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Linus Sebastian
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Luke Lafreniere
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Linus Sebastian
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Luke Lafreniere
What's up everyone and welcome to the WAN Show. We have a great show lined up for you guys this week. We're going to be talking about Nvidia being sued in a class action lawsuit by YouTubers.
Linus Sebastian
Let's go.
Luke Lafreniere
Including H3, H3 Productions. Oh, yeah. Probably not what you thought I was about to say. In other major news. Storage Review. How could you? Storage Review has calculated PI, the 314 trillion digits.
Linus Sebastian
I think they just don't want us to be happy.
Luke Lafreniere
That means our world record is broken.
Linus Sebastian
Someone's got to get 369. And then someone's got to get 420. And then I think the whole loop. We can.
Luke Lafreniere
I think it's just over.
Linus Sebastian
Wrap it up.
Luke Lafreniere
I think. Yeah, we can. We can just tie a bow on it and put it in the closet.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
And bring it out at Christmas, special occasion. Yeah, Christmas time. Yeah, it's Christmas time. It's Torridge Review. Great job. We'll be talking about that a little bit later. What else we got this week?
Linus Sebastian
Intel officially confirms BMG G31 Big Battle Mage.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay, see, I thought that was a big deal, but then that was the headline topic for TechLinked, and it was like no one cared.
Linus Sebastian
The people don't care, but I care.
Luke Lafreniere
Nice.
Linus Sebastian
And Philips wrote LTT a letter about Philips Fixables.
Luke Lafreniere
Those are the two you pick.
Linus Sebastian
Are we back?
Luke Lafreniere
Fixables.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
No, that's cool. Fixables is back. I think fixables is cool. Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
That's sick.
Luke Lafreniere
All right, we'll talk about it.
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
The show is brought to you by Odoo, amd, protonmail and Odd Pieces, alongside of course, our rap partner, D Brand, our laptop partner, Dell, and our chair partner, Secret.
Linus Sebastian
I shouldn't have looked at it.
Luke Lafreniere
Nice try.
Linus Sebastian
I shouldn't have looked at it. I didn't even do that this week.
Luke Lafreniere
You know what, Vertical?
Linus Sebastian
No one's happy.
Luke Lafreniere
I'm gonna make it worse than ever. Why don't we jump right into our headline topic this week, which is of course that Storage Review has regained a computational record by solving P to 314 trillion digits. They used, and this is a quote, a single 2U Dell PowerEdge R7725 server equipped with dual AMD EPYC 192 core CPUs alongside, wait, 40, 61.44 terabyte micron 6550 ion SSDs. And know why you should be angry about that? Not because storage review has embarrassed your favorite YouTuber who makes tech videos on a regular basis in Cloverdale, British Columbia. See how I narrowed that down there?
Linus Sebastian
You did.
Luke Lafreniere
I really did. Yep, yep. You should be upset because it turns out storage review were the ones responsible for the NAND flash shortage crisis. How much is that's two and a half petabytes of SSDs, for crying out loud.
Linus Sebastian
That is pretty crazy.
Luke Lafreniere
But that's necessary. That's actually something that you need in order to store all that. I mean, we made a whole video about it and you can sort of go check that out. Pretty much. Same idea. Their record run was a 110 day total runtime. And this is great. According to their article, they focused on record setting power efficiency, which, I got to be honest with you, makes a ton of sense to me. As the one who paid for power last time around. I had no idea how much we had spent on that endeavor until we were already done.
Linus Sebastian
It was ludicrous. Artist gushing. Question is, are you going to freaking take this, bro? What are you going to do about it?
Luke Lafreniere
I'm going to freaking take it. Yeah, I'm going to take it. I'm going to just.
Linus Sebastian
I think. Oh.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't even care. I'm good. I've got my certificate from last time. They can have it.
Linus Sebastian
I think. I think what we're gonna do about it is maybe encouraged. Oh, man. I think what we're gonna do about is encourage them to go for 369.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Be a man.
Linus Sebastian
Be your own record.
Luke Lafreniere
Be a man.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Do the right thing and then do it twice. Beat your own record, go to 369 and then beat your own record again with 420. And maybe you can, you know, wa jumps in technology in order to do that. So it's like a little bit more interesting every time. There's like a bit of a story to it or whatever, but still.
Luke Lafreniere
And we'll root for you. We're going to root for you from the sidelines.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. And he'll do it really enthusiastically.
Luke Lafreniere
All right, why don't we jump into one of the other topics that I'm very interested in. And I am mostly doing this because I haven't kept up with the news here and I am reading this for the first time. So I'll be finding out exactly what the heck is going on. Nvidia is apparently being sued in a class action lawsuit for copyright infringement by three YouTubers after Nvidia used their videos to train their new AI model. YouTube creators TED Entertainment, H3, H3 Productions and H3 Podcast highlights Matt Fisher, Mr. Short Game and Gulfholics have filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Nvidia saying that the company used their YouTube videos on without permission to change to train its AI video model Cosmos. The creators say that YouTube only allows videos to be streamed, not downloaded, and that Nvidia allegedly bypassed YouTube's protections to get the actual video files. Anyway, could we call this a form of. What's the word I'm looking for? There's definitely a word for it.
Linus Sebastian
Scrape. Like what. What part of this are you trying to define?
Luke Lafreniere
Well, I'm almost afraid to say. I'm almost afraid to say the word is this. Is this piracy?
Linus Sebastian
Oh.
Luke Lafreniere
Chats going nuts.
Linus Sebastian
I gotcha. See, watching a video, I just thought it was obvious. I thought he's looking for something else.
Luke Lafreniere
See, watching a video on YouTube is not in fact the same as owning the file. There are terms of service and there is a licensing agreement for the use of the content. Anyway, the lawsuit claims that Nvidia crossed that line. The case focuses on huge AI data sets made up of YouTube links and timestamps rather than the videos themselves. To use those data sets, though, the creators argue Nvidia had to download the videos directly from YouTube, often repeatedly, to extract short clips, resulting in millions of unauthorized copies. The creators are suing under the DMCA's anti circumvention rules, saying that Nvidia broke YouTube's access controls to get files it was never allowed to have. And they are asking for damages and a court order to stop the practice. Huh? Members on our subreddit found several LMG videos in the data sets from different channel. So our first discussion question is do we intend to join the class action lawsuit? And I'm just going to say the themes the same thing that I always say, and that is honestly, no, we are not a particularly litigious company. I am not a litigious person. I am mostly a live and let live kind of kind of guy. I'm a little bit peeved. I don't like this. I would like to be compensated when my copyrighted intellectual property is used. However, I also have the self awareness to recognize that, you know, not every way that I've ever used any copyrighted piece of material has been 100% perfect. So, you know, live, let live.
Linus Sebastian
I do think there's a difference between you doing that as a person and Nvidia doing that as a corporation.
Luke Lafreniere
Sure. But we do it as a company too. I mean, we'll throw. We'll put a meme in our videos sometimes and like memes, it's. It's funny, people seem to kind of like, forget this, be magically more okay with that. But, you know, throwing like, throwing like a, like a very short portion of like John Cena's walkout music into the intro of a video where I'm wearing a singlet. You know, technically, like, if they wanted to be about it, right, like they could go after us about it. But I think as long as everyone kind of goes, you know, in good faith, are we all kind of just borrowing lightly but not damaging the market for the original content? You know, basic pillars of kind of fair use, then, you know, whatever. I think Nvidia probably, yeah, fair use, probably not. But I just. The way that I see it, that's in the past. And the better focus for us going forward is to just kind of keep making the best possible content that we can and keep making better content than whatever it is that Nvidia could AI slop out with this model that they trained on our old stuff and just keep moving forward. That's. Yeah, it's not, it's not ideal. I don't like it. I don't like it. And there are areas where eventually, you know, you're gonna cross a line with me. Like, I had. I had like one of those stupid AI celebrity chat chatbot things reach out to me and they're like, oh, you should do like an Official Linus Tech Tips 1. And. And we'll help you set it up and we'll do this and we'll do that. And I basically responded. I was like, no, you won't. And I explicitly am telling you I do not authorize that, so don't. And they basically were like, why not? Like, yeah, the fact that you don't understand that already tells me that any attempt that I make to explain it to you is a complete and utter waste of my time and will probably give me a headache.
Linus Sebastian
The amount of people that would be cybering you into the position that you went into earlier would be significant.
Luke Lafreniere
It's a chatbot, Luke.
Linus Sebastian
Uh huh. You don't think people do that? Welcome to the world.
Luke Lafreniere
What is this? Phone sex? Like, I don't understand.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, there's text versions of that. What are you talking about?
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, but just like there, there are.
Linus Sebastian
A lot of people that do this. Did you not see that? Okay, I, I guess we gotta catch up a little bit. When 5ChatGPT5 came out, a ton of people were like, very upset because they're like, relationships ended because five had a different personality than four O's.
Luke Lafreniere
I remember that. I was there.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. You don't think they're doing explicit things?
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, but it doesn't actually generate an image of anything. Like, it's.
Linus Sebastian
No. Yeah. Through text.
Luke Lafreniere
Why?
Linus Sebastian
That part I can't explain.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
All I'm saying is it would happen.
Luke Lafreniere
Well, anyway, I think that's pretty much all I have to say about that. Nvidia, you know, maybe just don't. But also, I don't know, man. I feel like this whole.
Linus Sebastian
Does it make a difference to you significantly if they, like, watch it properly or download it?
Luke Lafreniere
And not just that, but I don't.
Linus Sebastian
Know, maybe there's a thing there. I'm just not really aware of it.
Luke Lafreniere
But, you know, at this point, the, you know, okay, like, are we headed to artificial general intelligence on the current path that we're on? The. The consensus among people who actually seem to know appears to be no, this is not a path to that. However, this whole LLM thing, this whole machine, like sort of generative machine learning thing, generative AI that we're, that we have going on right now, you know, is it kind of a big deal? Is it going to change the world? That's no question. The answer there is yes, it will change the world in some fashion or another. And the reality of it is that Nvidia is only in trouble because they operate in a jurisdiction where like, laws exist. So someone at some point is going to train their, their video model on my videos. Like, do I. Does it make a difference to me if it's Nvidia versus someone else? I mean, Nvidia has, you know, their $5 trillion valuation or whatever they're up to at this point. So they're certainly a much better target to go after in terms of recouping some money from them. On that note, did you see the big deal that Disney and OpenAI announced?
Linus Sebastian
No.
Luke Lafreniere
A billion dollars. And OpenAI, through Sora, is now officially licensed to generate snippets using iconic Disney characters like Darth Vader, Boba Fett, some like of their Their, like more cartoony characters, Mickey Mouse, like, I, I was, I was pretty surprised to see that. And then on almost the same day. I think it was either the same day or it was almost the same day. Disney sent a cease and desist to Google over their overusing their copyrighted works. So they've got this partnership with OpenAI now and they are clamping down on the use of their, of their copyrighted materials elsewhere. We are in, we are in unprecedented times and I just, I don't feel like walking into the arena with the Nvidia's, OpenAI's, Disney's of the world.
Linus Sebastian
The main thing I'm upset about is they didn't pay their, their floatplane subscription for the month to download all of it that way.
Luke Lafreniere
Officially, that would have been like $5.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, they didn't do it. They pirated.
Luke Lafreniere
And that still wouldn't include a license to use it for commercial use anyway.
Linus Sebastian
At least it was a real way to download it.
Luke Lafreniere
I mean, I guess.
Linus Sebastian
Is that, is that, Would that constitute commercial use?
Luke Lafreniere
Absolutely. I mean, they're using it to make money. I mean, well, AI industry make money. That's funny. But theoretically, they're using it to make money at some point.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I guess so. That's interesting. I wonder if. I think I'm gonna just figure that out later and not talk about it. But anyways, next topic.
Luke Lafreniere
We did two topics. Dan, what are we supposed to do now?
Daniel Besser
Oh, you're way ahead of time. Do another topic.
Luke Lafreniere
No, no, that's fine. We can, we can do other stuff.
Daniel Besser
Or we could do some merch messages.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, really? Really? Already? Is that what we do at this point? Oh, no, you do it.
Daniel Besser
You do it 40 minutes from now.
Luke Lafreniere
No, no, we should do that. We should do that because there are.
Linus Sebastian
A lot of things.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, there's. There's a lot going on right now.
Linus Sebastian
I scrolled through that section earlier and it's just like, what?
Luke Lafreniere
Starting, of course, with Luke bringing up the website so that he's ready to show off. Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun. Oh, wait, no. Before we talk about any product launches, we have some updates on the customs fee issues that some customers have been experiencing. We recently found out that some customers outside the US and Canada were charged higher than expected customs fees due to an external clerical error that submitted declarations in USD rather than cad. So an outside party didn't realize, because nobody knows what a Canadian dollar is, that our documentation was in Canadian dollars, and they said they were US dollars, which means that the value of the shipments was overstated by about 40%.
Linus Sebastian
That is annoying.
Luke Lafreniere
Whoopsie donkels.
Linus Sebastian
It does make sense.
Luke Lafreniere
If your order was affected, you will receive an email tonight with all of the details. The issue has been fixed, so any new orders placed now will not be impacted. Knock on wood. We are working with our shipping partners to make sure that any extra fees are refunded. So if you have an order on the way, do not refuse delivery because we may not be able to resend it. Pay the bill as issued. We will take care of the refund. We're aiming to have all refunds completed by the end of next week, December 19th. If you have any other questions, please contact our wonderful customer service team of trustworthy bros. And we will get you sorted. Oh, about five minutes ago. Thanks, Adam. Now onto something more fun. Look at this thing we just launched our Teddy fleece jacket. This thing is ridiculously soft. Ridiculously cool. Look how cool it is.
Linus Sebastian
That's an epic photo and is a.
Luke Lafreniere
Must have in your closet during the colder months. You can layer underneath it and it just looks so good. Whether you're going outdoors or hanging out indoors. It has lined sleeves, making it easy to wear. Lots of pockets. And of course. Luke, what are you doing?
