New Problems Need New Solutions - WAN Show May 29, 2026

Summary

The WAN Show – Podcast Summary

Episode: "New Problems Need New Solutions"

Date: May 29, 2026
Hosts: Linus Sebastian & Luke Lafreniere

Brief Overview

This WAN Show episode dives into a host of current technology issues, from surging hardware prices due to AI demand, new players in the RAM and SSD market, and the impact of AI features in software and search. The hosts recount community tech trends from recent LAN events, analyze internet outages, touch on California tech policy, discuss the arms race around digital ownership, and deliver lively commentary on everything from controller drift to sponsor goofs. Interactivity this week includes a chaotic attempt at a Roguelite hockey game, live giveaways, and their usual Q&A banter.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Headline: CXMT and Changes in RAM Supply

[03:40-06:00]

• Chinese memory maker CXMT is supplying DDR5 to Corsair (for the Chinese market), marking the first time a major western brand ships RAM with Chinese DRAM chips.
• US sanctions blocked CXMT from AI-focused HBM production, freeing capacity for consumer DDR5.
• Linus: “Is it a small win? Yes. Is it a win? It’s still a W. I’ll take a microscopic W over a giant L any day of the week.” (04:01)
• The broader impact is less about “winning the chip war” and more about temporarily easing shortages and giving China revenue for future R&D.
• Luke: “Making DDR5 is way more profitable today than it was six months ago.” (05:31)

2. SSD & RAM Price Surges; Nostalgia for Storage Flex

[06:30-10:50]

• AI’s voracious appetite is causing RAM and SSD prices to rise; older SATA SSDs get a new lease on life due to shortages.
• At events like Whale Land, gamers are now flexing vast amounts of NVMe or RAM over GPUs, echoing early SSD and “Velociraptor” hard drive days.
• Linus: “I’m not saying you’re poor, I’m just saying I’m wearing your whole house on my DIMM slot.” (08:00)

3. Linux Gains Among Gamers

[10:55-14:00]

• At Whale Land, more gamers are daily-driving Linux, not just Steam Decks but desktops, highlighting “colossally rising trend.”
• Dual-booting is still common for fallback, but many find Linux “just working” for their needs, citing Bazzite and gaming with relatively few problems.
• Luke: “The general conversation was…they really don’t use it much. Like, they haven’t launched into it in quite a while. But it’s, it’s like a security layer still.” (13:15)

4. Whale Land Event: Network Outage & Solutions

[14:21-22:47]

• Unifi (Ubiquiti) hardware vulnerabilities forced risky last-minute updates, resulting in severe CPU pinning and packet drops at the event.
• Onsite network staff swapped hardware on the fly; once hardware was upgraded, stability returned.
• Luke: “At this point it’s a tradition…we’re not going to be able to host a Whale Land without at least one small internet connectivity issue.” (21:02)

5. Event Trends: Hardware, AV Improvements, and Sponsors

[22:47-27:08]

• AV upgrades (mod mics, 480 Hz monitors), improved TeamSpeak config, and more interactive main-stage events boosted energy and participation.
• Genuine sponsor involvement: Threat Locker reps just gaming alongside attendees, breaking down ‘stuffy vendor’ stereotypes.
• Linus: “It’s easy to look at a brand like Threat Locker and forget the company is made up of geeky community members.” (26:19)

6. User Backlash to AI in Search (DuckDuckGo & Kagi)

[27:22-36:49]

• DuckDuckGo installs spiked after Google pushed new AI search features at I/O, with users seeking AI-free alternatives.
• Kagi, a paid, ad/sponsor-free search engine, discussed as a possible alternative despite its cost.
• Linus: “Remember when Google’s whole mission with search was to help you actually find something? What happened?” (30:51)
• Luke commits to trying Kagi, noting how AI features have led to Google giving wrong answers even on basic tasks.

7. Digital Ownership & Merch Tie-In

[36:49-40:00]

• New LTT Store shirt: “If Buying Isn’t Owning”—inspired by rising digital license revocation in games and “features” like paid seat heaters.
• Linus: “It just feels like so many things belong to us less than they did last week.” (37:09)

8. Podcast Growth & Occult Merch Idea Tangent

[43:00-52:04]

• Q: How to grow a podcast? The hosts admit they do “almost nothing” for promotion beyond existing audience.
• Tangential brainstorming: Occult/witchy podcast merch (Ouija boards, e-ink tarot cards, bone LEGO sets).
• Luke: “The best part is you can just make it all up.” (50:03)

9. California OS-Level Age Verification Law

[66:20-69:07]

• Law amended to exempt open source OSes like Linux from age verification APIs. SteamOS may be in a legal grey area, but most open distros now protected.

10. Game Shutdown Protections Proposed in California

[69:10-71:20]

• New legislation would require 60 days’ notice and some avenue (source code, alternative access) when paid games shut down—aimed at increasing consumer rights in “Games as a Service.”

11. Tape to Tape: Roguelite Hockey Game Segment

[53:00-99:08]

• Interactive (and chaotic) live hockey match with giveaways for viewers.
• Numerous technical hurdles—latency, network issues, team chaos—as Linus and guest “Sammy” attempt to game against Luke and Dan.
• Increasing hilarity as Linus loses (“brutal,” “I’m better off with literally no one than Sammy”) then redeems himself with AI as teammate.
• Sammy: “What, do I do? I don’t know what to do right now.” (78:21)

12. Breakthrough in Xbox Controller Drift Fixes

[102:29-109:32]

• Open source tool “DriftGuard” can recalibrate and fix stick drift across Xbox controller generations, including 360.
• Discussion on why stick drift is a bigger deal now: increased “sweatiness” of gaming and greater consumer voice and repair know-how.

13. Blue Origin Launch Pad Explosion

[112:31-113:37]

• Recent Blue Origin accident could set back Artemis mission timelines by a year since ruining a bespoke launch facility is harder to fix than just losing a rocket.

14. Miscellaneous Tech News & Hot Takes

• Valve raises Steam Deck OLED prices by up to 46% due to “component costs,” sparking user outrage and sarcastic comments from Epic’s Tim Sweeney. (151:02-154:08)
• Nostalgia and technical mourning for Intel Optane, which was “a decade too early” but would be perfect for AI workloads now.
• FTC fines companies for faking “AI-powered” eavesdropping adtech that didn’t actually work—more evidence of “AI slop.”
• Pizza Hut’s AI-driven delivery management (Dragontail) leads to order delays and franchise implosion.
• Nvidia retires classic Control Panel for unified app interface—hosts actually prefer it.

15. YouTube Auto-labels AI Video Content

[133:01-138:51]

• YouTube will now auto-detect and label AI-generated videos, overlaying labels even on Shorts. The goal is empowering viewers with context, not yet punishing creators unless they repeatedly fail to self-disclose.
• Linus: “If everyone took this as seriously as YouTube, the world would be a better place.” (137:40)
• Will it stop “AI slop”? Hosts are skeptical but agree it’s a step forward.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the state of RAM and SSD:
  “I’ll take a microscopic W over a giant L any day.” — Linus, [04:01]
• On gamer hardware pride:
  “I’m not saying you’re poor, I’m just saying I’m wearing your whole house on my dim slot.” — Linus, [08:00]
• On DuckDuckGo’s spike:
  “DuckDuckGo says U.S. app installs jumped an average of 18% week over week after Google’s I/O conference and AI features.” — Linus, [27:23]
• On Google Search’s decline:
  “Remember when Google’s whole mission was to help you like actually find something? What happened?” — Linus, [30:51]
• On Raspberry Pi and mod mics at LAN:
  “Those mod mics are so much better than the microphones we were using before.” — Linus, [21:23]
• On threat of Flock cameras:
  “It’s like, if I don’t want it anymore I should also be able to destroy it.” — Linus, [146:16]
• On tipping culture:
  “Tipping before you actually get the service…that’s not tipping, that’s protection money.” — Linus, [174:14]
• On Optane’s untimely demise:
  “Rest in peace, Optane. You were too great and too early.” — Linus, [161:20]

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Important Timestamps

| Time | Segment | |----------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:31 | Headline topics rundown: RAM, SSD and AI market shifts | | 04:16 | CXMT & Corsair RAM partnership kicks off deeper discussion | | 07:24 | Gamers now flex NVMe, RAM at LANs, not just GPUs | | 10:57 | Linux adoption soars among gaming communities | | 14:21 | Whale Land internet outage explained | | 27:22 | Google’s AI search push triggers DDG/Kagi popularity | | 36:49 | “Buying isn’t owning” digital rights T-shirt launch | | 43:00 | Q&A: How to grow a podcast + wild occult merch ideas | | 53:00 | “Tape to Tape” Roguelite hockey game (chaos & giveaways) | | 66:20 | California Linux age verification law exemption | | 69:10 | Proposed law: publishers must preserve paid online games | | 102:29 | Xbox controller drift fix breakthrough | | 133:01 | YouTube to auto-label AI video content | | 151:02 | Valve spikes Steam Deck OLED prices | | 161:20 | Mourning Optane’s demise and missed opportunity for AI | | 171:16 | “AI-powered” adtech fraud fined by the FTC | | 172:49 | Pizza Hut’s AI-automated delivery system disaster | | 168:47 | Nvidia retires classic Control Panel, switching to unified app |

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Listener Q&A Highlights

• Tips for podcast growth? — “We don’t promote. We just put it on the Internet and hope people care.”
• Mac OS/Apple challenge? — Luke would try for a month on laptop but not desktop.
• Overconfidence/humbled by skill? — Linus: Fortnite “cranking 90s,” Rocket League aerial tricks (“witchcraft”).
• Digital ownership advice: — If buying isn’t owning, you’re doing it wrong. Push for better policies and awareness.

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Tone & Style

As is classic for the WAN Show:

• Lively, candid, and irreverent.
• Hosts riff with each other and chat, often tangenting into relatable stories and meta-analyses of the tech world.
• Community engagement is heavy, with questions, live gaming attempts (even when they go completely off the rails), and plenty of “shoulder shrug” moments around trying crazy merch ideas or handling technical failures.

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This summary omits ads and purely logistical “after dark” sections for brevity. For full sponsor reads, see episode transcript.

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

How is it going, you fine folks. Happy Friday and welcome to the WAN show. We've got a great show lined up for you guys this week. California is introducing. Hold on, where is it? I knew I wanted to talk about this one, but I didn't find it in the doc. Where? Where is it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The age verification thing?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, the other one. No, no, the better one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

California's doing a lot of stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Apparently they're doing a lot of stuff. I'll find it later. DuckDuckGo installs have spiked after Google put more AI into search. It looks like people are soundly rejecting the idea of just everything being all AI all the time. In other news, I forget what our headline topic is. Oh, right. Yes, this is amazing. Both RAM and SSD have seen unprecedented upward price pressure thanks to AI demand. But both of them are getting at least one small win this week with a bit of downward pricing pressure thanks to SanDisk bringing back SATA, SSDs and a Chinese memory vendor, Cxmt, entering the mainstream memory market. What else we got this week, Mr. Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a major breakthrough in controller calibration for Xbox hardware. That's exciting. And YouTube is introducing auto detection of AI generated videos. You've probably seen the AI generated flag before, but that was like an opt in by the creator and now there is auto detection, which I think is great.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. Where's that thing I was reading? The show is brought to you today by Razer. Just Razor. All Razor, all the time, only Razer early in the show. Oh, this is fun. Luke and I are gonna go head to head in tape to tape a Roguelite hockey game and you guys get to participate. If you can guess the winning team, you can enter to win a prize from Razor. And I don't want to spoiler it or anything, but it's like pretty freaking awesome. So you guys are going to want to participate in that. There's going to be a link in chat. And oh yeah, by the way, our rap partner is of course dbrand, as you guys, as you guys know. All right, let's jump right into our headline topic of the day, which is of course that my brain is slow. And yes, here it is. Chinese memory maker CXMT has entered the mainstream DDR5 market in partnership with Corsair. A Corsair Vengeance DDR5 6000 CL36 RAM kit has been spotted by hardware enthusiast WXNOD running CXMT chips instead of the usual Samsung and SK Hynix or Micron. CXMT is China's largest memory maker and this is the first time that their DRAM has shown up inside a major Western brand's product. The kit itself is currently China exclusive based on its CN part number. But any, any memory chip that is produced today is going to be a net benefit. Because if only Micron, SK, Hynix and Samsung were able to make DDR5 chips like at all, even within China, then that would be it. That would be the finite supply that is available to gamers. But if some of that demand in China can be soaked up by cxmt. Look, is it a small win? Yes. Is it a win? It's still a W. It's still a W. I'll take a microscopic W over a giant L any day of the week.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And this is funny. The reason that CXMT apparently has supply despair is almost ironic. US sanctions blocked them from getting the cutting edge tools needed to make HBM for AI. So their production lines are wide open to build the consumer DDR5 that Samsung, SK, Hynix and Micron are simply too gosh darn busy to make. Our discussion question here is when the memory shortage gets bad enough that Corsair turns to a Chinese chip maker that the US Government is is trying to restrict who's actually winning the chip war. Oh lordy. That went straight into politics really fast. But there. Oh, look at that. Our discussion question is gone. Luke, can you think of it? Okay, no, no. In all seriousness, I mean, no, I don't see this as a win for China in the chip war. I mean, it's very clear that from a, from a strategic standpoint, HBM is a lot more important to governments right now than some consumer gaming DDR5 memory.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I still think this is actually a W for them. I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

But given the kind of revenue that this is going to be funneling to CXMT that they otherwise would not have access to or otherwise might be much less. I mean, making DDR5 is way more profitable today than it was six, six months ago. It's only going to accelerate China's long term ambitions. So in the short term, no, I don't see this as a win. But in the long term, having a company like Corsair buying memory from CXMT

[Luke Lafreniere]

is might as well be money these days.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, yeah, dude, my system wouldn't post last night and I needed to scan a document and setting up my scanner is kind of a pain in the butt. It's like a whole software suite and I was just like, okay, what's less work setting up the scanner on another computer or fixing my computer so that I already have the scanner set up. And I settled on fixing my computer since I kind of wanted it fixed anyway. And I realized that I was having an issue with like, my Expo memory profile. It was booting fine at jdec. And then whatever. The point is, I booted up my system, having fixed the Expo profile, and I saw that 64 gigs of RAM in it, and I went, do I really need 64 gigs of RAM? Is this worth more on Facebook Marketplace than it has value to me? Could I just get by with 32? Probably. It's crazy. What an investment in a DDR5. My RAM's not even that great. It's like a fine kit from the Ryzen 7000 era. Like, it's not even anything special, but it's worth like 500 bucks now, and I probably paid like 200 to 250. It's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was doing one of my, like, late night walks around whale land, checking out all the different systems and stuff. And the talks I would have with people were like, you know, normally people want to flex their, like, GPUs or whatever, and that is still a huge deal. And people were definitely doing that. But I'd show up to people's computers and the first specs they'd rattle off was their NVME drives and their RAM. Like, every time I'd be like, I've got four terabytes of NVMe. And it's like, whoa, now listen, that's crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because it actually is.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not saying you're poor. I'm just saying that I'm wearing your whole house on my dim slot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dim slot? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. That was. That was pretty nuts. It just. Just hearing like, you know, I. I don't remember the last time literally ever that I've done like a walk at some lan and people have rattled off their storage when they didn't, like, I don't know, bring like a server for the LAN or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, you know, it's been a long time. You're right. I think the last time storage was hot was like, almost like, okay, early days of SSDs, there was an era of like, yeah, I'm rocking an SSD. And then before that, if you had like a 10k drive, like if you had a WD Raptor or something like that, that was like, yeah, pretty cool. Running dual Raptor.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Were those the ones that had the, like.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't even know there was a window.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Serrated metal on the side.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah. They had heat sinks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of the Raptors.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it like. I doubt it was all that effective of a heat sink.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh no, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It mostly just like looked cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

It worked. So those, those 10k RPM drives, they were more designed for, for server use and so there were, there were a couple different eras of Raptor. There were. There were three and a half inch Raptors that had the bigger disc. But I don't remember if they were short stroked or not. Or maybe they just spun it the faster speed. And then I think it was the later generation Raptors that actually used 2 1/2 inch 10k disks and then they were just like thermal interfaced to a three and a half inch sled. That was a big heat sink.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you want to look it up because I can't share my screen. WD Velociraptor. It's a, it's a WD 1000 DHTZ. They look wild to be honest.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here you go guys. Yeah, nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the one I'm talking about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. Oh man. Is that the only picture they. Oh no. Okay, here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I found an Amazon listing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here we go. Here we go. I got it, I got it. There's got to be some more pictures in here. Come on. Tom's hardware. Don't let me down. Are you serious right now? Maybe I went to the. There it is. Yeah, that's the one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's freaking cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Huge heatsink. Yeah, the, the, the. Honestly the heatsink on it looks more legit than my memory was telling me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Big heatsink energy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. That was a wild drive.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was around the same era that you could buy water blocks for your hard drives and stuff too. I miss the days of just like water cooling. All the things making any sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So like it's, it's. It's been a minute. Generally people don't lead with their like storage specs but, but more than one person did while I was there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I'm blown away by how many people lead with their operating system these days. The new.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There was a bunch of Linux users at Whale Land.

[Linus Sebastian]

Uh huh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There was a bunch.

[Linus Sebastian]

And look, I know that Whalen is like a sample size of only a couple hundred and I know that there's an enormous numerous selection biases in terms of geography and the cost of the ticket. Sort of self selecting people who can afford to travel and bring their computer to places. There's all kinds of selection biases here. However, those same selection biases have existed for every Whale Land. And there is undeniably a like colossally rising trend in people that are running Linux in some form or another. Like the first Whale Land at ltx. I would say the biggest Linux trend was people who were dailying Steam decks and just like using them with docks as their everyday gaming machine. Not for their full computers. They were secondary computers for basically everyone we talked to with I think maybe one or two exceptions. Whereas now you still see that. Actually, if anything you see more of that. But man, people are tripping over themselves to show you their, like, their custom, like arcade style, you know, Linux machine for playing like retro games or to show you some game that they got running that's like a real big challenge. And by the way, they're running architects. It's pretty cool how I also. Nah, go ahead.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought you were done. I was also surprised at the lack of issues that a lot of them were having. I know there was a guy in my row who was running Bazzite and he had Forzer Horizon 6 running. He did have an AMD card which, you know, solved that problem. But we would play whatever random games and he was able to jump in and keep up, which was cool. Yeah, I didn't hear a lot of issues. I did hear from a few people because I had some conversations with people about their setups. I did hear that most of them had a Windows dual boot still. But the general conversation was around that they really don't use it much. Like they haven't launched into it in quite a while. But it's. It's like a security layer still because there are still some rough edges and it seems like a lot of the, A lot of the gamers want to have that fallback just in case having the option.

