019.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So it's gone through. As you guys are about to see in the. In the 20. In the 2020. Nick's holding the other gold one over there. As you guys are about to see in the. Oh, I was just about to turn it on. There we go. We figured it out in the. How does LMG make money? Update Creator Warehouse. The LTT store.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a lot has grown.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, floatplane has grown in share.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

In the piece. You guys are going to see that. So massive. Shout out to the floatplane team and our floaters who are watching on floatplane right now in the live chat. Thank you very much, guys. They have Grown. LTT store has grown a lot. Adsense makes up a shockingly small amount of our revenue. Have you seen the pie?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You seen the pie chart? I'm not going to show you guys the pie chart because I'm going to make you wait for the video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Genuinely stunning. For people that like, don't do this.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's going to be genuinely stunning for like our YouTube contacts to realize how little of our company's revenue comes from AdSense. Yeah, I think that depending on who you talk to at YouTube, they like think they swing a really big dick in terms of like their effectiveness for creator monetization.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some of them get it and there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are other ones that are like, yeah, no, no, we know, we know. And like we're figuring out how to kind of work on it. But there's, I've had conversations there, stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like shopping is a step in the right direction.

[Linus Sebastian]

Absolutely. I mean, that's something I've been pushing them for for eight, nine years. Like, hey guys, you need to get over whatever the ego is that prevents you from working with, you know, other big tech brands. And you need to just like figure this out. You need to just integrate this stuff in the platform because TikTok came in and just ate their lunch on it. And, and so I think there's, there's some of them that are going to figure it out, but there's other ones that I've talked to and I basically said, hey, yeah, I couldn't help noticing that your, your monetization efficiency compared to what, you know, our business team, who, you know, quite frankly is great, they work hard, they're personable, they understand our product, they understand our processes, they, they build relationships, they do a lot of really good stuff. But every single one of them we basically just recruited off the street, essentially. Like, we didn't bring in like seasoned industry, you know, advertising industry sales people. Like, we, they're just like guys, they're just like a bunch of gamer bros. The fact that they are so dramatically outperforming from like an RPM standpoint, like a revenue per thousand views standpoint, AdSense to me means that AdSense is not that great. Not that we are like magic rock stars. To me, it means that if Google just across the board said, hey, yeah, your AdSense bids need to be higher.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you think it has to do with Skippable, like the skip button on ads and ad blocker?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, because it's, I think it probably partially contributes, especially on a more tech savvy channel like ours where people have the. Because like, I think the percentage of people that are annoyed by ads is probably the same across a cooking channel and our channel. But the percentage of people who could take that annoyance and turn it into a pie hole deployment is going to be a lot higher for us. Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well like we, I think we talked about this in the pre show, but Firefox very recently like Mega fumbled a update to their what is it? Terms and questions or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then they're like response to Mega fumbling. That was also not amazing. Even though it sounds like it's like probably not a huge deal relatable. Their response was really bad. And what I've seen as a result of this is a lot of people switching from Firefox to, to Brave. And also other people discovering that Brave exists. Like Chrome users seeing the Firefox news cycle and going, oh, what is this Brave thing? And Brave has, as far as my understanding goes, I've never actually used. It has native ad blocking built into the browser. So like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, Brave is they also have, don't they have their like attention token and stuff too? Like, I forget exactly how all of that works. So don't, don't, don't quote me on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, so let's not get into it if we don't sort of fully understand.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know practically nothing what their model is.

[Linus Sebastian]

But anyway, the point, the point that I was trying to make is just that, you know, to, to some of the people I talk at, talk at, talk to at Google, sometimes it does feel like talking at people. Some of the people I talk to at Google, they look at, you know, our, our, our business team's ability to monetize and they go, well, that's just, you know, your sponsors must be stupid to pay that much. I've literally heard that response from people at YouTube. Whereas others look at that and they go, oh, we're dropping the ball on Adsense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because we could be doing 5X.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean we know we not just in other segments, we know creators in similar segments that are charging more per like View.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, what are you talking about?

[Linus Sebastian]

Absolutely. And the thing is like again, I don't want to take anything away from our business team because they work hard and they really do take the time. They take the time to understand the brand. They take the time to understand our voice and our brand and our lines in the sand where we're just like, no, we're not going to do that. We're not going to cross that. They take the time to understand that. They take the time to bridge that gap. And that's work. Right. But I also don't think that, you know, none of them have a PhD in ad sales, you know, So I think this is replicatable. I think, I think it could be done if you take the time. All right, well, what are we supposed to be talking about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think whatever we want.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, your Mac. It's time.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, let's do it. So here's my. Here's the title for this segment. MacOS is great unless you try to use it as a desktop operating system. Because my experience using the MacBook actually pretty solid as long as I use it as a MacBook. But one of the things that I noted on the shopping video where I went through all of my different options was a prevailing sentiment from the audience was Linus right out of the gate, you're doing this wrong. Nobody buys a Mac mini and a MacBook like two cheap devices. Anyone with an ounce of sense would buy one good MacBook and then a dock. And so I kind of went, okay, that actually works pretty, pretty well for my, for my month experiment because I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don'T really kind of annoying to switched.

[Linus Sebastian]

Away because I wanted to use my Mac at home as well. And so what, I'm going to go buy like 3 Macs now? No. So no, what I'm going to do is I'm going to deploy the Mac Mini at home and then at work where I carry a backpack, commuter backpack. Lttstore.com where I carry commuter backpack. Anyway, I'm just going to carry my MacBook around. I'm going to dock it in my office and then use it as a laptop. And what's been really nice about that is that I never have to think about charging this thing because it charges whenever I'm docked. I've got all my peripherals plugged in and the whole thing is really seamless in theory. This is the part where we get into what is just two days of notes and is already like two full pages of densely formatted text in my what things are like switching to macOS. And you know what? I want to preface this. Calm the down.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This segment was helpful when we did the iPhones.

[Linus Sebastian]

I want to preface this by saying a lot of these things. I haven't even looked into a fix yet because right now what I am doing is I am experiencing macOS as it is raw, out of the box.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Well, actually there are a couple of things I've had to Fix already because I just could not handle it. But. But for the most part, I haven't even tried to find mitigations yet. So that doesn't mean. Don't pipe in, in the chat with your ideas about how I could fix them. Absolutely. I want to see that because, you know, I want to have the best possible macOS experience. I'm just saying that if I say something that it turns out is not the case. It might be that I had a weird edge case. It might be that I haven't googled it yet. These are raw notes. They're raw notes unlocking with the watch. Pretty nice. It's one of those things where, like, would I buy a watch expressly for that purpose? Absolutely not. But it is pretty convenient to just like, sit down at my desk and my computer's unlocked.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because you're close.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean, it's a lot more expensive than a webcam with Windows hello, face recognition.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But, like, that's already built in anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, well, I mean, I. Well, this uses Touch id, so you just press the power button anyway. Unless you dock and then don't press the power button. But then also, like, managing the screen is a pain in the butt. Like, have you used a Mac recently?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So, okay, my. The, like, nice lady that lives across the hall sometimes has computer problems and she is a Mac. So I try to fix them, but, like, you know, I'm not using it for my own stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did you know that if you plug in an external display and leave this open, you cannot turn this off? The only way to turn it off is to close it and leave it docked. The computer will stay on and you don't have to configure anything for that behavior. But your only options are mirror and extend. You can't just be like, no, weird, be off now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Odd.

[Linus Sebastian]

And dude, I cannot. I cannot actually believe that this is still a thing. But the way that it handles resolution configuration, you do not configure a display resolution and then configure scaling. You just set a resolution and it outputs the native resolution of the display, but scales it as if it were that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Does it at least tell you what the native is?

[Linus Sebastian]

So I've had. I don't know if it's my dock or if it's just macOS being a giant steaming pile of garbage.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But sometimes docs can confuse things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sometimes when I plug in, it knows that 4k is the maximum and remembers that the last time I configured it to 4K so that I have lots and lots of Screen real estate. And sometimes it comes up with these like, oddball rando resolutions. It doesn't seem to be related to which port, which are my two ports I plug into. So I. I'm not ready to. Not ready to make a statement there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's go through some of your things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, I mean, I am. That's what I'm doing. That's one of them. But what's inconvenient about that is that, say I had a display like my one that I have, which is a 4K 165Hz display or 144Hz or something like that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's your work desk monitor?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's a 42 inch OLED. I only have one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

How many monitors do you have at work?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, across both my desks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, I have three.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so I have one monitor. So calm down. So I have one monitor. It's a nice monitor, but it's one monitor. So on a PC, I would be able to make a choice. Let's say I had a slower, earlier generation HDMI link. I could say, okay, hey, run it at 1080p, let the display scale. Or use like four to one pixel. Perfect, uh, integer scaling. That's the word I'm looking for. And then run at 120 hertz. Or I could say, run it 4k, run at 60 hertz. Uh, I'd rather have the resolution on a Mac. I cannot find an obvious way to do that. And I will look, I will look into it. Uh, someone sending me a Synaptics product display link. Graphics.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I'm gonna have to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who knows?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to, like, start making some nodes here, guys. Oh, my goodness. Chad's moving too fast. Anyway, on macOS, there's not an obvious way for me to deal with that. And that's pretty. That's pretty frustrating. I can't find an obvious way to even configure 120Hz in the first place. Like, my external monitor just runs at 60Hz, but I can't tell if that's because the HDMI port on my dock is limited to that or not. So I haven't really looked into that in detail yet. All right, so what else we got here? Oh, my God. Okay, this makes me legitimately extremely angry. So, Luke, go ahead and like, scroll this document, you know, in a way that you would, you know, two fingers on the trackpad, you know, like you would. Okay, that feels right. Right? Okay, so that is Apple's natural scrolling, right? So where up is down and down is up, like it was a touchscreen. Okay, okay. And that's the default behavior. But if you haven't used a Mac in a while, you might not know this. If you plug in a mouse, it's the same down is up and up is down on the scroll wheel, which, no, is not how that's ever worked in the history of anything other than on apples. Like touch mice. Okay, you can change that, no problem. Okay, you can change that. You can change it from natural to not natural. But if you change the toggle for your mouse, it changes it for your touchpad. And if you change it for your touchpad, it changes it for your mouse. Oh my God. Why? That's pretty like why. They are not the same thing. People are pointing out. You can use linear mouse or another free software, it won't toggle both. Yes, I will, I will note that down and I will use that. I should not have to do that. That should be a thing that just be. And the stupidest part is that if you go into the system settings, they are two completely separate menus. There's one for Trackpad and when you have a mouse plugged in, the mouse menu appears and you go in there and that option is there. They are two separate sub menus, but when you change them in one, it changes it in the other one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I find it kind of interesting because Windows is kind of like last place right now in regards to, in my opinion, how often people do customizations to OS functionality. Not that that's a race that you necessarily want to win, I don't know. But like, I never really hear people talking about like, I don't know, like Rainmeter is more just like stylistic. But there's been a lot of things over the years that you can do to Windows to make it work in different ways. And Linux is obviously somewhat famous for it. But you always hear like if you express any issue with Mac, people know about some app probably paid that you can get, that'll solve your problem. Might be like three bucks or something. Like it's probably not a huge deal.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I just, I shouldn't need that to. To do something that Apple literally built the functionality for but then just decided to half arse it. Oh man, here's. Here's one that I. Here's one that I had to fix right away.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think this, this Moss thing that people are linking. I think it's free and open source. So that's. Yeah, that's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

I installed Sensible side buttons on the first day.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sensible side buttons?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, because by default my. My third party mouse, just a Logitech Superlight, didn't have back and forward functionality on the side buttons.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They just didn't do anything.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's like, brother, the first mouse I ever owned with a side button on it to go back in the browser and in File Explorer and stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Worked immediately.

[Linus Sebastian]

Came out in 2003. That was, I kid you not, 22 years ago. To plug in a mouse and not have it immediately, immediately understand back and forward is, well, insane. It's not sensible. There, that's what I was looking for. It's not sensible. So I have a third party app that will fix that. Someone says not even with logi options installed. I don't care. No, no other Linux windows like Android. Okay. You could plug in a mouse and the basic buttons will work. Yeah, sure. You're like macro functionality or whatever. Probably won't. And you know how sensible side buttons works? It emulates like a three finger swipe because the functionality doesn't appear to exist for the mouse in Mac os. That's just negligent. That is negligent. W. Calderini says Apple really, really, really wants you to use the Apple mouse. And that's nice. And if they want that, then they should build a mouse that doesn't destroy my wrist. That's not an option for me. I literally will not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Or you need to like help this turtle in order to charge it. You still have to do that, don't you?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. This is great. One of my notes says repeat rate is so slow for keys like backspace. Oh my God. I need third party software, dude. Holding down the backspace. Excuse me. Delete key is infuriating. I am like, I am literally like dying as I wait for the cursor to numb up all the characters that I've typed. It looks like I need third party software for that, but I have not really looked. That I've not looked at. Of course that. Let's see what else we got. I ran into a super weird bug. Oh, I. Did I pull you in to show you this. The text clarity bug? No, I think I did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Dude, that was very odd.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was weird. I took a video on my iPhone. I'm not gonna send it to you guys right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What even happened?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, like the browser rendering, like completely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bunged up, but only on part of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Super buggy. It was only in certain tabs, so it was definitely browser related. It seems like a Safari bug. And yes, I'm using Safari, because I am having.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's its own challenge.

[Linus Sebastian]

The Mac experience that is speaking, speaking of rendering issues here, I should send. I'll send this one, I'll send this one to Dan. This'll be a teaser like dude, Apple, seriously, this is a genuine conflicts of interest be damned. Apple. I am genuinely offering to come in and work for you guys for a week as a consultant. I will give you a to do list of just sensible as fixes that you guys can make to macOS that will genuinely improve the experience of your product. I will do it for free. I will come down to Cupertino, I will do it for free. And I guarantee you based on how much stuff that I found in like three hours, it will be some of the most valuable time that your developers have ever spent with anyone. Because I don't know what it is. Is it that your users are afraid to tell you this stuff or that they just. Or that your staff doesn't care or people are just so used to these stupid workarounds that they just. They don't see them anymore? I don't know what it is but you clearly need an outsider's perspective because the fact that Dan. Check, check this out. Did you. Do you see the thing I just sent you in teams? Okay, so bring it up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't realize he had sent you something.

[Linus Sebastian]

So when he was like Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs would be rolling in his fucking grave.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, cuz the pad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Seeing this, look, the Apple F Cking logo is cut off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh no way.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look at this. The top left here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not cut off.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it's not. Sometimes, sometimes the logo gets cut off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, really? Why does it move at all?

[Linus Sebastian]

What a great question, Lou.

[Dan]

It's OLED safe. Like the WAN banner.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Why does Overscan exist? I don't know.

[Dan]

I'm sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It just goes off the screen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Isn't that wild? Dude, isn't that wild?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know I would respect it if it was OLED safe, but the fact that it would go off the screen is insane.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

And it's just the logo, not any of the other top bar text. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you look how much padding it has on my built in display.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's a lot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Initially I thought I was like, oh you know what, it probably is because Apple has their stupid rounded displays and this is a square corner one or something. That's not it. Because I went and checked on Alex's system because he's also doing the 30 day challenge and his is fine and he has never seen It.

[Dan]

How do any of their products have bugs? They only have to make them for one device. It's.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, it's.

[Dan]

It just drives me nuts.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's wild. Disk management is terrible. I mean, disk management is kind of terrible on Windows as well, but I had a Linux formatted USB drive and I basically put it in and it like read all the files and everything, but I couldn't copy anything to it. I couldn't erase it. I couldn't reformat it. The. The flow was wrong. So when I couldn't do it, it sent me to a tool that didn't even bring me to the USB drive. It just took me to the, like, system settings for my boot drive. Completely useless. Completely sent me in the wrong direction. It might as well have been like the Fix it Wizard from Windows xp. Completely useless. Oh, man. I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cypher Colt said, is it a pixel shift to protect the panel?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, absolutely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dan and I were just talking about that joke. Yeah, no, it was. You wouldn't have to make it go off the screen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, no, the panel would do it, so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I see.

[Linus Sebastian]

Apple wouldn't be able to control that. That's definitely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Still.

[Dan]

It's only the logo.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Based on the other thing. Yeah, exactly. Based on the other things that are on the screen. That's not what.

[Linus Sebastian]

I will double check. I will make sure before I actually, you know, crucify Apple for cutting off their own logo in their interface.

[Dan]

Well, that doesn't fit the design language. And as you said, Steve would be rolling over.

[Linus Sebastian]

Steve would be livid if he saw the Apple logo get cut off. Livid. And I. That's not even, like, debatable. You literally cannot debate this. Imagine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, there's.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's no way, like, people would potentially be fired over something that egregious. You do not screaming. You do not do that. Grayson says it's not only the logo, and I think you might be right. So I think it might be down to the weird display scaling issues that I'm having. So I will investigate. But it shouldn't happen with any kind of display scaling. Yep. Yeah, I think there's less margin on top of Safari as well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There definitely is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Either way. Either way, I will look into it. But this is not a desired behavior, and I think that's too much to be oled pixel shift. But I will check. I will check. What? Oh, my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're definitely right.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not just the acceleration on the mouse scroll wheel.

[Dan]

Well, it's. The first thing I asked you is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Infuriating infuriating if you do it because they use. They use momentum, like on a touch interface. And it's ironic, right, for computers that don't have touch screens. Yeah. They have touchpads. So they. So it uses what. Start listening.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can you not close that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. This is amazing.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Welcome to Apple Music.

[Linus Sebastian]

So they have, you know, window. They have, like, closed this thing, you know, interface, but. Oh, oh, oh, oh, sorry. You want to. Oh, oh, okay. No, well, yeah, sometimes. Sometimes the red button just like, goes away and you need to use the top bar. Because, like, I talked about this a lot in my. In my iPhone challenge video where it's like, look, if you want to have your logic for doing things, fine, fine. There needs to be consistency if you're going to have your little stoplights and the red one closes this window.

[Dan]

And you.

[Linus Sebastian]

You saw that it literally had the stoplights, but the red one was grayed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Out with the red one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why, if you know it's supposed to be there, you clearly know what I want to do. Let it close. No, but. No, I have to go up to the top.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're not allowed.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not okay. That is just bad design. And again, it's not debatable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is Command q like Alt F4?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Inconsistent design is bad design. That's it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone in chat saying, command queue everything or else it doesn't fully close the application.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan, do you want to get rid of the screenshot?

[Dan]

Oh, sorry, I forgot. I thought Command Q was more like Control W and then there's like Command something Q which is more like alt F4.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. I haven't had to use it yet.

[Dan]

It's been a long while.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Unsure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's see what else we got. Oh, man. The acceleration on the scroll wheel. I haven't looked into that one yet. Hopefully there's a fix for that, but it is infuriating.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, it's more like Control Q on Linux. Okay. I mean, that makes sense.

[Dan]

Command W. So that's like Control W on. On Windows.

[Linus Sebastian]

Capturing screenshots was pure pain the first time I did it because basically this actually, like, still makes me mad. I asked Alex, which was my first mistake, and he goes, oh, it's. It's Command Shift five, I think, or something like that. No, no, no, he. No, he told me three. I think Command Shift three to get a screen. Yeah, there you go. So it pulls up the screenshot here and then I was looking at this interface and there's like no obvious way to save this. Right. So there's like Share, which is not really what I want to do. Delete, markup, whatever this means, and close. So there was no, like, obvious way to save it. And I was like, okay, so, like, is it saved already? Is it saved automatically?

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I went, wait, but they don't have the traffic lights for close.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's just like an X. Yeah, don't worry about it. It's really, really good UI design.

[Dan]

It's weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

I didn't even notice that part. That. That's good, though. Yeah. Anyway, I was like, okay, well, like, did it save somewhere here? I'll just open Finder and I'll find out. But my Finder wasn't like that. It was like this. So I opened Finder.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, what is it behind the screen?