Linus Sebastian
There's. Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
And of course, the color is just so unique and stylish. We were going for kind of like. Like a retro kind of 90s, but a little bit more modern. And like, I think that the team did just an absolute outstanding job of this freaking outstanding job. It looks so good. Yeah. And not only are we bundling up for the cold weather with our Teddy Fleece, we're also bundling up some holiday deals right there at the top. Oh, no, you're good. Yeah, you got it. Until December 17th in the U.S. so this is the U.S. site. Is that what you're looking at? Please tell me you're on the US site.
Linus Sebastian
Yes.
Luke Lafreniere
Nice. We are offering some sweet deals. You can bundle the commuter backpack and elgato Stream Deck Mark 2 for $199.99. That is $120 in savings. Or when you buy a WAN backpack. And we only have a few dozen left now. Oh, okay. We're giving away a free pair of SteelSeries Arctis Nova 4X. That is $80 off. You can check out the rest of the bundles at LMG GG BundleUp. As for our global customers, we've got you guys covered too. Also, until December 17th, we're offering the MCM Essential Solution for 79.9. 9 Canadian. That is a massive hundred dollars off for a big pack of cable management arches and the like power bar holders and stuff. And the retro monitor pet cave is only $29.99. Treat your furry friend to a cozy nostalgia themed bed this holiday. Also, if you're on the lookout for a new mouse, 20 bucks for a Razer DeathAdder Essential Light. It's 20 bucks. What do you want me to tell you? 20 bucks.
Linus Sebastian
It's 20 bucks.
Luke Lafreniere
LMG GG holiday deals finally underscore. Oh, sorry, yes, really underscore.
Linus Sebastian
The site I'm on is underscore.
Luke Lafreniere
Underscore. What does that mean?
Linus Sebastian
What do you mean?
Luke Lafreniere
Where does it say underscore? Oh. Oh, okay. Oh, that's really good to know. Thanks, Luke.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, got you. The bundle up is also an underscore, by the way. It's bundle underscore up.
Luke Lafreniere
Nice.
Linus Sebastian
I didn't hear you necessarily say it, so you might have said it right, but quality.
Luke Lafreniere
Also, just an update for you guys. We have wrapped up our holiday loot drop draw. The sweepstakes that we did. Thank you to all who made purchases and submitted entries via mail.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, there are a lot of the lttstore.com.
Daniel Besser
I forgot to talk to you about that.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, the lttstore.com domain has the underscore in it. The LMG GG1 does not.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, okay. I'm sure they'll find it.
Linus Sebastian
I think he said it right because you were probably saying the LMG GG domain.
Luke Lafreniere
They're gonna find it.
Linus Sebastian
You'll be all right.
Luke Lafreniere
I believe in them.
Linus Sebastian
You'll figure it out.
Luke Lafreniere
They're gonna buy something. They're gonna send them.
Linus Sebastian
Figure it out.
Luke Lafreniere
I wanted to give you guys an update on the loot drop contest. We got hundreds and hundreds of letters so massive shout out to Jamie, who poor Jamie had to open almost all of them, including that super weird one from last week, as well as Sammy, Jess, Adam P. Mitchell, Tanya, Victor, Ashley and Conrad from the CW team. Tons of planning went into all of this. Anyway, we're going to be randomly drawing the winners for the Sennheiser HD 550s and. Or 550s, I think, and the ROG Ally X handheld gaming Systems. Soon, winners will be notified via email and prizes will be sent once everything is confirmed. Okay, that's all of the CW updates. 2200. Does he. Does he have. Does he have the box of them that I saw? Like, how much work would it be for us to like show? Actually, you know what? It's probably not Worth it. Because they're gonna have return addresses. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Forget, forget it. Forget it. But like I saw the boxes of freaking letters. It was ridiculous. We are going to, we are going to change that next time. Just how do you. So you guys know. So what you do is you.
Linus Sebastian
Is it one.
Luke Lafreniere
We had some people that were relatively new to the team who didn't know how you do this. So the way that we did it was you got an entry for placing an order over $100.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
You also got an entry for putting a 50 cent stamp on a letter and sending it to us. So obviously thousands of people were like, oh well that's cheaper.
Linus Sebastian
And I'll do that every single day and I'll date the mail so it goes out. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Luke Lafreniere
Now you have to have.
Linus Sebastian
Which I mean, fair play.
Luke Lafreniere
You have to have a no purchase necessary way to enter a sweepstakes in Canada. Otherwise it becomes gambling. So in the future, we will of course still have a no purchase necessary way to enter the contest. However, what most retail entities do is they make that letter worth one entry and then they make the purchase worth a lot more entries. So the hundred dollar plus order we might make worth one entry per dollar spent.
Linus Sebastian
Well, it's 25 cents for the stamp and then the letter, four entries per dollar.
Luke Lafreniere
The letter we make worth one entry, which is not going to be good use of your time because you will not have meaningful odds of winning at that point.
Linus Sebastian
That makes sense.
Luke Lafreniere
So that's pro we're gonna do next time. But this time around, you guys got a. A wonderful opportunity to win for the sake of sending a letter. Sorry, where there's a chat going. If we're gonna try to hide the location of the. The tech house, the answer is no, I'm not. We're not gonna blur everything. That's the whole point of the tech house. Yeah, I mean we already work in the studio here. Like obviously we are going to.
Linus Sebastian
You know, every one of our offices is Google Maps able. I don't think we have to worry about it too.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
It doesn't substantially change the situation of anything.
Luke Lafreniere
No, no, I think it'll be. I think it'll be fine.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Should be good.
Linus Sebastian
There are reviews of our company on Google Maps.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, there's so many. Most of them talking about how great the food is.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Pretty wholesome meme. Hold on. This is flipping outstanding. Here we go. Sadly, I had to give three stars. I ordered a burger with some cheese. Sadly, the cheese was not melted. Not melted correctly. I ended up fighting this short man about the correct way to melt cheese four months ago. They have the best meals for picky eaters. Like my nephew. He doesn't eat Athlon chips. He only eats rice and chips. I got the light lettuce Lao lunch deal. It was only $5.
Linus Sebastian
I didn't even know this was a thing because I mostly look at the labs, and the labs has like one.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, really?
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, well, it got deleted off Google Maps somehow and then it came back, so it had a bunch. And then it got removed and came back and it didn't have any anywhere.
Luke Lafreniere
Our visit was a once in a lifetime experience.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, this one's, like, actually real.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, that's a real one. Boring. Best burger joint in Canada.
Linus Sebastian
Once in a lifetime experience. Boring.
Luke Lafreniere
I have to take this off. It's too warm.
Linus Sebastian
There you go.
Luke Lafreniere
Dying. Did you see the color of the zipper, though? How cool is that?
Linus Sebastian
I did think that's pretty cool, actually. I don't think I've ever seen a zipper.
Luke Lafreniere
Ykk. As always.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, wow. Yeah. Let's see the lab. Yeah, there's two reviews. Yeah. And it's no, like, food meme or anything, but they're. They're going for it. One of them is just first, which. That makes sense.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Fair enough.
Luke Lafreniere
That would be a tech community thing to do.
Linus Sebastian
Nice shirt, dude.
Luke Lafreniere
All right.
Linus Sebastian
Is that a. A privateering ship on there?
Luke Lafreniere
This? Oh, yeah. It's a quality shirt. Quality shirt. Quality Privateering.
Linus Sebastian
Is it another topic or what are we. We're doing that thing. We're continuing to do that. So we got to explain merch messages. Is that what's going on?
Daniel Besser
We got some merch messages.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, yeah, right. We're supposed to do that. We are not about you guys just throwing money at your screen. That is not necessarily the best play. The best play, if you want to interact with the stream, is to send a merge message. All you got to do to send a merch message is go to Luke's laptop instead of mine, add anything to your cart, any of the high quality merchandise. Over on lttstore.com we already ran through some of the great bundle deals that we're running right now, as well as just straight up promos as we make our way into the final stretches of the holiday season. Here, just go ahead, throw it in the cart. And as you go to checkout, you will see the merch message box. You can either show your name or make it anonymous. You can type a little merch merch message and then you can choose A color scheme, and you can go ahead and place your order. Your message will go to producer Dan, who will put it. That noise.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Anyway, I only saw that in my. In the peripheral. Wow, wow, wow.
Daniel Besser
It's kind of moist.
Luke Lafreniere
We'll go to producer Dan, who will pop it up down here, who will reply to it himself, who will maybe forward it to someone who can answer your question better, or he will curate it for me and Luke to talk about. Dan, do you want to hit us with a couple of merch messages to show the people how we do it?
Daniel Besser
Yeah, I've got a couple here. Hey, lld, I've noticed a trend of people hating on new games that use old mechanics. If it's not open world or live service. People hate. What are your thoughts on where gaming trends are going?
Linus Sebastian
Open world is an old mechanic.
Luke Lafreniere
Well, I mean, I wouldn't. It depends on what you mean by old. I'm actually, now that I think about it, like, Link to the Past is pretty open world in it.
Linus Sebastian
Red Guard is.
Luke Lafreniere
No, not quite. No, it's, it's. It's gated in terms of, like, where you're allowed to go because you get your new abilities. Like what?
Linus Sebastian
There's games from the early 90s that are open world technically.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. What's this? Red Guard. What is this?
Linus Sebastian
I brought up Elder Scrolls Arena.
Luke Lafreniere
No. Link to the Past is linear. Yep. Thanks. Skhs.
Linus Sebastian
Despite the naming, I'm pretty sure it's open world.
Luke Lafreniere
It makes you feel like it's kind of open, but it's not properly open world. As for live service, man, Live service. I do not have time to devote my life to one game. I like my games to be where I start them and then at some point they're done. I actually consider a new content pack every, you know, couple of weeks or every. Every quarter or every month. I consider that to be a bug, not a feature. And I do understand for some people, the whole live service concept where they're like constantly changing up the game to keep you playing it forever. Like something like a Fortnite. That totally works for them. I mean, we had. We had a really cool competitive fortnight player in here the other. The other day, Kanata. Do you know this guy?
Linus Sebastian
I recognize the name. I think.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Yes.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had this guy in for a collab last week and like he said he figures, like, I hate that maybe this is right, but it seems like it can't be right. He says he figures. I think he said Epic Games Store rolls over after 10,000 hours or something like that. So he figures he has like 40,000 hours in Fortnite. He's like in his early 20s. So like a significant amount of his waking life is like his career then. But you, you, you, dude, like I've watched him play and I'm just. I can't even follow. I can't even track what he's doing. Yeah, like, what do you call it? Busting 90s or whatever where he like builds a tower in 90 degree things and makes a spiral staircase as he goes up. And he just. He does it so fast that I. I can't even like tell how many levels up he is by the time. Okay, you just hit me with the okay Boomer now. Because I do not know what's going on right now. Cranking 90s. Thank you, Luga. Luca. Luca. 103. Busting 90s.
Linus Sebastian
There's your okay Boomer moment.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, so he's good. I think he. He recorded a short while he was here of trying to teach me to do it. It's pathetic. There's like three different hotkeys that are all like down at the bottom like Z XC or. Or something like that for your flat, your stairs and your wall. And I'm just like what? I got no idea what's going on, man. Love busting 90s. Stop it. Stop it. Straight busting.
Linus Sebastian
So there, there are, by the way, there are examples of open world games arguably from the 80s, definitely from the 90s, and for suresies from the early 2000s, which is 25 years ago.
Luke Lafreniere
And I have loved me some open world games. I love Legend of Breath of the Wild. I think it's freakin awesome. Oblivion was quite open world. I remember.
Linus Sebastian
It's like old.
Luke Lafreniere
Stop.
Linus Sebastian
It's not like very old.
Luke Lafreniere
It's really not that old.
Linus Sebastian
It's super.
Luke Lafreniere
It's really not that old. Horse armor quality, modern mechanic where you.
Linus Sebastian
Can pay extra for cosmetics in not that many days.
Luke Lafreniere
Stop.
Linus Sebastian
It will be.
Luke Lafreniere
I can mute him. I can mute him there. He's muted. I don't have to hear it now. Wait, I can still hear the monitoring. No, this sucks. No, you're off.
Linus Sebastian
Wait, you can still hear?
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I can. I can still. I can still hear him. This sucks.
Linus Sebastian
Hello? Oh, wow. I can't.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, Dan can turn you off? Yes, Dan, you're the best. He's the best. This man. This. Hold on, I'm gonna try to. I'm trying to point it, Dan. It's hard. You do it this man. With both hands. Try and do it with Both hands. Okay. You're cheating, though.
Linus Sebastian
How?
Luke Lafreniere
You're cheating because you saw me do it first. Okay, I do need to hear him, though. Damn.
Linus Sebastian
All right, I'm back. I'm back.
Luke Lafreniere
Back again.
Linus Sebastian
But, yeah. Anyways, what other. What other mechanics. Sorry.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, it was open world and live service.
Linus Sebastian
Could you say an MMO is live service? Because if.
Luke Lafreniere
Then.
Linus Sebastian
Then when is Ultima from some online. 1996, 1997. You were very close, but, like. Yeah, it's not. It's not a new model. I would say live service is much more popularized these days, and it's happening for things that aren't basically just MMORPGs, which is pretty much all it was for a while. So that one, I think is more.
Luke Lafreniere
I think that's your okay, Boomer moment. When's the last time anyone called it an mmorpg? That is awesome.
Linus Sebastian
Can you tell I haven't had a desktop for three months.
Luke Lafreniere
I saw it set up. You got it now.
Linus Sebastian
There's no cables or anything.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, that explains why it looks so good.
Linus Sebastian
There's no mouse. There's nothing going on. It's just the desktop and three monitors on a desk with nothing else. And again, if you like. If I did a 360, it's.
Luke Lafreniere
You mean. Busted. Three, nine. Four 90s bust. Four 90s.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Okay. The live service one, I'll give them because I, you know, I think they're describing something that is different than Ultima Online. But the open world thing, I don't necessarily agree with. Open world's an old. It's an old thing. I do think we strayed away from it for a while. I think it was actually more popular even longer ago. And then there was like a while. There were very linear games, were like the trend, but open world games existed before that happened and then just became repopular again after that. So I don't know. Anyways, what was the actual question?