[Linus Sebastian]

Having the option makes sense and I can understand 100% why people would want that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

What else, what else did you think? Did you feel like you noticed in terms of. In terms of just like gamer trends at Whale Land? It was the. I wasn't able to make it for a ton of this one, unfortunately. But I know you were there like for a lot of it. The vibe seemed really good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Vibe seemed really good. This was one of the stronger whale lands, I think AV8 was working, which was nice. We had that unfortunate. Oh man. I got some details from, from Sean on this that I could probably bring up, but let's talk about. It was a. Yeah, sure. So let me go Find Sean's message real quick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. I'll give the background. So we had a couple of Internet outages that were related to some security patches that Ubiquiti rolled out for their UNIFI networking equipment. From my understanding, these were high severity bugs that enabled outside attackers to potentially gain fairly deep access to your network. So not applying these patches, not an option. Unfortunately, from the way it's been explained to me, the fix for at least one of these bugs was to disable hardware acceleration for something. Was it like packet switching or routing? Luke, do you have that level of detail yet?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have a really long message from Sean, so I can just like read it out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool. Why don't you do that? Why don't you do that now that you've got that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

So Sean said. On Tuesday, it was reported to us that UNIFI gear at multiple places were vulnerable to a security exploit that had been reported to unifi. Thinking that it was in reference to the March vulnerability disclosure, somebody was messaged to ensure all their gear was updated. And on Wednesday they responded that the gear is up to date. And sure enough, their site was no longer vulnerable. But in testing we found that the Smash site also had that issue and they had to migrate to something for March vulnerability. A ticket was opened with UNIFI support to find out what was going on. On Thursday, UNIFI support said updating to the newly released 5.1.12 console resolved the security issue. So we did that subsequently. Thursday afternoon, Unifi disclosed five vulnerabilities, three of which were a 10 rating and one was a 9.7. All remotely exploitable. So it. We couldn't even be like, ah, the LAN people are probably cool and just leave it like, these were exploitable to people on the Internet. Sean updated all the consoles. Da da da da da. Smash was done Friday morning, so that

[Linus Sebastian]

was theoretically in time for the LAN and everything was Gucci.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But as an aside, we'd normally never update a console that soon after a release. Like usually we wait to update patches to see what happens and you usually don't exactly want to update things the day before a lan. But no, due to the level of vulnerabilities, we went for it. Yeah, due to the vulnerability disclosure and the advice of support, we just went ahead with it directly. And the update does seem to resolve the security vulnerabilities, which is great, which is good. But it turned out that 5.1.12, the update was not just a vulnerability update, but it was a package update containing a number of improvements. And bug fixes with some users reporting it even bypassed the normal early access testing schedule because they needed the security stuff. But user updates on the unifi forum since Friday have a lot of users complaining about resource utilization issues and random ISP drops. For most, the fix is to roll back to the old version, but that would make the device vulnerable again. Yeah, the only reason we pushed the update to Smash on Friday was security vulnerabilities, otherwise we would have held off. Also, the other consoles updated.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ok, this is a very detailed report.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that was a little heavy. I should have read it ahead of time. That's my bad, not Sean's bad. But yeah, basically that screwed us up pretty hard at the beginning because the CPU on something, some piece of unifi hardware, I don't remember, which was just 100% pinned and it was causing issues. Packet drops.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think I heard it was the main core switch. So not. So not the, not the switches that are at each row of computers because those realistically are not being hit that hard, but the main switch that's up in the server closet, up in the, in like the. The premium members lounge was just at like a hundred percent CPU utilization.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It might have been. I know the piece of hardware that AJ mentioned he swapped was. He referred to it as Fortress, so it might have been the gateway.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, was it the gateway? Actually that makes more sense anyway because we're probably not even doing that much switching. So we. So we had a pretty like entry level gateway because like, whatever, we're not really doing that much with it. But when hardware acceleration and it was able to support.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was able to support Smash Champs just fine. And it, sorry, not just Smash Jams, but Whale Land just fine and has multiple times in the past. But whatever this thing that they did was to solve the security vulnerability that reduced hardware performance, which I had heard was they turned off hardware acceleration. We needed just a beefier gateway. So very luckily the LTT warehouse is right there. So AJ whipped down the road, grabbed a Fortress, brought it back, upgraded it and then he said like utilization of the Fortress was like higher than you would normally expect. Yeah, because I mean it also had the, the security update, but it has

[Linus Sebastian]

an 18 core processor in it that apparently allowed it to just brute force whatever it needed to do. Yeah, yeah. And there were no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then. Well, no. And then we had a little problem after that, but classically it was just DNS.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's always DNS.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And we fixed that and then it was rock solid for the rest of the event, which Is kind of frustrating because there's been like a blip at the beginning of a few of these

[Linus Sebastian]

whale lands, but I think everyone has had an outage for some reason or another. The first one we screwed up. The second one just. Dude, I think you and I have both personally been on Telus Internet for a combined like 10 years now, right? Probably something like that. The office has some telus networking smashes on Telus. I think their uptime across my anecdotal evidence deployments has gotta be to like four or five nines. Like my Internet is hard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Minimum of three nines.

[Linus Sebastian]

Always up. Always up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably more than that.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then it just happened. During the second Whale Land, we actually had an ISP disconnection which was freaking wild. And then the third one, we had this stupid vulnerability. I swear we're like snake bitten now where we're not going to be able to host a whale land without there being at least one small Internet connectivity issue.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was joking with AJ but like, what's good? What. What is even going to happen next? I can't imagine what the next thing is even going to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Network cable is going to light on fire. Luke. Like I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure, yeah, yeah, it'll be something.

[Linus Sebastian]

It'll have to be something because now it's a tradition at this point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, we fixed the ava. I guess you know that because we were playing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, the AVA was freaking bulletproof. Like we played a whole round of left four Dead through that. Like, I just sat down. I think there's a couple things I'd love for us to create a script that runs on boot that changes the display refresh rate to 480 because every time they reboot it goes back to 60 hertz. Um, and then I think we could probably get teamspeak tuned so that every time someone sits down, they don't have to play around with the push to talk settings. But man, those mod mics are so much better than the microphones we were using before. Uh, mod mics sent over a whole. Or Antlion. Excuse me, Sent over a whole bunch of their USB mod mics. Dude, the quality was totally fine. Those 480Hz monitors are great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The modmic situation was actually almost unfortunate because people thought the mod mics weren't necessarily very good. And then I got everyone to fix their teamspeak and then they were like, oh, okay, sweet. Because teamspeak was set to just like basically essentially open mic all the time. So the mod mics were picking up Whale Land, but like, you know, it's Misuse of hardware. At that point, it wasn't the mod mic's fault. So we set a volume gate and there might be a better way to set it up. But at the very least, setting your volume gate to like +10 at a whale land just mostly solved the problem.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, no, it was fine once everybody set that up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So we're already planning. We're going to do some form of thing to set the team speak correctly. And then I'm sure there's a script you can run on boot that fixes the screen refresh rate. But yeah, AV8 was running pretty well. Yeah, things. Things were pretty good. The. The stage activations seemed stronger than last time, at the very least. There was quite a few times where I saw like a big crowd of people in front of the stage because they were doing something which was cool. I think there was like, there's a few people not really all that interested in participating. And then there was some tournament they had on the stage where there was like pro players of. I think it was Valorant. I. I'm saying I think it was Valorant because I can't participate. Not that I would have won, but if I did win, it would be just really cringe. But there was a. There was a giveaway. I think they got like GPUs and CPUs or something. I don't remember what it was, but it was just like, crazy. The hardware giveaway was nuts. And when the giveaway happened, I kept like saying to people in my row, like, you should. You should probably go. Like, the giveaway is crazy because I heard them announce at the beginning, but nobody really clued in until somebody won and got it and, like, walked away with the stuff. And then the whole audience was like, wait, what? I probably should have done that.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's like, yeah, yeah, you should probably participate in things. Yeah, that's why we're here, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it was good.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When's the next one?

[Linus Sebastian]

The goal is every three months.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And the idea schedule is already up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so. Upcoming lands. Yeah. So go to info top Upcoming lands.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here we go. That's probably too hard to find. Whoops. Okay. These dates are tentative and may change though. So sometime in late August. Sometime in late November. But yeah, the goal is four times a year. And the idea is not for people to go to every single one. Four lands a year. Forever is a lot, a lot. Like, I can't even if you're traveling, go to all of them. Like, Luke's missed one. I was not really present at this last one, but like, the idea is that, you know, for. Instead of like, you know, 350 people coming to four lands a year, the idea is that there'll be a lot of churn there and like, you know, a thousand to fifteen hundred people will all come to like one a year. Because it's. It was actually really cool to see how many of the. How much of our team came out to kind of hang out with the community. Kyle showed up with a mock up or like a, like a physical sample of the battery bank that he was just, you know, doing Kyle things and just showing to people. I mean, the guy loves to talk about engineering, anything to do with electrical or mechanical engineering. And obviously there's a lot of overlap in those interests with our audience. So he was having some pretty good conversations. I was pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also. This is, this is a random one, but I just thought of it because they were sitting right behind us and they were playing games with us sometimes. But I think it's kind of like fun that at least one of the sponsors of Whale Land just sits in the land and games.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, Threat Locker.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Threat Locker, Yeah, yeah, Their guys just

[Linus Sebastian]

come up and like, they chill, they

[Luke Lafreniere]

hang out playing games.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, you know, I think that kind of thing is really important though, because I think it's easy to look at a brand like Threat Locker and go, oh yeah, they're Threat Locker. They make like kind of, you know, boring, you know, enterprise software in suits or whatever and forget that a company like that is probably made up of a bunch of like really geeky, like community membery type people who just happen to work for Threat Locker. My experiences with the Threat Locker folks have actually been really amazing across the board so far. So if you guys are ever at a Whale Land, which from my understanding they're just like the title sponsor forever

[Luke Lafreniere]

at this point, seem to be at all them and they bring shirts and they're nice shirts actually. So like, if you want a cool like event shirt, this man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke, Luke, this is both. This is both an order soldier, and a respectful request. Never change. Never change.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Luke. Hey, you can get free stuff, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just saying, hey, five bucks is five bucks. You know what I'm saying? All right, why don't we jump into our next topic. Ooh, Duck Duck. Go installs are spiking after Google put more AI in search. DuckDuckGo says that US app installs jumped an average of 18% week over week. In the six days after Google's I O conference, the Surge came right after Google announced a whole mass of new AI search features. At Google I O visits to DuckDuckGo's AI free landing page NOAI DuckDuckGo.com also climbed about 23% on average. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg said that Google is force feeding its users AI with no way to opt out and it's making the search results worse. DuckDuckGo still only has around 2% of the US search market, and it does offer its own AI features. But Weinberg said the company wants to put users in charge and let them decide how much or how little AI they want. Our discussion question is with AI overviews, slash like AI interactive, quote unquote search, because is it even search at that point just being crammed down your throat? Are you ready to just stop Googling things?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I mean I've been. I've been considering. There's a. There's a guy on one of my. One of my teams now.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're good. Carry on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've been considering Kagi. Have you heard of Kagi?

[Linus Sebastian]

I have.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've been considering that. I think I've even.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke's been considering paying for something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, why don't you explain what it is and tell us why you're considering paying for it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Part of the reason I'm considering paying for it is one of the people on my team that, I mean, I respect the opinions of all the people on my teams, but he's been using it for a long time and really likes it. COGI is a paid. Makes me cringe a little bit. But you know, there's the whole thing of if it's free, you're the product. But it's a paid web search. There's no ads, there's no trackers. I think they actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's no sponsored results.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's no sponsored results, which is honestly a huge part of it because even Google right now, like, my God, man. There's been some really misleading stuff. Like the sponsor results are very clearly kind of malicious at this point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I forget who was screen sharing with me. It might have been today or yesterday or something. Someone was screen sharing with me and they basically like were trying to look something up and like couldn't get past the sponsored results. Was that Dan, were you in writers meeting this morning or no? I think it might have actually been in writers meeting this morning. James was just trying to like look something up and he scrolled past the, like completely filling above the hold, above the fold. Sponsored results. Got all the Way to the bottom where there was like more kind of misleading or sponsored results and then he had to go like back on. People are like, yeah, yeah, there, there, there. I think that's the one. Yeah, there it is. Unbelievable. Remember when Google's whole mission with search was to help you like actually find something? What happened?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's a little wild. It's, I don't know, it's, it's, it's interesting. Kagi has some AI integration stuff. They also have an AI philosophy tagline thing explaining like how they want to use it and why. And I think you can kind of choose to not engage. They have something called their COGI Small Web, which I think is pretty interesting. It's interesting to me because Kagi is a paid thing. But then says Kagi, Small Web prioritizes authentic human voices. This curated collection features only non commercial sites submitted by real people. Browse by category or at random to discover hidden gems created for passion, not profit. I think it's interesting. It's interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not cheap.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not cheap, which is why I haven't done it yet. Because I've known about Kagi for a while. I think this isn't even the first time I've talked about it on wan show

[Linus Sebastian]

but however, I don't know and I would never endorse this. The family plan is only 18amonth if you buy it yearly for 206. So that's $216 a year for six people. So what does that, what does that work out to? And I have no idea how they enforce this. Maybe it's like only two adult ones and then all the other ones are, you know, only kids. It doesn't look like it. It looks like they're professional plans. So what would that, what would that work out to? $216 divided by 12 divided by 6 would be only $3 a month. If you, if you have a big family and your family is six people and, and your family has like, you know, a convenient pay app or whatever else, if you know what I'm saying. So yes, it can be pretty expensive. Like 10 bucks a month for the professional tier seems like, you know, kind of a downer. But there are, there are ways to, you know, maybe, maybe not as much. I mean, realistically though, would you use more than 300 searches a month? Do you do more than 10 web

[Luke Lafreniere]

searches a day currently?

[Linus Sebastian]

Because that's only five bucks. It's only five bucks for starter.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My problem is that there are days where I use way more than that. But I also have to assume that there's days where I use practically none.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. 300 searches and 300 AI interactions per month with standard models for 5 bucks a month plus tax. I think that's a pretty reasonable place to start. Which is probably why they call it the starter plan. That makes sense. They were way ahead of me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This isn't an ad, but if you're interested, you can get a hundred searches for free. So you can at least try it, which is nice with a product like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Have you tried it out yet?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I haven't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I really should.

[Linus Sebastian]

When we were doing the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've been. I've been. Sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

When we were doing the de Google your life series, Emily was working on this project and showed me how well it works. And I was really impressed because on the one hand, obviously they don't have the sheer data volume of someone like a Google. But on the other hand, it turns out that when you're actively trying to find the right result, rather than just force feeding whatever sponsored garbage you're being paid for, you can overcome a lot of that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's interesting, man. I'm going to commit. I will at least try it before I get back from my trip. I will have tried it. That'll be my thing. Because the Google search stuff is getting really whack. I was trying to. Usually when I do a trip like this, I'll just Google like. Like right now I'm in Japan, so I'll just google like what time is 4:30pm PST or 4:30pm in B.C. because we've been messing around with our time zones in Japan. And it'll just link to like time zone converter, whatever that is already set for those things. So I just click on the link. I don't even have to do anything. And it shows up perfectly. This trip I almost screwed up the start time of the show because the AI search thing gave me the wrong result. And the only reason why I got it right was because it like sounded wrong to me. So a few hours later I searched it again and it gave the right one, but I didn't even type it again. I like clicked on my previous search and did the previous search thing. So like it wasn't a typo or anything and it just. It just. I don't even know like how that necessarily happened, but it got. It got it off by an hour. So like I was almost an hour late for the show.

[Linus Sebastian]

Unreal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it's just. And like stuff like that is like, man, I don't need that. That is so unnecessary. There's a lot of things I've used Google search for in the past that it's just worse at now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Jamie from CW is in the chat being all, like, if only Linus would actually wear the shirt that's hanging on the back of his chair. Jamie, you hung it on the back of my chair. Why would I see it there? You got to put it on the front. Anyway, I'm going to put this on. Should we just talk about it now? Because I feel like this is one that's going to resonate a lot with our audience. Dan, should we just do that now? Apparently, I don't know what it is. Oh, oh, Dan's putting on his shirt, too. All right, Luke, I'm sorry. You're missing out on a really good one this week. We'll have one for you. It'll be here when you get back.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice. I still don't know what it is.

[Dan]

Guess what, Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Dan]

It comes in tall.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hey, I like it.

[Dan]

Are you ready? Then you say, aye. Aye, captain.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, hey. Oh, cool. Nice. Okay. I like it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I love this design. This is from Ashley from cw. You know, it's a sentiment that at various points in my life, I have aligned more or less with, depending on everything that's going on. But I think that it would not be. I think it would be an ice cold take for me to say that the alignment is happening more lately. It just feels like so many things belong to us less than they did last week. If that kind of. If that kind of makes sense. So here, I'll.

[Dan]

I'll.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll talk through. I'll talk through the. The. The talking points that I've been given from the CW team. If I can find them. God, I can never find them. Here they are. The if buying isn't owning T shirt is our response to everyone who's had their ownership of a game revoked or a movie that vanished from their library or found that their car's heated seats were locked behind a paywall. You bought this? You own it. It's printed on our classic poly blend T. Soft, breathable, everyday fit. And of course, it's a high quality print that won't crack and peel after a few washes. Honestly, given how much I've ranted about digital ownership on the show, I'm a little surprised it took us this long to make this shirt. Is that a fire alarm? That would be a hilarious way for the WAN show to be interrupted. We never really thought of that, did we, Dan? We're We've accounted for power outages, we've accounted for all manner of technical glitches,

[Dan]

but I would like to postpone the emergency.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, could it. Could it just wait until the Wanch was done? They're just testing them, I guess, right? Do you know this?

[Dan]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Have you heard about this?

[Dan]

No, never heard about that. Why would you test them? Sounds like irresponsible. Because if they go off, then there's an emergency, right? If you wear them out, then there's no emergency. Which means the Wancho can continue.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's flawless logic.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, he's gone. That works anyway. That works. You can get yours today at lmg. GG Owning T shirt. What a great picture of Rylan. Okay, Galaxy Quest is worth buying. Just throwing that out there.

[Dan]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, what else we got here? All right, anywho, check it out lttstore.com and hey, if you're gonna pick one up today, then maybe you could use it to send a checkout message. For those who are unfamiliar, checkout messages or comms are the best way to interact with the WAN show. We don't do twitch bits or super chats or anything where you just throw your money at the screen in hopes of that senpai will notice you. We believe that if you throw money at your screen, you should get high quality merchandise in return. So all you've got to do to send a checkout message is go to lttstore.com, add an item to your cart. Note this is available in both regular and tall sizes. All right? And then when we're live, you will see this interface where you can put a checkout message. That checkout message after you checkout will go to producer Dan, who will curate it for me or Luke to respond to sometimes. Dan to respond to sometimes all of us. Or he will respond to it. Or he'll just pop up a little thing that's like, hey, such and such bought a shirt. Shout out my mom. Or, you know, whatever else. If your mom watches the WAN show, that's cool. Cool mom. Anyway, Dan, do you want to show us a couple of curated checkout messages?

[Dan]

Yeah, sure. First one here is for Luke in all capitals. What was in the usb, Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did that Linux episode go live or what are we talking about? Is that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, it did. I think we all want to know the answer to this, Luke. Man, this is a long pause. I think a pause like 70% of this length would have been something to do with illicit substances this long. It's gotta be. It's gotta involve nudes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. No pictures, no pictures. It wasn't. It wasn't about the.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a. No video, no video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. No video. No video. No video, no audio, no pictures. No, no, no, no, no. It was more about what it did than what it. What it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Was it a project?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ah, homework. I see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was a. It was an old one.

[Linus Sebastian]

I see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a very old project.

[Linus Sebastian]

A very old project. Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I don't know why that drive was in that drawer, but it is. It is now elsewhere in the house.