[Linus Sebastian]

And then I was like, okay, well, did it open here? New Finder window. But it didn't do it like that. It did it, like, behind it again. So I was like, what? But I can move this. Hold on. If I click on it twice, first you have to click on a window to make it the focus window.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Then you have to click again in order to move it. And then I was like, okay, Finders. Sorry, it's behind this. And then I. Oh, man. I ran into. I ran into a really funny one. So I was able to. Oh, I forget I was able. Did I. I think the ice cream record this. I was able to edit the text in this window, unless I had this one as the focus. I forget. But basically I could interact with a window behind it, except when I couldn't. And so it's just. And what's funny is that this. The one. This screenshot preview, it's like an app. Like, you can. You can mark up a screenshot and you can share and you can do this stuff, but it also isn't an app because if you look up at the top bar, it's still Safari up here. So I cannot quit this app by going up here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's what Apple calls a preview window that stays on top of other windows. Couldn't tell you why they do that. I mean, yeah, that's a feature in Windows as well. They just don't use it very often because it's incredibly annoying.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's really, really. It's a really bad experience. Well, what it is is it's an inconsistent experience.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A lot of people. Other people are saying that you don't have to click twice. But, I mean, I've seen him do it, like, a million times, and when he tries to select it the first time, literally nothing happens. So I'm not sure. Maybe that's a configurable thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe it's depending on where you. Because I'll usually go for the bar and I'll want to move something right. And it looks like I have to make it the focus and then click again. It doesn't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I know. He's just saying I haven't clicked twice in ever.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, you guys just watched me do it, so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I have what, to be clear. Yeah, obviously he is clicking twice. We've seen him click twice. But I've seen him try to click once and it doesn't do anything.

[Linus Sebastian]

So. Yeah, so it's PEBCAC error.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But you guys. Sorry, we need. Why?

[Linus Sebastian]

You guys literally watched me try to drag it there. Like, I did try to do it and it didn't work and I had to go back and get it and move it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe it's clicking on the name of the window, maybe. So you can't click just anywhere on the bar. You have to click right on the name.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe there's a particular spot. This is one that. This is one that like, needs more investigation, but I've definitely run into it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Yeah. Apparently Command Shift 4 is like Snipping Tool where you can select a portion.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, that's why I said part of my problem was I listened to. To Alex. He's a new Mac user.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So he said 5.

[Linus Sebastian]

Command shift. No, he said 3. So command shift 5 is also pretty good. That brings up like, screen capture, which is built into macOS.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

How is it even possible that screen capture is not built into Windows?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, no, that's. That's genuinely cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

How is that even possible?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Every Windows user is just OBS built, like, unbelievable.

[Linus Sebastian]

They should not have to be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's like one of the first apps I install on my computer. Now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Obs's interface is so obtuse compared to, you know, something slick and built.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That genuinely, like, looks really nice. Yeah, that's cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, it's unreal. Urban Fervor says, I think it's built into Windows 11. Now I'm gonna have. I'm gonna have to check. I have not seen an obvious place for it. Someone says Windows G. Is that the game bar? Hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, it's built into the game bar.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God, I hate the game bar. Literally. The game bar is so horrible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would never want to use it. It's also Windows Alt. Windows Alt R. Yeah, Windows Alt R.

[Dan]

I use Windows Shift s all the time for taking screenshots.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's working. Well, where's the interface for this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't see it at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God. You have to hop. Wait, no. How do I.

[Dan]

If you hit Windows R again, how.

[Linus Sebastian]

The hell do I, like, interact with this thing?

[Dan]

You don't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, that's stupid.

[Dan]

Just stop the recording with the same.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Shortcut recording button, and it's. It's just gone. I'm assuming it's in video.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, was it Windows Alt R?

[Dan]

I think that's the recording one. Windows Shift R?

[Linus Sebastian]

Windows? No. Windows Altar. Yeah. Windows Alt R. And it just. Then it just like, goes. How. How the hell do you configure it? Recording.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So mine worked. Yeah, just. When you click Stop, it just goes to your Videos folder under Captures.

[Linus Sebastian]

Man. Is. Man. Is Windows search ever useless?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That feels a little clunky.

[Linus Sebastian]

Searching for recording yields record audio. When I record a game capture Mouse cursor in game Game captures maximum recording length. Fix some problems with game bar settings. Okay. Game bar settings. I think is. Is maybe what I was looking for.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hmm.

[Linus Sebastian]

Helps game bar looks like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God. Why is this so hard to find? Stop. I love Computer Windows G. Okay, so, like, can I configure it here? Settings Home. Don't do that. Settings. Hello. Capture Settings, maybe. Oh, was that the settings? Did I. Did I. Did I make the settings go away? Did I click.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I think Settings is what you recorded last time, actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

Settings?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Seriously? Oh, no, that's what it will record.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, no, I'm trying to click this and I can't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, no, no, no, no. That's. That's. It's not. That is not a settings button. Yeah, it's because the window below you, what you're going to record is settings, like mine says. The Perpetual WAN Show Live stream document.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, hilarious. That. Wow. Oh, wow. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, you. You just. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Gaming features. This is horrible. Why is this so hard to just configure?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone said it's built into Snipping Tool. Oh. Settings in the bar at the top. Top right hand corner of the bar.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I know. I found it. That's it right here. But it's. It's not in there. Like, there's no configuration for screen recording. How is this so stupid? Oh, no, it's like, people don't use these products, you know? Okay, so Windows Shift R is the better one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Isn't that what we just did?

[Linus Sebastian]

Snipping Tool. Oh, Snipping Tool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, but Snipping Tool is record Settings.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I haven't played around with Snipping tool much lately? Been a Share X guy for a while. Here we go. Okay. HDR color corrector. Okay. This has some stuff in it. Where the devil do I, like, change any encoding settings or anything?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that's a no.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Yeah. This could be better on Windows as well. Again, I've said this a lot of times and for some reason it doesn't work, but I'm gonna say it again just for fun. Just because I have a bunch of gripes about macOS does not mean, in fact, that I hate hot dogs. Or actually, no, it doesn't mean I like hot dogs. I might hate everything. Everything might be terrible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Everything is awful.

[Linus Sebastian]

So, yeah, this is something that is. Could obviously be better on the Windows side of things. All right, what else? What else we got here? Oh, dude. The fact that the. The Mac App Store and the Safari Extension Store are jumbled together is mind blowing to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That sounds horrible.

[Linus Sebastian]

I searched for Keeper in the App Store and it came up with a Safari Extension and a desktop application. Are you kidding me?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that bad?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's really stupid. Especially because it wasn't obvious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. I was gonna say, is it clearly delineated?

[Linus Sebastian]

Like one of them was obviously for Safari and the other one was just like keeper. It's like, okay, so I've got Keeper and Keeper for Safari. What does that even. What does that even mean? Solve.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was just like a pretty simple tagging system.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Seems easy to solve.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Definitely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not that they've done it, but yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

It seems very, very solvable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man. Volume adjustment doesn't work on my external display. Definitely need a little bit more diagnosis there. But literally doesn't work with my scroll wheel on my keyboard. Doesn't work with the, with the volume adjuster in the corner. Like, it's there, but it's just grayed out. It's kind of like when you connect to a Bluetooth speaker and it just kind of maxes it out. Assuming that you'll do volume control on the external device. Except that configuring volume level on the like nipple on the bottom of my monitor is not very convenient for me because I use my monitor's built in speakers. Very annoying. Some other people in chat are saying they have some issues with that as well. Apparently I need Display Buddy to fix some of my issues. I'm going to write down Display Buddy here.

[Dan]

Why do you have to install so many programs, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's just like. Doesn't it just work? I thought it just works, right? Doesn't it just work?

[Dan]

Dan, isn't that Todd Howard?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh my God. Paste as plain text is not a right click context menu option. You have to press and I kid you not, command alt, shift V What? No, it's also apparently not supported everywhere. So there's a horrible terminal workaround that I found on Reddit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So what? In full plane chat I lost their message. But they mentioned that like this segment was painful because blah blah, blah, blah, blah blah. And no Mac users use Safari.

[Linus Sebastian]

What are you Even talking about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

2023, Safari was the second most used web browser and the amount of people that have Macs versus other types of PCs is like way lower. So as far as my understanding goes, and actually huge percentage of Mac users use Safari.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's really, really, really interesting to hear people say no one this thing that I don't do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I guarantee you that if no one was using Safari on the desktop.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Safari Mobile. Interesting point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Absolutely. Yeah. Safari Mobile is definitely a thing. But people definitely use Safari. Don't kid yourself. People just. Many people just use whatever the included apps are on their computer or phone or whatever. Like why do you think Internet Explorer, in spite of being such a steaming pile of garbage for so many years, held onto its market share, still has like 10%? Because people just use whatever's in front of them. Do not kid yourself. People use Safari. All right, what else we got here?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, it's desktop users. Apparently almost 12% of desktop user market share is Safari.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's like. That's such a. That's such a non take that. People don't use it. Oh, man. Middle click press to get like a scroll thing when you move your mouse and scroll. Not a thing. Such a downer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's annoying. I use it a lot.

[Linus Sebastian]

I use that all the time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A lot of very conflicting stats on browser market share. I don't know. I don't know which one of these is right.

[Linus Sebastian]

But the someone definitely uses it. That's all you need to know. Yeah, someone definitely uses it. Yeah. So I mean there's. I'm going to find all kinds of things I like maybe eventually. I haven't really found any yet, but I'm sure something I'm going to like something about it. I definitely like the hardware. Like the MacBook itself is great, always has been. Really.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To be honest, PC laptops have been struggling.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Forever basically compared to Mac.

[Linus Sebastian]

HP's got a really cool one that uses the same.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Those fingerprints on that screen is. Are like actually bothering me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I know, right? It's not even a touchscreen why are they there? Watch this. I'll clean it after.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Steve is rolling in his grave because of that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I know, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe that's why they're not touchscreens.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah. HP has a super cool machine that uses the same processor as the new Framework Desktop. Strix Halo from amd. That thing looks sick in a Framework investment disclosure, but man, that, that HP machine looks amazing. It's one of only three devices I've seen so far with Strix Halo. And as far as I can tell, I just love Strix Halo and everything should just have Strix Halo now. As long as you don't mind the price. It's very, very expensive. It's. I don't know actually, I saw it at ces, but that doesn't mean that it's out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, reviews just dropped like earlier. Z2. Z book. Z book. Strix Halo. I'm. I'm not, I'm not seeing anywhere to buy it yet. Does anyone know if you can actually like buy this thing yet?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is it called again?

[Linus Sebastian]

Let me see. ZBook Ultra 14 GI.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ugh, what a name.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, right? ZBook Ultra 14. Here it is. Mobile workstation PC coming soon. Yeah, not yet, but this thing looks freaking awesome. Like it's. It's. What is this? I scrolled and it opened a freaking video. No. Oh, I must have accidentally clicked.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

50 NPU tops. Ryzen AI Max. Up to 4 terabytes of storage, 128 gigs. Unified memory.

[Dan]

Let's go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, this thing looks incredible. It's super thin. The battery life is actually decent. And according to Alex, the performance is still pretty okay looking comparatively.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The USB ports, it looks like they didn't 100% prioritize thinness, which I'm actually kind of down with. Yeah, it doesn't look thick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, they needed. I mean this thing will do up to 120 watts. Strix Halo. So I think, I think they landed, don't quote me on this, I think they landed around 75 for this chassis.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Apparently Tom's Hardware says $2,700.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not, it's not going to be cheap. I mean, that's the thing is, I've seen a lot of criticism toward Framework investment disclosure for their, their pricing, just about the desktop in general. And I've seen people dunking on them for the pricing. But I think the thing that people are missing here is that this LPDDR5 that they're using in, in this configuration with Strix halo, is it LPDDR5 or LPDDR5X. I can't remember.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's funny because you have to say that to like show potential bias or whatever, but you having to say that is probably like the most valuable thing to Framework.

[Linus Sebastian]

You haven't watched the video, have you? Nurav says that point blank. It's like, oh, that's great. The more disclosures, the better.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's honestly like, it's just the consistency of it is insane. If any, if any other laptop gets any talking point ever, Framework also gets a talking point. It's like, holy crap.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I now that they make a desktop, I think we legitimately have to kind of talk about how to deal with this because I can't do a Framework disclosure every single time I talk about a laptop or a desktop computer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can we.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why don't we save that for, for the actual like Framework announcement section of the WAN show, though?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I never thought about.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, the point is people are giving Framework a hard time about the desktop, but they're actually being extremely fair about their pricing for the upgrades and their pricing in general. Like this laptop we're looking at. What did you say? Starts at $2800?

[Luke Lafreniere]

27, I think somewhere on there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, the Framework desktop, actually. Let's see, is their site up? Is it frame dot work? Yeah, desktop. Here we go. Pre order now. Yeah, this thing starts at like 1600 bucks. And yes, it doesn't have a display and yes, you have to add your own storage and os, but like it's still pretty good, all things considered.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, what are we supposed to do, Mr. Dan?

[Dan]

Explain merch messages and do some announcements.

[Linus Sebastian]

Merch messages. Today is a very special day to send a merch message. We got some respite in terms of tariffs from our friends down in the states and we are making the absolute most of that by moving up our schedule for our annual tax reform write off sale event.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have you ever wanted to bother Dan?

[Linus Sebastian]

That's right, friends. You can save on, you can save on our inventory overstock. I'm sorry, this isn't the lime day sale. This isn't the Linus inventory management experience. This is the tax write off sale. You can save on our tax write offs on, well, inventory that we have that we need to get rid of. And you can avoid any future price increases due to future tariffs. Potentially asterisk. We have no idea what's going to happen because everything is topsy turvy and unpredictable these days. And if our costs do go up substantially, some items could be price adjusted in the future. But what they definitely are not is price adjusted today. If you place an order today, you will receive that order at the price that you paid for it. And to celebrate the tax write off sale, we are tax writing off some shipping costs. That's right, my friends. If your order exceeds US$175, you will get free shipping to Timbuktu or anywhere, really. Yeah, yeah. You don't have to be in Timbuktu. There's lots of places.

[Dan]

Took me a long time to realize that that was an actual real place I not just made up. I had a bit of a cry on the floor.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, no Timbuktu. Real place. So, guys, put on your shirt now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yes, I got you, Arty.

[Linus Sebastian]

So now is as good a time as any to place an order on lttstore.com. and if you're gonna do it, why don't you send a merch message? Merch messages are the way to interact with the show. We don't do twitch bits. We don't do super chats. We do merch messages. All you got to do to send one is go to ltt, add an item to your cart. Like, say, for example, the tech bro vest, which is on sale for. I forget, I don't know, whatever. I think it's 50% off. Like, I think it's very aggressively priced. So the tech bro vest is on super sale. Or. Or you could pick up one of these probably never to be reordered, Mac address button up shirts, which are also deeply discounted. You add one of those to your cart and a little merch message box will pop up. That'll go to producer Dan, who will reply to your message with his broken, broken fingers. He's already. A lot of people figured out the tax write off sale before we talked about it on the show. So he'll reply to it, or he will curate it for me and Luke to talk about, or he will send it to someone who can get you an answer or whatever the case may be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All the deals that you're supposed to to say were written out on the dock, and you got some of them wrong. Well, where are they on the dock?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't see them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right in the announcement is a tax write off section.

[Linus Sebastian]

I see it. Well, I didn't scroll. I didn't scroll far enough. So it's. What are we looking at? Oh, 60% off the Tech Bro vest and 50% off the Mac address Oxford shirts. This deal literally dropped. Right now we've also got $25 mystery hoodies $10 mystery t shirts, over 60% off the off site laptop bag. That is a killer deal. It's a really, really nice laptop bag. 25% off the more comprehensive MCM essential solution. With 60% off the MCM starter solutions. We have 10 bucks off the scribe driver bolt action pen and wow. You get a free shaft extension with your stubby screwdriver. We don't want you to feel inadequate. What else is there for us to say? Yeah, free shipping orders over $175. And we're happy to announce that more commuter backpacks will be available to ship starting next week. So that could be an easy way for you to reach that tax write off sale shipping threshold. Nice, nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Should we do the other announcement after merch messages? I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

A lot of people figured that one out before we, we, before we actually talked about it on the show as well. Commuter backpacks are selling like yo, the hotcakes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You guys. Yeah, you guys figured it out. Well, good, good, good for you. Anywho. Yeah, my loss, your gain. Let's do some merch messages. Sure.

[Dan]

I've got a couple for you here. Finally able to catch the WAN show live.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, wait, hold on one second.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mystery T shirts.

[Linus Sebastian]

One of the best selling ones Crystal pointed out. Also, there's a bunch of cool stuff in the bonus bin. I'm not going to tell you what's in there. Oh, but she's right. There's some really cool stuff in the bonus bin. Jamon says backpack enamel pin is $250. Yes. It comes with a backpack. That's a meme.

[Dan]

Don't worry about it. Whoa.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The bonus bin.

[Dan]

What do you call them?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We don't have to show it, but wow.

[Dan]

Product upsell items.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So the bonus bin is stuff that you can get for free with your order.

[Luke Lafreniere]

These are, these are, these are not cheap things. Okay, cool.

[Dan]

Have fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

Neat, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Good luck.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, neat. Good stuff, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Tax write off.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, tax write off sale. Time to write. Time to make some money by writing off taxes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, but pure profit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pure profit. Okay, Mr. Dan, hit us.

[Dan]

Sure. Finally able to catch a live WAN show again. What is the difference between Nvidia and the AMD GPUs that make Nvidia so much better at ray tracing?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, they have dedicated hardware for ray tracing and they are a solid entire generation ahead of AMD in terms of developing their design. Nvidia was the one that. Yep, they're the tip of the spear in terms of pushing ray tracing into the mainstream. They worked with developers, they worked to build the hardware that can do it back when they launched the RTX 20 series. So like when did the RTX 2080 launch? Like that was a thousand years ago. September 20th, 2018. Nvidia has been beating this ray tracing drum for over six years now. And AMD is playing catch up. And that's what happens when someone else goes and they innovate a feature and you kind of go oh crap. And you sort of implement it mostly in, I don't want to say software because they were definitely still using hardware to do it in the early generations. But you know, essentially using more general purpose compute in order to handle ray tracing. Then you kind of, you know, you build some ray tracing hardware, but it's your first crack at it. It just takes time to catch up. Nvidia was all in on ray tracing right, right out of the gate with the 20 series. And that has paid off for them. For gamers that appreciate ray traced lighting, which isn't all gamers, but certainly is some gamers. I talked to some folks that are like, I think it looks worse. I hate the lower FPS and that's totally their prerogative. But I talk to other people that are like, I won't play a game without ray tracing on. That's a thing. And you don't have to agree, but you do have to understand and acknowledge that that's a thing. And for some people it has a lot of value.

[Dan]

Oh yeah. More merge messages. Sorry. If no SATA 4, why no U2 instead on motherboards for expanded storage. M2 drives Waste Limited board surface area. They're okay for low profile laptops, but desktop cases have room for mounting hard drives.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a good, that's a good question. Why don't we just mount drives in drive bays and use cable interfaces? Well, one of the reasons that we wouldn't want to do that is SATA cables are cheap. U2 cables are not. It's a really high speed signal and putting it directly on the board means that the trace length is going to be much lower if, if you were to try. I think the last time that U2 was really present in like mainstream consumer boards was like PCIe gen 3. Did we ever see, did we ever see gen 4, like U2 really take off on consumer boards? Can you guys think of anything? Feel free to, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, guys, but it's, it's an expensive connector, it's an expensive cable because it's a super, super high speed Interface and the commodity consumer computer industry guys, we're talking fractions of a penny of savings sometimes that influence design decisions. SATA was cheap. SATA was cheaper than IDE to implement because it required so many fewer conductors. It's like, where does innovation come from? It comes from cost savings. M2 is relatively affordable to implement because the trace lengths are so low in order to maintain those data speeds. So I would say that U2 is just simply, simply not not happening on, on consumer. And the only reason to have a U2 drive would be if you need like a shed load of NAND flash chips. Otherwise you can cram as many as you would want on an M2. Like you could buy 8 terabyte M2s. The only impediment to doing that is the cost. So are you going to tell me that people need a 40 gigabit or a 40 gigabit? A 40 terabyte drive? Like no, they're not going to be able to afford that anyway. So what are we even talking about? We don't need to build a 2.5-inch drive for this. And they do exist. You could buy an enterprise drive and you could put it in your computer. You could put a card into your PCIe slot and you could run like a U3 off to your card or whatever. Or you can get an M2 adapter, you can get a little M2 carrier card and you can put a U2 or U3 interface on there. Run that off to a drive. I do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But we kind of knew those cables were going to be brutal right away because the second you feel it it's like that's expensive.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but I just don't think it makes a ton of sense for consumers especially when you consider the additional costs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Next one, Dan.