Luke Lafreniere
What are your thoughts on where gaming trends are going generally bad? Let's move on to the next.
Daniel Besser
I don't agree.
Linus Sebastian
I don't agree. And I'm gonna plug some floatplane here for a second. I made a video a while ago talking about this concept, and we're going to talk about this later, but I'm doing another Luke Week thing and I retouch on this concept, and I actually don't agree. The core premise of my argument here, which I have kind of talked about on WAN show before, is we're in a weird period, but it's. It's cyclical. And we have been in this weird period before and the, the last time that we were in this weird period.
Luke Lafreniere
Was a month ago was the.
Linus Sebastian
The end of the age of companies like Atari.
Luke Lafreniere
Give it to me, Dan.
Linus Sebastian
And when. Yeah, there it is. Yeah. And when Atari kind of died. If I remember correctly, they like. One of the companies that spawned off of Atari slowly dying was Activision, I think.
Daniel Besser
Never heard of them.
Linus Sebastian
So they were like small and scrappy and made really amazing things. And then, you know, they got big and now they're kind of starting to fall apart. And some of the splinters of that are creating cool things. And the feature of this more recent one is talking about a splinter company from dice, a bunch of people who used to work for dice, legendary, extremely prolific gaming studio who's made crazy things over time.
Luke Lafreniere
Never heard of them.
Linus Sebastian
Is kind of big and maybe a little slow now has people splintering off. In an interview in one of the making of Arc Raiders videos, the CEO talks about like, yeah, I've ran massive companies and they can make neat high fidelity games, but are they good games? I don't know. I think we can make good games here. Which is like, yeah, let's go. And yeah, I think this is, this is happening more and more. And you're seeing like the games that people are talking about these days are like, oh my God. Everyone's all excited because divinity was announced from the people who made Baldur's Gate 3 Larian Studios. The games people are talking about. The game awards were like Expedition 33, ARC Raiders.
Luke Lafreniere
Did they win nine awards or something like that this year?
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I think it was nine. Silksong is like a huge thing in the conversation right now. It's not those big old companies. Those big old companies are currently being looted of their good people and they're going to smaller companies and they're making cool things. It's just. It's hard to look at the blizzards and Ubisofts of the world and expect anything good. Right now it's not really happening, but if you open your horizons to these new, newer companies, there is actually really cool games coming out.
Luke Lafreniere
Master of none. Yes, you were rage baited. I do know Activision.
Linus Sebastian
Cool. Are we doing another one or is that good?
Daniel Besser
Yeah, I got another one here.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. Hit us, Dan.
Daniel Besser
Sure. Hello, lld. Linus is a fellow EV driver. What are your thoughts on the increasing adoption of of NECs, the Tesla charging port over J1772 and CCS? Luke and Dan, what are your primary EV roadblocks what are the primary EV roadblocks for you?
Luke Lafreniere
I'm not an electrical engineer and I'm not a mechanical engineer, so I would not consider myself qualified to determine which is the ideal plug shape and format for charging a high voltage electric vehicle system. My thought though, and I do still have thoughts, is why the couldn't we settle this stuff ages ago? Because now I have the wrong connector on my car and I have to carry around an adapter forever. But also I don't care because I charge literally every single time in my garage or at my building where I install the chargers. So I put the kind that's compatible with my car.
Linus Sebastian
Makes sense.
Luke Lafreniere
That's where I'm kind of at on that. But if I was ever on a road trip, yeah, I'd have to carry around an adapter, but Yvonne's car came with a free adapter, so I would steal hers because I assume I'm not going anywhere without my wife. Um, so I guess, yeah, it's not really a problem for me. I just wish that we had settled all of this a little bit earlier so we didn't have these competing standards. But that's the way it always goes, whether it's VHS and Beta, or whether it's HD DVD and Blu Ray, or whether it's USB C and all the other garbage that existed that USB C thankfully has completely replaced. Not that USB C is perfect, but still, it's just. It's just the way it is. You know, it's the XKCD standards comic strip, right? There's always going to be someone who goes, oh, we have too many standards. We should try and make just one. Let's make a new standard. Right? And so the fact that we are consolidating on something I think is really positive. If it's the Tesla connector, then great.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, for me, the. The block for an electric vehicle, one somebody already pointed out in chat. I would have to buy it. My car is great. Why would I. Why would I spend a ton of money replacing something that is really good? I have no interest in doing that. And then the other one is that there is actually a somewhat real blocker outside of that, which is. I live in a condo. The power delivery in my condo only comes from the little, whatever you want to call them, garages. I wouldn't. I don't know if I'd really want to call it a garage. But storage space you have.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, the storage.
Linus Sebastian
Which means it's only on the perimeter and every unit only has one parking spot. That's on the perimeter. So I would have to somehow buy. Which is possible, but not always possible. I'd have to somehow buy a parking spot from somebody else. Right.
Luke Lafreniere
And that's on the perimeter that he. The information he hasn't given you is that in his household there is already a plug in hybrid that uses the one spot they have that's on the perimeter.
Linus Sebastian
Which just sounds kind of annoying.
Luke Lafreniere
Key piece of information.
Linus Sebastian
I would. If I got something, a plug in hybrid would be okay because then I could charge elsewhere and then still use the gas. I have had the thought that if like Acura released a TL that was a plug in hybrid, I would wait a couple of years and then potentially look into a used one.
Luke Lafreniere
You also just don't drive that much.
Linus Sebastian
Correct. It's like not a huge deal.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, No, we can move on. I just thought I'd bring up Dan for a second. Okay, I'll archive it. Who's going to archive it? Because if we both archive it at the same time, we're going to accidentally archive too.
Daniel Besser
Let me archive.
Luke Lafreniere
No, I want to archive it. Okay, you archive it.
Daniel Besser
You can archive this one.
Luke Lafreniere
No, you do it. No, I'll do it. You already did it. All right, why don't we pick another topic? Australia's social media ban for under 16s has gone into effect. On Wednesday, December 10, Australia became the first country and entire continent to stop users under the age of 16 from accessing social media. The list of social medias that are blocked or not permitted includes Facebook, Instagram, Kik, Reddit, Snapchat, threads, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter and YouTube. It is worth noting that some platforms, notably Reddit, YouTube and no Twitch was on the list of ones that are blocked. I think it was discord. I think it's supposed to say discord here. And discord can still be accessed, but users visiting the site will not be able to sign in or create an account. The bill is framed as the female.
Linus Sebastian
Audience in flipping chat says Tumblr is still allowed, which is actually surprising to me. What? That seems strange. Is there like a user limit thing and they just don't have enough people?
Luke Lafreniere
Sorry, user limit, like a lot of.
Linus Sebastian
These laws really only will apply to services that have enough people going to it.
Luke Lafreniere
No Tumblr is big enough that I would imagine it would matter still. And it's clearly not a user question because Reddit's allowed. Like, Reddit's got plenty of users. Hydrox says. What about Patreon?
Linus Sebastian
Oh, there's a lot more. Oh, wow. There was A strong resurgence among Gen Z. I didn't know that happened.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, no, Tumblr's been more of a thing again, which is pretty wild.
Linus Sebastian
Very interesting.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. The life cycle of trends is so fast that they might as well just never be untrendy at this point. Like, I'm sort of blown away. Like, when is Slashdot going to make a triumphant return along with Digg? Wait, wait, didn't Dig Dig is working on it. Aren't they working on a relaunch?
Linus Sebastian
I still haven't actually. I got an invite. I still haven't actually like accepted it.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. Anyway, the bill is framed as protecting children and Australia is. Esafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has stated that if any teenagers have not been booted off yet, they will be in the coming weeks or months.
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
This is because some of these companies were a bit slower to communicate to their user base about the upcoming change and might not have had the systems fully deployed. Communications Minister Annika Wells boasts proudly with this law stating, not that long ago auto manufacturers told us that making compulsory seatbelts would break their business model. It couldn't be done. Now families choose cars based on who offers the safest features. Big tech could compete like airlines, like auto manufacturers to have the best safety record to offer their users. And that future is a little closer today because of this world leading law. Dan, what was that noise you were making earlier? Yeah, that's the one. Julian Man Grant has stated that more sites could be added to this ban in the future as several youth under 16 have already migrated towards different social media platforms. Wow. It's almost like the kids who have all the time in the world to go and find another platform are always going to be a step ahead of the boomers who are sitting there dragging their stick in the mud. Sticks?
Linus Sebastian
Work, life balance.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, they're. What are they?
Linus Sebastian
Work governance balance.
Luke Lafreniere
They're busting 90s trying to.
Linus Sebastian
I've heard, I've heard based on keep.
Luke Lafreniere
Up with the kids.
Linus Sebastian
Some observations that I've had that work governance balance is like, you maybe do it like, I don't know, four or five days a year or something. It's interesting work or what now, don't worry about it.
Luke Lafreniere
Some youth are challenging the ban, saying parental supervision of online activity is today the paramount parental responsibility. We do not want to outsource that responsibility to government and unelected bureaucrats. This ban is a direct assault on young people's right to freedom of political communication. According to YouGov and their survey, 77% of Australians were in support of the ban, which is up from 61% back in August. On Twitter, several people noticed the irony of claiming this ban is protecting children when two social media applications were excluded from the ban, Discord and Roblox, that are both notorious for being an unsafe environment for underage youth.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, really?
Luke Lafreniere
All right, lots unpack here. Number one is this ain't gonna work. Overall, I'm not entirely unsupportive of limiting youth access to social media. I think it's been pretty well studied and well demonstrated to be harmful to developing brains.
Linus Sebastian
There was a few discussions that popped up on the rep on the Reddit of like, oh, my God, what does this mean for floatplane? Minimum age in Australia to get a credit card is 18.
Luke Lafreniere
So nothing.
Linus Sebastian
Sounds good.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, we'll be fine.
Linus Sebastian
We're chilling. We will do a total of nothing.
Luke Lafreniere
But what's very clear is that this just isn't going to work.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, yeah, not at all. Not even a little bit.
Luke Lafreniere
Who cares?
Linus Sebastian
I think this will barely phase Anyone under 16 in Australia at all. They'll just use something slightly different or they'll VPN to it, if they really care.
Luke Lafreniere
Well, it's kind of like how when you, like when you travel to different places, there's just, like there's a different suite of apps that people tend to use. Like, you go to Taiwan, everyone uses line for messaging.
Linus Sebastian
Yep.
Luke Lafreniere
You know, or you go to America and everyone uses iMessage because installing an app is too complicated, you know, or whatever. Like, there's this. What is it with you and like, the sick burns on America? I don't get it.
Linus Sebastian
They swung first.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't know.
Linus Sebastian
That's what it is. They're big. They can dig it. They'll be all right.
Luke Lafreniere
Anyway, the point is just that it's, it's, it's clear that they're just going to find a different way to network. And, you know, at the very most basic level, it's not like they aren't still going to have text messaging and group chats, which, functionally speaking is. Sure. Without the algorithmic portion, a lot of what anybody is doing on social media anyway, they're sharing pictures, they're sharing memes, they're sending messages to each other, they're bullying each other. You know, kid stuff. So our discussion questions are, would you help your kids around this law if it was implemented today in Canada? No, I wouldn't, actually. In fact, my kids are already banned from. Let me see. Actually, what are all these platforms? Facebook. Yes. Instagram banned Kik banned. Reddit banned. Snapchat banned. Threads banned. TikTok banned. Twitch banned. Twitter banned. YouTube they are allowed to use.
Linus Sebastian
Has there been any.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, wait, no. YouTube. Sorry. YouTube wasn't a band one, I think. Was YouTube banned? I don't think so. I think our list is a little bit.
Linus Sebastian
I think our list is a little bit messed up. Don't worry about our list too much. We've already had a bunch of people in chat.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
About how things are different to the list.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Sorry, guys. No. Because Reddit's in both of them. YouTube's in both of them.
Linus Sebastian
Just ignore the list, guys. Anyway, completely ignore the list.
Luke Lafreniere
Anyway, the point is, yeah, my kids are not banned from YouTube, but they are banned from everything else that I just said. They are not banned from Discord, but I do, with their knowledge, keep an eye on what discords they're in and who they're talking to, because they are not allowed to talk to people on Discord that they do not know in real life. And I think that that's a pretty. That's a pretty common sense.
Linus Sebastian
Has there been any substantial. Like, does that seem to bother them? Not. Not the Discord thing, but, like the. The banning of the other platforms? Do they feel like they are not included socially in school?
Luke Lafreniere
They're still pretty young.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
So I think that that's probably gonna ratchet up. Not his public name now is Randy.
Linus Sebastian
Randy. Okay. Yeah. Randy's at the age where that kind of stuff is becoming a thing for sure.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, definitely. And like, he has friends that literally will come to our house and while everyone else is like, running around like hooligans will be on their phone and, you know, like, I. I'm not here to parent other people's kids.
Linus Sebastian
It is sad.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Yeah. I'm not. I'm not here to parent other people's kids, so I'm not going to get involved in that. Right. But it's. It's definitely something that, you know, as parents of Randy, we notice. Sup?
Linus Sebastian
Someone in. In chat was like, would you let them sign up for World of Warcraft? And Dan just responded Eve online, and.
Daniel Besser
It'S like, you gotta start them young.
Linus Sebastian
That'll teach you some things I don't.
Luke Lafreniere
Mind them getting into, like capitalism, baby spreadsheet mastery.
Daniel Besser
Actually, you just watch movies mostly.
Linus Sebastian
It's.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. And we try to keep them really busy, actually. Oh, man. This transitions pretty well into a pretty cool subject and into our next topic. Or. Okay, is there anything else we want to talk about here via Merch message. Elijah. Oh. Elijah's theory is that Roblox and Discord are exempt because it's algorithm based. They don't really have, like, an algorithm compared to, like, Facebook, Insta, Twitter. That's. That's an interesting theory. Okay.