[Linus Sebastian]

All we can tell you for sure is that at some point, Luke bought that drive and now he has it and you shouldn't have it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And if you find it, don't plug it in

[Dan]

or do. It would be funny. Next. Next. Call, get you out of this. I hadn't seen the video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm sorry.

[Dan]

I didn't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thank you. Oops.

[Linus Sebastian]

Howdy.

[Dan]

Lld. A Spotify VOD guy here. How would you suggest someone who produces their own podcast? Ways to increase their audience and then in brackets, we're an occult podcast.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. I mean, that's got to be a growing segment, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

A cult podcast.

[Dan]

Yeah, not a cult, an occult.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Otherwise I would like witchcraft and stuff. Right. Occult. Like the afterlife and like that sort of thing. Supernatural mysticism. I mean, I think that's a growing, growing market.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if there were the right people to talk to about how to grow your podcast.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we don't do anything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We don't do anything at all. The same thumbnail style that we had. We don't edit our podcast. We have the same thumbnail style we had genuinely, like 13 years ago or something like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think we go out of our way to tell anyone about it. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do we. Do we advertise the Land show in our, like, mainline content? Have we ever. At all?

[Dan]

No, more like the number four tech news podcast globally or in the US or something like that. It's, like, kind of silly, huh?

[Linus Sebastian]

And that's on Spotify or like.

[Dan]

Yeah, podcasts are weird. We go through Spotify, we use a distribution thing, and, like, I think it's called Megaphone, which is a Spotify product. But podcasts just go everywhere simultaneously. It's really cool. There's no, like, you have to upload it to everything. You just upload it somewhere and. And now you can listen to a podcast, right? Yeah, but it gets, like, hundreds of thousands of listens and downloads per month, Right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, cool.

[Dan]

Yeah, just put it on the Internet and then do nothing else.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's terrible.

[Dan]

He's gone.

[Linus Sebastian]

He's done.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What we did was we put it on the Internet. And what the. Something else that we did was a lot of other things, and we just hoped that people would find it because

[Dan]

17 million subscribers, and then your podcast might get a few hundred listeners.

[Linus Sebastian]

Find a charismatic co host, do a big, like, face, reveal he has a broken arm. You know, I mean, look, if they're. If they want to follow our playbook, they've got to do everything step by step. The broken arm is essential. I don't think the WAN show would be what it is today if not for the broken. I mean, it wasn't really broken.

[Dan]

It was.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was more damaged.

[Dan]

And you could get, like. You could get into merch. You could do, like, branded. Excuse me? No, no, they would do merch.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, they would do merch. I see.

[Dan]

Branded, like summoning candles.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, in.

[Dan]

In. And like, you could do embroidered robes and things like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, doesn't. Doesn't Dennis. Doesn't Dennis have a candle side hustle or something?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. He did. I don't know if he still does.

[Linus Sebastian]

He still.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He did for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on.

[Dan]

Dennis. Dennis. Occult candles over candle merch.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on.

[Dan]

It'd be kind of cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, this has got to be. Is this still a thing? First result by left, 10 year job. LTT. Okay, well. Yeah, we miss you too, Dennis. All about Dennis. Missing candle. Okay, I don't. I don't see anything about them. Is this. Is this a thing? Does anyone know? No, no one in chat is talking about it. Okay, well, anyway, maybe you'll have to find a different supplier for your. For your candles.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's no way that's what he called it. Are these it?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't think this is it. Yeah, this is from, like, Knoxville. Forget this. Anyway, yeah, okay, so candles. What. What else would be, like. I mean, obvious? There's the obvious ones, like, like a Ouija board. But I feel like Ouija board's got to be, like, old school, like, not cool anymore. There's got to be, like, new, trendier occult gimmicks, right? I mean, again, you're asking probably two of the least supernaturally attuned people on the face of the earth.

[Dan]

If we did a water bottle, they could do a blood chalice.

[Linus Sebastian]

A blood chalice?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, you could do, you know those, like, dual layer water bottles where there's, like, something in between the layers? Yeah, you could have, like, a red liquid in there.

[Linus Sebastian]

That'd be kind of fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it's all spooky.

[Dan]

Like, if it was a double wall. It keeps your blood at body temperature.

[Linus Sebastian]

I feel like that's a very, like, Disney Store version of, like, to go along with, like, Maleficent or something version of. Because, like, I feel like actual occult things.

[Dan]

Disney blood chalice on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You could.

[Linus Sebastian]

You could put the spirits of your ancestors. Let them go. Let them go.

[Dan]

Are you gonna date for that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The Halloween Frozen? Yeah. You could put cherry bombs at the bottom of your candles so that, like, you just have random explosions in your house so that you. But they're not, like, super loud or crazy. They're just a little bit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I think a cherry bomb. I think a cherry bomb would be pretty loud. Luke, have you ever. Have you ever lit a cherry bomb?

[Dan]

Isn't that like a 16th? I mean, dynamite.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Cherry bombs are pretty serious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, okay. I don't. I mean, it's been. I was like a child.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why do you. Why do you hate occult people so much? Yeah. You could put Mads in your pillowcase.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. The, like, little. What are the little. Like, it's like a little white bag, and you throw it at the ground.

[Linus Sebastian]

Party snaps.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that's what they're called.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. Like, little. Little things just so there's, like, random noises in your house. If you feel like it's haunted, you could make an app that just randomly puts, like, 98% transparency pictures of people in photos.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, if you wanted to, like. If you wanted to, like, really make money and grift super hard, is you could make an app that lets people talk to their dead relatives so they could just upload. They could just input everything about their dead relatives. You make it some, like, AI thing. I bet that already exists anyway, though. God, I hate that. That's, like, a real thing at this point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You could. You could make crap. What is it called?

[Linus Sebastian]

Sasburg says that exists.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What are those, like, paper white displays called? There's a name for it.

[Dan]

E Ink.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can make, like, E Ink tarot cards so people could, like, change the theme on them.

[Dan]

That's actually sick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that one might actually not be a bad idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I feel like there'd be a lot of, like. A lot of, like, cool, like, supernatural kind of stuff that you could do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, you can. The best part is you can just make it all up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke, you gotta remember, you're being. You're being very disrespectful of people's beliefs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My bad. My bad, man. My bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, the thing is like, if. As long as. As long as you believe it, then it's like it's genuine, right in that sort of space. Right. So yeah, you could just kind of. I guess you can kind of decide what you believe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then I think the Yank tarot cards could actually be pretty sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

I feel like something with real bone would be cool. Like, I'm sure there's lots of like cow bones, you know, like from the beef industry. I bet there's lots of bones. I bet you could do like bone, you know, chessboard or something. That'd be kind of cool. It'd be very like occult.

[Dan]

The bone.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, the boneboard, dude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you could get the, the. Whoa. The bones of like opposing animals.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. You could do like, because like animals

[Luke Lafreniere]

that fight in the wild.

[Dan]

Bones of your.

[Luke Lafreniere]

As a chessboard, obviously you would actually be nuts.

[Linus Sebastian]

You watch wan show. So you're probably into like kind of hobbyist type stuff. So you could do like, like, like bone crafted like, like models and stuff. You could do like, like, like trains. You know, you could do a bone

[Dan]

train or like Lego kits, but made of animal.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting.

[Dan]

Is that what you're saying?

[Linus Sebastian]

So do you make an animal or do you make something else? But it's made of pieces of animal.

[Dan]

No, you would get like a collection of bones and it would be like a spaceship or a Millennium Falcon but made of animal parts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting. Fascinating.

[Dan]

That'd be kind of neat.

[Linus Sebastian]

Gundam made of bones, says Conrad.

[Dan]

Yeah, Hell yeah. That'd be sick, dude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Gundam primal. That would be. That would be sweet.

[Dan]

More listeners for your podcast. Start a toy company made of animals.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I do love, I do love that. That Dan Dan created like Lego taxidermy.

[Linus Sebastian]

And the best part, the best part of all of their things being made out of animals is that they'll only become more dedicated listeners. Because if they weren't haunted already, they will be soon. Mm.

[Dan]

Yeah. There's 10,000 rats in my dreams because I bought all the kids.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are they hyper intelligent or are they just normal rats?

[Dan]

They'd be just screaming.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Dan]

My normal dreams. I don't know why I'm just talking about this. They live in my walls.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no.

[Dan]

Talking of living in my walls, are you guys ready to play some tape today?

[Linus Sebastian]

We are. This is actually very exciting and you guys should be as excited about it, if not more so, than I am. Am I supposed to do the razor read now or.

[Dan]

I don't know if it's before or after. I think we' Just going to play some games and then maybe we'll do the sponsors later.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, cool. Well, basically I'm going to throw the

[Dan]

link in the chat.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, Dan's putting a Jotform link in the chat. If you want to just go there yourself. It's LMG GG tape number two tape. We are going to be playing Head to Head, some Roguelite hockey game and you guys can bet on the result of the match for a chance to win. No spoilers. I'm not gonna tell you what it is.

[Dan]

I don't think you get a laptop on the dock. Let's see here.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it's a really good prize from

[Dan]

Razer Cooling Pad, the Joro gaming keyboard or Thunderbolt 5 dock chroma.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait, it's not a laptop.

[Dan]

Not a laptop.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So not not what Linus was alluding to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I thought you said it was a laptop, Dan.

[Dan]

It's laptop accessories. It seem.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, so we don't actually. That you can't win the propane. You just win the propane accessories. Well, and Razor's never sponsoring us again. Way to go, Dan and me. I guess I also contributed. You know, when we assume it makes an ass of you and me. Luke, you are as red as your shirt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, technically I never promised the laptop before.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You might win this. You're not going to, but you might.

[Linus Sebastian]

So. Do you remember when the guy asked about growing his podcast? I'd strongly recommend not alienating your sponsors as part of your overall strategy.

[Dan]

To be fair, this is on me. So maybe I'm banned from.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

From Razer. I'll make it up to them. Razer, we really, really appreciate you sponsoring the WAN show. Please don't stop sponsoring the WAN show. I actually miss your chairs whenever I have to do a remote WAN show. Thank you, Razer. Now let's play some video games, which Razer stuff is really good for. I've got my Razer Wolverine V2 controller here. Okay, I'm going to be. I'm going to be playing some tape to tape and you guys can go ahead and you can place your bets. That's in the Jotform, right, Dan?

[Dan]

Yes, it is. Prizes are at the top of the JOT form. I guess we'll get our other participants in here and get set up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Other participants?

[Dan]

We're doing doubles.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're doing doubles. Okay, so who do I have to carry? Oh, hey, what's up? All right, so wait, if people haven't. Well, come on it. Come on, come on, come on in. Come on down.

[Dan]

Are you on Linus's team? Oh, who's online assistant?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll take Sammy because I've got the. Yeah, I kind of.

[Dan]

You're in Luke's.

[Linus Sebastian]

I assumed because Luke's. Luke's got the latency disadvantage, so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, across the world.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Oh, man. See, I was sitting here thinking, man, anyone who doesn't bet on me is going to be crazy because Luke. Of having this, like, latency disadvantage. But then I. I end up with this guy who, for whatever reason, I look like a hobbit next to right now. This is quite the wide angle lens we've got here. You know what? I'm leaning into it. I'm going even. I'm going even closer to the center of the frame here. No, Sammy, you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sammy. I like the helmet, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hell yeah, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. You're gonna need to take that off because I don't want to lose this thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know, I was pretty worried about the whole latency issue that I got going on, but I'm feeling pretty good about my chances right now. Yeah, the teams look pretty good, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm happy about this.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. We should both just play as the same team. Why don't we just both play as the Calaveras?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right now I've got no audio, too, so I can't hear. What. What controller number are you? Linus?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm four.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. I'm five.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, what are you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is Sammy supposed to be mic'd? His mic is, like, completely in front of his face. No, no, Dan's got it. Dan's got it.

[Sammy]

Have your water, too.

[Linus Sebastian]

What? I mean, if you. If you need some of it, I guess we're teammates. Sammy, you're not on the right team.

[Sammy]

I don't. Who are you?

[Linus Sebastian]

You're on the right. I'm number four. Okay, so hold on. I need to do a pre briefing with my teammate here. Okay, so our.

[Luke Lafreniere]

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

[Linus Sebastian]

Our jerseys are red. Do you remember how to play this game?

[Sammy]

I've never played.

[Linus Sebastian]

Shut up. No, that's not even true. Haven't you. I. Are you even sleeping?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man. Okay. Okay. This is all you need to know. This button right here. This button right here is pass. The direction that you push is the direction your pass will go. Pass it to me. Okay, this is body check. B for body check. So you go up next to them and you, like. You, like, try to whack them. Okay. This is Jimmy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you Name it your own net and you press X. No, it automatically sends it to Linus. No, it's an. It's an automatic pass to your friendly player.

[Linus Sebastian]

He's trying to get you to own goal. What?

[Sammy]

I can't hear him. I have no headphones. Okay, I'm playing audio list.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, terrific.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I don't have audio.

[Sammy]

So then we have things.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is brutal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thanks, Razor.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Actually, Sammy.

[Dan]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, this is terrible.

[Sammy]

What. What are you complaining about?

[Dan]

I.

[Sammy]

Playing with me?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not complaining about anything. Sammy, this is great, okay?

[Sammy]

I struggle with bad leadership.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. Okay, seriously, if we. Some. If we somehow win this, it's gonna be a Christmas miracle. So here's what we're gonna do. Sammy. Oh, you already readied up. You haven't even picked a position yet.

[Sammy]

This positions.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's hot. Okay, who keeps. Who keeps entering anything? Okay, hold on. You get. Okay. Okay. Sammy, press B. Okay, now press. Yeah, yeah. You're gonna be our left winger. For better or for worse.

[Sammy]

You know, I don't watch hockey either.

[Dan]

I did not also go left winger. I did not pick Sammy for this challenge.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, Dan. All right, just.

[Dan]

Just to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, all right, clarify. Let's just get this over with. Ready, up, everybody. What if I clutch up? Yeah, better lock in. Okay, let's do. Oh, I don't have control. Let's do. Oh, what just happened? No, we got it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't do that.

[Sammy]

I didn't do that over playing.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, we're not. This is not the right format for this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, what version of the game is this?

[Linus Sebastian]

This is. This is a pretty new build. Okay, okay, who has control? Play now.

[Sammy]

Oh, I have control.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no. Quick match. Okay. All right. This is all fine. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, it remembers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Everybody. Ready, up. Okay, Sammy, wait. Hold on. Okay, press, press A. Okay, four periods go down. Period duration, two skater count, 3v3 difficulty, very hard power ups on, injuries off. Yep, that all sounds good. Okay, here we go. All right, well, we're boned.

[Sammy]

We could win. You don't know. Don't be negative. Who am I?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if I'll ever be able to win a face off with this latency.

[Sammy]

Who am I?

[Dan]

Oh, well, there I am.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Okay, now pass it to me. Okay. All right. We're off to a good start. We're off to a good start. Okay, so the red sweaters are me and Sammy. All right. Oh, dude, we got this. Dude. I think the game's running at like 30fps.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mine's running at maybe 2. I didn't see anything there.

[Sammy]

I'm fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is potentially unplayable.

[Dan]

Why? What happened? Nothing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my goodness. Daniel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know what's going on. I literally can't see at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan, what's going on? I think our. I think our networking might not be usable. Pass up, pass up. There we go. Now go to the other side and be ready to shoot. Yeah. Or not. Yeah, whatever. Oh, oh.

[Sammy]

Extra shoot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry.

[Sammy]

Extra shoot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think we might have to do this next week, Dan. I think with Luke Remote, it's not going to work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wonder if I. I'm genuinely getting, like, no frames per second, I think. Yeah, I think it would average out to zero.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I. I think this might not work, everyone. Well, how are we. Hold on. Where's the. Where's the. Where's the Steam remote play interface? You want to bring that up? You were. You were looking at the latency. Is this the host?

[Dan]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fast

[Linus Sebastian]

quality, fast.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Razer might be able to solve some problems with your setup.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is there any reason for us not to be. Is there any reason for us not to be. Plugger plugged in on this for streaming. That might be good. Do we have an ethernet cable? Because I would personally probably never try to host four players remoting into a machine on a wireless connection. Our access point on this side of the office is actually kind of old, and it seems like it's been flaky sometimes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Isn't it upstairs, too?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's far away, too, which might be okay for the clients, but probably is not a good thing for the most.

[Sammy]

Why is there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He's finding the buttons on the back now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice. All right, should. Oh, man. Now. Okay, well, can I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We had a great breakaway and everything, and then my side just, like, literally stopped working. I was like, well, okay, I can't do this. Sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. Dan didn't come back with a long ethernet cable, but he came back with several short ones.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you have enough switches, you can make that work.

[Linus Sebastian]

I love the Ranch's mic. Even on. You might have to sit a little closer to it. I don't think it's picking you up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've been hearing them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, you have? Okay, good. Excellent.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, we were styling. We were doing all right, and I don't know why. Actually, it was working fine for, like, I'm guessing 15 seconds. Yeah, I was gonna say 15, 20 seconds. Yeah. And then just. Nope. Completely stopped.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Splice time. No, the last thing we're going to be doing is splicing together Ethernet cables to Try to get this working.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, that would probably make a pretty good WAN show.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan, I totally believe you that it was working because it even worked perfectly for like, the first minute.

[Dan]

I blame Luke.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what? Let's go with that.

[Sammy]

Not my fault.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's fine. That's acceptable at this time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Shout out Razer, by the way, for having Ethernet built into their gaming laptops. That wasn't to be taken for granted for a minute there.

[Dan]

Yeah,

[Luke Lafreniere]

and it's not even one of those stupid flippy ones. It's an actual plug.

[Linus Sebastian]

What you doing, Dan?

[Sammy]

He's hacking.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hacking the mainframe.

[Sammy]

He's the hacker. No one's 4chan.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. All right. Okay, so. Oh, that's interesting. Right? We're not getting. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, we're.

[Dan]

We're.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're not getting a connection. What are we plugged into? All right, we're connected. Let's go.

[Sammy]

We did it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think we're gonna need the remote play invites again.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, buddy. Thanks, Dan. Should we do a quick topic, Luke, while we wait?

[Dan]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, and of course, Dan's needed for that as well so that he can remove the thing from the thing. All right, let's do a quick topic while we wait with guests. Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

California moves to exempt Linux from its upcoming age verification law. After backlash over forcing operating systems to collect users ages. In late 2025, California passed the Digital Age Assurance Act. Yup. Act is in all capitals, but that is not the acronym that takes effect on January 1, 2027. Rather than forcing websites to handle ID checks, the law will try to push age gating down to the OS level. The OG law initially stated that all operating systems must ask for the user's age and birthday when setting up the device initially. And then apps and websites would get that data through an API. As if that would do anything. After a bunch of pushback by the open source community, especially for accountless Linux distributions, the argument was that they would be legally obligated to build age tracking API APIs. Buffy Wicks, the same lawmaker who wrote the original bill just fast tracked an amendment to exclude any OS distributed under licenses, allowing users to copy, redistribute and modify the software. So essentially, if an operating system is open source, private, non commercial, then it will be excluded. Unfortunately, SteamOS is in a bit of a gray area, as while running Linux, it is tied to a proprietary app ecosystem of the Steam store and client. Is it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man. I mean, okay, it is. Certainly it's not. Oh, can you run Steam OS without Logging into Steam. Because that's where I could see the distinction happening. I've never, it's never occurred to me to run Steam OS without logging into Steam.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Like why would you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luca103 says yes. I think, I think, yeah. Have you ever tried to run steamos without logging into Steam?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's never.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you can, at what point in time do you have to log into Steam when setting up steamos? I think it's like on. It's right away.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's like right away. Like you install it and then it dumps you onto a login screen.