[Dan]

It's only two in the middle and I think I'm going to move into sponsors now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, we're. We have, we have an announcement. We have one more announcement.

[Dan]

We have an announcement.

[Luke Lafreniere]

First of all, I think I covered this in the pre show but we are, we are doing the hirings. I just wanted to remind people to check out the Careers page on Linus Media Group.com There's a, there's a variety of positions at Creator Warehouse and Linus Media Group that are up right now. There's going to be a project manager role put up for float plane in a bit. It's not up yet but it's going, coming. At Creator Warehouse they're doing a part time photographer and photo editor, a full time graphic designer and A full time supply chain manager. All the Lineage Media Group roles are full time. There's two test technicians that we're hiring.

[Linus Sebastian]

So there's actually five.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Same job description? Yeah. One full time logistics coordinator, one full time content writer for the labs, and potentially other technical content. Things like short circuit, stuff like that. And a full time time testing coordinator. So go check those out. You want a link for the job posting?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, they're memeing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was gonna say Rysa was memeing. Rysa is trying to trigger Luke. Can I get a link to that job posting?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's the barrier of entry.

[Linus Sebastian]

Immediately followed with slash S. They knew how triggered you were gonna be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Immediately bothered me.

[Dan]

So Luke's turning red.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know. He was shaking from here. It was so upset for Luke. That is literally like the first IQ test that you need to pass to get a job at this company.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a few too, but that's a. That's an early fail. And the next one is that the lab's website has had a pretty major update.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, this is exciting. This is more of a topic. This is less of an announcement.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, okay. I mean, sure. We're doing this topic then. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure, yeah. Let's talk about the lab's website.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It probably looks different if you haven't seen it in a while. There's a lot of reasons why it's really cool, honestly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's start with the buttons.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, what I'm going to start with is that we had Dan, the leader of the labs web team.

[Linus Sebastian]

Other different Dan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not this Dan. Other Dan.

[Dan]

Luke's Dan. Not Luke's Dan.

[Linus Sebastian]

Burn Dan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's confusing and it has little gifs showing off all the different features. And it's actually really well written. So if you want to really dive into everything that changed, this is probably the way to do it, to be honest.

[Linus Sebastian]

But if you're lazy and you want us to just do it for you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Then we can do that.

[Linus Sebastian]

So here's the shoddier version.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah. What did you want to see? But okay, these ones.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So this was, I believe, an idea from Sebastian that was iterated on by Dan. And I love it because what I believe it was Sebastian was pointing out is that the new categories page is fantastic and he wanted to be surfaced more. So the idea was to put them down here. And it's kind of nice in my opinion, because this shows off the color coding. So do you see the colors of all the buttons here? If you scroll down and you see the tags and the colored bars down here, they coordinate, which I think is genuinely actually pretty sweet. But the new comparison page I'm going to go into. GPUs, for example. Sorry, not comparison page. This is a new categories page. So now we have this. You can see all of the different stats in here and you can filter by a wide variety of different things.

[Linus Sebastian]

So you could be like how many slots or what kind of memory, how much memory? If you want, you know, a decent sized frame buffer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I want a card that's going to fit in my like fairly small form factor case that has, I don't know. Yeah. This much memory. Okay, here's all the cards.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that uses a power connector that doesn't light on fire.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So this is, this is all the. This is all the cards that fit that, that filter. Are the columns customizable? I don't think so, no. But I don't know. It is what it is. The Compare bin over here. There you go, you've got your. You've got your thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, look, it has a tool tip. Now that's cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's fast. So you can add to comparison.

[Linus Sebastian]

I saw that yesterday and it's already.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Done, like near end of day too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, no, that's sick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So you can add to Comparison Bin from here, which is awesome. So I mean, let's. Let's say this just narrowed it down to three things. I'm going to add the three top cards here. And then the Comparison bin has also had.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, Dan, do you want to. Oh, yeah, there we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep, the Comparison bin has also had a big update. This is my favorite one out of everything. So. Well, okay, you can see this now. If you have to like a mixture of things, you can select which subset you want to see.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So if you added like power supplies and mice and whatever you can, you can do that. Click on Detailed comparison. And now the comparison pin looks like this, which is way nicer. The photos don't automatically, like, destroy the viewability of all the data right away, but you can show them if you want. So you can see all the different photos and even scroll through the different photos of the different products that you're viewing and then tuck those away when you don't want them. I. A feature that took some tweaking to really like make it right, but I'm super happy with personally is the highlight differences button. So you can do this and then it shows you, like what actually changes between them. So like, what, what do I need to like care about between these different cards, what's going to matter? What's going to change depending on what selection I have? You can. You can see the graphs for all of them in here. The graphs are configurable as well, as always. Yeah, it's good stuff. I think you can even. Yes. So you can take one of the cards off or put it back on. So if you like, you know, don't want to reconfigure your entire comparison bin, but you're like, all right, I'm not going to get this one. It sucks, or whatever, you can uncheck that. Yeah, it's pretty great. The search is a lot better now than it used to be. I'm trying to think of what I'm mixing. I'm probably mixing things. I'm going to go to Dan's article to figure this out.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's going to be a ton of work for us to get, like, you know, every card, you know, populated in here, you know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right. The product cards, obviously.

[Linus Sebastian]

But the goal is still. And we have not deviated from this mission, the goal is still to turn the lab's website into just an absolutely incredible resource. Whether you're buying something brand new, whether you're buying something off of Facebook Marketplace, to. To make it easy, to make an informed decision. And there's been some setbacks along the way. There's definitely, you know, been some mistakes, but make no mistake, Labs, we're still cooking. The labs is still cooking. It's not finished, but it is absolutely still cooking. And we haven't lost sight of what the mission is. And it's not to make money. It's to create an incredible resource for the tech community. Um, and it's been very frustrating, I think, to see a narrative built that, like Labs was somehow like a negative thing in some way. It was never meant to be a negative thing. We are human and we've made some mistakes, but, man, is it ever coming along.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Trying to make it cool, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is super cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One more cool thing to point out, I think I somewhat mentioned these, but these. These product cards have been updated as well. You might remember earlier in the year we added the, the, the like blog section to the right here, but the product cards over here have gotten an update as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Very cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And these. So now they don't just have the blurb, they also have the tags. This is another thing that went through a few iterations. There was an idea of just having the tags at one part, at one point, but that didn't really like. It felt like something was not really there. So I think, I think Dan went through a couple iterations and ended up on this one. I, I mean I might be biased here, but I really like how this page looks and feels right now. Personally just even having all the categories listed here, there's, there's a sense of.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like I'm feel, I feel a little guided.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It feels full, it feels saturated, it feels good. There's stuff there, you know, categories, you can still find them under here, but they're not tucked away anymore. They're right here. You can see the color coding, it's right there. You can see the tags on here. So you can quickly identify if that one matters to you or not. But we're also not. We were having this debate on like if we put too many tags, too much information on this section, it would almost dissuade people from.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, very cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. With it pre selected as very cool, it would almost dissuade people from clicking into things and like effectively learning more. And one of the missions of the Labs website is to give people a resource. So we were almost worried that by surfacing too much information on the like card view that it could take away from what we want the site to do. If people are like oh, you're just trying to like get people to click more. There are no ads on the site.

[Linus Sebastian]

Literally zero.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's been like years. We gain nothing from keeping you here. We just actually want you to like find more information. We don't just want to surface level things. We're expecting that someone coming to the lab's website is looking for more and wants to go deeper. So we want to cater to that experience. But anyways, I'm incredibly proud of this. I think the web team has done an extremely good job. I think the website looks fantastic and we're hiring.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's time to put even more resources. The web populated. No, sorry but, but the Labs team. The Labs team is hiring. CMD Carini asks is the long term plan to subsidize Labs content with ltt? Well if it wasn't, boy, have we ever deviated from the plan to the tune of seven figures.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Millions. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Depending on how you calculated it could be more than seven figures. Yes, definitely. And yes, Dark rainbow. We want the Labs to succeed and we are, we are extremely committed to helping the lab succeed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's even little things like, and I know this matters to like very few people, but I, I, I, I know this matters if you ask them to very few people, but I think it Actually does matter. Like if I, if I move my mouse over this card, the little arrow in the corner turns and the brand and model gets underlined. And if I highlight over the plus. Whoop. Little nice design. Little nice little animation. Like, the site feels really smooth. There's. When you, when you go into an article now, like, this section right here is going to go with you. Whoop. Like, everything just feels really nice. I don't know. It's fast. It feels good, it looks good. I'm very happy with the lab site.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, the site's. The site's ready for a lot more product data.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Which is why we're, you know, hiring testers and hiring testing coordinators and the. We're getting the labs. Yeah, things are good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Crusty trombone asks, is there a timeline for new component categories like main boards to be added? Right now? No. I think one of the big mistakes that we made was to try to go too broad too fast. So right now we are laser focused on the peripherals that we have there now. Power supplies, CPUs, GPUs, and getting ramped. Because, like, I don't know if I've made this clear in the past, but our goal is not just to test every Ventus tri flow strix, like every version of every gpu, but to. To have enough capacity to do that and start making our way backward so that if you're upgrading, you can literally take your current card and compare it to all of your different options to upgrade to. Now, it's. It's obviously not going to be perfect, right. Because we might not run with the same CPU that you have in your system, but it will at least be a valuable point of reference. And, and that's our goal in the longer term.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Another just little reminder to check out that blog post that Dan posted. It's. It's well written, the gifts are. Are painstakingly crafted, and there's probably a couple things in there that I missed. So if you're. If you're interested in the lab site, I would. I would highly suggest checking that out. But yeah, man, it's. It's starting to feel really good. There's still so much more we can do with the lab site, which is also exciting. Like, as much as this makes it feel like full and all that other type of stuff that I said, there's so many more features that could be coming down the line. I'm not going to name any of them now, but there's some really good ideas that will really continue to push the usability of the site and help people end up with a decision. That's another one of the things that we've been talking about. What does the lab site eventually need to be able to do? And it's been really interesting for information for a while. But as we move forward into the future, we want to help you come to a conclusion more. Yeah. Right now it's still in the great for information stage and we think stuff like that categories view that we're showing off can really push forward towards helping people come to a conclusion. But there is still more that we can do and it's exciting to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Have.

[Luke Lafreniere]

More things to work on. That's good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, buddy, let's go. Yeah, buddy, let's go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, moving on. Oh, sponsor spot, I guess.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is that right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. Dan, you tell us.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It'S a takeover. Wow. We need to stop tossing the dock around.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My goodness. It's like scroll me to the very top when something happened and stuff is a. It was wild. Anyways, Threat locker has taken over this wan show. As you might have seen at the beginning of the show.

[Linus Sebastian]

Take all the sponsors.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They take all the sponsors.

[Linus Sebastian]

Threat Locker, all of it. Is that who took it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Threat locker. So they've taken over all the sponsor spots.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They took over all this.

[Linus Sebastian]

So if I tried to talk about another sponsor like it would Threat Locker.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know their security method, my mic would stop working. Their security method is default.

[Linus Sebastian]

I won't talk about another.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Other sponsors.

[Linus Sebastian]

Fair enough. Okay, carry on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was a. I. I'm pretty happy with that actually. That's pretty clever.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was pretty good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was pretty good. Anyways, Zero trust world is one of the talking points that I can go over. So I went to zero trust World. Unfortunately I missed actually some. Some parts of it that I think were really probably cool because I flew into Toronto Pearson where that plane flipped over. So my flight was. My connecting flight was canceled. So I missed like. Like the whole first day.

[Linus Sebastian]

Could have been worse. Could have been your flight.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That would have been kind of cool. Everybody survived. I would have been down.

[Dan]

You could have been talked about on the Internet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, he's never been talked about on the Internet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Never happened. They had. They had some cool panels. They had hands on stuff that I had some fun with. They had cool guest speakers. They had Reggie F. From from like ex Nintendo. That pretty wild. I don't know. I really. I think I talked about this on last Wednesday show but I liked the. The ducky panels. They had hack five rubber ducky Panels where we. We learned how to do a bunch of different stuff with those, which was cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

What was like the best thing you learned how to do?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, they gave us a ducky and then AJ and I were sitting there and we ended up finding. So back in the day, if you've seen the Channel Sleeper fun video, it's got a ton of views. So you might have. In high school, I found this screen melting program online and then I. I messed with it a little bit and change it slightly and kind of made it my own. But you know, I didn't make the. I. I made fairly minor changes. There is a maintained version of the original source code online that updates it to support like multiple monitors and all that kind of stuff you can find on GitHub. It's called screen Melter. So I didn't have access to my version and there's a better version now. Anyway, so we downloaded the executable from that and I got it to run by having it just. It had to access the file on the computer. And AJ's like, well that's dumb because if you plug it into someone else's computer, the file is not going to be there. So we figured out how to get it to self reference the rubber Ducky itself for file storage. So you just plug it in and screen melts, which is fantastic. Wasn't really in the scope of the presentation, but Script Kitty confirmed. Not quite, but I did take the beginning thing from somebody else. Anyways, it was, it was, it was fun. We were messing around.

[Linus Sebastian]

So defensive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We took things a little bit well. I mean there was a stage where it was like. But I did actually do cool things to it. I made it like network deployable and all this other stuff. Anyways, yeah, it was fun of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah, don't worry about it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool. Anyway, tell us more about ztw.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, there. There was a lot of the main stage events were cool. The hack panels were probably the most interesting ones to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's funny how certain people like implicate themselves because they can't help boasting certain kinds of people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't do anything anymore. It's been a long time. It's been like genuinely closer to years than not. Like it's weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's been a long time since what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nothing. Anyways, on a panel at Zero Trust World, they announced the addition of some cool features. One of those called Insights, allows you to collect data from millions of endpoints worldwide and present them as actionable information, saving lots of time that might be Spent researching Web Control, which lets you build a library of websites from an always updating list of ones automatically identified as suspicious and blocks your endpoints from accessing them without permission. And Patch Management, which scans devices for outdated applications and inspects the proposed updates for anything that might make your environment less secure or unstable and then lets you apply the patches according to your preset policies.

[Linus Sebastian]

By the way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Threat Locker, as I previously mentioned, is a default deny type system. So it, it can be very useful at not letting something happen. One, I don't have their exact talking points for this in front of me, but the idea is that they're not reactive.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Or their focus is not being reactive. So they're, they're. They try to block things before they can potentially even happen. Which is, which is pretty cool. They lean really heavily on the whole Zero Trust concept. Zero Trust is not necessarily their thing. It's a concept that has existed for a long time. There's products from other brands that reference the term Zero Trust, but I've always kind of liked that approach to things and they embrace it very heavily. It's like the kind of the core of their company. They have a big emphasis on their support. They always have real people behind the scenes helping out with, with their platform and their whole Cyber Hero thing is, is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that might have helped during the hacking.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, you can like, you can like pull in support basically, which is, which is pretty great. Oh yeah, there's a note here that says maybe they could have helped during the hack.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Honestly I don't technically know because we haven't used that yet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure as heck would probably.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

To just have someone at least a reassuring.

[Luke Lafreniere]

With a cool extra set of. Yes, yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because I was not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's often all you need too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like just somebody who's like I've been through this before. Yeah, it's gonna be okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Take these steps and we'll work our way out of it. But yeah, it's cool. Excited.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So we'll be switching over to them and we're pretty excited about that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I got a couple quick things from the floatplane chat here. Neomorph says, hey, please tell me you know when the LTT store sale ends. And then in response I'm going to give you this message from Jetpack Dan in the chat. No, the tech vest in my size is out of stock. It doesn't matter how long the sale event lasts. If you see something you like, you should probably order it because this is the write off sale and quantities are going to be limited regardless of how long the sale event lasts. So you should probably move pretty quickly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I don't think we're going into backordering for this stuff. Right. It's just when it's sold out, it's sold out. Please address the.

[Linus Sebastian]

What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, we're not going to play a video.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's not going to happen four hours ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry. Yeah, that's not going to be a thing. Apparently, we may or may not have said things incorrectly about placebos. On the last show, there's a video from somebody about it. Feel free to check it out if you want. We're not. We don't really talk about medical stuff, so I'm sure if we said it wrong, it's our bad. We're a tech channel. It is what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool. All right, what else we got today? Do a new topic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sick. Okay. Do you want good news or bad news?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Good news.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Eight sleep engineers backdoored your bed. Oh, wait, no, that's not good news. Wait, hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait.

[Dan]

Backdoored. It might be good news.

[Linus Sebastian]

Microsoft is shutting down Skype for good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's probably neutral.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's go with neutral.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Microsoft has confirmed that after 21 years, Skype is shutting down for good. This confirmation comes after users poked around the latest Skype preview update and noticed text that read, starting in May, Skype will no longer be available. Continue your calls and chats in teams or discord. You know, some Skype users will already be able to log into teams using their Skype credentials, while others should gain the ability over the next few days. Our discussion question here is any good Skype memories?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, LTT Forum mod team used to meet over Skype and that was cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was pretty great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was pretty great for a little while.

[Linus Sebastian]

Until the IP resolver bug.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Basically made it unusable for us because we would have people call into the WAN show and then I forget the exact details, but I think anyone who had the username of anyone in the call could resolve the IP address of the host of the call. And so the WAN show would just constantly get ddosed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whenever we would try to have a live guest, which was basically why we stopped doing live guests for a long time, we eventually figured out some mitigation that we will never, ever, ever talk about. But yeah, Skype. Any good experience I ever had with Skype, you know, whether it was affordable long distance calling or using it as a reasonably high fidelity gaming chat, was more than any goodwill that I had towards Skype was more than wiped out by not just the existence of the IP resolver bug, but the long, long, long term persistence of the IP resolver bug. It was a huge, huge issue. So yeah, sucked. Goodbye Skype. I wish that you were never introduced in place of MSN Messenger.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Rest in pieces.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

What else we got?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Should we talk about the bed thing?

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. After discovering an AWS key pair in a firmware update for his eight Sleep mattress in December, cybersecurity researcher Dylan. Sure. Dylan. Did some more digging and discovered that eight Sleep engineers are able to remotely SSH into every customer's bed, which by the way, contains a full Linux computer. And they can even run arbitrary code and not just from your local network.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dylan posted screenshots and code snippets on his Truffle Security blog and noted that with this access, eight Sleep engineers could know when you are sleeping, detect how many people are in your bed, change your bed's temperature, change vibration and alarm settings, connect to other devices on your local network, and this is the kicker. Do literally anything that they could on a normal Linux machine. I'm really glad we don't work with them anymore. Yeah, they have turned out to be absolute massive budgets. Was it you who posted that nine Sleep thing in the chat? Yeah, apparently there's. Has it been abandoned?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It looks like maybe there's like a.

[Linus Sebastian]

DIY like, like hack thing where you go and you take the micro SD card out of your eight Sleep pod and you can like overwrite a file and then like manually configure it and stuff. Like there's no reason you shouldn't be able to do everything that 8 Street 8 Sleep does through the cloud locally other than just that they want to maintain control over the ecosystem. I have one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can use it to tie into home assistant stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke has one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like begrudgingly have one.