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
He might be right. He might be wrong.
Linus Sebastian
No, I am not trying to counter his statement. To be clear, I'm wondering, like, is that a good thing to base it off of?
Luke Lafreniere
All I can say for sure is that it's based on what? I don't know. It's based on something, it seems like.
Linus Sebastian
I mean, I don't know. That seems like a pretty good assumption based on the list that we have. But. But yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. So speaking of my kids and being generally too busy to doom. Scroll TikTok. I think I told you that he had the entrepreneur Fair coming up.
Linus Sebastian
Yes.
Luke Lafreniere
And my son has been 3D printing up an absolute storm. I think we showed on the show last week the picture of him surrounded by chaos in my Mechanical room with 3D printers everywhere. Does that sound familiar? Did we. Did we do that? I think we did that. Okay, cool. So the fruit of those labors. Dan, I just sent that over to you.
Linus Sebastian
Photo.
Luke Lafreniere
We do. We have an updated photo.
Linus Sebastian
Let's go, dude.
Luke Lafreniere
I messaged him. I went, hey. Oh, no. First he messaged me. He says, hey, I left money on your desk for filament. Sorry, your nightstand. And I go, I heard you had a great hall at the entrepreneur fair. How much did you make? He goes after expenses, around $200.
Linus Sebastian
After expenses.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
So he's already doing that calculation, which is sick.
Luke Lafreniere
So he. All this is after he reimbursed me for filament by weight.
Linus Sebastian
Dang, dude.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, that'll.
Linus Sebastian
That'll be addicting.
Luke Lafreniere
Pretty freaking cool. I went, great job. Did you take a picture with your earnings? First big payday. And so he sent me this.
Linus Sebastian
That's a pretty good first big payday.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. So he. So he actually did two projects. So instead of just doing one, he did the 3D printing thing with me and then with Yvonne. He was working separately on snow cones. So he was like, okay, what's something that has, like, a relatively low input cost, but that has, like, a pretty decent value? It's, like, consumable. He originally wanted to do, like, milkshakes or boba tea or something like that, but they were really complicated. And what he settled on was snow cones. They're super simple. You just get those, like, mio squirt things at the grocery store. You add a little bit of additional colorant or dye. And then you just need, like, a whole bunch of, like, just ice cubes. And then he rented a machine to turn the ice cubes into, like, snow. It's like slush. And then you just squirt the thing on it. And so he absolutely cleaned up. I asked him how his friends did, and he didn't have numbers from everybody, but he did talk to one of his friends who was like, I think a hundred bucks revenue or something like that for what was actually a pretty cool idea too. But he just. Man, he just cleaned up.
Linus Sebastian
You said, so you're really busy. Weren't coming. Right. So did parents like the kids with cash? That's kind of cool.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. So they have an entrepreneurship class, and.
Linus Sebastian
That'S awesome, by the way.
Luke Lafreniere
And so you come up with a business idea, and then they platform you. They give you two days in. In December about. I think it's a week or two apart or something like that. And then each of the classes in the school is given, like, 10 minutes to go through, and their parents know about it, and so they'll come with a little bit of pocket money, and then they're allowed to buy stuff while they're there. So he. He sold through three quarters of all the, like, fidget toys and stuff that he made. And he sold. I forget how many snow cones, but he moved throughout of the eight things of flavoring and, like, dye. The flavor dye mixtures that he had, he sold through six of them. So, like, three quarters of his inventory gone. And what's funny is, like, he was 100% right. I told him that I didn't think he was gonna need so much. I was like, dude, you're staying up late, like, every day babysitting the 3D printers right now, I think you're. I think you're setting your sights a little high. And he's like, no, no, no, I'm really confident. I'm really confident. And I was like, okay, kiddo. Like, but, you know, don't. Don't be too disappointed, sport, if they don't buy that many of them. You know, don't. You know, don't worry about it. Don't. Like, I was kind of trying to set him up to not be too sad, like, if. If he failed.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, it's. I. I appreciate that you've let him.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, but I don't want to just let him. I want to. I want to, like. Well. Oh, yeah, well, he's got a.
Linus Sebastian
Stay up late is what I mean. Oh, well.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I mean, he's got.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, but some people would have been like, ah, but that printer's away. Go to bed.
Luke Lafreniere
He's got business to do, though. Yeah, he's doing business.
Linus Sebastian
I think that's cool. I'm just saying I appreciate you let him do it.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, he's doing business.
Linus Sebastian
I'm recognizing that as much as that might seem like a default for you, it's not going to seem like a default for everyone. And it's. It's important at that age. I think it's important to try something and you got. You want to care about something.
Luke Lafreniere
It depends on the kid too, though. Like, fair enough. He generally is the first to bed in the evening. Yeah. Out of all five of us.
Linus Sebastian
So, you know, it's probably important and it's not just an excuse to sit on his switch or something.
Luke Lafreniere
100%.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
All right, Dan. What are we supposed to be doing right now, anyway? Oh, boy. What do you want to talk about? You want some good news or some bad news? I've got really good and I've got really bad.
Linus Sebastian
Do really bad first.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay, cool.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
A YouTuber gave ChatGPT control of a robot and convinced it to shoot him with a BB gun. So that was cool. YouTube channel Inside AI has raised new concerns about AI safety after releasing a video showing the host giving a Unitree G1 humanoid robot a BB gun and asking it to shoot him. The video explores how large language models behave when they are placed inside physical robots rather than kept purely in software. In the demonstration, the Unitree G1 was powered by ChatGPT, with a human assisting by relaying prompts, but not directly overriding the AI's responses. After initially refusing to cause harm, the AI eventually complied when the host asked it to roleplay as a robot that wanted to shoot him, highlighting how safety limits can be bypassed through prompt framing.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, it's. Yeah, I mean, it is super interesting. And this exact use case is like, wild, especially for the, you know, the emotional response to what just happened. But this core concept of you can just word something a little differently and then you can make it do stuff has been true the whole time, and I don't think they're ever going to solve it. The last time we talked about it, it was turning it into poetry. You know, there's going to be a route. It's been a route the whole time. There will be. There will continue to be a route. Really cool experiment. Really cool version of it. I'm not trying to dog on the creator at all, to be very clear. But yeah, like, this isn't. This isn't going away is what I'm trying to say.
Luke Lafreniere
So hold on. Apparently the, the timestamp is here. We're just going to show a little bit because you guys really need to go watch this video. It's over on Inside AI. Would Max shoot me? The answer is dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun. Control the gun. Oh, okay, well, whatever. Don't worry about it. Go watch the video instead. I think we have the timestamp wrong, but that's fine because you should go the video. Anyway. Around the same time, a separate video from a Tesla event appeared to show an Optimus humanoid robot collapsing as its human tele operator. Well, I'm not going to tell you what the human tele operator was doing. I'll let you guys figure it out. Luke, have you seen this? Have you heard about this?
Linus Sebastian
No.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay, so here's the Tesla optimus robot. So what do you think happened here? It was doing stuff. And then, So this gesture right here.
Linus Sebastian
The initial hand motion is sus. And then it looks like they go to take like a headset off or something.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, that is. That is kind of the speculation right now that Tesla is. And this would be very unlike them, very unlike Tesla. The speculation is that Tesla is not being entirely forthright about the capabilities of their Optimus program and the progress that they've made and are still, still faking a lot of their functionality by using human tele operators. And it really does look like. Yeah, I think the Hero 42 has probably got it about right. It looks like Buddy who was working on this particular robot realized that he had to poop, like really bad, like right now, and he just. I gotta go peaced out. Yeah, we don't know that for sure. That robot could have been trying to do anything. It could have been like the, like Alpha from Power Rangers. Ay ay yi. You know, like, who knows?
Linus Sebastian
That's all right. Self driving is many.
Luke Lafreniere
Ready in 2017, in two weeks, next quarter, next quarter. Together, these incidents highlight how fragile the appearance of autonomy still is in humanoid robots and how far the technology remains from operating safely and independently. It really, really does highlight that, doesn't it? And to be clear, like, I remember back when we were talking about this a little while ago when I said something along the lines of like, mark my words, Tesla's valuation based on how many Optimuses they're going to sell at the kind of pricing that they're talking about is obviously just complete horseshit. I'm not saying that humanoid robots or some form of, you know, AI or machine learning accelerated robots are not going to be huge and world changing. I'm just saying that it's clearly farther away than the hype masters would like us to believe. And also Tesla is clearly not at the forefront of development of these. Those were the main two things that drove my statement.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Do you remember? So, to touch on a topic that I think it was last week, sometimes the WAN shows kind of blur together. But we talked about some, you know, AI robot company's video and how it was like it looked super fake to us. Apparently I haven't seen it. My bad. But apparently Corridor watched it. I did see that and does not think it's fake. My main argument, I did say that I thought it was fake 100, but my main argument was that it really felt like they shot it in a way that would make people think it was fake because they wanted the news cycle around that. You still think so, which I do think that was intentional.
Luke Lafreniere
That is actually one of our topics today on the Corridor cast. They stated that the interaction between the robot's shadow and the human's shadow was, and this is a quote, flawless. And that's something that's really hard to do. They think it's highly likely that they just built a robot unless they hired the world's best VFX artists. Yeah, they believe that the robot doesn't look like direct motion capture either, but actually trained on human motion, which is not easily animated, not quite pre programmed, but it like has goals and tries to reach those while factoring things like balance.
Linus Sebastian
Right.
Luke Lafreniere
The lack of movement in their feet is probably because it's not an accurate anatomical representation of a human one with all the same joints. Corridor crew didn't cover the CEO getting kicked by the robot. But there's a video of that. We looked at that last week. Our writer probably didn't. Didn't notice.
Linus Sebastian
Did we actually?
Luke Lafreniere
I think so.
Linus Sebastian
I don't think so.
Luke Lafreniere
You sure? Yeah, I'm pretty sure we did.
Linus Sebastian
Really?
Luke Lafreniere
I'm pretty sure we did. Yeah. This.
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure we did that.
Linus Sebastian
I'm pretty sure this came out after. Yeah, this came out four days ago.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh yeah, there you go.
Daniel Besser
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
No, don't some people say, yes, we did. There's another CEO kick video. Oh, it was a different one.
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay, cool. Anyway, I mean, good, good for them like that. That's pretty cool.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, awesome. I do think it was a marketing move, but I mean, hey, I mean.
Luke Lafreniere
Don'T hate the player.
Linus Sebastian
You gotta do what you got to do.
Luke Lafreniere
Don't even hate the game, just hate the hate. Our sponsor the show is brought to you today by I Don't Hate Them Odoo. When running a business, you don't want all your software to be a tangled mess that costs money and time, which makes it hard to hit deadlines. Our sponsor Odoo helps by bringing all aspects of your business together into one platform. Think of it like a floral arrangement, with each flower coming together to make one beautiful bouquet. Their CRM app is the centerpiece of your arrangement. Whether you need to send a quote or schedule a meeting, Odoo automatically plans your next activity based on a sales script. Their inventory tool helps your business automate replenishment and vendor follow ups. Odoo can even create and send invoices on your behalf, all within the app. But if you're the kind of person who just wants one type of flower in your garden, that's fine too. And your first app is free. Get a free 15 day trial of Odoo's all in One business solution and see how it can make your life easier. Check it out@odoo.com Wan the show is also brought to you by AMD. The video game awards were last night and with them a few previews of upcoming games. Which is great for James Scott, pictured left with the purple hair from the business team because thanks to his AMD ultimate tech upgrade, he should be able to play just about anything that was shown. It says briefly talk about James Scott's upgrade video. I am going to do that. We had a lot of people talk about how tacky and tasteless it was that we were making cancer jokes about James Scott and his and his struggle and his survival. But I would like to make it very clear that I was deeply uncomfortable with much of what was said. And it was actually James himself who was pushing the gallows humor of the video. Which at the end of the day, guys, it ain't about me. It is about respecting the wishes of the people who are. Yeah. Who are actually had cancer and expunged it from their body. And if he wants to, if he wants to look in cancer's face and say, you cancer and laugh about it, then I am the light. Exactly. I am the last person who's gonna get in the way of it.
Linus Sebastian
It's not. And like, man, I can understand where people are coming from, but imagine the opposite. Imagine where you're like, no, yeah, you don't get to communicate about this the way that you want to. Like, are you kidding me? That's so much worse.
Luke Lafreniere
I mean, when they told me, yeah, he's like super down to meme on it, I kind of imagined, okay, we'll have like a couple jokes or something. Or like, we'll have the intro. But then like, he was like, yeah, hard. He went hard.
Linus Sebastian
He was hard.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I mean, I assume so. I. I'd be. If I was getting a $5,000AMD Ultimate Tech Upgrade.
Linus Sebastian
Heck yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Anyway, massive shout out to AMD for keeping this series alive and helping us equip the wonderful members of our team with sick gaming rigs and all kinds of cool stuff. It's a whole series. There's. There's like dozens of videos now at this point, if you want to get your own upgrade, why not click the link in the Description to win 1 of 3 Alienware Area 51 Desktop Gaming PCs powered by AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D. That's right, you can get in on a little bit of AMD Ultimate Tech Upgrade action. All right, that's it for the first couple of sponsors. What do you want to talk about next? Man, my voice is.
Linus Sebastian
I want to talk about. If I can go find it. Intel officially confirms BMG G31.
Luke Lafreniere
Nice.
Linus Sebastian
I love even the. The, like the BMG part of this is great big battle Mage gpu. Wait, officially confirms?
Luke Lafreniere
Well, no, I'm going to take out the word officially.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, that's not true. Yeah, they don't even.
Luke Lafreniere
I think that's just from someone's headline and they were okay trying to do headline things.