[Sammy]

I don't know if there's a way

[Luke Lafreniere]

to get to DES desktop mode without logging in though. And if you could, then theoretically I feel like Valve could change that pretty easily.

[Linus Sebastian]

I feel like they would if. If it allowed them to circumvent this. Yeah, even.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Even that doesn't seem like a long term problem to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

With that said, I mean, okay, Steam already asks you your age anyway.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's what I was about to say,

[Linus Sebastian]

so I'm not even sure what difference that would ultimately make. Dan, should we. Okay, let's. I mean, we can finish any conversation around this. Sure. I also wanted to jump in and talk about the other bill that's going down in California right now, and that's one that would bar publishers from switching off game servers without thinking of players. This past a California State assembly vote, I believe this was. I think this was earlier today or yesterday or something like that, but basically. Okay. I read a different summary of this earlier that from my understanding of it, pretty much said, yeah, you can turn off your game, that's totally fine. We can't expect people to support a game forever, but if you do, you have to provide. I believe it was 60 days of notice. Chat, jump in and help me out. Because this didn't end up in the notes, but I believe it's 60 days of notice. And then at the end of that 60 days, you have to provide some way for the game to be accessed. You have to provide the code, or you have to provide some way for it to be accessed. And that's pretty much what Luke and I have been asking for since games as a service was a thing and servers started being turned off for things like MMOs, where at least back then there actually was a very compelling reason why it had to be always online and why so much of it had to be server side. Nowadays, I'm not even convinced that a lot of the games that are so dependent on online Services even need to be. They just are, because I don't know you or something.

[Sammy]

I think. I think it's noted that it's only for games you purchase, not free games. I. I 80 sure about that? Because I read this yesterday as well. I think it's only games you buy. It's like buy to rent. It's not buyer rent anymore.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I see.

[Sammy]

So, like, you know, League of Legends would be. It can go, it can die, and then that's it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right? That actually. That actually kind of makes sense.

[Sammy]

I'm intelligent.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's what an intelligent person would say. Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Should we take another crack at. Should we take another crack at our game thing that we have going on here? All right. And let's give it a shot. What are the odds that this is gonna work? Whoa, whoa. Okay. Leave without saving changes. Cancel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We can start it again.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, here we go. I am center.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not in the game. Hold on.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm trying to join brilliant. Genius. Love it. I heard something loud,

[Luke Lafreniere]

says the host is busy.

[Sammy]

I am busy, Sammy. You can literally see my hand press nothing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you want me to take center? Yeah, actually, yes. Yes, absolutely.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. And actually, new. Cancel.

[Sammy]

That wasn't me. That was.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was me. That was me. Sorry. I'm actually gonna take. I'm actually gonna take defense.

[Sammy]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We've only got three players.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, okay, okay. I'm resuming now. Here we go. Where am I? Oh, wait. I am not assigned to a player. One sec.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. We've only got wingers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry. Okay. I need to be right defense. Okay. There we go. Okay. I'm good. We good. Okay, Sammy.

[Sammy]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

You can resume the game.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Here we go. I'm anxious.

[Sammy]

I'm anxious. Where am I?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no stick.

[Sammy]

Oh, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no stick and I must scream.

[Sammy]

Have you thought of getting a stick then?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. What are you doing, bud?

[Sammy]

I'm trying to tackle.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was buying time to tackle stick.

[Sammy]

What am I supposed to do?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm dead.

[Linus Sebastian]

How are we not totally.

[Sammy]

Oh, oh, oh. Watch this. Watch this drive.

[Linus Sebastian]

Watch what? What do you even. Watch this drive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Watch this drive. Score.

[Sammy]

I need the clip.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I need.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would legitimately.

[Sammy]

How did that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not rather it go to my AI at this point?

[Sammy]

What do you mean?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, nice hit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I don't think anyone's going to score.

[Sammy]

No, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

Watch this at all.

[Sammy]

No, watch this. Don't be so negative. Oh,

[Luke Lafreniere]

wait.

[Sammy]

I'm trying to beat people up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What the heck?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my Goodness.

[Sammy]

Okay, we have this. We have. Oh, pass to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, I'm so slow. Why am I so slow? Oh, I just completely lagged out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, no, you got it. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You guys, I got it.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I couldn't even see.

[Sammy]

Let's go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My screen was completely frozen. Boom.

[Sammy]

We lost an afk. That's crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man. All right,

[Sammy]

where am I? Who am I?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man. Who are you? Who are you, indeed?

[Sammy]

Oh, I got it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can't see again. Oh.

[Sammy]

Go, Linus, go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my goodness, I'm lost. You said pass.

[Sammy]

I passed.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Oh, man. Sammy, we are gonna get destroyed.

[Sammy]

When are we playing League of Legends? That's the one game I'm good at. Oh, where am I? Oh, okay, so we're going this way.

[Linus Sebastian]

What is happening?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Should I be the big guy? Should I be the big guy?

[Linus Sebastian]

What the hell?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's illegal.

[Linus Sebastian]

What is this? That's illegal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You just switch the defense.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're on the rush and you just pause the game. What is that?

[Sammy]

I think there's a penalty for that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Huh? I think there is a penalty for that. It's called delay of game. Also, unsportsmanlike conduct.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You guys did the same thing when

[Linus Sebastian]

we were already paused, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Defense.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I see what you're doing.

[Sammy]

I lost my. Where am I?

[Linus Sebastian]

Pass, Sammy. Oh, my God, he paused.

[Sammy]

I'm lost in the sauce.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're blue. Oh, boy.

[Sammy]

Oh, I knocked out an old teammate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Unbelievable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, you took me out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry.

[Sammy]

I'm gonna get fired. Imagine getting fired. Cannot play tape. To tape a video game.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man.

[Sammy]

Not perform on camera.

[Linus Sebastian]

How many hours do you have in this game, Pankratz?

[Luke Lafreniere]

At least a couple dozen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Uh huh.

[Sammy]

Oh, I also have a couple dozen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure you do.

[Sammy]

Of minutes. Where am I? Oh, there I am.

[Linus Sebastian]

Unreal.

[Sammy]

Watch this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, what am I watching, Sammy?

[Sammy]

You're watching them score.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, shoot.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, yeah, I'm definitely watching that.

[Sammy]

So how do I throw my stick?

[Linus Sebastian]

You can't.

[Sammy]

Well, I can't die.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sammy, get out of the way. You can't check him. You're just in the way of me throwing my stick at it.

[Sammy]

I can't tackle you.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not called tackling.

[Sammy]

I don't play. This is sport or game.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Pass, pass, pass.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man.

[Sammy]

I don't play this for or the game.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There we go.

[Sammy]

Oh, my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Computer, score.

[Sammy]

You're losing the house.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, losing the house.

[Sammy]

Where am I?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, our new goal, Sammy, is to score one goal. That's our goal, Sammy. Oh, my God.

[Sammy]

Do anything I got, I got, I got. Watch this. You have no stick. Give him no stick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just pass it to the AI It'll be better than nothing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I did.

[Sammy]

I passed an AI. Oh, it's me. It's me. It's gathering.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pass. Oh, my God, Sammy.

[Sammy]

I score. Why am I not score.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, wait.

[Sammy]

What's so bad with scoring? I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, shoot. That was my bad. That's all good.

[Sammy]

Wait, why can't I throw my stick or tackle?

[Linus Sebastian]

You can't. Just don't worry about it.

[Sammy]

I'm curious.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pass up.

[Sammy]

I'm curious.

[Linus Sebastian]

Doesn't matter right now. Oh, I didn't have my stick. Yeah, I'm the one throwing.

[Sammy]

Listen, watch.

[Linus Sebastian]

Definitely me.

[Sammy]

What if I just pause the game right now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No way. I don't do that.

[Sammy]

Oh, oh, watch this.

[Linus Sebastian]

No pass. Oh, my God, Sammy. Oh, I'm trying to get the free alleged pass. I did.

[Sammy]

I passed.

[Linus Sebastian]

I passed. You can't just shoot it straight at the goalie. It doesn't do anything.

[Sammy]

What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Does it. Well, no, no, it does. It does. It does.

[Sammy]

Okay, see, I trust.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Speaking. Crap.

[Sammy]

Listen, I trust.

[Dan]

Why you shouldn't.

[Sammy]

What do I do? I don't know what to do right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. Oh.

[Dan]

Okay, here we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Who's with me? Me.

[Sammy]

Who's with me?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, pass it over.

[Sammy]

Okay, here we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God. You passed to the AI you said

[Sammy]

pass to the AI.

[Linus Sebastian]

I said pass to me.

[Sammy]

Okay, originally, you said the test to the AI.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my goodness. What the heck is our guy doing way back there?

[Dan]

The business team is gonna kill me. Yeah, I'm not. Not. I'm not coming into work on Monday.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my gosh. Wait. What?

[Sammy]

Wait, am I. Am I doing bad?

[Dan]

Oh, my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no.

[Sammy]

Go, go. AI.

[Dan]

Oh, no. My mic's hot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Dan]

Oh,

[Sammy]

get my way.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, Sammy, you get out of my way. No.

[Sammy]

Why can't I get the p.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. Oh, man.

[Sammy]

What do I.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is actually worse than if I was just playing myself.

[Sammy]

Wait, okay, okay, hold on. What was it? What was to do then?

[Dan]

Am I. Am I going to have to sub in? I probably played more Sammy and I together. Temperature, iq.

[Sammy]

If I can't get the stick on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've played a video game before with my latency issues. I'm barely even here, so really, I think this is just Linus losing the game.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean, that was my bad just now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Sammy]

Oh, I got. I got. I got it. Oh, I don't got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, you. You don't got it. You can't just, like, assume you've got it.

[Sammy]

I got it. I got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, you don't. You're not the. You're not the first one.

[Sammy]

I could be the first one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait, you don't even have your stick.

[Sammy]

Where my stick go?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm dead on the ground.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is unbelievable.

[Sammy]

Lies. Do you still appreciate me?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man.

[Sammy]

You can answer my question.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I missed.

[Sammy]

Oh, I got.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just get out of here. Doesn't even matter. Nothing matters.

[Sammy]

Listen, I got it. Wait, where's my stick? I got the stick.

[Linus Sebastian]

What the.

[Sammy]

No. What do you mean, no?

[Linus Sebastian]

Fine. You know what? No. No, I'm not. Okay, fine.

[Sammy]

We got one unbelievable rat to wrap everybody.

[Dan]

Great job, Sammy. You're killing it.

[Sammy]

I'm killing somebody?

[Linus Sebastian]

You're tackling them.

[Dan]

You're tackling.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sammy almost soloed that.

[Sammy]

Do you have high blood pressure?

[Dan]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sammy was behind the net.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Luke, just a reminder, Sammy's going to

[Dan]

end up with no blood pressure after this.

[Sammy]

I'm low quality when the net is

[Luke Lafreniere]

the spot to be. Clearly, you got just scored from there.

[Sammy]

Low cortisol, type B. Oh, I got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

See?

[Sammy]

Look at that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, hold on, hold on. Holding.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let me pass it back right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

No. What the. Sammy, what the hell?

[Sammy]

It was me videos.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke said pass it. Why would you follow Luke's instructions?

[Sammy]

He has a trusting voice.

[Dan]

I'm so sorry. Please buy a Razer laptop. Sammy, how's that screen look?

[Sammy]

It looks great.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can see it's 240Hz.

[Sammy]

It's so. It's so bright. I can't see how much shade I'm bringing lines right now. It's like. It's like the brightness. You know, the knit.

[Dan]

You know, I. I've never seen him this upset before, honestly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you've never seen me play tape. Sammy. Why is everyone standing around with me? Why are you following me? Sammy?

[Sammy]

What do I do?

[Linus Sebastian]

Just go anywhere other than right next to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my goodness.

[Sammy]

I do anything mad. See, I got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, you didn't get anything.

[Sammy]

Oh, I got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but you didn't shoot it.

[Sammy]

Okay, but you guys mad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hold on. Oh, I'm not with you.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it doesn't matter. Pankratz and an AI is better than me and an AI and Sammy. Oh, man. This is absolutely positive. Brutal.

[Sammy]

Positive, right? Nice.

[Dan]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. What? Nothing's happening.

[Sammy]

No, it, like, flew. It flew. I'm surprised. Really.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Holy smoke hole.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was a rebound. See?

[Sammy]

Why can't mine do that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, because you're never in the right spot. You're not right in front.

[Sammy]

Why can't I do that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Because you play legal.

[Dan]

Pick up a video game and this is big.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I'm lagging out. It's all you. I'm lagging out. Oh, I'm lagging out.

[Dan]

Sammy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whatever. Just give it to him. Sure, fine.

[Sammy]

No, no, no. I'm so negative.

[Linus Sebastian]

What do you mean negative? I'm just telling you what you did.

[Sammy]

Listen, half the battle is positivity.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my goodness.

[Sammy]

How do you throw it?

[Linus Sebastian]

You don't. You're not. You can't. How many times do I have to tell you? You can. I did, though.

[Sammy]

I did, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, you didn't. You can't.

[Sammy]

I could if I really believe.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, you can't.

[Dan]

Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why did the AI passed me there? Unbelievable.

[Sammy]

Oh, I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Unreal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not with you. That was all the AI. Oh, boy.

[Sammy]

Oh, nice throw. Oh, I got it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm down. I'm down.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. Just do nothing. That's fine.

[Sammy]

I tried gonna angle, but you don't have to.

[Linus Sebastian]

A stick. Just dump it down there. Oh, man. Pass up. Maybe we can still. Oh, sure. Or just shoot it at the referee. Just do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I love that the game ends with Blus's character just laying down on the ice.

[Dan]

Sammy, I put next month's rent on this.

[Linus Sebastian]

The hell, dude?

[Sammy]

Yeah, I bet against us. So, Sammy, did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I was gonna say, did you have money on you or.

[Sammy]

Well, you know, I was told that there was a big prize, so I

[Linus Sebastian]

was like, all right. So anyway, the great thing about Razer Gaming Hardware is that even if. Even if your partner is terrible, you could. You can still have a sexy laptop.

[Sammy]

I feel like it's not. I think it's not all my fault you miss a few shots. Let me honest, if you shot a little better, we would got like six, two, six.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, there is a way for us to experiment with this. We could control for this. I could play against them literally without you, and see if I do better. I mean, we could find out if you're an impediment or if you're a help.

[Sammy]

Well, we don't know how many of you know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know how much time.

[Sammy]

I guess we'll never know. I guess.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I guess we'll never know. Oh, my goodness.

[Sammy]

Thanks, Razor.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, thank you, Razor. That was truly. That was truly something. Float plane chat says do it. Float plane chat says do it.

[Sammy]

This is not my show. Oh, yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Thanks, Sammy. That was fun. Oh, man.

[Dan]

Are you gonna do another one?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, that's up to you. Sure. You know what? Sure. Let's see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my goodness.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, wait. How is this even gonna work? Because his laptop is the host machine and it has the wired connection. Oh, yeah. If we just don't. No. Yeah. If we just don't select a thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. How did people vote and stuff? How did that work?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, there. Okay. All right. Here we go. All right, let's see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, he won't be able to throw a stick anymore.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, he won't be. He won't be able to do anything. It'll be. It'll be glorious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're on ld.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Luke, are you in?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. Give me one sec. Yeah, and you're on the. You're on the wrong one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have a player.

[Linus Sebastian]

I won't have a player. Oh, is it rd?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Whoops.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I didn't think. I changed it. That's weird. Also looks like Sammy's laptop has to be in because he's the host. So I will just do this. What is. What is it attached to the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The power.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, I got you. No, we're good. We're good, Dan. Everything is good. Everything is fine. Everything is beautiful.

[Sammy]

Everything is fine. We're doing fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, everything's fine. So it's rd. Okay, here we go. All right, you guys ready?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're fine here. How are you?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, how are. Yeah, thanks. That's great. All right. All right. Game on. Okay. Wait. Why am I not RD then? Hold on. No, I don't have a. I don't have a player.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's weird. I am. Maybe the lineups are. That's weird. Very weird. I had a player and I'm right

[Linus Sebastian]

D. Okay, let's see. Do I have a player now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep. Are you good?

[Linus Sebastian]

Which one am I?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, Wait, one. You're orange.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I'm center. That's so weird. Hold on. Sorry, guys. Yeah, I'm center for reasons that I can't comprehend. You know what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was a vicious time to pause the game.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry.

[Sammy]

Oh, you quit the game to win it.

[Linus Sebastian]

You got. Fine. You guys. You guys can have a one goal head again. I didn't have control of a player yet, Luke. You guys were playing against AI.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm just. I just sad. It's not. It's not unfair. It's just sad. It should be right D. It should. It should be right D. We were both right D last time, and I was right D. And it worked.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know why it made you center. Do you have to have a center? Do you have to control the center?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. That's a good question, actually, I don't think so. Okay, so it's supposed to be right D. Okay, let's see if this works. Okay, here we go. Oh, for crying out loud. Serenity now.

[Dan]

All right?

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll do two longer periods, so this will be just a quick one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That means that you'll get the Luke cam on the. On the delay. Okay?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. We good?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It looks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we're good.

[Dan]

It's all one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are you ready?

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, Game on, boys. Oh, wait. Hello. Hold on. Luke, are you in?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I am now.

[Linus Sebastian]

You good? All right, he's good, he's good, he's good. All right, all right. Oh, my goodness.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Where's my sticking?

[Luke Lafreniere]

More than before.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my goodness.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, boy. I can't do anything against you.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, here we go. Ba pow. Oh. What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, sorry. That was me. That was my bad. For what? You know what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is way laggier than last time. I don't know what happened.

[Linus Sebastian]

We can just call it. It's not going to settle anything if you're just lagging the whole time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There we go. Because I didn't even have control of my screen for that again, and we still scored. I was in the right position. I spamxed.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my goodness.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This second shot, I. That did not happen on my screen. Only the first one happened, and I was like, I'm just going to keep pressing. It doesn't gaze. Oh. Oh, boy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I knew that was coming.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's go serious. Honestly, the AIs are so much more useful than Sammy, like, infinitely. He had a magical way of being completely wherever. Was completely in my way at all times. Like, if I was trying to throw a stick to intercept something, he was in the way. If I was trying to pass, he was in the way. Did you bribe him?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, no, no. I was gonna say I might have hit that stick throw if I was, like, able to control the game, but. Oh, my God. Yeah, like, yikes. I was literally right behind you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, bud.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

And skip.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, God.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry about that. Sorry about that. Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, there we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice goal. Now the game's actually flowing. People are actually, like, doing hockey things. It's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You take a win face. Oh, my goodness. I gotta stop turning that direction.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can't. I can't really let you do that. Okay, my AIs are gonna go for it. Oh, what? They why did pass to me, for crying out loud. Come on. Go for it, AI. Get it. Get it. You're better than Sammy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Damn.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The stick throw guy is a little ridiculous.