[Linus Sebastian]

I like mine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They seem to make monster money, so maybe.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, they don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

They were in like financial trouble a while back.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh really?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, maybe it's because they're shipping everybody Linux computers. Maybe they should bomb down their product.

[Linus Sebastian]

I could be wrong. Eight Sleep has raised 86 million in series C funding. Hold on, what's this one? Was this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just like, I want someone to come up with a competitor.

[Linus Sebastian]

February 2023 okay, I don't know. I take that back. I take that back. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but addressed a leakage issue. I missed the eight sleep. They've raised over 155. Oh. Their latest funding round was a corporate minority on June 24, 2024. I don't know what that means.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Valuation was about half a bill in July 2020.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. People are saying lots of embedded devices have embedded Linux for some reason. Yeah, I mean that is true.

[Linus Sebastian]

But sure, fair enough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't have a SSH backdoor into my house.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, that, that thing that he said just now. So yeah, I'm not super into it. Our discussion question is, is it time for DIY water cooled bed version 2? Oh man, I don't want to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can you buy a cover? Yeah, you can, you can buy just a cover.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh like that's water cooled. That I don't know. But like in terms of like duvets you can get.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, no, no, no, no. Like the, the eight sleep cover. It's called a cover. Yeah, the part that straps onto your bed, not the pod.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I, I don't know. That's a good question because the, if.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I remember correctly, when you guys made that video, the difficult part was the.

[Linus Sebastian]

COVID No, the bed was hard. The cooling was. Well, the cooling was only easy because we had that chiller that we just happened to have. Most people wouldn't have that. But realistically you don't need that kind of horsepower in your. Not literal horsepower, but you don't need that powerful of a chiller anyway. And something more akin to what we made when we did the water cooled gamer chair would be more than fine because like a couple hundred watts is lots to draw heat away from a sleeping person. Let me see if I can find it. Water cooled chair.

[Dan]

Yeah, here it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, apparently there is a competitor. I've never heard of this.

[Dan]

Oh my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

I will come back to this once my ads are done.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know nothing about these guys. They might have the exact same problem. I have no clue. But chili pad sleep me.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I got a Grammarly ad. Grammarly is one of those companies that like I would never use for myself but I absolutely believe that a lot of people should use. Yeah. So here, this, this just little like peltier element that I'm holding is, is enough to cool one person and that's basically what's inside the eight sleep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then it just say I thought it was calm.

[Linus Sebastian]

It either runs to the hot side or the cold side depending on whether it's trying to chill the mattress cover or heat it. Uh, and that's why it's so quiet too. But it's not very energy efficient. But because you're not actually Trying to cool a computer with it. It's fine. You're just trying to cool a human, which is like I think about a hundred watts at rest or something like that. It's not, it's not that much. Uh, anyway, not cool. How's this competitor look, I'm on your screen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When they were showing this animation, I thought it was just like a cool pad. But then you can see as the animation goes on, it's kind of pivoting away from it now. Oh, do you need one for each side? Interesting. So they show the COVID coming down and then they show a little blue animation of like look, it's plugged into this thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, so there is some form of external heat cool element. But then I also see one on the other side. So maybe it's one for each half the bed.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which honestly is probably fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, probably fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Realistically, any like, main bedroom layout is going to have, have a spot for two nightstands and you know, like it's going to have two sides of the bed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Generally speaking. Oh yeah. Here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Looks like these are their options.

[Linus Sebastian]

Doc Pro. Yeah, so it comes with, with two of the things. Supreme Sleep Track does that. Is it a subscription?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Me half queen me or we sleep week sale. Is it a subscription? Does anybody know?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So yeah, the price jumps a bunch when you go to two people.

[Linus Sebastian]

That makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which does make sense, but I don't see any subscription things. They have a protection plan, but that's not a subscription.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, it has a $6 monthly subscription.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One month of sleep me plus. Yeah, I see see it now, but.

[Linus Sebastian]

Does it work without it? Because I don't have an eight sleep subscription. Yeah, you don't need enough for me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, me too.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, well, realistically it's probably not gonna be that different, but who knows.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe it is pretty similar, but I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a subscription, but you don't need it. Says someone says low boom.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So kind of same deal, I guess.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. All right, what else we want to talk about today? Twitch has implemented a 100 hour storage limit and people are losing their minds. In an effort to cut costs, Amazon owned frenemy of streamers. Twitch is culling archived content by making all highlights and uploads, whether published or unpublished, count toward a single 100 hour storage limit. This limit will go into place on April 19th when content will automatically be deleted until it falls below the limit. This limit won't apply to full VODs or clips, only highlights and uploads from third party services. But some creators are sharing screenshots showing they have several thousands of hours in highlights alone and now have less than two months to archive them. And FKA Socks pointed out on the Twitch forums that Speedrunners will likely be the worst hit. Speedrun history is stored entirely in highlights, not just world records, but most every run submitted that was on Twitch is stored as a highlight on speedrun.com they said. Discussion Question how expensive is hosting up to 4,000 plus hours of video for 0.5% of Twitch streamers, which is the percentage of Twitch streamers that Twitch claims will be effective. And the answer is very expensive. Which is why Amazon is stepping in and doing something about this. And this is something that Luke and I have talked about for a long time. The most difficult part of TWI of pitching floatplane to creators is that floatplane costs what streaming and data storage cost. Everyone else is the VC model, which is I provide everything to you for free and we'll figure out the financials later. And what that looks like is, you know, when sites like Patreon start.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, they worked with Vimeo with their.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, when sites like Patreon that like, you know, had a video solution, just like don't have a proper video solution anymore. I believe they do now. Yep, they do now. But that was a big surprise to everybody. When sites like Twitch go, hey, unlimited data storage, this doesn't make any sense and they just turn it off. That's what happens. And that's one of the reasons that I've talked about this at length in the past, but that's one of the reasons that YouTube is such a remarkable platform. The reason that the, the fact that they allow everyone to upload and the fact that all they ask in return is that you watch the ads, which admittedly are a lot these days, or that you pay a premium subscription, which quite frankly given that it includes YouTube music, is very reasonably priced, is kind of incredible. YouTube is flipping incredible. And I don't know how long it's gonna last. But anyway, back to. Back to Twitch. I don't see them reversing course on this because realistically I don't think they care. I think the only place that they're gonna potentially lose streamers to is gonna be what, like Kik. And from my understanding KIX infrastructure just runs on AWS anyway.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. But sometimes has like better features, which is really funny.

[Linus Sebastian]

So like what does Amazon care? Because they basically get your business either way so they can just either bleed money themselves on Twitch. Or they can just, like, take money from crypto Bros.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Apparently, someone in Full Plane Chat posted that. Apparently Facebook is removing live VODs that are over 30 days old.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. That doesn't surprise me because none of this is sustainable. Yeah, like, that's the thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Flow streaming is a crazy model. Like, it's actually wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

Floatplane is built to be sustainable, and it is priced to be sustainable. And we do it all right, and we're doing fine. But this other stuff is built for explosive exponential growth and just, like, suck money up from VCs until it doesn't make sense anymore. And then stall. Right? Like, that's the thing. If you take a plane and you go like this with it, eventually it stalls out. Whereas we're kind of built for slow, slow, steady growth. Very slow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Glacial.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You'll do that. You'll do the business side someday.

[Linus Sebastian]

Someday. Someday you'll have an actual CEO.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It'll. It'll happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not just a CEO in name.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe never.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like the dog waiting outside of the store. Come back someday.

[Linus Sebastian]

Except the store that I went to is for cigarettes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dad's never coming home, is he? Honestly, this feels like. This feels like an opportunity for someone, like, investment disclosure Azhack. Like, right now would be. It's too bad that they weren't, like, out of beta, you know, at this point with Hexos, because if they could just be like, yeah, okay, Twitch, Twitch streamers here. Get ready to own your data. It's going to cost you a little bit of money because, like, duh, storage costs money and you have to pay for it somehow. But it's going to cost you a little bit of money. But here's where you can put it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think most streamers are going to perma store their data. They might perma store clips or specific streams or things like that, but I don't think they're going to perma store everything.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. But, I mean, we're not talking about everything. It's not like Twitch isn't willing to store 100 hours worth of storage, but if there's anything that they want outside of that, then they're going to have to figure it out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some streamers will. I remember Sevitus. Yeah, he used to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And everything.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's true. Well, good luck, everybody.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

What else we got? Yeah, I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So much stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like Sorene said ten plus years ago, Twitch stored the VOD of every stream ever. Then they took that away. This is just A natural progression of that. Yeah, it just doesn't make. It doesn't make any sense. Especially when, no offense, Twitch streamers, but the vast majority of your airtime is just garbage.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Chair stream.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, it actually should not be archived. It doesn't matter. We don't need it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What? You don't need to watch one person watching someone else's content?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What do you mean?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't even need to watch two people watching someone else's content.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Twitch streamers do if, like, YouTube didn't exist.

[Linus Sebastian]

Play video games.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's tough.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wild idea.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's hard work. Wild idea about that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nurdle says, me watching two people talking about people watching content. Touche.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, good news. EA releases the source code for four Command and Conquer. Was this on anyone's bingo card for 2025?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not even a little.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, EA Next you're gonna tell me, like, Activision Blizzard did something good. No, I'm kidding. No one's gonna say that. But the source code release is for Command and Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, Renegade and Generals, along with the Zero Hour expansion. It is being released under the GPL license and the code is available from EA's freaking GitHub page. Steam Workshop support is also being enabled for Renegade Generals, plus the Zero Hour expansion, Command and Conquer three Tiberium wars, plus the Kain's Wrath expansion and Command and Conquer 4 Twilight. They have released a modding support pack that includes source xml schema, shader, and map files for all games utilizing Sage Strategy Action game engine, also available from EA's GitHub page. What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Genuinely wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you kidding me? EA released remasters of Command and Conquer, Tiberian Dawn, OG and Red Alert back in 2020, as well as the Ultimate Collection in 2024 on Steam. But this is. This is wild. Ferna 182 says it's EA. There will be a catch. Mark my words, there will be a catch. But I don't. I don't see the catch. I never got into Command and Conquer. I was a Warcraft kid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Red Alert was. Was big in my house.

[Linus Sebastian]

But like, dude, this is. This is. I am at a loss.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, we had Valve last week going full good guy on TF2.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And how did these happen so close to each other? I know. It's really hard for me to believe that EA was able to, like, do this in a week.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, there's no way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So they must have both been cooking on it. But, like, what it's just so weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thanks, Mukim. I want the Luxe backpack. I will pay double. Also, this money could have went toward tinting my golf. I don't know if we're gonna bring the Lux bag back, but, hey, thanks for picking up a backpack. I, I, I, I. I mean, we've said everything there is to say about the topic at this point. I think other than just I want to drag it out a little bit more to emphasize good job, ea. Like, this is, this is the best case scenario for game preservation. This is the best case possible scenario for preserving gaming experiences for future generations. Like, what was it? I think it was Destiny. Destiny 2. I was looking at that, that lawsuit. Destiny 2 lawsuit YouTube footage. Because they were trying to. Here we go. Yeah. Bungie's lawyers had to use fan videos of old Destiny 2 content in court because it doesn't exist in game anymore. Freaking wild. So this is because a science fiction writer is, is suing them, but the. So the lawyers can't point at the game anymore because these live service games change over time and these gaming experiences are just gone. That sucks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And I didn't expect ea, of all companies, to be one of the first to do this in a big fashion. I'm, I'm a Commander freaking Conquer.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, this isn't like some crap game no one ever cared about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, Commander Conquer was a huge deal. Red Alert was a huge deal.

[Linus Sebastian]

No kidding.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Both of these were, were massive. I mean, I think it's Command and Conquer. Red Alert, but whatever. Red Alert one and Red Alert two were both massive. I don't know. It's cool. I just, I, I respect it. It's good. Good. It's rare.

[Linus Sebastian]

See, Radon, man, he wasn't gonna say anything anyway. They're like. He's like, let Luke talk.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I had nothing to add.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's really cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just good someone said it. Did it first. Yeah. I mean, I didn't know that, to be completely honest, but maybe I knew it at one point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Forgot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not sure. But it's just, I'm still very happy.

[Linus Sebastian]

In less good gaming news, Warner Bros. Cannot break their L streak and has shut down legendary game studio Monolith Productions alongside two others. And this one hits me a little harder than most because I don't know if you guys remember this, but we actually got an incredible opportunity seven years ago to go behind the scenes at Monolith. That is a terrible thumbnail. Not enough people watched this. This was a really good video. The folks there were so cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They were awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

So dedicated to their craft. I, I just, I don't think I've ever seen a more passionate team doing more passionate stuff. This was sponsored by Xbox and this was the one time we ever did a sponsorship with Xbox and it was so worth it and so cool. Let's go to their mocap. They had an on site, they had an on site mocap setup where the actual developers, like some of them had a little bit of martial arts training and they would, they would like have an idea for something and they would literally just go jump in the mocap room and, and, and just do it and, and then go back to their stations and, and work on it like it was. Oh, what an absolutely incredible team. They did some incredible work. Shadow of Mordor was actually one of the only games during that time of my life that I managed to play all the way through because I was really busy like running a company and having kids and stuff. Middle Earth, Shadow of Mordor, what that came out in 2014. That was like, that was like the empty times for gaming for me. I played through the first Tomb Raider, like, like reboot. I played through Middle Earth, Shadow of Mordor. I don't know, maybe like one or two other games. Absolutely incredible game. The Nemesis system was so cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So sick. Literally. It was literally just messing around with the. The Nemesis system was like worthy gameplay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, 100%. So for those of you not familiar, it basically created memorable characters out of like just rando NPC enemies and like created like, like feuds between you and even between them and each other and stuff. The Nemesis system was super cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Made it so that deaths in the game, like if you died the, your nemesis would like level up and evolve. So like your own death was a, was an actual mechanic in the game, which is so cool. Like I, I don't know though. It was, it was sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, this sucks. Let's read through the thing. Monolith has had struggled under the close scrutiny of Warner Brothers after the second Middle Earth Shadow game made less money than the first. The bros were only really interested in established franchises at that point. So the new IP codenamed Legacy was canceled in 2021 and most of the studio leadership left once work on the troubled Wonder Woman began. David added a note here. They formed cliffhanger hanger games at EA and are making the new Black Panther game.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

After the historic 200 million dollar flop of suicide Squad killed the Justice League as well as the 100 million dollar write down of Multiversus and the New Quidditch game. Warner Brothers has canceled Wonder Woman and closed Monolith, as well as Player First Games, Multiversus and WB Games San Diego, which was working on an unannounced free to play AAA game. The incredible but unfortunately patented Nemesis system from the Shadow Games will now live in legal limbo instead of being iterated on by Monolith or other developers. Okay, so yeah, that blows basically. I don't really know what else there is to say about that either.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hall Effect is dead. Long live TMR8. Bitdo is releasing the ultimate 2 non C wireless controller and they have ditched Hall Effect sticks in favor of a new text, a new stick tech TMR or tunneling magnetoresistance. TMR can offer higher precision, reportedly 10 times overhaul effect and refresh rates up to 20,000 Hertz while using less power from Gillikit CEO Jack He. The power consumption of TMR sensors is usually in the range of 0.1 to 0.3 milliamps, while hall effect sensors can consume 0.5 to 2mA. Mainly because of this difference, Hall Effect joysticks cannot work very well when installed on stock controllers. There are already several other controllers currently available with TMR sticks, including the excellent GamesIR Cyclone 2, which David unboxed recently on SC.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People love that dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Third party controllers are not little brother anymore. No, that controller roundup that we do. That controller roundup we did opened my eyes in a big way. I just had not. I have been given enough attention to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It controller enjoyer for a very long time. And that GamesIR Cyclone 2 video from David has made me like consider buying not an Xbox controller for like literally potentially the first time ever.

[Linus Sebastian]

This video was a ton of fun to make. And there's. Just because something didn't win the bracket doesn't the bracketed tournament doesn't mean that it wasn't really an incredible controller. There's a lot of diamonds out there. Some of them in the rough, some of them hiding in plain sight. I was blown away. I was blown away. The community really was right on this one because they, they called us out. They were like, you guys have not paid attention to like controller Reddit. And we're like, okay, all right, all right, we're on it, we're on it. And man, they were, they were right. Very cool. What else we got today? Do you want to talk about developer Rhys Kentish who built an app that stops people from doom scrolling by making them touch grass? This is awesome. To unlock your phone, touch grass. You have to, it opens the camera and you literally have to go outside, stop doom scrolling and touch actual grass. Grass detected. That is awesome. And I love it. That's all I have to say about that. No, maybe there's more to say about that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it uses computer vision to detect the grass. This is getting significantly easier. This is. There's this thing Wendell told me like eons ago at this point that everything becomes like. In the software development world, everything becomes three times easier to make every three years. And there was like reasoning why it's not, you know, two times every two years. It's, it's like anyways. And these types of things are just so much easier to make these days. There's another app out there, App time. Let me see if I can find it. I don't know if I'm gonna be able to find it right now, but there's another app out there where you have to put your phone in front of you and then it kind of like maps out your, your structure and you have to do push ups in order to like effectively buy app time so you can use apps. I think you could potentially combine a few of these things. I think there's. There's been a surge in popularity for things like dumb phones. There's also been a surge in popularity of blocking app time and different things to just like help aid your willpower in using your phone. Did Handyman just find it? He might have. This is not the one I was looking for, but yeah, clearly there's a few of these types of things. This is not an original idea. Maybe the actual touching grass portion is. But putting barriers in a variety of different types of barriers in front of using apps is like absolutely a thing that I think caters to younger phone users, to be honest.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I think everyone's probably had the idea of like, man, gaming's not even that unhealthy. If I like get up and do some push ups during every loading screen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that lasts for like the first quarter of one gaming session.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because it doesn't. You're not forced to do it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If the webcam on your computer like wouldn't allow you to click next match.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think we've talked about that probably. I think we've actually talked about that as like a, like a, like a, a product that could exist, like. Yeah, that must have been on WAN show at some point. I would. Man, there's so many WAN shows and there's so many hours of WAN show.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So many hours.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's amazing that Anyone is willing to archive all the hours of WAN show.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, not very well because they're like. Like half of them are corrupt.

[Linus Sebastian]

But this is true, you know, it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is what it is. But yeah, I think things like this are fantastic. So that's very, very cool. Good job. Keep going.

[Linus Sebastian]

Less fantastic is that Plex is killing the Watch Together feature. They've been rewriting their apps from the ground up over the last couple years and have made the decision to remove Watch Together. It will continue to exist in the web app for the foreseeable future and was this did not go over well with their community. Watch Together initially launched in May of 2020 during the COVID pandemic, it synchronizes the video stream for the group, pausing for everyone. If an individual pauses playback and resuming for everyone at the same time, they don't preclude the possibility of offering similar functionality again in the future using new tooling. But it's gone for now and is just yet another string of Ls from the Plex team removing features that used to exist and that people, you know, paid for their software with the understanding that it would have it. A big frustrating one for me is how broken downloads still are. I ran into a bug recently on Android where I tried to. Or Was it on iOS? I think it was. I don't remember. Anyway, I tried for a recent trip to down to Disneyland, I tried to load a season of a show onto Yvonne's phone. So it was on Android and two of the episodes errored. And when you don't click the individual episodes, when you click an entire season, there is no way in the interface to retry one of them. So I had to remove the entire season and then redownload the entire season, which then also failed. So it was just complete waste of my time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's annoying.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, like Plex says, it's really complicated doing like downloads, especially background downloads, which I kind of get, but also like, oh my God, then don't do background downloads. Force me to keep the app. Do something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I see.