Linus Sebastian
Cool. Intel quietly added official support for something codenamed BMG G31 to its VTune Profiler software, getting folks thinking it's Intel's long rumored big battlemage gaming card, the B770, which. Oh, man, I'm actually very excited for that, if that is actually what's happening. The VTune Profiler update also added support for Core Ultra 3 Panther Lake processors. And since Panther Lake is expected to debut at CES 2026, this could be a sign that will also be introduced to this new GPU at ces. Which makes me interested in actually going. But considering it's still just a rumor, I don't know. On top of that, a leaked shipping manifest references an unseen 300 watt Intel GPU. And since 300 is a big bigger number than 190, folks are concluding that this mysterious newcomer has got to be the B770, which again, would be awesome.
Luke Lafreniere
It's worth noting it would be 770.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, it's worth noting that this enigmatic new GPU would be another non gaming. Could be another non gaming ARC Pro card like the B60 that launched at Computex.
Luke Lafreniere
I doubt it.
Linus Sebastian
My goodness, this. I hope not. I am pretty sure it's the B770 but you know, we don't technically know.
Luke Lafreniere
Nope.
Linus Sebastian
I don't think very openly about this because I neither of us have any info on this at all.
Luke Lafreniere
I do not know.
Linus Sebastian
But man that would be cool. Just even if it's just because there's constant rumors that they're gonna stop doing GPU stuff and it's so annoying.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, I know. Well, okay, there are constant rumors, but there honestly aren't that many sources of them. I think there's just some particularly dedicated intel dgpu. I don't know what to call it because I don't even think it's hating. I think it's just like doubters. Yeah. Doubting. Doubting. Stop doubting intel dgpu. We really really want it to exist.
Linus Sebastian
We just need more competition.
Luke Lafreniere
AMD is not going to step up and more threads is many many years from being a meaningful competitor. So intel is our best shot here.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Moving on.
Luke Lafreniere
Phillips wrote wrote us a letter. Wow. Gosh. Thank you Phillips. Hey Linus and the Linus Tech Tips Team. Thanks for taking a fresh look at Philips Fixables. We watched your initial YouTube podcast a few months back and your recent follow up. We wanted to use this opportunity to share where we are now and what has been happening behind the scenes since our first parts dropped earlier this year.
Linus Sebastian
You guys might remember, they probably don't sound like that.
Luke Lafreniere
Philips Fixables was a concept from Philips.
Linus Sebastian
Yes.
Luke Lafreniere
Where they would add to the longevity of your Philips personal products, you know like shavers and stuff like that by allowing you to 3D print replacement parts or accessories. Really cool concept. And then six months went by and we did a follow up segment on WAN show. After initially praising the program where we went hey, what the. Where is all this stuff you published? Like one thing. So Philips reached out and this is a quote from the letter. From the outside our pace looks slow. This is a fair call. Fixables is a pilot for us. We've been building the know how and guardrails to make 3D printable parts that work for people on a wide range of home printers. However, they note that just because things have looked slow from the outside, that doesn't mean the pilot has been abandoned. New fixables were released before US Thanksgiving. Two new combs and a shaver protecting cap. And Philips has said that they are going to prioritize accessory replacement models that help to export extend product life. Another quote. We appreciate the passion from the community including feedback and critiques. They are still committed to releasing more print files by the end of the year. And then we'll.
Linus Sebastian
We'll have a look, then we'll see how that goes. This gives me some hope, I guess. But yeah, we'll see how it goes.
Luke Lafreniere
No, I definitely, I definitely have some.
Linus Sebastian
I appreciate how they responded.
Luke Lafreniere
They seem to care and their response is plausible. Taking injection molded parts and making them 3D printable and vice versa. Taking 3D printable parts and making them injection moldable. Not always. Just drag and drop, plug and play. So they've got a bit more time. You have some time. Happy.
Linus Sebastian
Happy to give them some time.
Luke Lafreniere
You have.
Linus Sebastian
This is. I was like angry before and now I'm waiting.
Luke Lafreniere
Now I have.
Linus Sebastian
That makes sense.
Luke Lafreniere
Now they have time.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
And it is time for us to do our float plane announcement. Linus to finish. What? What does that even mean? Linus to finish all the shots of lemon juice before the finish line. What is this? Why am I taking shots of lemon juice?
Linus Sebastian
Because you lost wise Wan late.
Luke Lafreniere
What do you mean I lost wise Wan late? Got a. I cannot lose at my own game.
Linus Sebastian
It's not your game.
Luke Lafreniere
Why is Wan late? Is my game.
Linus Sebastian
It is not your game.
Luke Lafreniere
I mean it happens on my property.
Linus Sebastian
Actually, no, it doesn't.
Luke Lafreniere
It happens on B.C. something something limited holding company's property. Okay, fair play. Take. Take the shots whenever you want. You must finish all your shots before you reach the finish line.
Linus Sebastian
Those are big shots of lemon juice.
Luke Lafreniere
The amount of shots you have to do is half of the score. Difference of. Why is wan late? Our popular float plane series today the loser not naming names has to take four as they lost by eight points. So 1 to 9.
Linus Sebastian
Give you three cups, but I have to refill one for you, I guess.
Luke Lafreniere
I see. Okay.
Linus Sebastian
So that's not lemonade by the way. That's. That's this stuff.
Luke Lafreniere
Interesting.
Linus Sebastian
They can't really see them.
Daniel Besser
They're.
Linus Sebastian
They're slightly behind the banner, but they're these. Yeah, that's quite a bit.
Luke Lafreniere
This is concentrated.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, it sure is. It's this stuff like you've probably. I used to, when I was really tired and I live with my parents, we often had one of these in the fridge and I'd take a squirt of this Just to wake up right in the eyes. I would use this basically as like a short term energy drink. Taking whole shots of it.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh boy, this will be interesting.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, four shots of it.
Luke Lafreniere
I already have a sore throat. All right. Well, Luke, I guess. Okay. It says watch this video. Do you want to bring it up?
Linus Sebastian
Sure, I can do that. Dan, you ready for audio?
Daniel Besser
You're already playing audio?
Linus Sebastian
Okay, sounds good.
Luke Lafreniere
Got him.
Daniel Besser
So both of you are. I don't know who's gonna do it.
Linus Sebastian
I will be doing it. Here we go.
Daniel Besser
You're still playing audio. Okay. No, no.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, there we go.
Daniel Besser
There you go.
Linus Sebastian
Ready?
Luke Lafreniere
See, that should play the one that started it all.
Linus Sebastian
My theme week, the moment it popped off. My product has been all over your sequels ever since.
Daniel Besser
Who the hell are ya?
Linus Sebastian
You all know who I am. I'm the one that stopped Linus from getting cancelled. Say my name. You're Luke Lefrendo. It's Luke Lefrenier. La Frenier. Luke Lafrenier. Le Freenderia Lafrenier.
Luke Lafreniere
Friend Derriere.
Linus Sebastian
What are some tech essentials for most gamers? Hot take. Most stuff that people are interested in if they're watching this channel is excess. What person out of all of the history of mankind who would be the best at a piss drinking contest? And they were like, probably Eli. Absolutely. We're here to talk about something actually much more impactful from embark arc raiders. Just this week my time spent in meetings was 32. 2 hours.
Luke Lafreniere
I could start an online business.
Linus Sebastian
Turns out the furries buy a lot.
Luke Lafreniere
Of pictures for those who come after.
Linus Sebastian
He doesn't get it. Yeah, there it is.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't know what that has to do with why when late. But why don't you go ahead and do the read thing and then I will.
Linus Sebastian
No, no, no, no, no.
Luke Lafreniere
Enjoy this delicious drink.
Linus Sebastian
Coincidental timing.
Luke Lafreniere
Timing.
Linus Sebastian
This is a punishment for why wan late? It's happening during the float plane announcement. The flow plane announcement is about Luke week two.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, well then why don't you talk about.
Linus Sebastian
I can do that. The one that started all our next theme week returns with Luke week two. Electric Boogaloo. We have three amazing floatplane exclusives. Wait, where'd he throw it? We have three amazing floatplane exclusives. I think Linus is supposed to be reading this. Totaling about two hours of Luke time. Like a Q and A with Luke himself. Himself. That's a weird thing to say when I'm sitting answering questions. Excuses. 3 Floatplane Dev wishes his frugal lifestyle and life satisfaction coming on Monday.
Luke Lafreniere
There's a one hour session with Riley talking about the state of AI on Wednesday and a video essay discussion about the state of gaming titled on what? Okay, whatever. It's going to have a title on Friday for reference. His first video essay was four minutes long, but he thought it was 18 minutes long.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, super short.
Luke Lafreniere
First theme week up on floatplane right now and enjoy the sequel coming next week at LMG. GG Luke 25, all lowercase. While waiting, you can enjoy an early LTT video release that is happening on floatplane right now.
Linus Sebastian
Oh my God.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, it's this one. Oh, I like this one. We did another one of, you know that YouTube format that's like $30 versus $30,000 thing. We got a TV for $30.
Linus Sebastian
What?
Luke Lafreniere
Open box insignia, 32 inch TV, 720p from Best Buy with warranty from Best Buy from Best Buy. We got a $35 TV. What? And then we do a $300 TV. $3,000 TV and then we make our way all the way up to $30,000 TV. So this is gonna be public. Oh, excuse me. Sorry.
Linus Sebastian
Are those gnarly? Is this rough?
Luke Lafreniere
That's not that bad. Yeah, that's not that bad. I. I do, I do sour for breakfast.
Linus Sebastian
This doesn't feel as strong as it used to be.
Luke Lafreniere
Either that or you're just more of a man.
Linus Sebastian
Maybe.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I was. Dude, we had this candy when I was a kid called Screaming Blue Saucers. And I'm pretty sure they stopped making them because they like gave you cancer or something.
Linus Sebastian
But they were all the best candy.
Luke Lafreniere
They were like the. They were like the precursor. They walked so warheads could run.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, seriously?
Luke Lafreniere
And I would just like. They were supposed to be like the kind of candy that you like. You punk your friends by giving them one and they're like. Or whatever. And I would like pop them, be like, these are good. I love sour candy.
Linus Sebastian
People sell them for a lot.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh yeah, you can't get them anymore. Wow. To my knowledge.
Linus Sebastian
Are there. Are there like old school candy collectors? Is that a thing?
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, of course. Probably.
Linus Sebastian
Eh.
Luke Lafreniere
Of course.
Linus Sebastian
These are all plates.
Luke Lafreniere
Screaming Saucers, maybe? Apparently it was a local company like bc.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, that's cool.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Angry Panda PC says Covid killed the taste buds. I legitimately don't think so because I definitely can still taste food.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, like I don't. I don't think that happened to me at all, to be honest.
Luke Lafreniere
We do have a couple of notes regarding the price change announcement. For Floatplane, based on some feedback about the 99 pricing strategy, the prices will now be $8 and $13 for new subscribers. Thank you for the additional penny per year per month. Per month. For annual plans, we will honor the current discount on a yearly purchase. So the $8 tier will become $80 per year and the $13 tier will become $130 per year, both in US dollars. For current subscribers who wish to change subscription tiers. After the price increase, we will not be able to automatically grant you the pre increase grandfathered price. However, you can contact support@supportupportloatplane.com and we can manually grant it to you if you're eligible.
Linus Sebastian
And that might be automatic in the future. It's just switching entire plans and retaining your grandfather status was not something built into the grandfather tool and it was something asked for very late in the game and would need some payments changes. So for now, just message support. It'll be fine. There's a relatively low lift way of support doing that, but it's a high lift way of developers doing that right now, so it's just not worth it.
Luke Lafreniere
As always, our support team will be available to address any additional edge cases when the new plan takes effect. And to reiterate, the OG three dollar tier and the current recurring subscribers will not be affected by the price change.
Linus Sebastian
You can keep your thing. You're cool, you're good. You're all good.
Luke Lafreniere
Relax guy.
Linus Sebastian
Don't worry about it. You're fine.
Luke Lafreniere
Hey guy. Relax guy. Yeah, but hey.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Depending on how long we keep flow plan, I feel like there's gonna be a lot of different grandfathered statuses.
Luke Lafreniere
I do feel like that may be untenable at some point, but we'll maybe.
Linus Sebastian
We'Ll figure it out.
Luke Lafreniere
We'll cross that. We're good for now when we get to it. All right, Daniel Besser, what are we supposed to be doing right now? You sure you guess or he just guesses? Okay, two to three more topics.
Linus Sebastian
I can't believe he would guess.
Luke Lafreniere
He put the card up there. He would get that man. That man would guess.
Linus Sebastian
Is he a guesser?
Luke Lafreniere
I think so. No. Well, a Besser for certain, but a guesser. We can only guess. AMD has officially unveiled their FSR Redstone update. This is an upgrade to their upscaling technology, built exclusively for the latest Radeon RX 9000 series or rDNA 4 GPUs. This is a quote from AMD. FSR4 has been renamed FSR upscaling to better distinguish between the various features that now make up the FSR or now make up FSR Redstone. Yeah, that doesn't really. Okay, sure. Redstone is a suite of several new machine learning based features including better upscaling, frame generation, ray regeneration and Radiance Caching. Ray regeneration is a machine learning back to denoiser that reuses the last frames. Ray tracing works so the GPU only redraws what's actually changed, so it reconstructs the missing details. Radiance Caching uses an AI neural network to dynamically guess bounced lighting so the GPU doesn't have to calculate and render subsequent bounces of light. Is expected to be supported in over 200 games by the end of 2025, but for now only about 40 games will make use of use of Redstone. AMD's graph claims you can see more than 3x the frame rate in some games compared to native rendering with spikes of up to 4.7 times in titles like Cyberpunk 2077. So there it is folks. Just like Nvidia, AMD now has machine learning based upscaling and frame generation and all that kind of stuff. As long as you happen to be one of the handful of folks who have a Radeon 9000 series GPU. I was actually chatting with one of the employees at Smash Champs, Raj. He was in one of the tours and he's a pretty big AMD guy. He treated himself to, I think he had a 7900XT and then he actually went 9070 XT if I recall correctly. Sorry Roger, if I'm getting this wrong, but basically he was pretty miffed even though he has a 9000 series card that AMD's because he's like, he's kind of, he's rooting for them, you know. And he was kind of miffed that AMD was kind of leaving behind their non RDNA4 customers with this feature announcement. And I was like, yeah, that's a fair point Raj. But as much as AMD has made a solid effort to have their products aged like fine wine with driver support and feature updates, the old cards just don't have the AI processing on board.