[Linus Sebastian]

He is.

[Dan]

You have him so strong.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, we. I'm not. I'm dead. I'm just saying it's ridiculous. Oh, boy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, come on. Where's my stick at? Oh, yeah. Where's my stick at? Come on, let's go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, gosh.

[Linus Sebastian]

All I gotta do is clear a path for my AIs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no. The a. I wish you. I wish Rai would pass.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that was close.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, gosh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry. Pankratz.

[Sammy]

How many sticks are on the ice?

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Don't even trip, dog.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We got more sticks than people. I think that's true right now. Oh, gosh. I couldn't even control for that,

[Dan]

Man.

[Linus Sebastian]

There was like four or five sticks on the ice, I think. Oh, man, This is. This is crazy. I wasn't even sure if I was a hundred percent gonna be right about me being better off with literally no one than with Sammy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, I just threw my stick and it deleted it from the game.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I did too. I think we must have glitched it. This is an early access. This is an early access build. I also threw my stick at the same time as you, and it just disappeared. So I wonder if it's because we both threw our sticks at the same time or something. Also, there's a stick at center ice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, come on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry about that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Permanently there, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's kind of crazy. It just lives there now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I don't know what happened. I don't know why it's worse now. It's not that much worse, but every once in a while it just stops.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it's just WI fi doing WI fi things. You got to be on, like, hot hotel WI fi, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's not very. Probably. It's not very good hotel WI fi.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Not so easy when I don't have Sammy sabotaging me. Hey, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I also. I can't stick throw effectively because the latency and the stick throw, like, runs the game.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. To be clear, I'm not saying me beating you guys right now means that I'm better than both of you. I'm just saying that. I'm just saying that how.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that was.

[Linus Sebastian]

How badly I lost with Sammy was not representative.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think within like 10 or 15 seconds of the game starting the gap was obvious.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man. You could have it, Dan. You could have at least recruited someone for me who knows how hockey works. I didn't pick him who wasn't referring to it as tackling.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hey, he picked the right helmet.

[Sammy]

Oh, my goodness.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It just went flying.

[Dan]

Is that accidental helmet pick?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What was that throw?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, you boys are lucky.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can. I can do stick throws.

[Linus Sebastian]

They changed the aiming. It's not as easy anymore. So the aiming is very manual for the stick throw now, instead of just being, like, you kind of hint in the direction you want it to go. Oh, weird. Yeah, so it's like. It's actually a skill thing now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, I'm back.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice. You missed the replay. That's all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How does the manual nature of it work, then?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's just, like, passing. So the direction is dictated by the direction you're pointing your.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but I point it right at it, and it goes, like, way to the right.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, that might be the latency, then. Okay. Yeah.

[Dan]

Oh,

[Luke Lafreniere]

I should have passed there.

[Dan]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, My stick just disappeared into the ether when I threw it. I think the stick throw might just be glitched now. Whoa. Whoa, buddy. Oh, wait. It disappeared, but then it hit someone. That's pretty crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that why there's so many sticks on the ice? They're just, like, disappearing and then showing back up?

[Linus Sebastian]

Come on.

[Dan]

Here we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here we go, boys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also, why can you just stick through, like, infinitely? There's no cooldown. Oh. There's no one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, you have to have a stick, and then you can. And then there's no cooldown. The cooldown is you have to go get a stick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Usually from the bench, or if you can knock someone else's away, then. Oh, well, that was. That was interesting. Bold strategy. All right, one more minute remaining. Come on, AIs. Oh, nice. Nice. All right, that was a good quality stick throw, Luke. Quality stick throw. Well done. Well done.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Good goal. Quality goal. Gotta give it to you.

[Dan]

Oh, gosh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, sorry about that. Not sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

No way. Hold on. There's 8. 8 seconds left, and it's 6. 5. You guys could still come back. My AI just has to win this face off, then we're good. Come on, AI. Win the face off. Nice.

[Sammy]

What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, yeah, I just pointed my stick up and it threw it to the right. I don't know if that's latency or a bug or what, but yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was close.

[Linus Sebastian]

So, Sammy, in case you were wondering, this time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thanks, Sammy. Thank you.

[Linus Sebastian]

This time, Team Linus got six Goals and team. Luke and Pankratz got five goals, so

[Sammy]

confirms Linus is replacing you with AI.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Get on Reddit.

[Sammy]

Get on Reddit. Bye.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, thanks, guys.

[Dan]

Okay, I've got some news from the business team. It looks like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. Looks like Razer's never working with us again. That makes sense.

[Dan]

Apparently Sammy was. Had some money riding on this and was apparently rigging the game to cash out on a sports betting site.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I think this is a joke. Okay. I was taking that seriously for a moment.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, for how hard he sold that game. Would it even be unbelievable to you, Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was fairly believable to me until he said sports betting site. And then I was like, nah, probably just would have done a, like, local thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. If you'd said. If you'd said Pokemon cards or something, then that might have been more believable.

[Dan]

But I think what we're gonna end up actually doing is probably just giving everybody an entry into the draw.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Dan]

Both sides. Because you both won.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. All right.

[Dan]

Or you both lost.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but I think everybody lost today, Dan.

[Dan]

So did my hairline and wrinkles.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought it was pretty fun scoring two separate times when that was. That was genuinely really entertaining. The first one was wild. I have for, like, many seconds, I've

[Dan]

not laughed like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was crazy. Yeah. That everything about that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The second one had only locked up for, like, kind of a very, very short period of time. So it, like, it wasn't that big of a surprise when I had scored. But the first one, like, I genuinely had no idea. And for a long time,

[Dan]

that was bonkers. I'm glad we made it through, everybody.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Jon O. Johnson in full blank chat said the real winner was the Sammy's we made along the way.

[Dan]

Sammy is hilarious. I've never really interacted with Sammy in his element, but that was gold.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that was pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

And yeah, so his element is what,

[Dan]

Trolling me because making everyone upset, including poor Razor. I mean, I gave. I gave him the good laptop. I didn't realize that he had no idea what hockey was.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

And has never played a video game before.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dan]

Because even testing it, I was like, I'd never touched it before in like five or six minutes. It's like, oh, you just point in the direction. Yeah. And then you pass to your teammate who's more confident. It ain't that hard.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, are we. Why don't we jump into a quick topic here?

[Dan]

Do a topic. I'll set up something else.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait, did we ever do any comms did we do one? We did two.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We did at least one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Brilliant. Okay, let me collapse this. Oh, this is cool. There's been a major breakthrough in controller calibration for Xbox hardware. Driftguard claims that it can permanently store new joystick calibration data directly in an Xbox controller's onboard memory. Making Luke's cursor is making the adjustment difficult for future updates to reverse and saving you from annoying Stick Drift. The refix reportedly works across generations and types not just on the newer controllers that the official Microsoft tool supports. So even back to the 360. Dude, I have some old 360 controllers that are drifting like crazy. And it really sucks because I really love those controllers and there's no reason why I shouldn't still be able to game on them other than that they fell apart because of Stick Drift. If it's as simple as fixing this with a free open source tool, that's freaking awesome. Since the calibration data is written to the controller itself, firmware updates reportedly should not erase the fix, although the software is unlikely to resolve problems that are caused by worn or physically damaged components. There's a free browser version. How flipping crazy is that? And there's a Steam update expected soon, and early tests look promising, but your mileage may vary. This is actually a really good question, and this is from our. This is from one. This is from one of our writers. Why do you think the conversation around Stick Drift has become so much more prevalent? Back in my day, we didn't talk about Stick Drift. We just played with our busted controllers and darn it, we enjoyed it. Like, it's. It's not like modern controllers uniquely have bad joysticks. I mean, think. Think Back to the N64, what a piece of that thing was. And like, I understand if you've got the muscle memory for it or whatever, it could be really great for, like, playing certain games or whatever. And that. That's. That's great. But objectively, though, the design was terrible from a longevity standpoint, and we just kind of go, you know, oh, you Nintendo. The bad N64 joystick. Ha ha. Like, why is it such a different conversation today? I think there's a number of reasons that I've got in my brain. But what jumps to your mind, Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Honestly, I think it's the more serious nature of gaming.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that's a big part of it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think that's the biggest part because, like, I think Everybody had the N64 controller that they had, like, slammed their palm onto the Joystick to play Mario Party, and it's gone. And the joystick was just a mess, and it would, like, flop to the side and whatever, but you just kind of get used to it. And I think, you know, the cost of buying a new controller versus the amount you cared about being that much better in a game was like, like not that big of a focus. But these days, like, people are just very serious all the time in. In. In every game. You know, like, you would have been laughed at if you were, you know, that sweaty AIM trainer.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Oh, dude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Before, like, hold on, guys. I know it's like our, Our, Our. Our time to play games now, but I need to spend 15 minutes in an aim trainer before we get going.

[Linus Sebastian]

I gotta warm up. I gotta warm up. Yeah, like, you would, like, you would have gotten a joke even among the gamers. You would have gotten a guttural laugh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, if you're. If you were playing an arch and you wore a piece of armor or a weapon that looked icky just because it was good, people would have, like, laughed at you for it. And now if you don't wear the thing that looks icky because you. You don't want to look weird, but it's the best thing you have, people will now laugh at you for that. Like, it is. It is like, completely flipped mentality.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think there's. I think there's a number of other things. I think one of them is the sheer volume of gamers. Back then, the people who would have been able to complain were just kids. There weren't that many of them, and they didn't have any kind of voice amplification. Whereas now, like, everyone games, adult people with the means to make a lot of noise game in their spare time. I've got a lot of people in chat saying cost, but that one I'm actually gonna push back on because N64 controllers were freaking expensive in, like, $1998. Like, they weren't. They weren't cheap. I'm gonna. I'll have to look it up because I don't remember the exact amount. But, like, people did not have four N64 controllers to go with their console. Like, that wasn't a thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I honestly interpret the. The cost comment is the opposite of what you're saying, because if it was cheap before, they would have swapped the controllers out more easily. But. But controllers are expensive now.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, that's what they're saying. They're saying people are more mad now because they're more expensive now. Okay, but an N64 controller was US$30 back in 1996, which is a freaking ton of money. So that worked out to about 35 to 40 Canadian dollars for us back then, which if we, if we just plunk that into 40. CAD inflation calculator.

[Luke Lafreniere]

64 bucks.

[Dan]

Bucks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So they were, they were freaking expensive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

64 USD.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So that was like, you know, 85 Canadian dollars. Like, I don't think I knew a single person who had a full complement of controllers for their console if it was like a four controller console. Like I even had a friend.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Or you had like super janky ones.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, like horrible $20 little brother controllers. Like 20 Canadian dollar. Yeah, exactly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

With like four different switches on it. None of them worked. And it like, was the worst thing you'd ever used.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, that's the whole origin of like the little brother controller memes is that the console, like the N64 was only US$200, but by the time you kitted it out with a bunch of controllers, it was like over 300 or whatever. Like, it increased the price so much. And I mean, it's just, it's always been the case, like, the Wii was like that too. The Wii was so cheap. But by the time you actually got a whole bunch of Wiimotes and nunchucks and like got all the accessories so that everyone in your family could bowl without passing the remote around, or so you could have two people boxing or whatever, it was freaking expensive. So that's just kind of always been a thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wonder if. Yeah. So the sweatiness, sheer volume, like sheer popularity of gaming as a hobby, That's probably, I guess that, you know what, maybe part of it too is coming back to the difference in demographic. Maybe now that people have the knowledge to understand what's wrong with them and the skill to fix it, the conversation is much bigger and it's more extended. Like when you were a kid, your joystick was worn out and you were like, well, it's worn out. But now you might go online and watch a YouTube video taking it apart. Yeah, yeah. And watch them explain to you how, you know, Nintendo or Microsoft or Sony saved 14 cents on this part. And that's why it fails all the time. And, you know, that sucks. And so now you have all that context for it. Whereas before it was just like, well, my toy is broken and that, you know, that blows, obviously, but I could like still play the game good enough. So I think, yeah, I think it's there. I think there's a number of things. Yeah. Magnetic flux Says the rise of subreddits. I mean the rise of social media in general and the, you know, the perception that, you know, if you don't, if yours isn't like the best, if you don't pick the best one, then you've like screwed up or like you're missing out or whatever. I think yeah, social media is probably a huge part of just people generally being upset about stuff as well. But that's a, that's a much larger issue than just game controllers I think anyway. It's really cool that for Xbox controllers you can write a value to it that tells it where its new centered spot is and it's not going to stay there, it's going to continue to drift, it's going to continue to wear out. But at least you could, you can reapply this over time. I plan to do this on my Xbox 360 controllers like right away. I'm very excited about that because I've still got my first party dongle and I've got a whole whack of them. And what's really nice is that because if I recall correctly, they don't use xinput yet. Xbox360 controller x input or D input. I think they still use D input. Oh no, it's built natively for X input. Okay. I don't know why it is then because I've. I've had pretty good luck running Xbox One and then to get past the controller limit going to Xbox360 controllers, they can be used in D input. Okay, interesting. That's according to AI overview though. So who knows, I'd probably have to look into it a little bit more. Maybe the issue I was trying to overcome before was just reaching the maximum of the my connected dongle. Either way, it gets me another four wireless controllers without having to go buy another dongle now because I already have the controllers and I already have the dongle. Hey, did you see the blue origin explosion?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I've been, I've been out so I don't have a lot of details about it, but I got message about it. That's actually like.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's pretty.

[Luke Lafreniere]

From the extremely little I know right now, that's going to set things back.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

From like not good.

[Linus Sebastian]

I haven't done a ton of reading on it, but from what I understand it's not so much that the rocket exploded. That happens sometimes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But the launch pad like launch facility or like one of the towers or something. It was like a multi year project and this could even set Back like Artemis now. And like, it's a real downer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's what I meant by it's going to set things back. Was Artemis not, Not Blue Origin so much. I am not, you know, I want them to do well, but I don't. I don't care so much about the individual companies involved. I just want the mission to move forward. And this is, this is likely to set the mission back. So that upsets me. Yeah. Wiley Draft said when this happened to SpaceX, it was four months for the rocket, one year for the pad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yikes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes. This could be. This could be real bad. I need to look more into it and stuff again. I've been, I've been away, dude. I. I forged a knife. You want to see it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, of course.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can I show it here? Hold on one sec.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it's legal for you to show it? Yeah, this guy. Can I show it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Let's see this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hold on.

[Linus Sebastian]

So you did this in Japan?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I did this in Japan.

[Linus Sebastian]

So hold on. I'm just curious. Why would you go all the way to Japan and not make an authentic one?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What do you, what do you. Oh my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. That took me so long. I was like, I don't even understand it. Like, absolutely is. So I, I was looking up places to do this, and there's like some place in Tokyo which, like, I'm sure it's great, but it's incredibly expensive. And I found a place way out there that was a lot more affordable. And apparently they, like, just started doing this. We were like one of their, one of their first customers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it was just actually an amazing experience. You spent three hours. I think the group size is maximum of two. So it was just my brother and I in the whole shop and there was like, other people just working in there. Like, it's an actual shop where they make stuff. But they had, they had, like, I'd say one and a half people working with us. So they had one person who was with us the whole time and then another guy that would step in every once in a while when, when things are needed and we got to do a lot of it. And then they would step in and, like, touch things up a little bit if we screwed something up. But like, but like, you know, we put it in the furnace, we checked when the temperature was correct with like a magnet and all this kind of stuff, because when it gets too hot, it demagnetizes. And then you. We took it out and dunked it in the. In the water and did all that kind of stuff. And, like, we did the pattern hammering onto the metal and. And we did a lot of the actual sharpening and stuff. It was. It was, like, really, really awesome. I don't know how well this is going to show on camera, but.

[Linus Sebastian]

What. Okay. That's so cool. Damn, son.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's the. That's the handle.

[Linus Sebastian]

What did you, like?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I stamped. I. I hammered that pattern into it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then you can see the. The tip at the end.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So that. What. That angle was done by me on a grinder.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then this bottom was also, like. Like Richard's.

[Dan]

He.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did they have that app in Japan?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just was. I just wasn't sure that they did.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's no judgment knife. You can't make me laugh. But, like, even. Even the top here had, like, a slight curve to it, but I decided to have mine be, like, very, very angular. And then Richard's is more of a traditional chef knife, where it has, like, the. The gradual curve the whole way up and everything.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Knives actually look totally different. You can see the pattern that I hammered in is, like these. The. The hammer. It looked. The hammer that I was using looked like it had almost, like, bamboo shoots on it. So the pattern was, like, kind of random, angled lines.

[Dan]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And that's what I got out of it. This is the last side that I hammered, which is why I showed it to you, because I think it looks the coolest.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The other side is on the anvil. So the. I still like the pattern, but it loses some of the detail because you're literally, like, smashing it.

[Linus Sebastian]

If you hadn't shown. See, if you didn't show me the other side and then tell me you liked the other side better, then I wouldn't even, like. I wouldn't have even clocked it. Like, I. Yeah, yeah, they're both fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I also screwed up a little bit on this one, where you can see I hammered a little bit too low on the blade.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But that's not actually, like, a huge deal, apparently.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I mean, I think this is just one of those things where you see all the flaws of the thing you made. Whereas, like, I wouldn't have even. Yeah, again, I wouldn't have even noticed that that's an error, because I don't know that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And it's got. It's got a little oil on it right now, if you're seeing some streaks and stuff. But that's the stamp logo of their shop. It's hard to see.

[Dan]

Sick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then I. And then I did initials on the other side.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's sick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But yeah, this was like an amazing process. Three hours with the guys.

[Linus Sebastian]

If you don't mind me asking, like, how much did the whole experience cost? Because I'm willing to. Things can be so expensive or so reasonably priced in Japan that on either end of it, it doesn't make any sense. And so. And like, knives can be so expensive to buy like a nice knife that I'm kind of wondering, like, is it, is it affordable to just make your own versus buying like a fancy knife or whatever? I just want some context.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was looking in their shop.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it seemed fairly similarly priced to. To make your own versus buying one. Like buying one online and getting it shipped, which I thought was pretty interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I also did find that this place was fairly dramatically cheaper than the one that's in Tokyo. And as far as I can tell. Well, there's, there's like a few of them, but I found one random one in Tokyo and as far as I can tell, this one is like more hands on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which might be good. Like, it was good for me. That's what I wanted. But as I pointed out, like, there was, there was the part where I hammered a little bit too low on the knife. So like you're going to have a higher chance of imperfection because they let you do more things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. But they're your imperfections.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I think it's sick. Yeah. I have, I have no problem with that at all. And they will step in and try to help with stuff. Like there was. I don't remember what it was. There was my, my, my grind because again, I tried to make mine super angular. So I tried to get rid of some of the curvature of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And my grind on the side that we were going to sharpen was like a little bit bowed and I had a bit of a hard time seeing it. But the like, the like main like knife master dude of the. Of the shop could, could see it and was like, oh, I'll fix, I'll fix. And ran over and like grinded a little bit and made it just like a little bit better. But I did 90 of that grind. He just, he brought it the last little bit that I'm not going to be able to see. So like there's that little bit of perfection added on top which makes it just really awesome. People are asking for the name of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you want to just drop a link to Dan and then he can huck it in the chat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I'll try to look it up really quick. It's like sanjo dojo, something. Blacksmith.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, this looks right. Kaji dojo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These guys.