[Linus Sebastian]

Download a file. Download a file to a fault. That can't be impossible. I'm sorry, I don't. I don't buy it. I don't buy it. I'm sorry. Download a file cannot be that hard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Retry on download as well. Shouldn't be a big deal.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it really shouldn't. I wonder if part of the problem is that they try to transcode and download like mid, like fine to finish the transcode first and then I don't care but just download a file. Can't be that hard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean even then you should be able to retry it.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is cool. Psionic launches a new advanced ability hand for humans and robots. They just launched their improved mark 9.5 ability hand. It's available for both humans for use as a prosthetic and for robots and features the first touch sensing bionics with the ability to read and control 30 touch sensor values and send a vibration to the user's arm to communicate the sensation. It is blunt force impact and water resistant and will have 32 grip patterns. Currently 19. Okay, let's have a look at this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The video is pretty cool. Yeah. Oh, okay. Never mind.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is cute. Sorry. Where's the. Where's the video?

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is the second link.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ah yes, I've got it up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Actually just switched to Too late. Boink. No, I didn't got him. Like how they show the combination of people and also robots. I think that's pretty neat. They're trying to prove it's for both, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh wait, I know why this is in the doc. These guys sent me a video a while back of this. This woman basically just like going throughout her day with one of their prosthetics and it like blew my mind how she was able to basically do like everything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's so sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like obviously there's going to be a learning curve for something like this but.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And you can tell like with something it does. It doesn't look like necessarily 100% perfect, but that guy just loaded a big plate onto a bar.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that was her in that one where she was lifting the thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Like clearly you can be extremely capable with this. It looks like a lit a little more rigid than normal like human movement but it so sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Super cool. Yeah, I guess that's pretty much it for that. So rapid fire topic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fantastiche. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that's pretty much it for this week. Should we switch over to After Dark? How you doing over there, Dan? How's your. How's your fingers doing? A little tender.

[Dan]

Little tender. We're at 2:45 and so I'm doing one every 14 seconds.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well a little EP. Good job everyone. My eyes hurt. I should probably check the gross profit.

[Dan]

It's a lot. It's a lot of.

[Linus Sebastian]

The profit is not a lot. I promise you that much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Your off site laptop bag call out as much as people did notice it has caused it to surge in the rankings.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Driver is still dunking in terms of quantity.

[Linus Sebastian]

Amazing. Oh yeah, it's a great pen scribe driver people. And. And the great thing about selling pens is people need an unlimited number of them because they'll always lose them. Oh my God. The. Oh, no, the. The. Oh, wait, hold on. Oh, yeah. Okay, so scribe. Yes, scribe driver is ahead, but not by as much as you'd think. Looking at the dashboard, not everybody sends a merge message.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I know, I know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And apparently a lot of people who ordered the laptop bag do not send a merge message. So that's interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So people who like writing with pens are more likely to send in a merch message that kind of maybe lines up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And the MCM starter thing. Oh, actually, no, we did sell a lot of those. It's just really low on the list because it's not making money.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, hold on.

[Linus Sebastian]

How do I have this sorted? Let me just see if.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, Scribe driver purchasers might be yap enjoyers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that makes sense. Oh my God. Well, anyway, yeah, good luck me. So that's cool. Well, it's good for cash flow anyway. Stuck in for profitability. Okay, let's talk about some merch messages.

[Dan]

Sure. Oh, I forgot to set you over to the other one. Hi, Ellen. Dan. In your limited opinion, would the xreal one Pro entered after dark from the Fallon vid be usable as a work monitor? I'm a front end dev and often need a screen where I can't have one. Thanks. And high L2.

[Linus Sebastian]

Text. I mean, it's 1080p, right. And it's 1080p at like, you know, 170 inches or 150 inches or whatever you configure it to. Because you can sort of configure its virtual distance and virtual size, but no matter how you slice it, it's 1080p at an enormous size. It also doesn't have, like, it's not. It's not an Apple Vision Pro. Right. So it doesn't have the same spatial awareness that an Apple Vision Pro does. So it's not able to like lock and hover as you, you know, move around. You can't, like, set it up as a monitor and, you know, do your thing. Like, it either floats around with you or it stays. I forget what the. Sorry, I forget what the two modes are. It either is like stationary like that, or it. I think it tries to. I think it uses just like gyro to kind of float around with you. So it was a big problem when I was on the plane, for instance, like taxiing on the Runway. The Plane would turn and be like, see you later. So it's a really cool product and really useful in certain situations, but I don't think it's a monitor. If it was between that and nothing, maybe. But I gotta feel like there's almost always gonna be a way to get a higher DPI display near you than those glasses. What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nothing. Just something good happened.

[Dan]

There's a first.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. And you're not gonna, like, provide any context for that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Literally. Not at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

What an actual dick.

[Dan]

I have to work with a guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, what's next?

[Dan]

Sure. Sorry. You're gonna be a little.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, I can. I can say, I guess. Wow. I didn't think people were gonna react that much.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A new contractor that is theoretically gonna help us work on the apps for Floatplane. Just fully signed on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, wow. Very cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. That is good news.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is good news. I didn't like, really want to say it because now one's gonna be like, it's next Friday and I. Where's the app update?

[Dan]

So yeah, I. I'm already getting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Never mind. Next Friday. Where's the app update now? What are you waiting for?

[Dan]

Where's the Apple TV update?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Where's the Roku?

[Dan]

Where's the picture in picture? Where's the dark mode?

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is like actually a big problem because we. We literally discussed like one of the goals of bringing this person on and. And they're just part time. Whatever. Don't get too excited. But one of the goals of bringing them on is to have a TV app finally come out. But it's like, where do you. Where do you draw the line? Like, okay, so we have a general purpose TV app, but that doesn't work for Roku. So then you have to have a Roku app, but that doesn't work for this other thing. So then you try to get that. But then, like, there's no line.

[Linus Sebastian]

You maintain everything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you do it on zero dollar budget.

[Dan]

You pay Linus.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Less than zero dollar budget.

[Dan]

10 bucks. Come on. Roku app. 10 bucks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Think of all the. Think of all the payment and exposure you're getting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just iframe. Really? Okay. I didn't even know that. We haven't looked into it a lot. We're gonna do the general one first anyways. We'll figure it out. But hopefully they're helpful. It's. They're basically just gonna be working, like, probably weekends and stuff. So it's not. Anyways, whatever, Fine. Doesn't matter. But I'm excited.

[Linus Sebastian]

Girdle said I was joking. I'm sorry. Apparently it's not just iframe then.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, but like I thought it was like their, their own like language and junk, but again I haven't, I really haven't looked into it much.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're not doing Tizen because I just don't feel like it. Samsung should just stop doing Tizen and that is the real solution to that. You're welcome, Samsung. I'm helping, I'm doing my little part to put pressure on you to just abandon that hot pile of garbage.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To develop a Roku app, you primarily use the programming languages Scene Graph XML based for UI design and Bright script for logic and interaction within the Roku development environment, requiring you to create a developer account and following Roku's guidelines for designing, coding, packaging and publishing your app on the Roku store. I don't want to do that at all. So this is what I mean by.

[Dan]

Like where even their portal for publishing is awful.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Haha. What? LLM? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was just the Google search one. And I don't know, considering that was an LLM, just spitting that out, I don't know if that's 100% true, etc. Etc. I've just heard it's like kind of a huge pain, but we're, we're working on it. We'll get there.

[Dan]

Hey y'all getting the bolt action pen for my dad's birthday. I wanted to ask Linus what industries you think will be the most favorable for the emerging small businesses to be a part of over the next five years?

[Linus Sebastian]

Hmm.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you wanna just post your dissertation on the economy?

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I can't even begin, I'm thinking lentils. Dude, I can't even be. I like that reference. I, I, I can't even begin to, to guess. Like the world is so messed up, right? Like you've, you've got the st, You've got stock market volatility at maybe not an all time high, but certainly rather extreme, extremely high. You've got these valuations on companies like whether we're talking know, Tesla or Truth Social or Nvidia. You've got these valuations on companies that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are make no sense at all, utterly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Divorced from any kind of, of profit earnings reality. You've got EBITDA anymore. You've got Gold that's you know, gone up, what is it, like 56% in the last year or something like that. Meanwhile, you've got Bitcoin that shot up over the last year and then has plunged over the Last few days I, I haven't actually looked at it today, so I might be out of date. Right. Like BDC to US Dollars where we at. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Chat just said it's below 80k.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's up 1% today. But it's, it's no, it's 85 USD now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean being up 1% is huge though. That doesn't sound like much but in the, in the current environment.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Where is the safe haven right now? I have no idea. I mean I, it's funny, I ask my kids like, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up? And the hilarious part of me asking them that is no matter what they say, I'm going to have absolutely no guidance to give them whatsoever because I don't know what kind of world they are going to participate in the workforce of. And I've talked about that before on WAN show. You know, 10 years ago I said the same thing. Except that Here we are 10 years later where we're not talking that far in the future anymore. And yet my level of clarity is no higher because volatility just keeps going up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If anything it might be less. You know.

[Linus Sebastian]

What industries will be most favorable for emerging small businesses to be part of over the next five years? Okay, well, healthcare, human care won't be going anywhere. Therapy, a lot of therapy. Yeah, that's something man. I mean they're gonna try to AI that too, dog.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like they're already doing it as far as my understanding goes. Not even if they are doing it. People are gonna seek it out through Those like relational LLMs.

[Linus Sebastian]

Casper in float Casper Explorer in floatplane. Chat says Blue Collar Trades. Yeah, I mean if you have the. For sure, if you have the, the, the energy and you have the strength for it. And if you don't, you should I think try and find it. Building stuff, repairing stuff. There's going to be, there's going to be money to be made there. There's going to be reliable material harvesting for that matter.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mining, forestry, stuff like that.

[Dan]

The flesh of the weak underclass.

[Linus Sebastian]

Crystal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not saying machines, they make a lot of money these days, man. Like actually though, like you're not wrong.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I'm not saying that. Crystal, what else we got?

[Dan]

I like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cephalus says. I mean working for the federal government has always been solid, but the cracks are forming. Cracks, brother. Cracks you say. Dude, that's like looking at my ass and being like that's got a crack in it, you know, like that's a chasm. I Should have waited till I drank something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What the heck?

[Linus Sebastian]

Why? Like, don't worry. Just comb it with a brick. All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That might be worse. I think you just beat me. I had that streak for, like, a decade.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would never beat you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, Human care.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I think stuff like paid friend industry is going to make its way outside of, like, Japan and stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably. I would also say, I mean, you're talking about human care. We have an extremely aging population.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, well, that's. That's a big part of it. Yeah. Okay.

[Dan]

They won't be for long with the way things are going. Hey, DL, question for Luke. How much of a security risk is Linus still using his Note 9, a device still running Android 10 and that hasn't received a security update for probably more than two years?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's honestly the. The least of the problems when it comes to that guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, that's pretty high up there, dude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You just log in to your own accounts on random devices around the office and then just leave them there. Like, what are you talking about?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, like my Steam account. I mean, it's locked.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Locked by what?

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, by a lock.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you have a custom password on there?

[Dan]

That one does.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah, it does.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you do that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thank you.

[Linus Sebastian]

There you go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But this is. This is what we already follow around in his wake and, like, try to solve the incredibly chaotic things that he leaves behind. That is already, you know.

[Dan]

You know he's gonna be a problem, so why don't you just develop the systems that let him do whatever he wants?

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I will say, I don't know why I'm doing this, but to defend him. I love how he knew where I was going before I even said it. This is extremely common practice for, like, company owners and stuff, where the IT team has to be like, okay, please stop.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, my time.

[Dan]

I'm busy.

[Linus Sebastian]

My time is better spent doing literally anything else.

[Dan]

Why? I make a bunch of spreadsheets with the. It's literally account stack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not. He's not wrong.

[Linus Sebastian]

Literally, why a hundred other people work here is because they are doing stuff that I'm not doing, including an IT team.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Honestly, one of our biggest problems is that he won't stop doing certain things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why? What did I do?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, if you think about the Twitter one, like, if you just didn't do.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, dude, I. I have learned. Hey, look, I have passed every one of your phishing tests with flying.

[Dan]

Don't answer your email.

[Linus Sebastian]

I do. I do answer my emails. What email did you Send me that. I haven't answered Mr. Besser.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, that one actually.

[Dan]

I actually also missed that email because I checked my emails very infrequently, at least recently.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, you mean the email that I was supposed to do, like a training session?

[Dan]

No, no, that one looks like a phishing email, but the. The actual phishing email.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some people reported the training session emails as phishing, which was honestly probably a decent call. Bad. It looked really sketchy.

[Dan]

Click this link to go to your security training that you're.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is definitely from Sean, but it's not from his email. It's. Okay.

[Dan]

Your company name here. We didn't set it up properly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but the, like, phishing test email, you're not the one that opened yours.

[Linus Sebastian]

What do you mean I'm not the one that opened it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no, the phishing test email. The, like, blind test that we did when we tested the whole company without telling them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're not the one that opened it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's because I just like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So you never got.

[Linus Sebastian]

Before I even opened it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, you didn't nuke it that hard.

[Linus Sebastian]

What do you mean?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The other person opened it.

[Linus Sebastian]

What other person?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What? You nuked it before you opened it? There was no hint that it was a phishing email in the subject line?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah. Why not?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think there was.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. Oh, man. Now I. Now I want to know what it was. Oh, you mean the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can find it.

[Dan]

No, no, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can find it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think I remember a keyword from it, Man. What was it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You have that thing where there's someone that you can communicate with on multiple apps and sometimes you just like, open so many different things trying to figure out which freaking one it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. That's why I only use iMessage now. I'm an Apple user, kid.

[Dan]

There's other messengers.

[Linus Sebastian]

I must have deleted it or something. It's not. It's not. It literally is not in my inbox anymore. I'm pretty sure basically it was. It was an email that was asking me to, like, link up with someone on another platform that we use. But that was, like, obviously fake.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I.

[Linus Sebastian]

At least I think it was obviously fake.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The subject line said, your teammates are trying to reach you, exclamation mark.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, I would have just deleted that. That's. That is obvious. That's super obvious. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I did that on my phone. I probably just hit report spam or something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some from Microsoft Teams. Microsoft-office365.com I get those emails from a different chat platform, Mike Ra Soft.

[Dan]

Oh, it had a spelling mistake on purpose.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a bunch of them.

[Dan]

No, no, that's. That's good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, it's good that we do these training exercises now because while I've definitely been on high alert ever since the Twitter breach, not everyone is always on high alert. And it's. It's good to do these things as part of your ongoing training.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So we did one. We did one that we, like. We didn't tell anyone that it was coming. And then we have told everyone that they will be happening moving forward because we wanted to see how many people would click on it and who. But then after that, we just wanted people to be alert more than anything. So if we just tell them there is more coming and actually do it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Then they're going to be alert all the time because they don't want to click on it again, which is great. That is like the goal.

[Linus Sebastian]

Good job.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Good job, team.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who clicked? I ain't telling you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. Come on, you guys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're not knowing. No way that's happening.

[Dan]

Wasn't me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not saying anything.

[Dan]

Wasn't me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, you're saying. I thought you said, was it me? I was like, you're on the team.

[Dan]

No, no, it was not me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did you even have her in the shower?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a song reference, right?

[Dan]

Weird shower.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, obviously. Okay, Dan, can you give us another Richmond?

[Dan]

I'm gonna do that. Hi. L, L, D, wan or W, A N? I can't remember which one you lambasted me for, given how long y'all worked together at the seemingly close relationships J you have at lmg. If you had to move on to a new job, how hard would it be to get settled in with a new team? Also, yacht.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yacht's dead. The mooring's not included in the sale and there's nowhere to moor it here, so it's dead. As for man, how hard would it be to get it settled in with a new team? I even have a hard time, like, getting to know new people here these days compared to the early days. Because in the early days, I, like, had to. I was directly exposed to every single person on the team every day. No, stop.

[Dan]

We have HR now, but she's.

[Linus Sebastian]

I had direct contact with every man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Keep going, you'll get it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I worked directly. I bet you were with every member.

[Luke Lafreniere]

On purpose. Now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Prove it wasn't always on purpose.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fair enough. And.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I had to. Right, so. So there was no There was no choice. Whereas now I have to go. It's. It's like the opposite. It's the complete opposite. I have to go way out of my way to interact with a lot of people on the team, like, to the point where to. To interact with a handful of new people. I'll be like, okay, let's take the whole company to Disneyland. You know, which was cool. A lot of fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. We're back. Now what? Well, no, I mean, we didn't talk about it much before we left, so now that we're. Now that we're back. Okay, I just want to say Floatplane. You guys got an exclusive video out of that. I explicitly forbade multiple people to work on that project. So I would like to make that very clear. And I'm going to speak to the managers who approved some people working on that and tell them it is not approved. Next.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, did Sammy, like, get told no by dad? So when an ass. Mom.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know if Sammy ever talked to me, but I saw people with cameras, and I said, you better not be working. That's not work. Right? And they assured me that they were working on personal vlogs for, like, their own thing. And I was like, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I mean, I think the whole flowpoint exclusive was just Sammy. So if you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Was it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. I'll have to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, there's people that, like, feature in the video for sure, but I mean, the. The footage of the. The camera capturing the footage, I think was just Sammy's. I don't think other ones contributed. I'm not. I'm not sure, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sammy in chat today. Sammy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, dude, Sammy can't be controlled. Even if he was, would you want.

[Dan]

Him to be control?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, I would. He's not supposed to be wanting. Working.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I had a long talk with him at CES about how he needs to, like, say no more and, like, stuff like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it's not even a matter of him saying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He was talking about, like, how much he was working. And I was like, brother, you need to chill.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a matter of me explicitly saying, no, you're not allowed to work on that, and him doing it anyway. Like, that's a completely different dynamic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you actually tell him that?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know if I talked to Sammy. Yeah, I didn't think anyone was going to be doing it because I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

At least one or two other people that were doing it for personal vlogs.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, that's fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I told them, like, I know that Was a thing.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I told people. That's fine. Yeah, but people were not supposed to be working. It was supposed to be a work cation occasion from work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dan]

Hi, Future me podcast listener question for the mailing team. That's dhl. What's the hardest part of each one of your jobs?

[Linus Sebastian]

Mailing team. Like dhl, the carrier.

[Dan]

Which one of us is H?

[Linus Sebastian]

Does this person just think that, like, people use random letters to address the show? Maybe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe dhl.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what? Okay. It's a new one. What's the hardest?

[Luke Lafreniere]

People are saying Dan D, H a.

[Dan]

N. Then who's D. Done.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, anyway.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Duke.

[Linus Sebastian]

Duke. Did you see I was wearing my Luke Nukem shirt?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I commented on it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I. You. By your facial expression, I thought you might not have noticed.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, my get up was actually outstanding.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You want to know the craziest thing about that? And Emma almost wore her.

[Linus Sebastian]

Her Duke Nukem shirt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is awesome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I was like, oh, man. Not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, here, I'm gonna. I'm gonna send this to you, Dan.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. This is one of the better shots that I got.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you both showed up wearing, that would have been too much.

[Dan]

Oh, you guys are always so cute together. It goes there. Do you want me to show that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Actually, no, I got a better one. I got a better one. I got a better one. This is. This is one of my favorite shots, because. Who.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Kindness in hand.

[Linus Sebastian]

It kind of looks like I'm being photobombed, except, like, obviously I know the person, so I go ahead and pop this one up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, Jake just looks like a random guy that jumped into my picture, but he's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a great photo. Yeah, man. They're. I don't want to glaze Disney me, but they are very good at the whole ambiance thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, dude. It's a. It's definitely a vibe. So note the custom Mickey Mouse ears that were given to me by the one and only Mr. Daniel Besser. Are those amazing or what? I wore them all day.

[Dan]

I am so happy that you like them.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wore them all day. And for all the rides where there was, like, some risk that they'd come off or whatever. I took them out, I put them in my community commuter bag in the little, like, secondary sleeve and put it down all carefully. I was like, I'm not losing these. I let my daughter wear them for a very, very short period of time.

[Dan]

I thought you would be like, you're a. You're a You're a.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's awesome.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

What are you even talking about?