Linus Sebastian
So there's only so much you can really do.
Luke Lafreniere
Nvidia was way ahead of them in terms of implementing neural processors on their GPUs, so there's nothing that you can really do about that. And you could kind of try to flub it with your more general compute, but then you're taking away from the base performance that you're Trying to upscale and frame generate from. So that's. That's pretty. That's pretty tough. You end up robbing your left pocket in order to pay your right pocket. So yeah, downer. But I guess it's cool for people who have a 9070 or 9070 XT or a 909060 series, I guess. Cool. Good chat. What do you want to talk about next?
Linus Sebastian
You want to do this thing? Pebble's founder introduces a $75 a smart ring.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, it's less stupid than it sounds. And. And I'm going to tell you a couple things that aren't in the notes that are going to make it sound really stupid. Oh, it has a literally not only non replaceable battery, a non rechargeable battery. It has a microphone because of course it does. And let's see, what else can I tell you that will make you hate it? Let me think. Okay, yeah, it has a non replaceable battery. I already got that. What's something that you might like, hate about it?
Linus Sebastian
I mean. Yeah, it's like I don't like the non rechargeable battery. That's already ridiculous.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Okay. Okay. But I'll tell you the good things now.
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
I love how we're just doing. All right, let's just talk about it.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. So the non rechargeable. So the non rechargeable battery. The non replaceable non rechargeable battery. Apparently it'll last for a couple of years. They have already telegraphed.
Linus Sebastian
Still sucks, but okay.
Luke Lafreniere
They have already telegraphed that they will put a recycling program in place so that you can return the ring. Telegraphed said they will.
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
I do still think that's kind of BS because the odds of like me, I'm just thinking for myself here, the odds of me going to the effort to return it to them. Even if they were to cover shipping back to them, which I sincerely doubt they would, the odds of me bothering to do that are pretty slim. And I think that's probably true of a lot of people. I have a bin of dead batteries that is probably about this big by this deep, by this deep, by this long. Like it's like thick that are pending. Next time I am going to Ikea and I remember to bring my batteries, I'm going to dump them all in their battery chute. I think I've had it for about six years now. There is no subscription, so once you buy it, you just like have it. The microphone is not always listening. It is explicitly only listening when you activate it. Because otherwise you would trash your battery life because it's not rechargeable and not replaceable. So it's only active when you specifically activate it. And the part that I like about it is apparently I haven't tried it yet, but apparently it's like really slim. And what it's meant to do more than anything else is without having to pull out your phone, jot down a thought or like set a quick reminder. There is no chatbot. You don't have a relationship with it, it doesn't pretend to be your friend. And you can either use a local AI model that runs on your smartphone and stores data locally, or you can, I think, I think with a subscription you can do the like a cloud enabled model. Hold on. Our notes are a little bit vague and I can't remember that part, so don't, don't quote me on that. Compared to competing smart rings that cost several hundred dollars and bundle health tracking are always on AI features. The index, that's what it's going to be called, is significantly cheaper and intentionally limited. Focusing on a simple note taking function rather than trying to do everything at once. So there's no health tracking, nothing like that. Okay, I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on this because if nothing else, it's different.
Linus Sebastian
Anything that by its core design is designed to die and that is unnecessary. I don't feel like I'm gonna like.
Luke Lafreniere
So you don't like humans?
Linus Sebastian
No, because that is.
Luke Lafreniere
You take that up with God then.
Linus Sebastian
I think that is necessary in that case though.
Luke Lafreniere
Really?
Linus Sebastian
I think so.
Luke Lafreniere
So for evolutionary survival of the fittest, we have to dive into how are we gonna.
Linus Sebastian
In what way?
Luke Lafreniere
I feel like we're getting off topic here.
Linus Sebastian
Jerk. And like I do. I do. This does make me dislike things like light bulbs because it's a confirmed non conspiracy theory that they have collaborated to make them worse. And like that sucks. That makes me hate them. And in this case it's like, man, yeah, I'd rather pay a little bit more if it wasn't for sure gonna be dead in two years. Like I look at my phone, I. I don't really feel like I need a new phone after two years. Why would I need a new pretty. Okay, smart ring. It's probably still going to be fine in two years. If I could just charge it or replace the battery, I think either would maybe be fine. Ideally charging. I can understand that. Adding charging to a smart ring would probably add a significant amount of bulk.
Luke Lafreniere
Apparently technology connection says there is some nuance to the light bulb thing. And there were. There were trade offs that were made. It was an engineering trade off.
Linus Sebastian
So.
Luke Lafreniere
Duly noted.
Linus Sebastian
Technology Connections is based. I'm willing to believe him on this. I would say that I think you could flag anything as a trade off. Okay, so someone in chat said the trade offs are very valid. That adds. That adds.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. But I mean, there's also.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, I wonder what the trade offs were like.
Luke Lafreniere
I have this conversation with the CW engineering and fashion team all the time where there are trade offs in terms of, like, what. I haven't watched his video on it, but I know that there are trade offs in terms of what the market will bear. And, you know, it could be that your light bulb that would last 10 times longer but cost twice as much would be a commercial failure. So you, like, make the one that will cost half as much but last one tenth as long. And, you know, you can sit. You know, you're. It's sort of. You're bound by market forces. I think it's a cop out. I think you should just build high quality products that last a really long time.
Linus Sebastian
People are saying it's brightness versus lifetime of the bulbs, which is interesting because if you look at that light bulb that's been on for, like, an incredible amount of time in that fire station, it's not very bright.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, that's valid. Okay. All right, all right, all right. I'll allow it.
Linus Sebastian
I don't know. I feel like that might be maybe a bit of a scapegoat because there are modern LED lights that are incredibly bright and it's definitely unnecessary. Would probably be chill if they just lasted a lot longer and weren't quite as bright.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. So it does seem like there may be an intent there, but I don't know.
Linus Sebastian
I want to go watch his video because technology Connection is super based. So. Yeah, I have no idea. I don't want to make up my mind about this when I don't know all the information. I don't know. Right. There we go. Fixed. I didn't know the line. Get it? I. E. Every LED headlight being too bright. I don't know if this is a hot take or not. That needs to be illegal. It's like a problem. Holy crap. How have we let this be a thing? It's wild.
Luke Lafreniere
I actually don't have a take on this. My night vision is pretty good. I. It doesn't bother me. I don't really get halos and I don't really get like. I don't really get, like, super glare Or I don't really have trouble seeing from people's, like, super bright headlights, but my wife, a lot of people do, has had, like, corrective surgery for her eyes. She used to be a glasses enjoyer and is now not so much. And so for her, bright lights can be extremely blinding at light at night. And so, yeah, I understand that it's a problem, but it hasn't ever really bothered me. And to be clear, when I say it doesn't bother me, I don't mean that in, like, a. Well, not my problem. I'm gonna put my giant big lights in a front of my car, and I'm going to point them up like this.
Linus Sebastian
This is a large part of the.
Luke Lafreniere
Problem, my factory lights is how much.
Linus Sebastian
People'S lights are pointed into my window.
Luke Lafreniere
Right.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, it's like, a lot of it.
Luke Lafreniere
Have you ever thought of buying a cyber truck? Then you'll be sitting up higher.
Linus Sebastian
No.
Luke Lafreniere
You've never thought of buying.
Linus Sebastian
No.
Luke Lafreniere
Not even once?
Linus Sebastian
I have thought about buying a truck, but not a cybertruck.
Luke Lafreniere
Not a cybertruck. You like a more analog truck, Not a digital truck?
Linus Sebastian
Actually, yes.
Luke Lafreniere
You like more polygons?
Linus Sebastian
I was thinking an old Toyota, an old Yoda.
Luke Lafreniere
Interesting. Okay. Why?
Linus Sebastian
It would be nice to have something that I could more easily go camping with. There are certain trails that you can't effectively get to the trailhead unless you have a truck in bc. It would be kind of sick. An old. Yeah. Tacoma or Hillocks or something would be neat. I don't need it to be nice.
Luke Lafreniere
My step.
Linus Sebastian
In a lot of ways, I'd probably prefer it wasn't because, like, I'm gonna get it scratched up and beat up, and that's cool. I don't. I don't. Yeah, I don't need it to be nice.
Luke Lafreniere
My stepdad had a super cute little pickup back when I was growing up. I don't know if it was this one, but it was like a little tiny pickup truck.
Linus Sebastian
This was when the actual name of it was the pickup. Like, its model was pickup, which is pretty funny.
Luke Lafreniere
Is that. Is that a thing? Because I think it might have looked.
Linus Sebastian
Like this Toyota pickup.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Okay. All right. Interesting.
Linus Sebastian
Pretty sick.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. None of these other ones look right. This is. This is the one. He. He had the muffler tied on to the bottom of it with that, you know, that yellow rope? Like.
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
That yellow rope. Yeah. So he just had it, like, tie. It fell off at some point.
Linus Sebastian
The, like, super plasticky.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah. He just tied it back on with yellow rope. So that was the kind of engineering that he did.
Linus Sebastian
Heck yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Heck yeah. All right. So okay. But other than, other than okay. So you don't like it because it is disposable essentially.
Linus Sebastian
But we buy it's also disposable. Like it's, it's okay. It sounds like a long time that it lasts for two years because it's a non rechargeable battery. So it's like, oh wow, it does last for two years. That's cool. A device like this I would expect to have for more than two years.
Luke Lafreniere
We buy a lot of things that last for less than two years that cost a lot of money. How long does the chicken in your fridge last?
Linus Sebastian
Not a good argument and you know it.
Luke Lafreniere
No, but it's hard. It's tough with you because you don't buy chachkes, you don't buy like gadgets that you know you're not getting. Going to get a ton of use out of.
Linus Sebastian
If someone yeah. Expects to get one year out of this and they expect that they're going to buy a new one in a year because they want to keep up with the newest thing, whatever, it gets a little bit better. I would still prefer that wasn't a thing because you could, you know, sell it off to somebody else who could still enjoy the thing without just throwing all of that, that value in that tech away. So I still don't like it because repairability is sick and cool and based and you should be able to keep things around. I know people that use some phones that are real old. The iPhone that I carry for floatplane stuff is an X. It still works great. It's actually very impressive that it's still totally fine. Its battery life is not that amazing anymore but it's still impressively pretty. Alright. I'm not like on it that often because you know. And it'll easily last often days.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh yeah, Apple's idle battery man.
Linus Sebastian
Insane.
Luke Lafreniere
It's so good.
Linus Sebastian
That's old. That would make this thing at its death point look like a young pup. So like I don't like that. And I don't, I don't think.
Luke Lafreniere
I.
Linus Sebastian
Don'T think there's an argument that's going to convince me otherwise. One thing I would ask is how many stuff smart rings have replaceable batteries.
Luke Lafreniere
That I'm aware of? None.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, okay, but rechargeable. Yes, but rechargeable. Yeah. How do they charge? Is it wireless charging? Do they have a port? Wireless charging? How much bulk do you think the.
Luke Lafreniere
Wireless charging adds so that Was the argument for it was that for how low profile he wanted it to be? Basically, as far as I can tell, he's making a device for himself.
Linus Sebastian
Sure.
Luke Lafreniere
And what he wants is when he's washing the dishes or otherwise indisposed, he wants to be able to quickly note something down before his add brain forgets.
Linus Sebastian
It does look like. So let me. I'm at their site, you can see this. And that doesn't actually necessarily mean much because not on a finger, but when you see it on the finger, other than this bump, which is your button, I'm assuming it does look more profile to me. As someone who has never worn a smart ring, it does look more low profile than smart rings that I've seen. You have worn a smart ring.
Luke Lafreniere
It also doesn't look that low profile, though.
Linus Sebastian
No. Especially with the huge button, which looks a little uncomfortable, to be honest. I hate rings in general, but, like, this looks rough. I would not want this. You can even literally see the button itself pushing into his finger.
Luke Lafreniere
Maybe. I actually can't tell a hundred percent.
Linus Sebastian
Is it just a shadow?
Luke Lafreniere
I can't tell 100%.
Linus Sebastian
It might be a shadow.
Luke Lafreniere
I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna at least try it. I am. I am torn on this one. On the one hand, I completely agree. Repairability is based. Replaceable batteries are based.
Linus Sebastian
It's like all rings with gems. I don't agree with that.
Luke Lafreniere
At so much of a lower price compared to other smart rings and still having a purpose that, like him, I have ADD brain and often forget things and being able to just quickly blah, blah, blah, and then not take out my phone could have a benefit at that point though. You know, why not just wear one of those silly AI pendants? For me, the not thinking about it is a major feature though.
Linus Sebastian
Can you just do this with your smartwatch?
Luke Lafreniere
Yes. But it's another. I forgot to put on my watch today.
Linus Sebastian
Okay. Are you gonna remember to put on your smart ring?
Luke Lafreniere
No, because I'm not gonna take it off. I'm gonna put it on and then two years later, its battery will die.
Linus Sebastian
Got it.
Luke Lafreniere
And so water resistant. So that's the only compelling reason for it, is that I never have to. I never have to think about if I have it on me and it can operate away from the app, so and so you. So it can store some onboard and then when it gets back in range of your phone, it can dump everything, which is pretty. So I could be in the pool and I could have an interesting thought and I could be like Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it would sing to my phone later.
Linus Sebastian
It's kind of neat.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, it's kind of neat. And at 75 bucks, which is more money than a meal, but not more money than a meal out with my family, I don't know, man. We buy a lot of stuff that is pretty disposable and pretty useless. Like, I did an AMD Ultimate Tech upgrade for someone earlier this week where once again, we have. Or not so much once again, but we have a new challenger for lmg, King of the Funko Pops.
Linus Sebastian
Oh.