[Linus Sebastian]

Very cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think I, I paid for it like a while ago because I, I pre. Pre ordered it or whatever. I think it was like 200 and something, which is not cheap. But.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, but like, for what knife?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Having three hours in there with a blacksmith.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Honestly, the costing felt pretty good to me. Comparative experiences at a lot of other places I've been, like, when on destination vacationing and stuff. It's pretty well priced, especially because you come out of it with like a knife that uses very high end materials.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, it's, it's actually like. I mean, it's, it's not a By. By. It's not cheap. I mean, 200 bucks is a decent amount of money.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

For what you get. I actually think it is quite cheap.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, there's a huge difference between a small amount of money and a good deal value. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, exactly. I think it was a good deal. I don't necessarily think it was a small amount of money.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I've talked extensively on the show about how people will call something overpriced, but that's. But people use. Overpriced is one of those words like scam that has just kind of lost its true definition. And it's, it's actually really destructive to clear communication that we are using these words wrong. Because overpriced does not mean a high number of dollar coins. It means that it is a bad value.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I definitely do not think it's overpriced. I actually almost wonder if it's like underpriced considering what we got out of it. But, I mean, I'm gonna assume his permission and show you my brother's knife too, because it's like amazing at like

[Linus Sebastian]

65 bucks an hour for any kind of like workshop thing. Dude, I wouldn't have even assumed that includes the materials. Like, I think Yvonne and I were talking about this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. When we were leaving. And again, I might have. I might have got the price wrong. It's been, it's been quite a while since I booked it. But Rich and I were talking about this when we were leaving and we were like, dude, the entire time we were there, we were using consumables.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's the fuel for the furnace. There's the wheels for the grinders. There's the electricity for everything we Start off by taking a hammer, which is going to have wear and tear and just bashing it into. Into the metal. There's the metal, there's the handle. They source handles from, like a local wood making.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I think Yvonne and I paid more than $65 an hour to do that jewelry. Jewelry making thing that we. I think we. I showed you those earrings that. That we made. We each made an earring and they were supposed to match, but they ended up being a little different because we each made them, which is maybe the fun of it. But I think we paid more than $65 an hour each. Our group was like 10 or 12 people. We had. We had to pay for materials on top of that. So, like, honestly, this seems extremely reasonable. Yeah, his looks great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And you can tell, like, we both started with the same blade blank.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But the shape is completely different. Yeah, we both did a different grind on it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He also chose a different pattern. I told you. Mine was like. It almost looked like bamboo coming out. His was more like almost bricks. So you can see.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, no, I see it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I got it looking differently.

[Linus Sebastian]

Very cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This isn't the perfect lighting to see it in it. Look it. I'll say. I think they look pretty cool here. They look a lot cooler in person. And you learned how to, like, set a grind and then also go into stone sharpening. So we like. We sharpened it from zero. Like. Like it had a big thickness to the actual metal.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then you sharpen it down to the point where you could actually bring it to stones and stuff. And you do that with big grinding wheels. It's very. It's very hands on. Like, they give you this huge apron and goggles because you have to lean over this grinding wheel with like water flying over the place and sharpen it on there. It's like, it's. Man, it was. It was really cool. It was a really fantastic experience. I would actually highly recommend it if you happen to find yourself in Japan. It's on the. It's like coast to coast across from where Tokyo is. But you can take a. A bullet train. It gets you there in like an hour and a half. So you just fly across. Yeah, they were wonderful. Full and. Yeah. Roughly two hours on the bullet train. I think we jumped on the bullet train a little bit further out from Tokyo, which is why it was an hour and a half. Yeah. So somebody just priced it out. Apparently it's 216Canadian. 216Canadian for that is insanely cheap. Like, I. I would have thought that would have just been the time in the shop and that would have been pretty cheap, let alone the materials and everything for the knife. And again, there was knives that they were selling in their shop that, you know, they're probably nicer than what, rich knives. Yeah, but. But still, it's the same materials and stuff that were like just as expensive. So I don't know. Check them out if you're in town and.

[Linus Sebastian]

And check out our sponsor. Dan, do you want to. What. What's the thing supposed to be? This. Is this where we. Is this room make Razor not angry with us anymore? Anymore?

[Dan]

Yeah, this is the real stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. All right, There we go. The Razer Blade is built to get you desktop performance, but in a 16 inch slim laptop. Inside that one machine, you're getting an Nvidia RTX 50 series laptop GPU as well as an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor 386H, which is a 33% bump over the previous Blade 16. The display is also brighter with a QHD plus 240Hz OLED display with VESA display HDR True Black 1000 certification. And since you're going to want to do some gaming on the go, Razer has also significantly improved the battery life over the previous models. Yeah, going Core Ultra Series 3 is going to be a huge part of that. Each machine comes with the fastest available RAM, up to 64 gigs of LPDDR 5,9600 MHz. And as we learned tonight, they also have ethernet on board. So if for whatever reason your WI fi is flaky wherever you are, hey, you can always count on a good old fashioned copper wire. We had labs run some tests on the Blade 16 and found it to get over 10 hours on a single charge. Noting that for a small form factor gaming laptop, it has pretty close to the highest possible total graphics power for a laptop 5090. So check it out at the link down below or head on over to short circuit to see Elijah unbox one after the show. Oh, very cool. All right, all right. Floatplane announcement. We have something for every type of viewer this week on float plane for the OGs. We had a very special guest here a few weeks ago. Can you guess who it is? Luke, do you even know about this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Really?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

The one, the only Mr. Brandon Lee came into the studio. It was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What are you guys doing?

[Linus Sebastian]

It was just kind of a serendipitous thing. I had. I had HP of all people, just like an agency for hp. No one I even knew or anything. And clearly they didn't do any research on my channel because they offered to send me a film scanner. Like. Like for film negatives?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I was like, what are you even talking about? But then I was like, okay, that seems kind of cool. That's an area of tech, that. And there aren't many of these yet or anymore, but that's an area of tech we've never touched on online is tech tips. Is this a good one? Sure, send it over. And then I was sitting thinking, like, okay, what am I gonna do with this thing? I don't know anything about film photography. I don't know anything about film scanners. I have no purpose for any of this in my life. You know what? I know someone who does. So I reached out to Brandon. I was like, hey, do you want to, like, do a collab? Do you want to come in and just, like, you know, shoot a little bit of a film and we'll try out a couple different film scanning methods. I've had preservation of old media on the mind a lot. We did that VHS backup video with Mark Rathgaber a little while ago where I had that old VHS that I'd never actually watched from when I was a teenager. And we were able to digitize that. And then more recently, we collaborated with Reboot. What's up?

[Dan]

That's fun. You're good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, we're back.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're here. You never left. More recently, we collaborated with Reboot Rewind to capture the original master tapes from that entire show. To be clear, we didn't actually do that much. We mostly financially contributed, but it was something that I was really happy to be a part of. And then so with just all of that on my mind, I saw this, like, film scanner thing, and I was like, oh, yeah, that'd be really cool. So Brandon came in, and we kind of. We played around with it together. We had a lot of fun. There's a very embarrassing picture of me involved that up until scanning it with this film scanner, had only ever existed as a little crappy negative that my aunt had hidden away in a basket somewhere. So that's closer to the end of the video. And it's up early on floatplane. It'll go up probably sometime this weekend. So go check it out. Oh, wow. That's going to be released eight whole days early. Apparently it's scheduled for a little over a week from now. Oh, that makes sense, because Computex content is coming up, and then we've got something for chat. The Gen Zers, the Sigmas, the Triple T enthusiasts. Elijah showcased how much has changed from his AMD ultimate upgrade and his paint upgrade in Tech upgrades. Where are they now? So here's where it was. Here's where it is now. His rack has grown a lot. People are. Oh yeah, people are enjoying this one as well. Very cool. So that's already up. We got that going. What else we got going on this week? Finally, for the WAN viewers, it's that monthly installment of Wise WAN link. It's episode 23. Crazy to think this has been going on for two whole years. It's also crazy that neither one of us has made WAN late for an entire month. Except for one person. Okay. Hi. Yeah, I get it.

[Dan]

It's me.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it's not you. I think we all know who it was. Anyway, no matter what kind of LTT viewer you are, there's something for you at lmg, gg fp Wan Dan. If you want to throw that in the chat, now's a great time to join.

[Dan]

Floatplane Sammy also gave me some bad news before the show.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that he's not good at hockey. I didn't notice.

[Dan]

I. Yeah, he. Because you apparently lost, I think, or you lost ages ago. He forgot to liquefy some food.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, like I lost. Why is when late? Yeah, you mean so I forgot your punishment. Oh, I see.

[Dan]

So it might happen next week?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, well, probably not next week. Because I'll be in Taipei next week

[Dan]

and you know who'll be in the room with you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I see. Interesting. With access to fish balls, I don't think fish balls were involved yet. No, I'm pretty sure fish balls are

[Luke Lafreniere]

not involved, just other ones.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, well, we'll see how that goes. In other news, YouTube is introducing auto detection of AI generated videos. YouTube announced this week that it will start automatically detecting and labeling AI generated content on the platform. And it's also making those labels more visible on both long form videos and shorts. To be clear, AI disclosure labels have existed on YouTube since 2024. But up until now, they only appeared when a creator voluntarily disclosed that they had used AI in their creation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which, like, very rarely happened.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, definitely a problem. Going forward, creators are still expected to disclose their own AI use. But if they don't and YouTube's new internal systems detect what the company calls a significant photorealistic AI use, YouTube will apply the label on its own. On long form videos, the AI label will now appear directly below the video player and above the description, instead of inside the expanded description box. Where it used to live and on shorts, the label will show up as an overlay on the vertical video itself. YouTube's creator liaison said that the goal is context at a glance, that is, if a video looks real but was made with AI, they want viewers to know immediately. He also said that AI labels alone do not affect how videos are recommended or whether they can earn money, and that the change is purely about giving viewers the right information at the right time. If a creator believes that their video was labeled incorrectly because you know this is going to be incoming, they can challenge the disclosure status in YouTube Studio. However, they won't be able to change it in two cases if the video was made using YouTube's own AI tools like Veo or Dream Screen, or if the file contains C2PA metadata indicating that it was fully AI generated on its support page. Google also warned that creators who consistently choose not to disclose AI use could be subject to penalties, content removal, or even a monetization ban. Discussion Question do you think this will be effective in curbing the prevalence of AI slop on YouTube? Curbing maybe. Killing no is sort of my it

[Luke Lafreniere]

definitely won't kill it forwards. I don't even know if it'll curb it because as much as you can label things, I've seen some genuinely, incredibly obvious AI stuff and like I I also think that my accuracy has been going down as AI generation has gotten better.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah, me too.

[Luke Lafreniere]

An uncomfortable thing to accept, but we have to be.

[Linus Sebastian]

If we're being honest, I think the

[Luke Lafreniere]

trajectory I used to bat a hundred. I was batting 100 for a long time and I felt like I just like had it and I was fine. I was gonna be good. And then it, it started slipping and it started slipping pretty significantly.

[Linus Sebastian]

So is that because you're becoming a boomer or because the AI is getting better?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, maybe a little bit of both. But I I've noticed some like, like really painfully obvious stuff where where people in the comments are taking it very seriously and I, I think if it's labeled AI, honestly a lot of people just aren't going to read. That being said, I still think this is a huge W from YouTube and I appreciate them doing it because as long as you arm the people that will read and they can point it out in the comments and they can help make it obvious that's better than

[Linus Sebastian]

what we had before.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Massive. And it's huge.

[Linus Sebastian]

I gotta say I am surprised. YouTube, they do have some pretty good W's, but overlaying it, overlaying it on a Short. Pretty impressive. I'm surprised they did that because, like, Shorts is one of the. One of the key places where AI slot proliferates completely unchallenged. And YouTube has gone to great lengths to simplify the interface and keep it as just endlessly swipeable as possible. Like, you have to fight with it to find out when a short was uploaded. I forget. You have to like, click there and then open up a thing there and then like. Like to actually get to text information rather than just mindlessly scrolling from one short to the next. It takes effort for. So for them to take something that up until now has been buried in, you know, the expanded description on long form and overlay it on top of the video. I'm actually like,

[Luke Lafreniere]

that's super cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, clap. Good job, YouTube. If. If everyone took this, took the responsibility around this as seriously as YouTube, the world would be a better place. By how much? Hard to say. I mean, it depends how good their detection is. But by. But by more than zero.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like they're gonna try. I feel like they will always be okay with AI content being on the platform, but they want it properly labeled. I think, I think that is actually true.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think so too.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And if that's true, I'm totally cool with that approach, to be completely honest. If it is blatantly obvious to everyone, if something is AI generated and they still want to consume it, I mean, sure, maybe there's stuff that's good and you just want it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe you just really like watching kittens play ice hockey. Like, it's not like there's another way to. To do it cost effectively. So.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, so like, whatever. That's okay. I just want it to be. Yeah. Very, very obvious. It isn't obvious to boomers. Right. Which is why it'll be labeled.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then if they take the time to read it, then it'll be obvious and that's fine. You know, you can't, you can't. There's a. I'm happy they're doing that overlay thing with Shorts. You only be so aggressive about it before. It's just incredibly annoying. So there's. There's a bit of a give take on. On how much they. They push it. And it feels right now that they're doing an inappropriate amount based on this. But we'll, we'll see people in chat. I think thought by labeling we meant like metadata, which I do not think is the case here. No, they're just actually labeling it like, so it's human readable. When you load the content, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Contra Killa says, do you think that the public backlash towards AI is being noticed by advertisers? I think very selectively, yes. People got pretty mad about that Coke commercial and there's been sort of a couple instances of that where enough momentum has built around something that, you know, the company kind of went, oh, I guess we won't do that for now. But, but realistically, this is a frog boiling situation and people have only, they have only a finite amount of outrage to give in any given moment. And it's one of those things that Luke and I will be talking about something on WAN show and we're very upset about it. And to quote that south park episode with, with Bono in it, you know, you think of the starving children. It's like, how can you guys be mad about this like tech thing when there's like, when there's children starving or when there's like this going on or there's that. Why are you not mentioning every single thing that's wrong in the world? And it's like, because, because we don't actually, we don't actually have infinitely, infinitely broad and infinitely deep attention to give to every possible subject. And I'm, I'm sorry, I'm sorry that in this exact moment, you know, the concern that I am talking about does not align with the concern that is, you know, most at the surface for you. But what happens over time is we have this finite amount of care, energy to give about things and at some point we reach sort of a numbness. And I think that AI is going to be one of those things. I think there's going to be people for whom that is their life's mission, that is their cause. And you know what? Given what has happened in the creation of these LLMs and the mass theft and everything, I think that's a perfectly cromulent life's cause. But the vast majority of people, which, coming back to the context of what I'm talking about, advertisers, right, they're not going after the activists who are against it. No fur coat advertiser is trying to target members of PETA. That's just not how it works. But in terms of the broad market, are they worried about this backlash? No, I don't think so. Yeah, the backlash does seem to be growing, you know, like certain cohorts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is the backlash turning into spending changes?

[Linus Sebastian]

Literally the only thing that matters, Luke, asking the big important question, did you stop buying Coca Cola products?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Were you sipping a Coke while complaining about the Coke commercial.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well then, then, then they're not going to learn anything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't matter. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And that's not to say that you shouldn't still, you know, raise your voice about things that, you know you feel are wrong or whatever. Even if you are totally addicted to Coca Cola and you're just still going to keep drinking it. But it just does mean that their behavior is never going to change. So you just kind of have to come. You just kind of have to be at peace with that. Right? Speaking of things that people should never be at peace with, cities are covering Flock cameras with trash bags. So first of all, the obligatory Flock. Dayton, Ohio apparently is on board with that message. And they've started putting black trash bags over their Flock automated license plate reader cameras because city officials say they aren't sure whether the cameras are still active and they don't even know whether they're allowed to take them down under their contract with Flock. Joe Parlette, the deputy city manager, said at a City Commission meeting last week that the Dayton Police Department agreed to work with Public Works to beg the cameras as a stopgap measure until they can be removed entirely. This seems pretty based, but let's go on. Dayton has 72 flock cameras around the city, and an audit found that they were involved in what was described as egregious data sharing violations, including 7,100 logged searches done for immigration related reasons. The mess in Dayton started last October when the city learned that its Flock camera data was being passed to the Department of Homeland Security and ICE through Flock's national camera network. The city says it didn't intend for that to happen and blamed a specific officer who forgot to flip a toggle that would have blocked the sharing. This is not the first city to go the trash bag route. Late Last year, Evanston, Illinois covered its 19 flock cameras with garbage bags too. Evanston had terminated its Flock contract back in August, but then claimed that Flock came back and reinstalled the cameras without permission, which got Flock a cease and desist letter from the city. An Evanston spokesperson told 404 Media that the cameras are owned by Flock and had to be removed by Flock. So while they were waiting for the removal, they covered them. This same pattern is showing up in other places. The mayor of Menominee, Wisconsin recently said that Flock cameras in the city have been activated without city council approval. Residents in Boulder, Colorado have filed a lawsuit challenging the use of the cameras. A Flock a flock spokesperson told 404 Media that of course any city can turn off its cameras if it no longer wants to use them. But added that each contract is negotiated with the city attorney beforehand, and that legal conditions are. May prevent a city from voiding the contract without grounds to do so. So now hold on a gosh darn second here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Citizens of the city could. Could take a more permanent route with, like, a bat or a sledgehammer.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're not endorsing that Or a stick

[Luke Lafreniere]

with a hook on it.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're just making an observation. It's an objective fact, what you just said.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, that's. Wow. We talked before about how the only way to send a message to corporations Is in ways that affect them monetarily. That sounds like it would be very expensive for flock.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is. That is true. It's also like the whole, like, if. If buying is an owning thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. It's like, if I don't want it anymore, I should also be able to destroy it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right? Yeah. I mean, that makes sense to me. Makes sense to me. I mean, those rules apparently don't apply to me. We had some people very upset that we took some plants out of the backyard of the tech house. That was fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, really?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Didn't one of them. Didn't one of them just, like, go to alex d. I mean, not the

[Linus Sebastian]

way I took it out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was a very mature plant. There was no way that was going to happen. We would have to dig a hole, like, freaking 10ft around to capture all the roots of it. That wasn't. That wasn't going to be a thing. But, yeah. No, we're remodeling the backyard, and it's okay. People can. People can calm down.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's. It's more cool to destroy some flock cameras or to, you know, redistribute the materials used in the flock camera To a recycling plant Than it is to, you know, something. Something plant. So I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Man. Flock, they just. They can't ever be in the news for anything good. Hey, like, you know, for something that's supposedly for safety, you'd think more often we'd hear about all the people who are being made more safe by it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I like this Willing spy said, time to go clubbing, question mark. It's like, yeah, it's like. It's like, yeah, you go for a night of clubbing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, there's all kinds of different clubbing. There's, you know, there's going to a bar. There's seal clubbing, there's flock clubbing. Just, you know, Whatever's. Whatever's culturally relevant where you're from.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that makes sense. Rapid unscheduled deconstructions. I like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, I've got some other fun news. Your Blu Ray drive can now rip GameCube, Wii and Xbox games. OmniDrive, a custom firmware for Blu Ray drives that use the MediaTek MT1959 chipset, now lets you rip the aforementioned GameCube, Wii and Xbox games and Xbox 360 and Dreamcast games straight to your PC. Previously, backing up games from consoles with proprietary disk formats required a modded console or specialized hardware. Now it's that simple. The firmware did come out of beta in February, but only now is getting wider attention. It is worth noting that PS3, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and series and Wii U discs can technically be read too, but the content on those ones stays encrypted. Compatible drives are mostly from LG and Asus, and the Disk Preservation Project wiki has a full list if that's something that interests you. Just wanted to kind of flag this for you guys. Our discussion question is with retro console hardware failing faster every year, is community built preservation tooling like this the only realistic way that these games survive? And I think, I think that answer is highly dependent on the license holders for that media. A lot of it has been made available on like virtual console type platforms. A lot of it hasn't. And as long as. And sometimes that's not even because nobody wants to like wasn't it, wasn't it goldeneye that was, was or is stuck in some kind of horrible who owns the license hell, for the longest time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised, but I'm not sure. There's a lot of weird stuff with licensing like Spider. The license for Spider man is like shared like I think it's spite like Marvel is. Is Disney or whatever, but Spider man is Sony or something. I don't know. It's all strange.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I found unfortunately a deleted post called goldeneye007 the accidental masterpiece Trapped in licensing limbo. Yeah, so I think I. I think I did not imagine that. Rare devs talk about the nearly completed GoldenEye 007 remake. Oh, tell all. Including the reason it was canceled. All right, very cool. So there's an article over on. Over on Ars Technica, but I don't know if the reason that it was canceled was to do with licensing this time. I do know that there's been some challenges leaks Original studio Rare before anyone tried to. Okay what else we got this week? Actually got it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We gotta get cooking. I gotta get out of here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah, for sure. All right, time to talk about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Rapid fire. Some stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Valve has raised Steam Deck prices by anywhere from 43 to 46%. Update. It sold out already. The Steam Deck OLED 512 has been raised to US$789, while the 1 TB variant has increased to US$949, a 240 and $300 hike respectively. Valve notes in a Steam hardware community post that the Steam Deck itself has not changed and they say the new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So fuel increases for shipping component costs? Insanity.