[Dan]

No, I don't know. It's always interesting to see what. Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I let my daughter wear them for a little while.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then the second she was inattentive with them. Yeah, you can pop that one up as well.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

The second she was inattentive with them, I was like, I'm taking those back because those need to not get lost today. Oh, so cool.

[Dan]

It's got a little sublimated Linus. Wide Linus face.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Because why wouldn't it. Yeah. All right. The hardest part of each of my jobs. The hardest part is hr. The hardest part is other people. I'm answering proactively on behalf of all of us.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. We can move on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dramatically. Do not disagree at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sick.

[Dan]

Linus, how do you deal with being the boss of employees who are significantly older than you? When was the first time you became a boss of someone much older? And how did you handle the new role?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think mutual respect is the best way. That's not always an option, especially up the chain. Like, if you have a boss that you don't really respect, there's nothing you can really do about that. Whereas when you have someone who works for you that you don't respect, like, you can kind of do something about that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, what? Where did this. I thought. I thought they were talking about ages.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just saying that if you have. If you are the boss of someone who is significantly older than you, mutual respect and just treating each other with mutual respect makes the age difference not matter that much. Sorry. I probably should have started with that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. I was like, what are you talking about?

[Linus Sebastian]

Because I think that there's. There's an inherent sort of. I think. I think that everyone, or at least I hope that everyone understands that there's an experience that comes with age.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

However, I would. Wisdom, I would think that someone working for me would also, Again, like. So I would respect that experience, but I would also expect that they respect the experience that I have specifically and what it is that we do. And if they don't, then I would think they just wouldn't want to work here, and I would think they would probably leave. And in the same way, if someone is working on the team that I don't respect, and to me, like, not respecting someone means that they have to behave in a way that is like. Like egregious, that it's not going to have anything. It's not like they. You Know, flubbed, you know, a spelling error in an email. Like, that's not something that is not respectable. It's. It's more like, you know, theft or. Or, you know, being generally unethical like that. That's the kind of thing. So. So to me, like, a lack of respect means that you should just like, not work together if you can. If you can manage it. But. Yeah, I think that ages, age is a number to a degree. But it's also kind of easy for me to say because I don't have a lot of people older than me who have ever reported directly to me. Like, I'm an old guy at this company. I'm not even 40, but I am one of the oldest people here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Trying to think. I have. I think I have a few. Never been a problem at all. Never been something that's even been brought up. Never mattered at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it doesn't matter as long as there's mutual respect.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And I think that's. Yeah, I think it's never been brought up because we've just always been good. And I mean, I don't know, like, early float plane. Like, really early float plane. Before, like, video calling was. Was cheap and easy and everybody did it. Yeah. A bunch of those hires. I had never even seen the person, like, the. The first time we ever had a float plane get together thing was the first time I saw every one of those people.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's wild.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fun fact.

[Linus Sebastian]

When was the first floatplane get together? Was it Christmas party?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What was it? Well, it was the float plane Christmas party.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Because you guys did a separate one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because you made us split off.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can't say it that way. And then it was a horrible disaster because I took a bunch of Dev. Snowboarding.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's what it was, snowboarding. I remember that. Didn't I attend it, though, still? Because I definitely. I didn't know. I didn't go snowboarding, but.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, we. They were up here for, like, a while.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Like, I don't remember what it was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if you did that year. Maybe you came to dinner or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

That must be it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

I definitely did part of it. A later year.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We had part of it at your house. We. We, like, played board games or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. That wasn't the first one.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no. I'm thinking of the snowboarding one because I remember. I remember you and I talking about how you sort of had determined that snowboarding might not have been the best choice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We pivoted, we changed to board games. It was great. Everyone nerded out really hard. Stayed up late. Have a great time.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They required a pivot. Classic software stuff is all good.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Full rewrite.

[Dan]

Hey, Dan, Luke and Linus. Longtime listener, first time merch message. Linus, when was the last time you got royally mad at everyone? And why also come to Australia?

[Linus Sebastian]

We love you guys at everyone. Okay, see, this is where I end up getting myself into trouble. Because on the one hand, we're a small company in the grand scheme of things, we were down at Disney, and one of the things we talked about while we were down there, because it was a work trip, and we did actual. We did actually do some work on the trip. Even if I told people, don't make videos, because that's not why we're here. But one of the things that came up was that Disney apparently employs. What was the number?

[Luke Lafreniere]

36,000.

[Linus Sebastian]

6,000 people at their California parks directly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But there was, like, even way more indirectly because of all the, you know, the hotel infrastructure and everything else, restaurants, everything.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's around 36,000 people at those parks in California. And just put that in perspective. Disneyland and California Adventure park are 360 times the size of Linus Media Group, Creator, Warehouse, and Floatplane Media combined. We are a tiny company in the grand scheme of things. But when you ask a question like, when was the last time you got royally mad at everyone? I'm gonna respond and say, we're such a big company that I. How could I ever be mad at everyone? Like, it's not like. It's not like. Like, you know, if we get some analysis wrong on a. On a data point for a review that, like, I'm gonna be mad at, like, Sarah, like, what did she do? Did she draw something wrong? Like, at. Why would I be mad at her?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right? Like, I can imagine reasons. Because she, like, supervises stuff as well, doesn't she? Or product managers or project managers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no, no. I was saying, like. Like data analysis for a review, though. Oh, she would have nothing to do with that. I can't think of a single project.

[Dan]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have 100 employees, top tier. I can't think of a single project that would involve everyone that I could get mad at everyone for. Can you think of anything?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. We do such varied things as well. I mean, I can imagine a company that's. We have people many, many, many times our size that does, like, one thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So many things.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have people that work here that I'VE barely met. How could I be mad at them?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man. Okay, so I was going to mention this earlier. That is absolutely a thing. There are actually people that work here that I have probably never met. But another weird one is when I'll be talking to someone and genuinely think, like, okay, yeah, this person's probably been working here for, like, six months or something. And then it'll, like, kind of come up in combination conversation. They're like, oh, yeah, like, three and a half years. And I'm like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Especially in the CW side.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, how many times have you interacted with Bridget?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like, I mean, it's happened, but not very many.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm going to look it up. Hold on. I'm going to guess first. I'm going to say four years.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's been a hot minute. I know that much.

[Linus Sebastian]

Bridget's been here for. Oh. While.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, crap. I might get it wrong. Oh, crap.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And. Yeah, and then. And then there's people where, like, you know their name and you know what they do. No, I'm pretty close, but never actually necessarily met them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I nailed it. I nailed it. It's like foreign change. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. New people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

New people.

[Linus Sebastian]

Bridget Bergman, fashion designer. There's the email. Yep, I found it. Okay.

[Dan]

All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude. I was pretty close, but, like, dude, that's wild. That's wild. Like, she's been here for a freaking long time, done a lot of, like, really cool stuff. But you have never had any reason to deal with Ms. Bergman, because why would you. Why would you ever be mad at her?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, I think we, you know, like, I think we. Yeah, I think she was in the. Maybe not. I think she was maybe in the conversation chain for that thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe. But I'm not certain.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So you might have. You might have been cc'd on the same emails at some point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I. That's honestly, like, probably it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, sure. But, like. Okay, do you know. Do you even know who Robert from CW is actually?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, but this is one of those situations where I. I don't know if I've.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Would you recognize this face?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It took me a second to parse it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, you would. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In that situation, yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, let's see. Let me see if I can. Let me see if I can come up with someone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if I want to be quizzed on this live.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, you know what? I'm not good. No, I'm not gonna. I'M not gonna do that. Because. Because, like, honestly, you could get me just as bad. You could get me just as bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't even. Don't. Don't even. It's not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I'm not. I'm not going to. But, like, I could get essentially anyone at the company because of flipping.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, sure. Like, 100.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So, yeah. I've never been royally mad at everyone. Probably not since, like, the house days was the last time and we lost an entire shoot. And the reason I was mad at everyone was because our data handling practices were sloppy across the board. So I wasn't just mad at the person who happened to lose the data. I was mad at the general laissez faire attitude that we had towards dealing with SD cards ingesting data. Ingesting it only to the server and never to a local drive. And so I, like, yelled at basically everyone except you, I think. I don't think I was mad at you about that, because what would you have done?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I don't think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Dan]

Enabled them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I've had my times. Yeah. Mad at you.

[Dan]

The sorts of systemic failures are awful.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. In some ways it's like. In some ways, it's easier these days because, like, we both kind of. It's very easy for us to be like, hey, like, I don't know. Was I. Did I communicate that wrong? Like, I messaged you the other day because I was like, I didn't mean to be dismissive about something. I hope it didn't come across that way. Like, we're like, That's a lot easier these days. But I think because of the fact that we can kind of say anything to each other, it's a lot easier to, like, maybe almost cross a line.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just flow off.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I'm not interested in this conversation right now. I'm gonna leave. You know, like, we can just, like, say stuff like that to each other.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's pretty hard. I was having. I think I was having this conversation with Emma where she was like. Like, what would Linus have to do to, like, cross, like, said line, basically? And I. I don't think it was a negative thing. I think I was like. I don't remember how we got on the topic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, no, no, I'll let.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I'm gonna write. I'm gonna write down some ideas. I'll write down some ideas. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Okay, let me think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I did. I have a quoted answer. To be completely honest, I. I Think it was Emma. I'm preachers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man. Like, some of these, I'm just. Like some of these, I'm sitting there going like, I don't even think it'd be enough ask you to do something totally unethical. It's like you wouldn't do it, but I don't know if you'd care. I've got one, I've got one. I've got one. Okay, go ahead.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What I said was you'd have to fundament. It would have to be something that made me think that you fundamentally changed as a human.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. I had disrespect your family. That was that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But then you would never do that though. So I guess that's where the answer kind of. But I didn't get the push this down.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. Because I was gonna lean this down so you could.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because I fundamentally changed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But like, but like you can do this stuff. You get. I mean there's. There's so many things where, like, I don't know, it would piss me off, but it's not gonna like to actually sever the link.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, I don't know, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I'm trying to imagine like I ran. I ran into Rich the other day at like the skate sharpening place of all of all places and. And like that's what, that's what kind of. That's actually what made me think of like. Like if I. If I had.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like you just wouldn't do that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's why it comes back.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm trying to think of like, what. How I could have treated him in such a way that he would message you and go, yo, my man, that was weird, you know, Right? Like. Like I didn't, I didn't talk to him because I was on a call and I was just like, like, like I couldn't really. I couldn't really chat with him. But like, I don't know, man. Because I. I know that you're very like, you're very protective of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like your people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which is chill. I'm super, super into that. But that was the only thing. Because I can't think of anything I could do to you. That's why I said that's why I went with your family, because I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That'S not an angle.

[Linus Sebastian]

I thought I could try to physically inflict pain. He doesn't give a shit. Right. And even if I could, I don't think that would be insurmountable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nope.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think you could put it behind you. I think if I Was like, hey, I had a hormonal issue. I had a weird reaction to a medication I'm on. I. I was in a really messed up place.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Be over at. Immediately.

[Linus Sebastian]

And. And I, you know, I'm gonna do better. I think you'd be like, okay, yeah, like, whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, right.

[Linus Sebastian]

But if. But if. So if I were to, like. If I were to, like, you know, be a complete, you know, jerk brute like you and slap someone. I can't believe you did that. You know, if I did that to you, I think you'd basically be over it. But if I did that to, like, your mom.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, that's one of those situations.

[Linus Sebastian]

There'd be no recovery.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's why I said it would require a fundamental change as a person, because you would never do that.

[Linus Sebastian]

You would need me to have a good reason. I think, though, either way, you'd need a good reason because I think you're a rational person.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but how you can have a good reason to slap my maw.

[Linus Sebastian]

What if we wouldn't get the Guinness World Record if I didn't do it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Most. Most moms slapped and you, like, ran out of moms.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. The reference there is the one time. The one time he really looked like he could murder me was when he thought I, like, abandoned him on Mount Elbert.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was having, like, pretty severe altitude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sickness, and I booked it down the hill because we had one last guy that had to sign the thing, and he was a minor or something, and I had to get to his parent so that his signature counted so that the world record was captured. I also didn't know that Luke was suffering altitude sickness. I thought he was, like, gonna be fine. So when he reached the bottom, he didn't know that I was, like, booking it down the mountain because I was on a mission to make sure that we succeeded. I've never really talked about this. I don't think maybe I've alluded to it, but some of the other people who participated in Highlander did not want everyone to make it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

And said so explicitly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which made me extremely angry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And, like, actually did actions to try to inhibit the chance of other people making it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. It was permanently burned. A bridge between people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not going to get any more specific than that. It is not worth it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was not mad at everyone. No. Because that was not everyone on the trip.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so as part of making sure that the mission was successful, because we couldn't get the record for the highest altitude land party unless a certain number of people Participated. Something that the people working against the team. Oh, I didn't realize, I guess. Oh, well, this is a problem. Maybe I should have actually been helpful. So part of making sure we succeeded was we actually recruited randoms who weren't part of our group to participate in the land. Who happened. Who happened to be hiking it. One of them, for some reason. Whether it was because they were a minor or whether it was because I forgot to get them to sign at the top and I had to catch up. I don't remember what it was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Their signature had to be witnessed by or. Or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't remember why, but I had to. I had to, like, track them down. I had to go down with them, and I had to, like, catch up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To them on the way down this mountain. The reason why getting down it was so important was because at a, like, certain time of day, there's a huge chance of lightning storms.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And one did happen. We, like, literally saw lightning hit a tree in front of us, and it was, like, very close. You can. You can verify this claim from Austin Evans and Paul, who were both with me at the time when it happened. The second that happened, everyone. We had been hiking all day, and the second that happened, everyone just flat sprinted. It was. It was a very energizing moment. He's not paying attention.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm shocked.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm shocked.

[Linus Sebastian]

There it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That one gets.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry. So anyway, Luke didn't know that. Yeah, Luke didn't know that. I didn't know that. He was in rough shape. So when he got down, there was a very good reason, like any narcissist would have. Or maybe. Or maybe I just do things for a reason. I don't know. Who knows? But, yeah, I don't know, man. We. Yeah. Yeah. I think fundamental change is a way better way of putting it because that encompasses sort of all the stuff that I could try to brainstorm.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, what else we got?

[Dan]

We got lots. Hey, Dan, Luke and Linus. I've already read this one. Hey, lld, fellow home theater enthusiast here. I'm constantly battling the ever frustrating HDMI C. Cec can't even control any tips. Will it ever get better? Do I just need to buy an old Harmony rip?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you do just need to buy an old Harmony remote. Because I am also having some serious issues with cec. Like, it's so frustrating. No matter how I configure it across my shield, my receiver, my tv, for some reason, the shield will just rip the input back randomly. Sometimes even when it's like Asleep and I can't even begin to fathom it. It drives me absolutely crazy. When CEC works, it's super magic and great and then when it doesn't work, it's infuriating and drives me absolutely bat crap crazy. Man, what a great device. That would be just like an HDMI pass through that actually just does like great CEC handling and you could just like. You could just like SSH into like that device. It could be, man. It'd have to be super low power. It'd have to be like powerable over HDMI or something, I don't know. And have to maintain HDCP somehow. Basically it's an impossible dream. But like a coupler that just had like proper CEC handling and was just like programmed to deal with all the random stupid edge cases would be super cool because it in theory all I need is cec but in practice it's just not good enough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Hello Linux, Danbian and Temp Luke os. That's a good one. This is new. Collecting gift cards until I can get a screwdriver.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry.

[Dan]

Who writes the one liners that appear after the intro in the videos? Do you have a favorite past one liner?

[Linus Sebastian]

I can't even remember enough of them to pick a favorite one. There's definitely been some absolutely golden ones. It's usually the writer of the video. Every once in a while the editor will pitch in with an idea. Sometimes I'll pitch one in. Not much lately, but yeah, they're. I love it. I love it. They're great.

[Dan]

Luke. Dan, what's your squat bench? Deadlift. Powerlifter working in tech. Would love to get lift in 645, 445, 550.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why didn't you ask me? Wow.

[Dan]

You don't even lift.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. Wow.

[Dan]

You're on the cake, master.

[Linus Sebastian]

No one ever asks what it would take for me to not forgive you. That right there red line.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All that matters, those questions. Have you ever done any of those?

[Linus Sebastian]

Nope.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Okay, well, there you go. Carry on. Those are some pretty sick numbers. Good job. I don't do powerlifting. A lot of my stuff is for therapeutic reasons. For that reason, I've been having some not major but definitely existing back problems where like if I do anything that really involves my back after two days, it's always two. So it won't be the next day, it won't be the day after that. I'll have notable back pain and limited range of motion. So I've been trying to solve that for quite a while now. I haven't done squats or deadlifts in like probably at least six months. Um, so I can't really know to claim where I'm at right now. My and I also never do anything in in reps less than 5 so my peak not now. I'm certain it's lower now cause I've been doing it. But my peak for squats was 3:35 for five. Uh, my peak for deadlifts was 315 for five. And my peak for bench. Did I actually get it? I know I did 220 for five and I, I think I got like 225 for four and a half but didn't quite get the fifth. That's where I peaked out. That's what I'm at currently. Yeah, I have like. I don't know, I'm just so broken all the time. I, I used to be able to do more stuff but like right now the thing that's impeding my bench, my rotator cuff used to be the problem. I've kind of solved that. Now it's my front delt. I've been shifting to a lot of push ups lately instead of bench press because when I load the bar up enough I'm getting a bunch of pain and crunchiness in my front delt and I'm really not sure what that is. So I'm working, working on it. Yeah, all of it. For me, like I have, I have no specific goals other than I'm trying to be healthier and less broken. So if I run into some form of impediment I am happy to skip trying to progress weights for a while if it means that I can try to fix some part of me. And as far as I can tell, the stronger I'm getting and more able I'm getting. It's not that I'm breaking in various ways. I think I am unveiling problems and then addressing them and then continuing forward. That's what it feels like to me at least. But yeah, it's going okay. And Dan, when's the last time you were at the gym? Dan?

[Dan]

May 2nd.

[Linus Sebastian]

Of last year. Yeah, well it can't be of this year I guess.

[Dan]

Yeah, I will be coming back soon.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You should really check out the knees over toes guy. Knees or toes guy's great. I have been checking out for quite a while, quite genuinely mostly his content but a variety of other people's content as well. Is why my knees are like really good right now. There was a while there where my knees were screwed and my knees are Solid. Um, my knees are absolutely not the limiting factor when it comes to things like squats anymore. And I go pretty deep. Um, my. My problem is, is. Yeah, the weird, really delayed onset issues with, with my back and whatever is happening. This is very. The front delt thing is very recent. So whatever's happening with my front delt and the delayed onset issues in my back are by far the main problems right now. But I could argue with this for literally ever. So we should probably skip to the next merch message.

[Dan]

Yeah. I got to apologize again for dipping for so long.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's whatever, man. I just. I don't know. I think it's good to stay active. There's. There's that. Oh, man. Now I'm going to talk about more health stuff and we're going to get into. Let's skip it.