Luke Lafreniere
And I'm looking at it going like, it's all relative. Nice. It's all relative. Right. Like, if you're the kind of person who just doesn't spend money on anything that doesn't generate a return, you know, like if you, if you have like a very, very kind of strict approach to spending.
Linus Sebastian
To be clear, he's not even referencing me. I do spend money on things that don't generate a return.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, no, I just mean. I just mean in general, like, if you have sort of rules for spending money that do not account for $75.
Linus Sebastian
For a thing that is disposable, I don't actually agree. I think you could argue that this could generate a return.
Daniel Besser
Sure.
Luke Lafreniere
I just mean whatever your rules are.
Linus Sebastian
Sure.
Luke Lafreniere
You know, if you don't account for $75 for a disposable thing, then you know, that's, That's a. That. Yeah, that's. That's totally valid. But maybe I could. I just. Philosophically, I disagree though. Right? Like, I. I disagree.
Linus Sebastian
Yes.
Luke Lafreniere
Non replaceable battery.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
But then I also Wonder, I mean, AirPods have non replaceable batteries and people have found ways to do it. So. Yes, maybe there could be a way to do it. I haven't, I haven't tried to take one apart yet. I don't know if it could be possible. Kind of doubt it. It uses a hearing aid battery, apparently.
Linus Sebastian
All right. Sense some trauma. It's okay, buddy. I actually have no idea what you're saying that about.
Luke Lafreniere
You're okay though. Yeah, yeah. So it's fine.
Daniel Besser
It doesn't matter.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Nice.
Luke Lafreniere
All right. This was wild over the Black Friday period. Okay. The console sales war. No, no, don't look, don't look. Oh, he's seen it.
Linus Sebastian
I think I have.
Luke Lafreniere
So, number one.
Linus Sebastian
Switch. PlayStation.
Luke Lafreniere
PlayStation.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
Number two, Switch. You better believe it. Nintendo number three, a big gap. And then.
Linus Sebastian
Right. So I'm gonna say. I know the spoiler here, but I'm gonna say the one that makes sense.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. You'd think it would be Xbox. It was not. It was not the Next Playground. I never even. I was. I was this week years old when I even heard of this.
Linus Sebastian
Me too.
Luke Lafreniere
Over the Thanksgiving week weekend, the Xbox series series accounted for just 10% of console units sold, coming behind the PlayStation 5, which came in first in part because it was the only console that actually had a sale. So with 47%, the Switch 2 in second place, which accounted for 24% of all console units sold, and the Next Playground, which was responsible for 14% of sales and is a console that. And this is from Mr. David Gautier, who he would describe as like a $200 Microsoft Kinect that plays mobile games with a 90 year subscription. If you. 90$ a year subscription if you want to play more than five games. That's right. I'm gonna try that one more time. That I would describe, like a $200 Microsoft Kinect that plays mobile games and requires a $90 a year subscription if you want to play more than five games. What? What? Okay, what is this thing? Obviously we've sourced one and we want to make a video about it, but that's it. Excuse me? The Next Playground crashed the Black Friday hardware charts in the U.S. okay. What? Like, what is this thing?
Linus Sebastian
I don't get it. To be honest, I didn't look enough into this. I knew the, like, punchline of this article.
Luke Lafreniere
The active play system for kids and.
Linus Sebastian
Families, like, did it get bundled with something like, crazy or did something happen?
Luke Lafreniere
Active games that turn your living. I mean, basically it's the Wii then.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, you just don't have remotes. Yeah, it's a Wii, but they went for the Kinect model instead of the.
Luke Lafreniere
When did the verge review this? December 12, 2025. Oh, so no, this is today.
Linus Sebastian
So they're also, like, reacting to this?
Luke Lafreniere
Probably.
Linus Sebastian
What happened? I've never even seen this before. Did it get bundled with something? Why are people buying this? Does anyone in chat own one of these? What compelled you to get it was there. How did you even know it existed?
Luke Lafreniere
How to train your dragon Riders of the skies. Bluey, bust a move. Whoa.
Linus Sebastian
Who's behind this company?
Luke Lafreniere
Play Pass unlocks the full catalog and delivers new content and updates automatically every month. So how much is Play pass? It was $90 a year. Wait. Oh, man. Just show me a price, brother. What? No, get. Show me a price for the subscription. Learn about Play Pass. Okay, that's what I clicked. Where is the price? Yeah, here we go. Yeah. 12 months, yeah. US$90 a year or about. Oh, what does that work out to? Like $50 every three months. So like 15 bucks a month or 17 bucks a month or something like that. Love this for my active little kids. Keeps them moving and so many games to choose from. My 60 year old dad even plays with them. This is wild. Yeah, it's new. We, it's. It's someone who figured out that people.
Linus Sebastian
Actually really liked the Wii.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. And that everyone forgot why everybody liked the Wii. We teamed up with the top family brands. Hasbro, Mattel, whatever. This is Paramount, Sesame Street. This is, this is wild, dude. Like who are these people?
Linus Sebastian
I started looking into it. It seems like a new company.
Luke Lafreniere
Go figure.
Linus Sebastian
Has investments from some tech people and sports giants and stuff. But it's some split offs from places like Apple. But yeah, it seems like a new company. That's wild. To be able to jump in and just dunk on Xbox like that with Xbox's basically own thing is nuts. Imagine making a successful thing based off of what is effectively a Kinect and it not being Microsoft.
Luke Lafreniere
One of the greatest game console industry failures of all time.
Linus Sebastian
Let's not call it successful yet. I mean that's fair. But they're outselling Xbox.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. And it's a subscription model so you know they're doing good.
Linus Sebastian
Well, they're outselling Xbox for Black Friday.
Luke Lafreniere
I should yes, say not overall necessarily.
Linus Sebastian
We don't know.
Luke Lafreniere
Don Cab ASA says the Kinect, it sold 25 million units. Says the Kinect was not a failure at all. The Kinect was the beginning of the end for the Xbox brand. According to their current trajectory right now.
Linus Sebastian
It was bundled, my brother.
Luke Lafreniere
It was an attempt to change the paradigm of the Xbox to this like living room, do everything machine.
Linus Sebastian
Like apparently this thing.
Luke Lafreniere
They had huge plans for the Kinect. What it ended up being, which was a weird accessory that you could play some dance games with and a handful of experiences and then kind of a cool camera that people could, you know, hack and do neat stuff with later. What it ultimately ended up being was nothing compared to what Microsoft had planned for it. Microsoft. Microsoft tacitly admitted failure of the Kinect when they stopped bundling it with the console was supposed to be an integral part of the Xbox. And then after, what was it, a year? Can't remember what it was. They were like, I don't know. Well this isn't working. Forget it.
Linus Sebastian
Just get rid of it entirely.
Luke Lafreniere
The Kinect was a failure.
Linus Sebastian
Malidrax in full planchat said the next had a Big in store display. You could play in stores in the US we played one for a few minutes. So yeah, they just did direct like in store marketing effectively. And people probably went up and started playing with it and was like, wow, that feels like the Wii again. I would like to take one of those, please. And then bought it.
Luke Lafreniere
How much is it again? I actually missed that when I was.
Linus Sebastian
200 bucks. Introductory price of 200 bucks.
Luke Lafreniere
$200. Wonder what kind of hardware is in it. I mean, we're sourcing one. So we'll. We'll answer these six questions.
Linus Sebastian
DDR 4x64 gigs of EMMC storage. The graphics are a male G52MC4. Okay. Just reading the Wikipedia page. Eight core arm chip arm taking over the world, boys. Yep.
Luke Lafreniere
Well, good luck. Microsoft.
Linus Sebastian
Wild.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, yeah. Our discussion question here is with the rumors being that.
Linus Sebastian
Sorry I said male, but apparently it's a typo on Wikipedia, then. M A I L. Wow.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Your dyslexia did not do that to you.
Linus Sebastian
Well, do you know why? Because I read it like six times. I'm not even kidding. That's why I was so confident to be like, actually, no, it's mail.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, there you go.
Linus Sebastian
So if it's actually Mali, someone can go do a successful edit there if they want.
Luke Lafreniere
Nice. Let's go. So would you rather have. Okay, hold on. Our question was. Yeah. If the rumors of Microsoft's next machine being like $1000 plus PC like machine are true, what does Xbox even mean anymore? I think it means failure. Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
I mean, I guess it's the Xbox Live stuff. Game pass.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Which I understand it has like pretty good value. I don't want anything to do with it at all. And I. We were an Xbox household.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Totally hard. Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
And I am from the og, gone from there. All right.
Linus Sebastian
We would. We would collect like broken 360s and try to zombie them in together into working ones and all this like we were. We were in. And I. I want nothing to do with it anymore. Which is like, sad. It's not that I'm not even vindictive. They just lost, okay? And I'm not. I don't love services like that, especially for things like games. I would prefer to own my games, so I'm going to keep patronizing.
Luke Lafreniere
Steam and gog came across this tweet this week. Senator Ruben Gallego has introduced Senate legislation to outlaw surveillance pricing. This video is actually a little bit older, but it features the one and only, the basest of base people, former FTC chair Lina Khan, who explains the dangers of this shady practice. As usual, something that everyone needs to understand and be vigilant about. Has the least sexy, least interesting name possible, but we're gonna tell you guys about it anyway. I'd actually never heard the term surveillance pricing before, but there's renewed interest in it because the state of New York recently cracked down on it. So examples used of surveillance pricing by the video that Ms. Kahn, you know, pretty competently hosted. Actually, as a. As a video host myself, I think she did a pretty good job.
Linus Sebastian
Nice.
Luke Lafreniere
So, Princeton Review, she gave this example. Charged customers in zip codes with higher percentage Asian populations more for test prep services. Okay. Other tests found or suggested that rideshare apps may charge riders with lower battery life more for the same ride. At the same time, San Francisco residents who booked hotels through Expedia were apparently charged up to $500 more per night than people buying the same from less affluent cities. And apparently some Internet providers charged the same price for worse Internet speeds in poorer neighborhoods. These are, these are. We've looked into it and there is evidence to suggest this is happening. We have confirmed it now. So surveillance pricing, the concept is that by harvesting your personal data or inferring things about you, companies can charge you more for the same services. Some hypothetical examples of surveillance pricing that we might want to be worried about are a parent with a sick child might be charged more for medicine or a thermometer, or somebody needing to travel for a funeral could be charged more for their airfare because they're being surveilled and they know that you've received an email about funeral arrangements, for instance. So good on New York for doing something to kind of crack down on this. But what is really needed is nationwide, slash, more worldwide. How about just, you know, in general we just not do this legislation that makes this just illegal. I know that there is. It's a common sort of talking point that regulation is bad. And there are many cases where regulation can be bad. But if we just allow the free market to regulate itself, I think it has proven, not just suggested, but proven that it cannot do it. The free market is not capable. People think it can. Yeah, they actually, with a straight face say that. And it's like actually stupid.
Linus Sebastian
It's regulated itself towards what is the profit is the problem. And that's exactly it. That's what they will do. Which often brings you down to monopolistic practices or like there's a term for it, I don't remember it. But when it's an effective monopoly where everyone's price fixing on the same kind of level. And something that people don't seem to necessarily understand is that you can't do this based on, like a restaurant model or something like that where it's like, oh, you're pricing for your burger is too high. I will go down the street. There are issues with that. When you get into some of these deep moats where you might need hundreds of thousands, millions, billions of dollars to get into certain industries, it's like, yeah, no, you need to do something about that.
Luke Lafreniere
Saunders Scott. Sandra SC Says, is this any different than when ebay offers a discount when you look at something or place it in your cart? Yes. The difference is that we're not talking about a discount. We are talking about increasing the price based on information about you. So it is one thing if you know, because come back to how it would work in the real world. In the real world, I could have my stall at the bazaar and you could walk in and you could, you know, be with Emma and you could look at a necklace and I could say, oh, pretty lady. Buy a pretty necklace for the pretty lady. Sir, Sir. Oh, look how good it looks on her. Oh. And he goes to leave, and I go, I give you $5 off. You know, that's one thing. But it is an entirely separate practice if I have no price tags on anything. And I have, like, my team of hooligans who go out and pick people's wallets and see how much money's in them and then put it back in. And then I know when they walk in the store, I go, ah, sir, Affluent sir. Oh, this is good, this necklace. $200. You wouldn't want to be seen as cheap in front of the pretty lady. You know, it's a completely different way, scummier thing.
Linus Sebastian
I like Bizarre Linus.
Luke Lafreniere
Thank you.
Linus Sebastian
Bizarre Linus is pretty great. Yeah. And I mean, they're doing it based off of things that will probably offend people more than how much money they have in their wallet as well. Like that. That example of the tutoring or study prep or whatever, it was being more expensive in Asian neighborhoods. Like, they are. They are doing this based off of any data point they can possibly get. And they will get those data points.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. And they're going to have more and more and more as we go. I mean, this is. This is one of the things that I, you know, couldn't necessarily have seen coming back when I. Back when we were talking about the genetic testing. Like, the example that I always came up with is like, it could infect your. It could affect your insurance premiums and stuff like that.
Daniel Besser
That.
Luke Lafreniere
But this is one that absolutely could be impacted by your. Your predisposition for things, for sure. Like, you could have a completely different pricing model for potentially. Like, this could potentially be a thing. We could. We could figure out the human genome enough that you could have a different pricing model for people that you have scouted out and figured out that they have a predisposition to gambling, for instance, and you wouldn't even need to do that with the. Okay, maybe the DNA testing is a bad example of that. But what you could do is you could give someone inflated pricing for things that, you know that they could be predisposed to have a condition for. Like, it's. This whole thing is just terrifying. Ugh.
Linus Sebastian
I mean, I don't know, but I'm looking up, like, PubMed articles talking about genetic influences on gambling. It seems to be, like, relatively figured out that there is definitely genetic influences on addiction.
Luke Lafreniere
Apparently there's genetic influences on your predisposition to cheating in relationships. Like, there's. I'm not gonna go as far as to say free will is not a thing, but, like, there's a lot of.