[Linus Sebastian]

It sold out in less than 24 hours after its restock. We don't know if that actually means that there were a lot of them, but we do know that it is not in stock at the official source. So of course scalpers are running rampant. Tim Sweeney sarcastically tweeted that Valve consumers or suggested that Valve consumers are paying for Gay Ben's mega yachts. I think that's honestly a bit of a disingenuous take. I do see how a company as profitable as Valve could be vilified anytime they adjust pricing upward on anything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think their 30% take on the store is too high. I've thought that kind of forever, but I agree, actually feel feels like a realistic jump to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

However, you know, business units have to maintain their own independent profitability and if Valve, which according to Valve is how they want to treat it, if Valve wants their hardware unit to be a separately profitable independent ish endeavor that is justified of its own accord and doesn't just suck at the teat of their software margins forever, then I can understand why they can't just sell these things at a loss. However, I can also see why people are flipping outraged because the Steam Deck was like one of the few things that had remained a pretty darn good value even after the discontinuation of the more entry level options.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was Tim Sweeney that said that yacht thing, right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

According to Forbes, as of May 2022 he had a net worth of 7.6 billion. Bloomberg is estimating since then it's at 9.6 billion. He could, he could buy a few yachts I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wouldn't believe an estimate on Forbes. Just throwing that out there. I think I saw an estimate of like top top influencer net worths on Forbes or something like that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Forbes is like junk Now, Yeah, Forbes

[Linus Sebastian]

is slop now, so just. You just ignore it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I read Forbes and was like, oh, they must have like interviewed him

[Linus Sebastian]

or something with that said. I mean, he clearly, he clearly could afford a yacht if he really felt like it. Like, he's definitely in the yacht threshold of, of personal wealth.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, my dad. I gotta remember. No, not quote them. Yeah, man, I thought I was being a good boy. I didn't even look at the AI summary.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just, Yeah, I would just. I scrolled past like Forbes. I remember. I remember contacting a writer from there once because I had read about some influencers, some of whom I knew. Like, some, some of the people I actually knew. Not that I knew their exact net worth, but I have a pretty good understanding of their business and stuff. And so I was just like, hey, where'd these numbers come from? Like, could I get some sort of clarity on the methodology by which you came to these conclusions? Because some of these don't really make any sense to me as someone who's been in this industry for most of my adult life. And they just like completely didn't respond to me. Like, okay, neat. So source. I made it up.

[Dan]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's probably a lot though. Yeah, I, I'm not saying I'm happy about it. I'm just not surprised. The fact that they held on to the price that they had for so long is, is more of the surprising part to me. Fuel prices are insane. Like, I just, I, you know, I'm in Japan right now. This is a personal trip. I paid for this flight and I booked it a long time ago. And I'm really happy about that because I've looked at flight costs to places like this recently and it's like, holy crap. Fuel in general is going crazy. Who knows if the Straits can open anytime soon.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no, there's. There's news on that. Apparently the straight is open now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, that's been said before.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on, hold on. Maybe not. Yeah, okay, never mind. Carry on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, they've said it multiple times and then blown up stuff. Yeah. So I don't know. Memory costs going up? I have no idea. But I'm sure the like, soc in there went up in cost. Just moving everything around went up in cost, etc. That's going to be reflected onto the price of the product.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm so bummed about what this means for Steam Machine. Steam Machine is gonna be rough. It's gonna end up not being at all what I wanted it to be. I Wanted it to be the PC console and it's gonna end up being a Steam Machine just like it was last time. Like no, not quite as bad as it was last time. The original Steam Machine, for those of you who don't remember, like 10 years ago Valve had Steam Machines. This is like, this is Steam Machine resurrected this time. Steam machines were built with partners like Alienware and they were just small form factor computers that ran an older version of SteamOS. Was it based on Debian? I can't remember. It's based on something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. Yeah, I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, so they ran an older version of Steam OS and they sucked because the value was just terrible. They were like over $1,000 for some mid tier freaking hardware. Is that sounding familiar now? And that's, I feel like that's what we're going to end up with here because even though like we had that good news with respect to RAM availability or not availability but pricing earlier in the show that CXMT is building relatively affordably, I assume DDR5 memory that can be used in desktop systems. That's not going to help with the kind of like volume contracts that someone like a Valve is going to have to sign in order to get enough allocation to build something like Steam Machine. That's like Corsair buying some modules to make some sticks in China. That's not, I don't think that's going to be a needle mover for a volume purchaser like Valve. And. And then I'm also bummed about like what all of this means for Steam Frame. Like I should have my Steam frame already. I should be gaming on my Steam frame like every night right now. I'm so stoked for the Steam frame and ram. It's just everything up basically.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah,

[Linus Sebastian]

Absolute dread.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very frustrating.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you know what is one of the most frustrating things about it, Luke? What is that? Optane. Optane was too early. It was, I've said it before, 3D crosspoint, the micron, intel joint endeavor to build the layer that was supposed to exist between DRAM and high speed ssd, NAND storage. It just came a little bit too early. And then the nail, the final nail in its coffin was a collapse of memory pricing that made Optane not make any sense. Dude, if Optane was firing today. Dude. Okay, I'm gonna talk about this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wendell is so happy right now sitting on all his Optane drives.

[Linus Sebastian]

Redditor AP Frisco used six secondhand Intel Optane persistent memory DIMMs. So 768 gigs total in a Xeon workstation to run a 1 trillion parameter Kimik 2.5model locally at roughly 4 tokens per second. The Optane DIMMs were set in memory mode with DDR4 used as a cache. Optane has much lower latency than NVMe, but still approximately two to three times higher than DRAM. Intel's discontinued memory memory format was designed to bridge the performance and cost gap between very fast but expensive DRAM and much slower, cheaper SSDs. Optane sits in the middle, offering larger, cheaper byte addressable memory that is faster than SSDs but slower than DRAM and very importantly is persistent. They ran a hybrid CPU GPU inference workflow with most of the model staying in the Optane CPU memory while critical tensors were streamed into a 12 gig RTX 3060 for acceleration using Lambda CPP's memory override. All of this indicates that there is a tier of memory between DRAM and SSDs that could be especially useful for large language models. Oh, this is funny.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dan's pointing out that it was only four tokens per second, but I don't really specify what the compute was though.

[Linus Sebastian]

But yeah, it was very limited compute. So the important part is that it's fitting in, not storage.

[Dan]

And it's six drives and they're like 20 bucks. That's like crazy. Yeah, a trillion parameters at four tokens per second is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But the four tokens per second part, like I, I bet you could be a lot faster. I just. I. They don't even mention the compute. Like I think that's. Yeah, that's. Yeah, they said single GPU and they

[Linus Sebastian]

didn't specify what 1linus comment. Rest in peace, Optane. You were too great and too early. I. That's what, that's what I just. I. When someone proposed this topic, that was what I put in my notes. Apparently it made it into the doc this time. Oh man. I just, I was so excited about Optane and like it's like my next time someone asks me, okay Dan, next time someone sends a comm or something and it's like, you know, what was your like favorite tech that was canceled or unappreciated for its time? It's gotta be Optane. It's gotta be Optane. It was like, man, There were like PCIe Gen 3 Optane drives that still absolutely blew the doors off of like Gen 4 or even Gen 5 SSDs in terms of their real world performance, not in terms of how fast they can run a file copy, because that was Never the point. The point was always the latency. It was always the Iops. And freaking AI is like a perfect use case for it. It's like we're trying to find the answer to how do we run these gigantic models without putting them out to much, much slower storage. Optane cached. Optane, man.

[Dan]

I'm just having a look through what we have in storage. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 times 15. 5.7 terabytes.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have.

[Dan]

Sorry, 5.7 terabytes. We got like 30.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, wow.

[Dan]

3,050. No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You could throw this at Nick in the lab and let him have some fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean. Yeah, I think we have a whole

[Luke Lafreniere]

pretty crazy local model with that.

[Dan]

There's a 1.6 terabyte one signed out to you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's my boot drive.

[Dan]

Okay, well, we'll have Alex collect that, I guess.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nope.

[Dan]

Which computer? You find it, you can have it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. I treated myself to an eBay special as my personal farewell to Optane. I was actually planning to do a video about it, just like the video was going to be called. Maybe I should still do it. The best drive was made five years ago, or however long ago it was. It's really old now, but it's still the best drive on the market, as far as I can tell in terms of latency and iops.

[Dan]

Yeah. So even without that, we've got about six terabytes of obtain on site.

[Linus Sebastian]

How much. How many of the DIMMs do we have? Because we had a whole server. We did a whole video about it. It was like I. We lost this server and this server was lost in our warehouse for years, or something like that. I think it was called.

[Dan]

These are all NVMe, PCI3.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. No, they would be searching wrong. Yeah, that. That server might just be inventoried as one thing, or we may have ultimately sent it back. I don't know exactly what happened with it.

[Dan]

I've got an intel server system 1U rack mount. Is that it?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it wasn't a 1U. I don't. Was it a 1U? I'm sorry, I don't remember. Maybe it is. Maybe that's it. How much RAM does that say it has? Because I think we just combined.

[Dan]

12 by 32. Oh, 12 by 512. In tame. Optane DC persistent.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's the one. So that has. That has another six terabytes of Optane in it. Should we throw that at the lab? Put like a big fat GPU in there and see what they can do with it? Like they wanted to do some AI stuff.

[Dan]

We have 12 terabytes of Optane.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This could be really fun. Yeah, I'm gonna.

[Dan]

It's in storage. It's not even checked out. You can just take it.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's like ducks at the park.

[Dan]

You beat me to it. You're very quick. You've been doing this for a while. I have. 452 Optane drives. Cool. That's going to be sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. All right. Anywho, rest in peace, Optane. I love you, Optane. I wish you could come back, Optane. But it's just. It's never going to happen. Like, I forget how the whole thing collapsed, but like Micron sold their share in the joint venture and then intel bailed on it and blah, blah, blah, and. And then now you can, you can get. You can still get those little caching drives. Optane32 gig for like pennies on the dollar. Look at this. You can get these for like 40 bucks. It's a little M2. I think it's. Yeah. PCIe 3.0. And it might even only be two lanes. I can't quite recall right now. No, that looks like a by four interface, so. Shut up. So, yeah, 40 bucks for these. Actually, I was thinking of making a video about these too. Because storage is so stupid expensive. So using one of these cached on a hard drive. I think the first party tool is deprecated now or something. But there are third party tools that you can use for caching. So a relatively small cache is shockingly effective, even on a relatively large mechanical hard drive. And like hybrid storage and caching solutions is something that I was very bullish on like five to eight years ago and then just kind of never materialized. But maybe we just never had the right incentive to use it. And I guess. I guess the answer was AI all along. Oh, good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Aren't you excited?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm excited.

[Dan]

And then what we can do is we can just like take a bunch of water and then dump it outside and let it evaporate. Just turn on all the taps in the building and then we can feel better. We can be like the big boys. We can be like the real companies.

[Linus Sebastian]

In other news, we're laying off 30% of our workforce.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It should. I mean, it should be a lot more.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why is that funny to you, Dan?

[Dan]

Oh, because it was a low number. I think it should be. Wow. You're one of the good ones, Linus.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maximizing shareholder value. Hey, speaking of maximizing shareholder value, Nvidia is officially killing the control panel after 20 years as of the latest game ready driver update, the Nvidia app is now the only supported way to manage your GeForce GPU settings. The control panel is officially done after 20 years. It is worth noting though, existing installs will not be deleted unless you do a clean driver install and it will stay on the Microsoft Store for anyone who wants it. But it is frozen so no new features, fixes or updates. RTX Pro users still get Control Panel support until their professional features finish migrating to the app. Our discussion question is were you a right click desktop Control Panel person or did you never touch it? I've actually missed that for a long time. The ability to right click and just go to my Nvidia control panel. The fact that it's down in the system tray still bothers me to this day.

[Dan]

I'm a right click desktop.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm a right click guy, but have been using the tray as needed. But I'm a right click guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

I actually have. I almost never touch the Control panel anymore though. I actually. Oh man, this might be a hot take, but I really like the Nvidia app and if all the features are in there then actually yeah, I kind of like the Nvidia app. I can kind of, I can understand why they don't want to bother with it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, we don't, we don't need two apps.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I feel like the same people who are upset at Nvidia for getting rid of the Control Panel are probably the same people who are mock Microsoft for still having remnants of the old school Control Panel instead of managing to consolidate everything in the new settings menu. So we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to pick a lane here folks. And I think I'm gonna go with the. I'd rather have one interface rather than two interfaces, some of which have some features and some of which have other features. Electrobot Chat says what about three control panels? No, no, no, disagree. In other news, customers were deceived about active listening AI powered marketing service. The FTC is forcing Cox Media Group and two small marketing firms to settle allegations that they deceived customers by falsely claiming to offer an AI powered service that could target localized ads based on conversations captured from customers smart devices and that consumers had opted into such targeting. The marketing companies claimed that their active listening marketing service could do that and they sold the service to small businesses looking for targeted advertising. So the good news for the regular Joe, the service doesn't do that. The bad news for those businesses who paid for the service they were being resold email lists that were obtained from other data brokers at a high markup. Of course, Cox and co also claimed that customers had opted in to being listened to by accepting the mandatory terms and conditions. However, that doesn't constitute opt in consent for invasive recording services. Fun fact. Cox Media Group is a joint venture between Apollo Global Management and cox Enterprises. These two companies combined annual revenues are around $50 billion. A $1 million fine for them is kind of like a $2 fine for you if you make $100,000 a year,

[Luke Lafreniere]

which statistically you like probably don't. So it's probably even less than that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Womp womp. But hey, here's some funnier AI news. A Pizza Hut franchisee operating 111 locations across the East coast is suing for $100 million over Dragontail, an AI delivery management system that Pizza Hut forced them to adopt before dragon tail. Over 90% of their deliveries would arrive within 30 minutes. After that, the number dropped to 50%. Here's what it turned out went wrong. The old system had managers manually entering orders into a doordash tablet. Dragontail replaced that with real time kitchen visibility for doordash drivers who quickly figured out that they could wait up to 15 minutes to batch multiple orders into one trip. So pizzas that used to leave the store in under five minutes were sitting on the rack for up to 20 minutes. Some drivers could also see tip amounts, so low tip orders would just sit there longer. The franchisees New York City, year over year sales growth went from positive 10% to negative 9.8%. Meanwhile, Yum Brands is already closing 250 Pizza Hut locations this year and reportedly exploring selling the brand. Our discussion question is at what point does AI powered efficiency just mean hey, did anybody test this with real delivery drivers? Hello?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, hey, did anybody test this with like new feature? Launch was already a bit of a problem. I mean you and I, you used to talk back in the day. I remember in the NCIX studio there was, I believe it was Antec. There was an Antec power supply that didn't fit in an Antec case. And you were like, you'd think of

[Linus Sebastian]

all the power supplies they would have kicking around to check it would be theirs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You would have slotted it in and figured that out.

[Linus Sebastian]

I understand if the Enermax, you know, mega, mega volt 5000 doesn't fit or whatever, fine. But like really your own man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's the same kind of thing of like, did no one try this?

[Linus Sebastian]

Can I. I don't use food delivery apps much, but can I just kind of jump in with maybe. This is a controversial take, but, like, is tipping before you actually get the service? Not crazy?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is that tipping?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It probably is, but I suspect the tipping before you actually get the service idea is that this is someone that you don't get to see handle your food for a very long time and is not supervised by anyone else. So the chance of mistreatment is, like, very high. So I'm assuming people are tipping beforehand to try to prevent.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not tipping. That's protection money.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, that's a racket, I think. Yeah, I think you're paying protection money for sure.

[Dan]

Uber is doing tipping after now. I don't know if they did it before, but.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Like, I, like, I. I tip my Uber drivers, but I always get the prompt after the fact. I don't know if that applies to Ubereats, though.

[Dan]

The food seems to be doing that now too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Dan]

Doordash, I think, is still before.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Dan]

It might be different in different parts of the world, actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whoa.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, maybe.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are we both reading the same one? Jchrist08 says DoorDash has you tip. Then after the order, they ask if you want to tip more. Is that true?

[Dan]

That must be new. Oh, my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

That sounds crazy. I had.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, we. We went down to the labs. Some of the people from the labs went down to Puget recently and we had a dinner with Puget afterwards.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it. It. They did an auto gratuity, which is like, you know what, for parties over a certain amount.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't even blame them. Sounds good. There's an auto gratuity and then it asked you to tip.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And. And I, I like, double taked because the guy's standing right there, right? Like, it's a. It's a. You know, clicking zero is a thing to do when the dude is standing right there. And the service was good. So I double take to the receipt, like multiple times, being like, wait, no, like, if I remember correctly, I even asked him. I was like, this is an auto gratuity. Right? Like, you guys charged this? This was a tip that got charged. And he was like, yeah. And I was like, I look back at the machine, it's asking for a tip. And I'm like, okay. And it wasn't low. If I were correctly, it was 20%.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So it's like, I've seen servers that handle that well. They'll come up with the machine and they'll Be like, hey, by the way, the tip is already. There's. Yeah, they'll like proactively remind you. But I've also run into ones where clearly they like, kind of hoping you're not paying attention, you know, whatever. It's the, whatever. It's the corporate card. Right. A lot of the time when it's a big group, it's whatever, you know, who cares? It's a corporate card. It's not their problem. If, you know, you get reamed by your boss for leaving a 45% total tip or whatever. And it might even be, yeah, it would even be that high because if you leave a 20% tip on top of a 20% tip, that's more than. It's not just 20 plus 20 at that point. Right. Like it's, that's a ludicrous amount to leave. But I have almost accidentally done it before where like you, I had to kind of go and double check. I have no problem. I have no problem with tipping for good service, but I don't like being, I don't like being dark patterned into doing it, if, if that makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't like tipping pretty much at all. But I also don't like the fact that these people in a lot of cases get paid like under minimum wage because of tipping laws and all this other weird stuff. So like, imma do it. I will engage with the system because I don't want someone who is like, statistically probably just trying to get by to have to get by even less because of my, like, I don't like tipping, therefore I will not do it. So yeah, it feels like a weird

[Linus Sebastian]

hill to die on these days.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, exactly. It's a, it's, it is much more comfortable in countries where tipping is not a thing though I am, it's way nicer.