[Dan]

Anyway. Hi, Linus. Can you update us on how your workflow has changed since Taran joined? Has it worked out the way that you hoped? What specifically you've been able to spend more and less time on.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'd say the biggest thing is when I have an issue, I have a single or a couple points of contact that I can bring it to. It's not always going to be resolved instantly because the real world is messy. In theory, everything is perfect. You have an org chart and you have the reporting lines and you. But in practice, nothing's ever that simple. Simple. But I'd say that specifically I've been able to spend less time on performance management and more time on making videos, which is, I think, the best thing for the company. Like when we were looking, talking recently about how viewership had kind of recovered to pre controversy levels. Right. It's a little lower right now. But the reason for that is in the last month we've uploaded way fewer videos.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're kind of per video viewership.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we're banking up videos right now for the next little bit. And so even when things were kind of back to pre levels, we still weren't uploading as much as we had been before. So we're actually in a healthier state from that point of view. So I, and I do think that the best thing for the company is me being able to spend more time on the creative elements of things and less time on the business administration side. There's a bit of a misconception, I think, and I think part of it is the way that I've represented myself. There's a bit of a misconception that I'm somehow incapable of, you know, leadership, incapable of Setting the strategic direction. Well, I'm very self effacing in my sense of humor and I think a lot of the time I will publicly undermine myself in order to people don't get the joke, build up someone else's role or their contribution. And I think that what I forgot or didn't realize or hoped to give people more credit for than that is that people wouldn't take that seriously. They would understand that while I have gotten extremely lucky to arrive where I have, I also did like run the company until we had 100 people. And it. I didn't step down because I couldn't do the job. I stepped down because I couldn't do two jobs, more than two jobs. I mean I was our primary host. I was our editor in chief and I was our CEO. It was not tenable also still. And like I was realistically you did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

More stuff than that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Realistically like a chief creative officer as well. Like there was a lot that I was doing and like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Does that apply to the ideation for Creator Warehouse?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean, sure. Yeah, there's. And then there's Creator Warehouse too, which I didn't put a ton of my hours into every week, but I certainly did some. So I think it's, it's less that, you know, I wasn't able to do things and it was more that I have a hard time investing energy into things that I don't enjoy and I don't want to do. And I think that I do my best work when I'm focused on the things that I do enjoy. So like I did some of my best work this week right before WAN show when I was working with Alex on building a system in the new Kallios Streetcom tower. Check this thing out.

[Dan]

Was that on Build Corner?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Oh yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Isn't it beautiful? Oh, I know.

[Dan]

Oh, I know.

[Linus Sebastian]

So it's this thing, this was that, that company that like scammed everybody? Basically, yeah. Here we go. Kickstarter project by Kalios. It's been resurrected through a partnership with Streetcom. We didn't want to work with them in like any kind. We didn't want to take anything from them. We didn't cover them at Computex that year because they didn't agree to refund people. But what we did say was we'd, we'd, we'd buy it. So we, we bought one of the backers who wanted out. We, we bought their, their pre order. So we've got it, we've purchased it like anyone else would have. We're building in It. It's super cool. I definitely have some misgivings about, you know, its history and how, for sure, how it got to here. But, like, I'm having a blast with that. It's like, would I rather do that or would I rather, you know, look at budgeting? I can look at budgeting. I can work on spreadsheets. I did it for years before I worked here. But it's not where I think my passion lies, and it's not where I think my greatest value lies. So spending more time on things like that, which doesn't mean zero time on administrative stuff, like, I still find, you know, I still find problems. And the way that Taryn puts it is you need to be careful what you say because you still wield a lot of soft power, is the way that he kind of phrased it. Because even though I'm not someone's direct boss or whatever, I have to be cognizant that my words and actions can carry a lot of weight.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Asterisk. Also, all of the hard power.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. But I go out of my way to not exercise.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know. I'm just saying you're not wrong.

[Linus Sebastian]

But.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But that is part of the reason why there is the understanding of the soft power being carried is like you can't. As much as you don't use it, you can't ignore that. That.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it's. It's all. But it's also not all because there's an element of mutually assured destruction. Like, if I were to, you know, exercise my hard power.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Effective, mutually disturbed. Mutually assured destruction on others versus on.

[Linus Sebastian]

You is still destruction. And. No, I mean, you're right in terms.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Of if mutually assured destruction happens, you'll be fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Day to day, I will be fine. But in terms of, you know, other things that matter to me a lot, I mean, not just shrink. It can be destroyed. It's. It's. I think people from the outside probably don't realize how fragile organizations are. And I. And I mean that not just about ourselves. I mean, look at what's happened to intel over a shockingly short period of time. Like, organizations are made up of people. They're made up of processes. They're made up of a structure that it turns out, is shockingly fragile. Like, it only takes a few pieces to kind of fall out of place, and the whole thing can come crumbling down.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's actually, I think most companies are wildly more fragile than people think. Yeah, I mean, look at Intel.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you just repeating what I said on purpose?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was a little Bit definitely reading chat. Hell yeah. We don't have the same thoughts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, hold on. So unique username says, wait, what's this? Mutually assured destruction. So, like, yeah, I could. I could literally just go for full flex and I could be like, taryn, you're fired. Luke, you're fired. Dan, you're fired.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm literally not going to sign your paychecks anymore. See you later. What then? What, like, what for me now? Because, like, I. You have to have that mutual respect. I respect these people to do their jobs. They respect me to not do that. And there's like. There's almost like a tension and actually.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, literally how the whole world works.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't mean that. I don't mean that tension in a bad way. I mean, the kind of tension that is like, have you seen those. Have you seen those tables that are held up by tension?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Trick kill. Oh, yeah, those are super cool. Trick kill. And full plane chat said, no. Luke's free computers.

[Dan]

That's the only reason he's here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

These are super cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

These are super cool. All of these chains are loose.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, they're. They're tense.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, right. But they're. They're not. They're not, like, welded.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're not solid.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. Like, they're. They're just chains.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You could push it and it would.

[Linus Sebastian]

Would deform and it'll, like, wobble. So there's like, there's a tension that. That holds everything together where we all sort of rely on each other, and it would. I can't. The organization is at such a size, such a scale, and again, I re. Emphasize we are 1 360th the size of Disneyland. Just that park. Right. But we are still at a size and scale, and we do so many things that if I were to. If I were to just start cutting, the. The results could not be predicted other than that it would be disastrous. It's almost like, you know, not fully understanding what everyone does. You shouldn't just, like, run around cutting jobs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

And then having to, like, rehire them because it turns out you're a big, dumb idiot. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The nukes are gonna be fine. They take care of themselves.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

So that's what float plane does.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

I didn't know that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

You. Yeah, you flex too hard, you destroy the culture, and then that destroys the company. Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And I literally can't do it all myself anymore. There was a time when if the team were to come to me and say, we quit. You suck. Right. Like, this isn't A this isn't collective bargaining. This is just you, we out, you know. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You wouldn't have maybe been able to do as much but you could have kept the ship.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah, I could have kept the ship. The ship didn't do that much. The ship just like uploaded unboxings.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I could, I could hire someone to hold a thing. Yvonne could literally like, you know, like hold the camera.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Quite a few times.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean in the early, early, early days.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But these days it's like what I'm gonna, I'm gonna like create floatplane exclusives and do LTT and do short circuit and coordinate, you know, procurement and develop a website. Don't forget the apps and come on.

[Dan]

You'Re also going to lose all your institutional knowledge. There's still a lot that is still tribal here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, that's the thing, right. Is in the old days every job role I had done at some point. Now that's not the case. There are literally people who work, who have years of experience here doing things I have never done. Tension, mutually assured destruction. It's good, it's healthy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But again it's, it's largely how like I mean society kind of subsists on it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I mean it's a, it's a dog eat dog world. Right. Like we're all, I mean you've, you've described, you've described the world as PvP, constant PvP environment. But that doesn't mean that it's a zero sum game. It doesn't mean that every player has to lose. We can all win, but there are going to be degrees of winning.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so we all have to be cognizant of the constant tension and working to make sure that our attention is beneficial to the people around us that we are together. This table.

[Dan]

I think that to table is society. We live in a society now.

[Linus Sebastian]

I need to have this table. I should have this table.

[Dan]

I guess you can just order people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To make an office. Office.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There are people here that could make that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah, sure. No, it's, it's not that hard. We were looking at guides a little while ago because James wanted to do it. To do a tensegrity computer, that would.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Be kind of cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Where do we put the computer though? Like it's not really, I mean in.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The middle of that. I guess that's basically just a computer case exposed.

[Linus Sebastian]

Linus treats his employees like a table and we teeth. Anyway, they're kidding. Don't worry. What else we got?

[Dan]

There's still Many. Hi ldl Love, Love time viewer, first time merch messenger question for Luke. What is your opinion on using technical questions for software interviews? Is there a better way to scope out good candidates?

[Linus Sebastian]

I know the answer to this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Technical questions are good. I think sometimes people go way overboard with it. Like, I don't know if, if you're just asking like effectively, like leetcode questions. I mean, they just studied for that. Like, does that really prove anything? I don't know. I like having people actually just try to write something. Like the, we have a. The float plane test. I try not to go into way too many details, but the float plane test is generally referred to as the bad app test. And we, we give people a bad app and we ask them to comment it and identify why it's bad and then rewrite it. It's short, small. And since the advent of not AI assisting, but just fully AI written code, we've had to like, okay, we'll slap this through a few models and see what it outputs just to see if people are, are just completely copy and pasting AI written code because we don't want those results. But that has actually become a somewhat fun benchmark because if you can't beat.

[Linus Sebastian]

That, then why do we bother with you?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Kind of. And to be honest, you should be able to receive that and then, you know, probably improve it a little bit here or there, make it your own in some way. But if you're literally just taking the output, it's slapping it in, it's. It's not, it's not great. We also do those offline. Okay. By offline, I mean, like, not during the video call. And as much as that's sweet because it doesn't take up as much as my time, the actual core reason for it was I tried to do one live because I heard that was like what people did. And then immediately within that call was like, never mind. Just take this and we'll have another call later. Send it to me when you're done because I suspect this is always a thing. But that environment is not similar to how you're going to be working at all. And I suspect the level of nerves when you're applying at any company is high, let alone when it's very likely I'm sitting on the call with you and it's possible you've watched me on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Camera in the past, confirmed Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which is like, for sure, 100%. I'm the best.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm the best interviewer because I'm there in the interview.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No one Is good.

[Linus Sebastian]

They're probably nervous because I'm that cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They. They've now met their hero.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So everything's downhill from this moment, and they're realizing that in real time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And that's a really hard environment to be coding.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's really hard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's long and it's hard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's probably the most difficult thing they've ever done.

[Linus Sebastian]

The hardest.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Anyways, no. So, yeah, I. I just let people take it and do it on their. Which.

[Dan]

I'm not even gonna ding. That I was not on purpose.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which I wish. I wish.

[Linus Sebastian]

At least make them some chicken first.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, they just need the story of it. They don't need more than that. No. Yeah. So I don't know. That's what we do. Oh, God. Let's move on.

[Linus Sebastian]

So do these interviews take place on a couch?

[Dan]

Buy your disinfectant at Costco. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Forget the mineral oil. Buy the barrel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Works.

[Dan]

Hi, Dll.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't ingest it.

[Dan]

Speaking from experience. Good advice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's horse laxative.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's also human laxative.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So. Yeah, be careful with that.

[Dan]

Well, I'm not. I know what I'm doing at the next company retreat. Hi, dll. What cable sheathing would be used for the upcoming LTT store? Cables. Have bad experience with braided cables. Shrinking, causing kinks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hold on. I think he's fetching.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thank you.

[Dan]

Barely leaning into the after dark thing. Nice sack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's big. Very sizable.

[Linus Sebastian]

And black with orange on the inside.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a little.

[Linus Sebastian]

What am I doing?

[Dan]

Like Luke's interview coach.

[Linus Sebastian]

So they will not have braided sleeving on them. They are just the, like, the supple silicone style of, like, outer. Not rubber, but, like silicone. Lots of silicone.

[Dan]

Don't stop.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pointy. There's got to be a way to turn this into. Well, that's kind of flaccid in that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that was tough.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, the point is that there. Yeah, they're. They're. They're like this. They're kind of using, like, similar to, like a hobbyist grade, like, wire stock. Because I've found that in terms of durability, that's the best thing. I've also had really bad experiences with sleeving, just not lasting over the long term.

[Dan]

Hi, Dll. Why doesn't Samsung make desktop CPUs or GPUs since they already make mobile chips? Apple has had great success with their M series chips. They've brought out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, there's your answer. Apple has had great success with their Mobile chips has Samsung. They certainly put them in their bones. Does anybody else want to use them or would they rather have something designed by Qualcomm? Like, to be clear, they're not terrible. In fact, you can. I mean with. Oh, bloody hell. What's it called? Samsung's Dex. With Dex you can use a Samsung processor as a desktop. In fact. Oh shoot. Who's was it? Was it whose video, Whose Extreme Tech Upgrade video was it that they were using Dex as their like daily driver home computer until we did the tech upgrade? I don't remember. But yeah, like people do it. Yeah. Why don't they? I don't know why. Why doesn't anybody do anything? There's an opportunity cost. I guess they've just decided that's not the most useful thing. They'd rather make a smart fridge or whatever. Good luck. Samsung.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People are saying. Matt Laverne.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ah, yeah, yeah, that sounds right.

[Dan]

Why is it so rare for newer monitors to include more than one DisplayPort input? I have a variety of devices to connect and use at the same time, so a KVM doesn't help.

[Linus Sebastian]

What do you want to do? You want to have like, you want it side by side, is that right? So, okay, one. I actually share your, your perplexity because every HDMI port, to my understanding, costs a royalty fee, whereas DisplayPort is. Has no royalty per port. So it is a little weird to me that we don't just all use DisplayPort because like that would be cheaper. And you look across the electronics industry, basically every decision seems to be driven by how we can make it cheaper. I don't know, it's a good question, but you are right. Very, very few monitors include more than one DP input. However, if I had to guess, I would say that the reason you don't see PIP or picture by Picture support for DisplayPort is that DisplayPort can very easily be converted to anything else. So if you have a DP output from some device, then you can easily turn it into HDMI or VGA or DVI or whatever, mini DisplayPort, whatever you need to do. You could turn DisplayPort into anything. But turning some of those other things into DisplayPort is not always as cost effective or convenient. So I don't really see it as a problem. Because if you have a DPN and an HDMI in and two DP devices, then, then you could just convert one of the DPs to HDMI and boom, you're good to go. Especially now that DP and HDMI are have basically reached parity or close to parity, they kind of leapfrog each other now in terms of the bandwidth that they can support. It used to be that DP was like typically a generation ahead of HDMI, but now I think HDMI is actually ahead of DP. But then we got DP2.1A and that can do up to 80 gigabit. But now the new HDMI is coming. So I guess what I'm saying is I don't think this matters. And if what you want is for those devices to plug into the monitor and to switch between them. Although it sounds like you are aware of KVM's, but are you aware of really good KVM's? Like this one from the Level 1 Tech Store.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which can do 120Hz, 4K and USB 3 and multi monitors, which is like super cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

These things are amazing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So a lot of different configurations to Wendell.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wendell's store is funny because he's got like merch crap that like is just merch crap. And then he's got like actually like we built an incredible frickin product.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We did the best one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we like, we thought KVM's were bad so we were like, it, I'll build my own KVM if we made the best with blackjack and hookers. This one does four computers in a single one. I'm trying to find the like the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Big chunker super mondo one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I think it's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't remember.

[Linus Sebastian]

Triple monitors, two computers. Here's this guy. There's some, there's some. There's one wild one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's got to be a way you can filter by just the kvm.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you'd think that, but maybe. Maybe it was a custom one that he sent over to Jake or something. I don't remember.

[Dan]

Products.

[Linus Sebastian]

Come on. Hardware. Really? Hardware. Fine. There was one like super thick boy that I've seen. Maybe it was never a real product. Oh, here's a good one. Two computers, quad monitor. Check this out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I think that's what I was thinking of. I think that's the biggest one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Quad monitor, four computer. That's the one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Never mind.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep, this is the one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's crazy. The fact that this exists is just so sick. I'm so happy someone makes that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean it's not cheap and it's also sold out, but it technically exists. I think we might have one anyway. Wow, how rude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just have so many contacts.

[Linus Sebastian]

He's. He's just popular. He's just popular.

[Dan]

Hi LLD. Linus, how is the built in GPU CPU of the Mac? Have you run any LLMs or games on it and have you used the new Siri on it?

[Linus Sebastian]

I have not used any of that yet. I've been trying to figure out how to have my monitor scale properly so I'm pretty far away from doing anything. Performance reliant on it.

[Dan]

Hi wan.dlill I tentatively bought the tax write off shirt after not being able to handle sensory feel of the original American Apparel shirts. And it was great. Are all the current shirts the new one?

[Linus Sebastian]

No. I believe some of the mysteries in this latest batch are some American Apparel stuff that we found.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also the. The.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I think this is the last of it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

White. The pure white shirt is different as well, isn't it?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's different but it's not American Apparel. It is one of ours but the composition is different.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's. It is quite different. Just as a heads up.

[Linus Sebastian]

The reason for that is that making a white shirt that is as sheer as our dark shirts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Problematic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Problematic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, the archive Pokies dude. Dude, the archive of like products that I've tried on. One of these days we should just release it as a float plane exclusive download or something because there is some hilarious stuff that they've had me try on over the years. Like there's this one time Bridget had me try on like a ladies like white tank top essentially and I was like. I don't remember why. There was a reason for it but it was ridiculous.

[Dan]

Any scope creep stories. My company got tired of whining about me not being quick enough to work on another shop's gear. Now I'm training someone to configure CNC mills to pull from a networked FTP server.

[Linus Sebastian]

Literally everything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think this whole company.

[Dan]

I think that's the company culture. Yeah of just like oh more workings for things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like dude, the fact that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We did that at all is Scope creep. Like that was so incredibly.

[Dan]

Linus, you do motherboard unboxings.

[Linus Sebastian]

We had no business.

[Dan]

Now you're holding a script screwdriver.

[Linus Sebastian]

Making a screwdriver that's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's stored in a tech sack along with.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh dude.

[Dan]

And it's a partner partnered with Noctua.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The.

[Linus Sebastian]

The detaching like top on the magnetic parts tray on the precision screwdriver set like that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like why Amari and full plane chat said 1 million sales is scope creep. Like honestly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, let's go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well that's the. That's 100k.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well yeah, the million Ones still boxed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, okay. I see.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't get it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You got to make the point.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm working on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You got to see, you got to seal it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm working here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He'll get there. It's decently heavy, eh?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, she's heavy, boys. There you go. There's some scope creep right there. A million orders. Have you held it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. Oh, yeah. Wow. That is like you would expect it to weigh less.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's pretty nice.

[Dan]

Question for Luke. I recently got a pair of budgies. What?

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not a question.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I knew it was coming too.

[Dan]

I never expect it. I really should by now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What every time.

[Dan]

What qualities would you look for in a good bird vet? And what are some red flags for bad one? Concerned that I might have bumblefoot. Any tips?

[Linus Sebastian]

What is bumblefoot?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, Luke's about to Google it. Let's go chatgpt vet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, wow. Bacterial infection. That can of the foot that can affect birds, rodents, and rabbits. We've never had this. I've never ran into that before, man. I don't know. The. The. The thing that we did was we went to the only actual avian specialist in, as far as I know, the province. So unless we drove through the mountains for hours, there was really no other option. Well, technically there is because there was like. Like exotic pet vets, but they wouldn't specialize in birds or avians. They would be into basically not cats and dogs, although I'm pretty sure they generally take those too, but they. They would have experience with other ones. So we found the. The only one that really specialized in. In birds. And birds are weird. So I think it's pretty good to find a vet that can specialize in birds. That was honestly all we did. I mean, outside of that, it's just general stuff for. For the. The same types of things that you might probe questions for to try to find a good mechanic. Like it's, you know, if there's something that you are absolutely assured in your knowledge of, talk to them about it and see, you know, do they try to upgrade, charge you on something when they shouldn't. Stuff like that. I would also think that it would be pretty wise to try to find a vet that you can board your birds at, so that if you want to go on vacation or have to leave town for a certain period of time because of some form of emergency, there is somewhere that you can leave your birds that can actually take care of them properly. Leaving them with a friend is free, which is awesome because leaving them with the vet, it can be very expensive. But you're kind of. Especially with budgies, they're so fragile, they're so prone to death, and incredibly easy ways that really can't be controlled that well. You're kind of putting a lot on the person that you're leaving them with. Like, I don't know. I've never had an issue with dog sitting, for example, but leaving our birds with somebody just sounds like I'm kind of setting them up for failure. Like, it's not the birds, which might be true. It's more the person. Like, you're putting a lot on them. Like, the chance that you come home to dead birds and then they feel horrible for the rest of ever is really high. And that's just a lot to put on someone.