[Linus Sebastian]

I am finding tippingflation to be becoming a significant problem here. Who was this in, who was this in chat just now? I hate it when the options are 25%, 35% and 45%. This is in floatplane chat. Yeah, this is from Magnetic flux. And then the other part of it is that restaurant bills are going up by so much and tipping instead of being like a few dollars, is based on percentage. And it kind of reminds me of what happened with like realtor fees here in Vancouver is that our house prices like tripled and the realtor fees were still just a percentage of the total transaction. And you're looking at it going like, hey, so the work that you did was the same as before, but the absolute dollar value that you're claiming is, I couldn't help noticing three times. What's up with that? Yeah, also, dual agency was legal here forever and there's still loopholes that allow it. So like it's a whole crazy thing where as far as I can tell, the entire industry is incentivized for. Prices just go up. Whether a realtor is representing you or the other party, they're still being compensated as a percentage of the transaction. So like that's a pretty big conflict of interest. Anyway, sorry, this is a side. This is a side tangent is I'm

[Luke Lafreniere]

being reminded that I'm. I'm running late for things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh shoot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, well, let's keep going.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's hear. I'm going to push this one to next week. Hold on, let me just do this comment.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, that is super cool, but yeah, we can talk about it next week.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Yeah, it was super cool, but it's not particularly time sensitive. We can talk about. I'm doing a dedicated video on this at Computex.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That can push cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then. Okay, this is. This is mostly just speaking of conflicts of interest. My brother in law works for Specsy and I thought this was pretty cool. He was talking to me about it over dinner and now it's being reported over at GameSpeed. But my brother in law's company. Wait, what the hell is this? Is back for 2026 announcing a new format. This is. This is the wrong article.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not the article you clicked on. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whoops. Let's just. Let's try this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that is just a bad link.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can start reading through it while you bring it up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nah, it's fine. I got it. Niantic Spatial. You know, remember the mapping and AI spinoff of Pokemon Go's creator? Niantic is partnering with Specsy Geospatial. So that's my. That's my brother in law's company. A network of 10,000 plus drone pilots. The goal is to turn raw drone photos into highly detailed photorealistic 3D maps and reconstructions called Gaussian splats. Currently Specc has 6 million plus acres mapped at a resolution of around 10 times sharper than satellite images. And they plan to map cities across North America and beyond and are currently targeting around 300 US cities. Niantic's spatial tech automatically processes these images into interactive city scale 3D models. This is pretty huge because fresh data is really key for training advanced AI models and ensuring that things like self driving cars or delivery drones or robots have an understanding of real world geometry in order to navigate safely. Bill Lakeland, Spec C CEO, also spoke on how synthetic data doesn't work. When you think about something like a first responder trying to get access to a window or something that needs to be in an exact location, AI can't just fill in details. Exact locations matter. So the use cases for this vary. Infrastructure and utility companies can use the data to inspect bridges or power lines or pipelines safely from the air without risk to humans or without, if we're being realistic, time in transit. City planners and governments can create digital twins of cities to simulate construction and managing zoning or planning smarter infrastructure energy operators can monitor large scale solar farms, wind turbines and oil fields. And of course AI and robotics development can train on real world 3D geometry for self driving cars, delivery drones, etc. So the, the way it works basically is like you download their app and I think there's only like one particular model of DJI drone or there might be a couple of models that are supported and then they have just kind of like, like zones that you can just, you go to, you launch your drone and you just say go and your drone basically goes up and it goes click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. And it just captures a bunch of imagery and then you update it. And they're working on a system that I believe is still in like fairly early stages, but where basically if a city wants one of these super high resolution, super detailed maps, they pay spec C. And then spec C goes, okay, here's the bounties. Go ham. Here's all the zones where you can go earn a bounty. So people who just wanted to like go out, get some fresh air, fly their drone anyway can make some money while they're doing it. Yeah, so it kind of, it's, it's cool that they're partnering with Niantic, who was the same company that kind of went, hey, we're creating like geospatial mapping and if you happen to want to go out for a walk anyway, then you can go collect some Pokemon. And by the way, we're going to, you know, build this geospatial mapping thing. So it seems like a pretty cool partnership. And that was, that was a big announcement for them this week. So I thought I'd kind of, kind of share that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah, here it is. Noki posted, I think, for crying out loud. Yeah, I think this video has an example of the mapping around 30 seconds. Yeah, here we go. So this is super cool. That I, as a tech guy, this video was super light on the like, oh my God. This looks like an actual rts, but it's the real world. Like stuff that I thought was really cool. It's more like flashy, but very cool. And you know what else is cool is Luke just kind of taken off before we do after dark. Why don't you just. Yeah, why don't you head out if you gotta go and then I gotta.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is there any that are addressed to me that I can do quickly and then just rip out of here?

[Dan]

Yeah, sure. What mic are you using?

[Linus Sebastian]

I need to do the razor spot though before we do.

[Dan]

Okay, sure. They're in potential. If you want to read them through

[Luke Lafreniere]

first, go for it.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Were you gonna put the laptop here? Running cyberpunk again or are we not doing that again? Oh, cool. All right. Well, The Razer Blade 18 was built for heavy work. Oh, it's just me. Sure.

[Dan]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have my garbage here.

[Dan]

Dan.

[Linus Sebastian]

The Razer Blade 18 was built for heavier. They're never going to sponsor us again. Was built for heavy workload. From modern AAA games to rendering 3D assets to running local LLM inference and compiling code bases. Basically, you name it, The Razer Blade 18 can do it. And that's thanks to Intel's. Okay, this is a different. Oh, okay. That's thanks to Intel's Core Ultra 9 290HX plus processor with 24 cores giving you up to 5.5 GHz boost clock. And if you want a game on your Blade 18, it happens to include an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 with 24 gigabytes of VRAM. You are getting an 18 inch dual mode display. Can do 4K 240Hz or 1080p 440Hz. Sorry, excuse me. UHD plus and FHD. So I think that would be 16 by 10. And to keep everything cool under these heavier workloads, it has an advanced version vapor chamber cooling system including their updated multifan design. You get high speed connectivity including Thunderbolt 5, Wi Fi, 7, 2 and a half gig ethernet, and you get THX spatial audio from the speakers. So if you want to grab a blade 16, which is the one we talked about earlier, or a blade 18 today, all you got to do is go to the link in the description or scan this QR code that one on screen. All right, time to flip to after dark, Mr. Dan.

[Dan]

Okie dokie. Did you have a look through some of those ones in potential, Luke?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did Did. Did I. Oh, no, sorry.

[Dan]

Okay. All good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought you were just gonna tell what a sharp.

[Dan]

What a shot. What's interesting about the 16 inch there also has a 5090 in it, which is kind of cool if you want a smaller one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

Luke, what mic are you using?

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is the DJI Mic 3.

[Dan]

Luke, have you been to the Bar High 5 in Tokyo? If not, highly recommend it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't drink. If it's a drinking bar, it's a bar.

[Linus Sebastian]

It seems to be a drinking bar.

[Dan]

Luke, how have you liked.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I appreciate the suggestion, but I will

[Dan]

probably least give it FH6.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I played it a bit at WH Land. We were racing some people. It seems cool. It seems like FH5 in Japan, which is cool.

[Dan]

With no cappuccino. I'm still angry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No cappuccino, no ABCs.

[Dan]

There's the Autozam.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, no. 2009 Acura.

[Dan]

Just absolute worst game.

[Linus Sebastian]

What a scam.

[Dan]

Scam. Absolute scam. I guess for both of you. What is the. What is your least favorite part of maintaining the WAN show streak?

[Luke Lafreniere]

This.

[Linus Sebastian]

Needing to go somewhere when the Land show is on. Yeah, yeah. The. The challenging hours when you're traveling of like aligning the people who are not traveling and the people who are traveling is pretty tough, I think. Overall I like the WAN show streak. It's. It's just, it's such a part of my weekly routine at this point that I feel like if it was a Friday afternoon and I was not doing WAN show, I'd like, I'd start to get like kind of agitated. Like I wouldn't really know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It gets weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Because we've done it early. Like we've done very early in the day when shows and it'll be like Friday afternoon and I'm like get like the shakes. Like I don't know where to go. I don't know what to do.

[Dan]

Yeah. I've been doing a show for every Friday, at least for the last 12 years.

[Linus Sebastian]

Who needs the social life? No, I mean that's stupid.

[Dan]

Yeah, it's dumb. We got Luke.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah,

[Dan]

Luke, have you heard of Mitchell the Moose Hooper? He's a Canadian strongman and reigning world's Strongest Man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah, I know. Absolutely.

[Dan]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Dude. Dude's a beast, guys. Seems like a nice dude too. Yeah.

[Dan]

I know it's a long shot, but would it. What would it take for you to do a 30 day switch to Mac or Apple challenge? Would love to hear your thoughts on Mac OS after your recent experience with Linux.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I could do it on my laptop, I'm sure. And that could be interesting and neat. Doing that on my desktop would be the death of me, I think.

[Dan]

What if we gave you like a cheese grater or something with a Bulbasaurus sticker on it to make you feel better?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, we still have a Mac Pro kicking around, so you could take that trash can. Nah, nah. No, we have like, a new cheese grader stone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it could be interesting, like forcing myself to get used to using Mac OS and seeing if I could find a way to not just. Just hate it by.

[Dan]

Yeah, good luck with that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, exposure.

[Dan]

Actually, some exposure does help. Yeah. Hey, lld. I work as a flight instructor and find my students tend to get humbled when they try to land. When is the time you have found yourself being overconfident only to be humbled and get an appreciation for a skill?

[Linus Sebastian]

I find that the older I get, the more sure I am that whatever someone else is doing is probably pretty hard. I think the last time that something was even more harder than I expected it to be.

[Dan]

Now you are.

[Linus Sebastian]

Was. Was when someone tried to coach me on cranking 90s in Fortnite and just. I watched them do it and, You know, it looked like. Okay, it looked like it was, like, hard, but that I should at least be able to do it at slow speed. But I just, like. I couldn't. I couldn't. Muscle memory.

[Dan]

It.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was. I mean, admittedly I only tried for like four minutes or something, but it just. Ah, okay. Rocket League's another one. Rocket League doesn't look that hard when you watch someone who really knows what they're doing playing it. But, I mean, you've got to decide like, five seconds ahead of time where you need to be in five seconds with basically pinpoint precision, especially aerials. Like, it's ridiculous. Like, I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Air dribbling is probably witchcraft.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was trying to play with my son and his friends one time and I was like, oh, yeah. This is like when my dad tried to play Mario with us. And it was just kind of a waste of everyone's time. I'll just. I'll be in the room and I'll cheer. That's what I'll do. That's how I can contribute.

[Dan]

Hey, questions for Linus? Have your kids tried running Linux on their machines?

[Linus Sebastian]

I think you can go if you want. Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I was just gonna say.

[Dan]

Am I. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Take off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think there's any more. Okay.

[Dan]

Yeah, I gotta say. No, Say it right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, should I call him? No, what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You could call me.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll call him.

[Dan]

Okay, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Calling me would be fine. Okay, bye.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. No, my kids have not tried Linux on their machines. Because if my kids try Linux, that's me trying Linux. And I have. I've done enough trying Linux and troubleshooting for a while. My next foray, I think, is going to be just on one machine this time. I think it was very ambitious what I did where I tried to do all my machines at once with different distros. It was a lot of fun, but it was also. It kind of consumed a lot of the appetite that I have had for trying an OS for just a little bit here. How you doing over there, Dan? That's what she said. He's agile like that. Look at that. He's already back in his chair. It's crazy.

[Dan]

Next. Howdy. From Texas DLL Markiplier finally released Iron Lung on YouTube. He mentioned that there was going to be a collab with y' all and I'm wondering what happened with that. Cheers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ah, we just both got busy. I think he and I have an exchange on discord of just like, hey. And then several months pass. Hey, sorry I missed you. Blah, blah. Several months pass. Oh, yeah, thanks for getting back to me. Sorry, I've been really busy. And then several months pass and it's like, hey, yeah, I'm still totally down to do something. I know it's been a while. You know, no pressure. Like, it's. I think one day. One day we'll do something. I'd love to, and I think he'd love to, but it's been. It's been a very. It's been a very busy life for both of us as a whole. Thank you, Dan. That is actually perfect in every way. You've truly done a marvelous thing.

[Dan]

I'm a professional streamer.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. All right.

[Dan]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

More.

[Dan]

Let's see. If a village built its own fiber Internet network and they could connect anything to the network, what would be the coolest or wildest thing for them to install for their residents? Linus Town, maybe.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know one thing that, that I want to do is like a buddy backup server target as like an employment perk here. I don't know if the cost is going to make sense anymore. This is something that I had kind of thought about doing before. Hard drives and memory and everything absolutely exploded in cost and, you know, just random perks that don't have, you know, any kind of monetary benefit are they have cost, you know, so we have to balance that with all the other sort of perks that we offer and all of our other expenses. But I think just like a village scale cloud storage would be kind of cool. Just like running your own infra. I mean I think it'd be really cool. In the age of LLMs and AI, how cool would it be to have a town wide AI that doesn't share your data outside of the town and everything's secure or encrypted or whatever? Would anybody actually do this? No. But you asked me what would be a cool or wild thing and so I'm telling you that even though I know that it's not realistic.

[Dan]

Hey lld, Any thoughts on the future of Anti cheat while gaming on Linux? Will developers start supporting Linux or perhaps some form of compatibility later? Or will Linux gamers just suffer colon sad face?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll be honest with you, I just don't think that that is ever going to be reconciled in a way that is satisfactory to Linux gamers. I think the cold hard truth is that on the Windows side, on the console side, Anti cheat protections are still making their way deeper and deeper or higher and higher in permissions levels. And on Linux the entire architecture is inherently against prohibiting the user from accessing whatever it is they want about their computer. That's like the whole idea is that you own your computer and you can do whatever you want and you can't be locked out of it. But that's also the whole way that modern anti cheat works is that there's protected spaces where you and your own applications that you install on your computer are not allowed to tamper with them. It just doesn't seem like it's going to happen there, there may be exceptions. We may get like a gaming for Linux distro that is, that is designed to be Anti cheat friendly. But then you're just, you're going to have yet another distro. Is anybody asking for that? Raiden 428 says could valve create an anti cheat? Would they have enough clout and reason? I mean they have one doesn't seem to work too great.

[Dan]

So

[Linus Sebastian]

yeah. All right, hit me down.

[Dan]

Greetings Wan Dll My second build included a 2K QD OLED monitor. I'm struggling because so far since I play simpler texture games I feel like I'm not appreciating the OLED quality. Any suggestions?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean why force something? I mean I. That's interesting. I play simpler texture games because to me the, the quality of an OLED doesn't really stand out depending on the like the textures in the games you're playing it's more, it's more that the contrast really pops. So you could play like an old like you know, by modern standards like ugly looking game. You could play like Torchlight and it would probably look flippin awesome on an oled just because like the vibes of like dungeon crawling with a super high contrast display would be awesome. One thing that might help you get the most out of it is playing around with Auto hdr. There's both the one that's included in Windows and also the one that Nvidia includes in their drivers that works with both games and with your, your passive media like movies and anime and whatever else that's something that might really help your OLED punch a little bit more. The auto stuff is not going to look good in everything but there are definitely titles and there are definitely genres of content that it actually works shockingly well with.

[Dan]

My GF loves the leggings, especially the deep pockets. Was this something Ivan asked for and how involved was she in the design features?

[Linus Sebastian]

Design features, not much. But Yvonne was quite involved in just like trialing the quality and the fit as part of our typical development process. Like it's something that I do for, I'm afraid to say every like men's garment we've ever done because I don't know that for sure but 99% of them like I, I try on every garment. I mean my whole philosophy is that if it's not good enough for me to wear, then it's not good enough for us to sell in our store. It's just that simple. And I'm not an ideal fit model. I don't have, you know, the context of what makes a good legging. So obviously I went to people in my life that you know, I could trust to be picky and be critical and but also have the context to give appropriate, constructively critical feedback. Because if I just looked at it I was like, oh I don't know, it looks pretty good. Or like I don't know, it doesn't look good. Like that's not helpful. I don't use them every day. So I just felt like yeah, it'd be great to get women around here at the office to be part of that process. And it wasn't just Yvonne.

[Dan]

And the last one I've got for you too today. Oh, Mr. Sanu. Yeah, that's a, that's a good message. All the flow planes. Hi ltt. I have a question that I've never seen a good answer to. Why is Nintendo able to use Nvidia while Sony and Microsoft can't for consoles. Thanks again for a great show.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, it's not at all that they can't. I mean the original Xbox used like a cutting edge GeForce GPU. It was actually, if I recall correctly, it was ahead of what was available for PCs at that time as an add in card by like several months. As for Sony, trying to think, have they ever, I don't think they've ever used Nvidia. They, they rolled their own stuff and then they did that IBM thing with cell and then PS4, they went, yeah, they went Radeon and then Nintendo hasn't always used Nvidia either. In fact, I think the Switch was the first time they used AMD back in the Wii and the Wii U. So it basically comes down to all the same sort of business decisions that, you know, any company that sends out an RFQ and goes through and creates an optimal, you know, bill of materials and goes through the R and D of creating their device is going to go through where they're going to evaluate the performance and the price and the thermal and power characteristics of, of all of these, of all of their various options and they're going to go with what makes the most sense. If I had to guess, I would say that Nvidia, or excuse me, Nintendo went with Nvidia for the Switch because nobody else had anything that was competitive at that power profile for the level of performance that they wanted to make the Switch as portable as it was. And then with the Switch 2, I talked about this a fair bit in the lead up to it. Nvidia's DLSS is just plain better than the other things that are available in the market. And so if I was Nintendo and I was trying to build a very portable, very slim, very power efficient gaming system, I might be willing to pay the Nvidia tax. And you bet your butt there's going to be an Nvidia tax compared to what Microsoft and what Sony are, are paying from AMD. I mean, it's no secret that in the PS4 and Xbox One days, those contracts selling those Radeon chips and those CPUs for consoles was a big part of AMD's ongoing survival. Nowadays, not so much, but back then it was very important. So I suspect that Microsoft and Sony got pretty good deals. All right, I'm gonna give a certain man a call. Sorry for triggering everybody with this sound. Okay. Dan? Oh, right.

[Dan]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Same channel time.

[Dan]

Yeah, May not for you.