[Dan]

Hi. My boyfriend has been a long time fan of ltt and ever since he told me that Linus is a Swifty, I've been listening to the WAN show with him. I want to know what Linus's favorite Tailor album is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ooh, man, people are going to hate this. But I don't really. I don't really listen to albums.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know how many.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't.

[Linus Sebastian]

How many Taylor Swift albums I could name. Hold on, hold on. Red Taylor Swift. I believe she has just an eponymous. Eponymous. Eponymous. I think it's eponymous.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hmm. Not gonna look at chat. Dan, how many albums does she have? Can you find that out for me? Like, how close am I? Do I have, like, you know, a solid 40% of the albums?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You keep responding to things. Oh, they're.

[Dan]

They're lighter now. 11 studio albums, five EPs, four live albums, four re records. She's not quite as prolific as King Gizzard and the Lizard wizard, but she's up there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, say that five times.

[Dan]

She's not quite as prolific as the King Gizzard and the Lizard wizard, but she's up there.

[Linus Sebastian]

I had an extra the in there, but good. It was solid attempt.

[Dan]

Damn it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I give up. Oh, crap. I missed 1989 and midnight.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I would have missed all of them. If it helps.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God. Reputation. I've never even heard of that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You don't have one anymore.

[Linus Sebastian]

Eponymous. Okay. Speak Now. What the hell is Speak Now?

[Dan]

Looks like a single.

[Linus Sebastian]

December. No, no, it's a whole album.

[Dan]

Oh, it's a re record, is it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, what?

[Dan]

Speak now was from Third Student Album 2010.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wrote the album entirely herself while touring in 2009 and 2010 to reflect her transition from adolescence to adulthood. I think Enchanted is good. I think. I don't know, man. I. Yeah, I don't think. I. I don't think I have a favorite album.

[Dan]

Every single one has been number one in the U.S. but Taylor Swift, really, which was her first album.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow.

[Dan]

Bonkers.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's kind of wild. Okay. What was on Taylor Swift? Our song. I liked our song. That's good. Teardrops on My Guitar was huge, man. Was that song ever huge.

[Dan]

And your twinsies? Yep. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Five twins.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you still have thick thighs?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think so. I mean, even though I couldn't play badminton, I've been, like, on the StairMaster.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You just.

[Linus Sebastian]

You mentioned you lost weight hitting that StairMaster. I'm back up. This wasn't eating enough. Hello.

[Dan]

The talent. How it goes pejoratively. Hey, and the talent. Luke, how do you find motivation to do management as a dev? It looks unrewarding, thanks to your resolute commitment to transparency and integrity.

[Linus Sebastian]

The reward is. What is it again?

[Dan]

Drinking alone and crying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's breadth of impact.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah. That's good. It's like teaching, like, you can do so much more by, like, building a team than you can by just doing things yourself.

[Dan]

Being helpful.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're gonna need to manage.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So, like, it is what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't love that part.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I love, like. Dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, there's parts to love about that part, though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Sometimes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I think they're like. Okay. Living vicariously through the personal growth of others is, like, actually super.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is super cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're not living vicariously because that is a negative connotation. But, like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, I'm not trying to dissuade people from becoming managers either. I just. I think there's. There's a. There's a lot of thankless aspects to it and. And there's a lot of really junk aspects to it, and you end up being. I don't know. I don't want to get way too into it, but there are absolutely positives. You end up being. Oh, man. How do I say this in a way that I'm not going to piss off some various groups of people? The reward is you get a ton of flack. Yeah. I mean, that's part of it. What is this? Linus's career as Taylor Swift eras. That's amazing. How.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait, what? This was from four months ago and literally doesn't have a single upvote.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's sad, because that's an amazing post.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is Hilarious. Well, how. Why did, why did Dark Rainbow. Oh, you know what? I bet, I bet Dark rainbow is like Dr. Win or whatever. This is hilarious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But that's. That is a. That is a golden. Sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, carry on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But yeah, you end up dealing with a lot of people's personal issues inside and outside of work and. Oh, yeah, that can be really heavy.

[Linus Sebastian]

The lines between work and not work are very blurry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And that can be really heavy when you're doing that for a wide variety of people at the same time. So you're like receiving all of this stuff and it is usually negative because life is hard and life is hard for everybody. So it's just. I don't know. And that's. You don't want to not do that because you like care about these people. But when you go home at the end of the day sometimes it's like.

[Linus Sebastian]

And if you don't care, you can't care. You're not cut out for it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Only thing that can motivate you to, to work with the team is if you actually care for sure. Otherwise you'll be a terrible manager and you just shouldn't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And sometimes it's. Honestly, I mean, we're coming back to that rewarding thing, right? Sometimes you can help people get through it and there's only so much you can do about that being their, like manager at work. But sometimes you can help, you know, get people's mind off things or, or shift people so that they're. They're doing a different type of work or, or something that can like, help them in some way. Like you're not necessarily gonna be the solution, but you might be able to be at least part of it, which can be really cool and deeply rewarding. But also sometimes it's just really heavy.

[Linus Sebastian]

And sometimes there's no real way that you can help other than just that too.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Being an Earth, which can suck.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But again is one of those things where, like, I wouldn't want people to not do that. Like, if you're on my team, I want to help you. So it's just, I don't know, there's just. There's a lot of downsides that I don't think get a lot of light. But it is what it is. It's fine.

[Dan]

More for Luke. Hi Luke. I'm an engineer at Cloudflare. What's a product or feature you wish we offer but don't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Go with something really selfish?

[Dan]

Discount prices for tech youtubers main registrar yet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That'd be great.

[Dan]

Do they do it ca.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, they're domainers. Where they have been for a long time. Ah, yeah. Support CA domains.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well. Well, that's why I was asking. I know. We don't use.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why? You don't. Yeah, we do.

[Linus Sebastian]

We do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, but not for our casual.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so we can't switch everything, which is, like, silly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And how about that Weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

How about your domain registrar business, like, has more domains and then we could have all our domains through you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That would be sick. Please do that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Can you think of anything else?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The tech side of Cloudflare, I'm, like, pretty happy with and always have been, which is why I've been using them for so long. Something that is, like, actually a big problem at Cloudflare that you probably can't fix because you're an engineer and your side is probably working pretty well, is that your support is not awesome and hasn't been for a long time. And there's a system that a bunch of companies have where you have the team that's assigned to you. Right. And the reason why you get direct emails to a team that's assigned to you is because you're supposed to have those people for a long time, but then you're either a quickly growing or quickly declining tech company because. Because that seems to be the only status tech companies are ever in. So that team is extremely ephemeral. You'll have it for like, six months, and then every six months you get an email from somebody you've never heard of before saying, oh, hey, we'd love to have an onboarding call because you have a new team. Can you please explain what your entire company does? Because we have no idea, because apparently we store zero documentation on anything and it's incredibly annoying and honestly, just a huge waste of of time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. Tell us how you really feel, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's very frustrating. And then you had support tickets in with the previous team that they were dragging absolute butt on for weeks, if not months. And then those just get disappeared when the new support team shows up. We literally had an issue with Cloudflare that we were trying to resolve for over a year. And the last round of trying to resolve it, one of the people were like, yeah, never heard of this before, Never seen anything on it. I'm like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool, Sick. All right, let's not go too hard at them there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, the tech is great, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We have no intention of stopping to use Cloudflare. The. The support team that we have right now does seem pretty okay. These are mostly problems of the Past. It's good. We like your stuff. Keep going.

[Dan]

Hi, Dll. Quick question to Linus. What flower Lego sets are you recommending.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like right now? Flower LEGO sets. Hold on. Tax write off sale shop all deals. Free shipping on orders over $175. Whoa, look at that. There's a free shaft extension with every stubby screwdriver. Oh, $10 off the scribe driver for the tax write off sale. That's appropriate. Oh, did you know we've burned through like 60,000 shafts already out of our 100,000 shafts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a lot.

[Dan]

It's like me in college.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have sold.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Serious question.

[Linus Sebastian]

A few scribe drivers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Once you burn through all of them, what do you do.

[Linus Sebastian]

Off site? Laptop bag, $39.99. This is crazy. This is a really nice bag. Really high quality bag full of lots of great pockets for organizing your gear. Um, you cannot fit a submarine inside, but you can fit many things inside. Enjoy it. That's a good question. I think that there is still some. I think. I think the story is still fun, you know, that we developed the product to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no, I think that's fine. But like, do you. Do you come up with a die or whatever? You're going to need to make those specifically instead of. Because I'm assuming the way that you make them now is just gone the second you're out of those shafts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, we're out of shafts once we're out of shafts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And you don't use like two for every pen or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it turns out that I might have said that at some point. I was wrong about that. We use a shaft for the knurling and the top housing is. Is brand new.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fresh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I think that we actually had this conversation in merge meeting this week. Oh, they showed me a replicated crappy knurling job because they were. They were like, okay, they did the worst they could. Is this worst enough? Would we want it to be good or would we want it to be like the bad one? And I basically went, okay, well, if we continued to manufacture fail dry or fail pension. That was the original code name of the project Failpen. If we were to manufacture fail pens, we would want them to be as close to the original as possible. And I don't think I would want to. I don't think I would want to differentiate for people whether it's a fail pen or a not fail pen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Unless it's just a version 2 and you call it like the write off or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was a name That I stole from somebody in Flow Plane Chat, like months ago, by the way.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think what we would probably do, assuming we are successful enough with the product to continue moving through the remaining tens of thousands of shafts. Because when I say there's that many shafts left, that's like virgin shafts. We have manufactured pens as well that also have sh. Stop. That also have shafts in them. So it's going to be a while before we burn through all of our, like, faulty shafts for the original screwdriver production run. What to do, what to do?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if you're buying the flower set for someone. Just figure out what their favorite flower is and try to find a set that has that. They have a bunch of sets figured out.

[Linus Sebastian]

What do you think is the right thing to do? Should we just make pale pens?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is it still an interesting enough product development story even if you're not actually buying a piece of that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, I think we got more interesting to say this was so successful that we ran out of the failed material and now we just make it for real. I think that's entirely legit.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's what the team wants at all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that's entirely legit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I'll think about it some more.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a cool product. You don't have to just not make it. I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's pretty cool to turn that lemon into man. Because like, let's say. Let's say an average sell price of. I don't know. Because we've. We've promoted a couple times. So let's say an average sell price of like 25 bucks across its lifetime. If we actually sell through all of them. That's like away. Huh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How many shafts was there?

[Linus Sebastian]

A hundred thousand. To be clear. There. We did pay for those shafts and we did pay to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And you got to ship them around and you got to re. Retool them.

[Linus Sebastian]

That ain't all profit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You have to buy the ink cartridge and yeah. Put it in a package and all.

[Linus Sebastian]

That Jazz pay people to do all that stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But there I genuinely deeply think there is no reason to stop making them.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't remember what the loss was. I think it was. I think it was a hundred thousand dollar error.

[Dan]

Man.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is a pretty dealt with.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is some good lemonade.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Extremely tasty lemonade. Dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're good sometimes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're like really good at stuff sometimes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Aviation. AJ Says, what about the pencil version? That's still coming.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm more leaning to this point that it would be like. It would be lame if that was the reason why you stopped.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think if you were like, you know what? This product is run its course. We're not selling, like, a ton of them anymore or whatever. Whatever. Okay. We're going to stop making them when we run out of. That's. That's completely fine. That's its own reason. But if you're like, oh, no, the product story was whatever, so we have to stop now. Like, that's lame. I think that's lame.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it would be kind of cool if we gave people a chance to, like, get one of those. Like, if we kind of warned people when we were down to the last couple.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, why not? Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

But then after that, yeah, we just. Yeah, we make a success pen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah, sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Stole that from Negev and float plane chat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty good.

[Dan]

I work for large error lines, and I'm currently in the process of developing a new operations center. What challenges has LTT faced in internal communications, I. E. Email teams, that one. Random group chat.

[Linus Sebastian]

Lots. But I don't know if you guys are ready to talk about our new deployment yet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, it's kind of up to Dan.

[Dan]

I think there'll be a float plane exclusive coming where I kind of gush about the last month of my progress on it, and I believe the Dan dailies series will be continuing, so be able to follow the internal processes as we develop them forever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Dan]

Until you get sick of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Basically, it's. We're. We're working on a new tool that is going to help to sync information across all of the various tools that we use so that finding that single source of truth, it becomes a little less difficult.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One of the ways that I guess we're talking about a little bit now, I won't go. I won't dive too much into it, though. One of the ways that I've really liked that Dan has been bouncing off me for this thing for a long time is he wants to reduce the thinking.

[Dan]

I hate thinking.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Less thinking.

[Dan]

I've said it many times in executive meetings and teran lunches. But I hate working and I'm really lazy. And I wish more people at the company hated working and were really lazy. Busy. We really kind of go into busy work that isn't fun or productive or creatively stimulating. And the less work we do from doing that kind of garbage, the more room we have to be creative and. And think and be happy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So if you have to think, like, how am I supposed to do this?

[Dan]

Thing or it comes down.

[Linus Sebastian]

Where do I find that information?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Where do I find that information?

[Dan]

Not even.

[Linus Sebastian]

What is the process for this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What am I supposed to do?

[Dan]

What task do I start with? I have 50 tasks. Which one do I do?

[Linus Sebastian]

What are my priorities?

[Dan]

You get a list where your priority is at the top and then you just do that one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So I guess we'll talk more about it some other time. But it's, it's. It's exciting. It's been a lot of work. It's going to be a lot more work, but it's exciting.

[Dan]

I've been really enjoying it.

[Linus Sebastian]

This just seems like a good time to talk about flow plane. Float plane's cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

This was really funny. They quote unquote promoted Colton. It's epic. He got back from a vacation and they promoted him to receptionist. You should watch it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I will.

[Dan]

Oh, no. There was a floatplane call up that I think we were supposed to do.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh really?

[Dan]

I always forget. I got swamped and forgot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

As far as I know, this is actually Dan's fault now.

[Dan]

It has always been my fault.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Where is it?

[Dan]

I see it should just be above.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The sponsors full plane this week. Got two really good videos this week.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's hilarious. So I accidentally did the thing and.

[Dan]

Reminded me of the thing that I'm supposed to.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm supposed to play a timestamp from it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, you literally like almost exactly did the talking points. That's amazing, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm good. Okay, here we ready? Dan, you ready?

[Dan]

I think so. That's Linus laptop. It is that button. Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

Welcome to Linus Media Group. Have a Linus day. That's why I'm leaving.

[Luke Lafreniere]

See you.

[Dan]

Bye.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like and subscribe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's what I say. That's what I say. Like and subscribe.

[Linus Sebastian]

Subscribe. Buy some merch.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, there's Jimmy.

[Dan]

Oh, there he is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Jamie also asked. He was at the other building. He's like, you going over to going over studio. I was like, why?

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice. Sorry. What else are we supposed to say?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Secondly, you might have seen this Reddit post.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah. Oh, okay. This says it wasn't only Elijah who was there. All employees of lmg, fpm, CW got an all expense paid trip to Disneyland. And Sammy who wasn't supposed to be working.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you put that in?

[Linus Sebastian]

No. Yeah, that I already did as well. Vlogged from his perspective and other employees volunteered their time to be in the video. Timestamp 2025. That's the face of dedication. Say my notes. You have lost all his content for the day. I'm just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, anything for flow playing, you know?

[Linus Sebastian]

You see the phone, bro?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You come to this ride next time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh my God. You can't. Guys, you can't do that. You're. You're gonna give. You give all influencers a bad reputation. You do that stuff. Ah, okay. Anyway, what else is in here? I ran into Luke multiple times and him looking around for who was yelling his name was funny. Says Sammy. Did you know it was him?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, eventually, because I would find him.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's hilarious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if I always did, but.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, if you see these videos and you like them, head over to LMG GG slash floatplane. Or for the lazy. A YouTube membership at our LTT member plus tier will get you access to all the same stuff but at a worse price. So you should just use Floatplane.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, Dan, what else we got?

[Dan]

Couple more home stretches. Let's see. Spent all day troubleshooting six DCs that were failing to talk thanks to slight time differences. Calling causing Carabonos to SMP failures. What annoying thing caused you loads of grief recently?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my MacBook.

[Dan]

I've noticed in many. Oh yeah, get rid of that one too. Luke and Linus, how do you feel about ipt? Integrated project teams, Product teams versus regular functional teams. My company just switched to ipts and I am skeptical.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What.

[Dan]

What is an integrated product team? I've not even heard of this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan, if you're curating something, you should probably know what it is.

[Dan]

Isn't that your job?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Dan]

Oh, multi disciplinary group of people who are collectively responsible for delivering a defined product or process.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How is that different from just like a team? What was the other one that they said was the other thing.

[Dan]

Regular functional teams.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I think if we don't. And if we don't know, I think it's okay to say we don't know.

[Dan]

We have no. I'm just like, we have no feelings. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're not all dev. They're a mix. But then someone. Someone else said it's single skill people, so those are contradictory.

[Dan]

Okay. As an.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, we don't know.

[Dan]

As an enterprise storage engineer, is there anything. Storage technology. Anything in storage technology development you find exciting?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, anything distributed is always pretty cool to me. I love resiliency. Anything to do with tiering is always super cool to me. Anything like with like automated storage tiers? Other than that, like. No, I think that's all. That's all trends that are very much happening with or without My participation, but it's cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

High speed interconnects, unified memory is cool. I mean, we have it.

[Dan]

Hello, dll. How do you keep the senior staff motivated and focused on the job, especially when they don't agree with the business decisions at hand?

[Linus Sebastian]

You have to reach consensus. I mean, at the end of the day, that's always, that's always the goal. You have to get aligned. And if you can't get aligned, then it probably means that someone isn't being rational. And in those cases, what you have to do is you have to rationally agree to compromise. Okay, let's try this for a little bit. Let's give it a good real effort. And if it doesn't work, then we all need to rationally be willing to reevaluate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You don't have to agree with everything that happens at your company.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think you have to support it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, you have to do your job. And your job isn't always to just agree with everything. But your job also isn't to like hardline, refuse to do everything all the time. There might be situations where that makes sense. I'm sure this has happened to people that are in chat right now where like it's, it is morally unacceptable to do a thing that your, your boss or company asks, asked of you. But that's not usually the case. So I think there's, there's this concept where like everyone bickering over how to do something is almost always worse than trying to come to a relatively quick consensus on something and then trying it and actually doing the thing and then evaluating and going from there. So sometimes you just gotta do stuff. And I mean sometimes, like even from a management perspective, sometimes when you know something is gonna fail, you have to let the person fail. Because as much as you can tell them it will fail if they don't experience it, they don't get that learning. So it just has to happen anyways. So sometimes you can be like, well, this is going to be a waste of time because they're going to fail. It's not going to work. But it's not actually entirely a waste of time. It might be a waste of time in regards to your project completion time, but it's not a waste of time in regards to that person's professional development, which is still valuable assuming they stay on the team. So anyways.

[Dan]

Big D, little owl, medium D, huge fan of y'all. Was wondering if perhaps my favorite tech team could wish me, me and my fiance a happy engagement. Jerry and Brandy from Justin, Texas.

[Linus Sebastian]

Happy engagement Jeremy and Brandy from Justin, Texas. Are you anywhere else or Justin, Texas?

[Dan]

He curated it to just make that joke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you really?

[Dan]

I know that that's what he did now. Oh, you've ruined their engagement. Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who curated this?

[Dan]

Not me. Not me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So Linus is just chaos creating at the end of the show.

[Dan]

It's that kind of night. I'm not even. Do you want me to read it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like you should just read the thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

You have to read the thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You should read it and then we should just end it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh no.

[Dan]

I fixed it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, go ahead and read the thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready.

[Dan]

Love your stuff. Very well made. What do you think of the current USA administration?

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. Bye.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It.