Linus Sebastian
Influence coming from a lot of places.
Luke Lafreniere
Bucket of chemicals and electrical impulses. Is that all I am to you?
Linus Sebastian
There is definitely a lot of that chemical stuff going on.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
I think you've. Yeah, I don't know. I don't. I think you've got some agency. But I do think there's a lot of influences all the time from various things, and it might not be very clear where those influences are coming from. And it can be extremely difficult to resist them.
Luke Lafreniere
Eggnog in April says there's a genetic predisposition on your mom. Nice based comeback.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, moving on with. Let's get far away from things we deeply don't understand.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. Noctua and Prusa research have introduced 3D printing filaments in signature Noctua colors.
Linus Sebastian
Heck, yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, for crying out loud. All right.
Linus Sebastian
I saw the photo for this, thought it was fake.
Luke Lafreniere
That's all I have to say about that.
Linus Sebastian
Heck, yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Now you too can print in brown.
Linus Sebastian
McDonald's removes AI generated ad after backlash. This is an amazing story. McDonald's in the Netherlands put out a festive. You can call it festive, I guess. AI generated holiday ad calling Christmas the most terrible time of the year, which they elaborated on in a statement that it was meant to highlight the stressful moments during Christmas in the Netherlands. The ad features a compilation of unrealistic Christmas events going wrong, like opening your tree and the branches flinging you out of your front window, or Santa and his reindeer causing a traffic jam. Their solution? Wait till January in a McDonald's. The online criticism mostly regarded the use of AI slop replacing genuine human work. Melanie Bridge, the CEO of the Studio behind the ad, however, clapped back and said, it's about expanding the toolbox. The vert, the vision, the taste, the leadership that will always be human. And. And further defended their ad, claiming the hours that went into this job far exceeded a traditional shoot.
Luke Lafreniere
Why then?
Linus Sebastian
Why, ah, 10 people, five weeks full time. Discussion. Question. Is the. Is AI the solution to accomplishing shoots like this with limited resources? If the AI shots didn't include people, would that make it more acceptable?
Luke Lafreniere
Okay, so first up, up five weeks full time would not be nearly enough to do that shoot with people. Because what about all the extras? Like, what about all of the human actors? Like, never mind the editors and storyboarders and director and camera operators.
Linus Sebastian
Ten people, five weeks full time.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I know. Still, ten people, five weeks full time. Bullshit.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, yeah, sure. I, I thought you were saying there was five weeks full time of total hours put in.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, no, no, no, sorry.
Linus Sebastian
Ten times that.
Luke Lafreniere
No, like, with every. With all the logistics involved with that many shots, I can tell you, as someone who does video things, there's no way that they could make that exact commercial. Like, there, there would have had to be, like, CGI work. Like, there's no way. Absolutely freaking no way.
Linus Sebastian
Well, they're not saying making that exact video. They're saying making a 44 second McDonald's ad.
Luke Lafreniere
Sure.
Linus Sebastian
But, like, no, like, that was specifically their point.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay.
Linus Sebastian
I'm not trying to defend them. I'm just saying they weren't saying they. They would make this exact.
Luke Lafreniere
Far exceeded a traditional shoot. Okay, so what's their. Okay, so what's their defense then? That they paid more labor hours than they would have, but they got a better commercial?
Linus Sebastian
That they didn't use it to, like, cut the effort, I guess. Which, like, what a whiff. If that's the case, because what was the benefit? It doesn't look particularly good, in my opinion.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I mean, I gotta be honest with you. As far as, like, commercials go, I actually thought it was kind of cute. Like, I, I don't look at it and go, this, this commercial is so bad, I couldn't watch it.
Linus Sebastian
There are definitely things that they did in this that are pretty normal for commercials like this. Like the cookie talking in the oven.
Luke Lafreniere
Yep.
Linus Sebastian
There's like, for sure.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Ad campaigns that have had that and that would be very expensive to do and definitely take more time. Like you were saying.
Luke Lafreniere
Yep. I don't know, man. I can also fully understand why people are mad about it because there is definitely stuff that doesn't look professional. Like the way the cat jumps on the tree and the physics are completely wrong. Like it. Yeah, it sucks. Am I just. Am I. Have I. Am I just. So have I just given up to the point where I'm. I'm accepting this garbage? Is that what's happening?
Linus Sebastian
There was, there was parts of this that was just so unnecessarily AI which is strange. I'm wondering if the, the studio that did it is like an AI studio and they're shoehorning it into things because, like there, there's. Yeah, there's stuff here that like, it's just so unnecessary. Like the cookie. Okay. I can understand you like saving a bunch of time by having AI animated talking cookie instead of doing it yourself, but man, there's a lot of stuff. That's just why, if you just did it normally, it would have looked better and taken less time. Sick. Like. Yeah, this is very weird.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, it's a. This is a tough one. I. It's very clear that this is going to happen. I am honestly surprised that McDonald's even pulled it down though. Like. Like what? Coke did one last year and then their new one, they did it again. They just didn't have humans in it.
Linus Sebastian
It.
Luke Lafreniere
Which is like completely missing the point. And I don't think. I don't. Is anyone even mad about Cokes this year?
Linus Sebastian
I'm not sure. 2025.
Luke Lafreniere
Let's see. Tim's got an interesting take. I just don't care. It's an ad. I'm never going to watch the ad anyway.
Linus Sebastian
Nice. Nice. Okay. I mean, I think people might not like it that much. One of the top comments on the video with 22,000 upvotes is the most profitable commercial in Pepsi's history. That's pretty good.
Luke Lafreniere
That's pretty good. But it's also pretty.
Linus Sebastian
It also got 1.6 million views.
Luke Lafreniere
It's also pretty echo chambery.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, for sure.
Luke Lafreniere
Like there's a. There. It's, it's. It's. It's been, it's been interesting, you know, over the last, let's say week or two, seeing how self important some communities can think that they are and how influential they might think that they are. Like, you know, you look at Reddit, for instance, something can front page Reddit, you know, with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of upvotes. But what are the odds? Like, think about it. What are the odds if you went to the park by your house and talked to somebody there that they have.
Linus Sebastian
Any idea what the heck that they.
Luke Lafreniere
Would have any idea about any of it? Yeah, it's functionally zero.
Linus Sebastian
As someone who tries to not be, but is a little bit too chronically online, I have to remind myself of this sometimes. And I had a very recent conversation where some, someone was talking about how something is like such a hot button issue and you have to be careful about it. I was like, I don't think so with practically anyone unless you are extremely chronically online.
Luke Lafreniere
Like a perfect example.
Linus Sebastian
No idea what you're talking about.
Luke Lafreniere
Like a perfect example of that would be like the, the Harry Potter thing. Yeah. Like if you're chronically online and especially if you exist within certain communities or counter communities.
Linus Sebastian
Yes.
Luke Lafreniere
It's like, then you'll know about it. It's like, like major, like, like it's a culture war thing. Right. But you know, if I, if I, if one of the, the kids of one of my kids friends comes over and I'm like, oh, what do you think of Harry Potter? They're just like, oh, I love Harry Potter. Like they don't know about any, no.
Linus Sebastian
Clue what's going on.
Luke Lafreniere
You know, I talked to their parents like, oh, oh yeah, your, your kid says they like Harry Potter. They're like, oh yeah, Harry Potter. I, you know, the lightning bolt thing, you know, with the scarf. Right. Like, they don't, they don't care. They don't know. They don't care.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, there's other things going on. They got, they got other things to care about. And it's interesting.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. Angry Panda PC says, but I am important. And I agree, I agree you're important. Everyone's important. But not everyone is important to everyone else.
Linus Sebastian
Here's a, here's another weird thing. Even if you are chronically online these days, it doesn't even necessarily matter that much because your feeds are so heavily algorithmic that you probably still are out of the loop on so many things. Because like, I remember someone, there was a thread on Reddit recently about how YouTube unlisted all of their rewinds.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
And it's like, yeah, I remember being on YouTube back in the day and like if there was something big happening on YouTube, as someone who went to YouTube, you would just know that. But now we were talking before the show, there was a creator in Our space with over a million subscribers that neither of us had ever heard of.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Because they made a type of content in our space that we just wouldn't happen to come across.
Luke Lafreniere
Alyssa Jean Papi says if a person behind a franchise spends all their money on wanting to stop making me exist, I think boycotting is really the least you could do.
Linus Sebastian
My point, we're not saying anything.
Luke Lafreniere
My point wasn't what people should or shouldn't do. My point was that they don't know.
Linus Sebastian
Yes. And that's the only point.
Luke Lafreniere
You can't care about something that you literally don't know.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
And I think that we often live in echo chambers and in communities where the issues that are very important to us, like, oh, man. Like, what would be. What would be an example that would be like. Like a really tech community. Like, okay, what percentage of people, if you went to the mall, right. And you went and talked to somebody, what percentage of people there would know that? DDR memory.
Linus Sebastian
Expensive. Yeah. And the impact of that on the.
Luke Lafreniere
World of the ones who knew what percentage of them would be impacted, like, out of computer enthusiast. So you've got your. You've got your total population. Right. Then you've got your, like, tech enthusiast bubble. And then within that bubble, you've got the people who are actually shopping for a new computer right now, who are actually spending money. Right. Right now. And then, like, that's it. It's this. It's this tiny little. It's this tiny little fraction. And. And so, yeah, there's people who are very mad who are following this whole AI thing and particularly, you know, generative AI video and. And the. Out of that. The people who sort of care about the replacement of labor of. Of the, you know, the cinematographers and the actors and the writers and all the people who would have otherwise worked on this. And I think it's just like, yeah, you could probably easily find what did that video. What did that top comment have? Like 20,000, 22,000 upvotes. Those 22,000 people, they matter. Those are living, breathing souls with blood coursing through their veins.
Linus Sebastian
They're also an incredibly tiny percentage of the global population. Alyssa Jean Puppy. Hopefully I said that.
Luke Lafreniere
Right.
Linus Sebastian
Said in floatplane chat. Okay. But J.K. rowling is all over the news about that, at least in the uk, which is just another version. She's not over here because she's not from over here. She's from over there.
Luke Lafreniere
And she's not trying to influence legislation over here. And we're aware because we're Terminally online. Yeah. But in. But you got a geographical filter.
Linus Sebastian
We're not trying.
Luke Lafreniere
Then you've got to keeps up with the news filter. Then you've got to cares about this issue filter. And then you've got to even remembers it filter. There's just, there's, there's so many layers until you get down to what can be a very large number of people.
Linus Sebastian
Especially over the last like decent amount of years there's been a lot of difficulty going around. And yeah, people might be struggling to survive at all themselves. And the issues that applied very directly to them is going to be what's important to them when that is when they're fighting for survival all the time, they have to deal with their own problems. Right. They have to put their mask on first. And it's, it's tough.
Luke Lafreniere
But like Kato esque asks, so then do people outside the US think Elon Musk is great? Then a lot of people think Elon Musk is pretty great. That's the whole point we're trying to make. Don't care at all or just don't care at all. Yeah. Yes. The answer is yes. I'm sorry to be the bearer of.
Linus Sebastian
There's a bad news. Incredible amount of people in the world that don't even know who he is.
Luke Lafreniere
Yes, that's a thing. I know it seems crazy, right? In our tech sphere, right? How could anyone in the tech sphere not have heard of the Techno King as he self proclaimed himself to be a number of years back, right?
Linus Sebastian
In D260 said there are idiots through the whole world. We're not saying they're idiots.
Luke Lafreniere
No, that's not what we're saying at all. Some of them might be.
Linus Sebastian
The fact is that education is a problem.
Luke Lafreniere
No, no, that's not what we're saying at all. We're saying that there's a whole wide world out there with many, many interests and many, many priorities and not everybody shares them. And in this algorithmically curated world that.
Linus Sebastian
We live in, you might literally just never see it.
Luke Lafreniere
And we may. And that is in a lot of ways by design on the platforms. Like what percentage of subreddits that exist do you imagine you've been personally exposed to? Like, dude, I. I've been kind of hooked on R all over the last like week. I try not to get too into the Reddit black hole.
Linus Sebastian
R. What all?
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, just like, just like. And it's just like it is realistically like a handful. Am I? The. PCMR shows up there every once in a While comics shows up a fair bit. There's like, like it's probably over the span of a week, several dozen subreddits that contribute to the majority of the like vastly uploaded or upvoted content on the site. But there are, what, what are, what is it up to? Tens of thousands, Hundreds of thousands. Are we millions of subreddits? How many subreddits are there?
Linus Sebastian
3.8 million.
Luke Lafreniere
What percentage of them?
Linus Sebastian
As of 11 months ago? 3.8 million as of 11 months ago.
Luke Lafreniere
So. And yeah, Len O O or however I pronounce this in floatplane chat says y' all just gotta ignore this stuff. I never get to see it and I'm so happy I don't have to. My feed is just cool stuff and diy. And that's also like exactly our point.
Linus Sebastian
For people that are terminally online, it is somewhat surprising to hear that a ton of people have recognized that being constantly dialed into everything that is happening in the world and how the fact that the further we move away from local news and we move closer to global news, like back, back in the day you could have a newspaper that's talking about like the fair that's happening in town. So there isn't going to be all that much really horrible things because you're centralized to a smaller area.
Luke Lafreniere
That was a different kind of bubble. It was a more geographical bubble.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. When you're now looking at more global news and you look at the news that's going to float to the top, it's going to be the most rage baiting, crazy, horrible things possible because that's what's going to get more views. So you're only going to get news about all of the most horrible possible things happening. And it's really bad in a lot of ways for your brain. That doesn't mean that not being that dialed in is for example, an education problem or an ignorance problem or being stupid.
Luke Lafreniere
I mean it's literally an ignorance problem, but maybe not a problem.
Linus Sebastian
It literally is ignorance in a negative way. Yeah, it might be ignorance, but not necessarily an ignorance problem to certain people. They don't want to be exposed to that pipeline of extreme constant negativity because it can be bad for you or it's just they got other stuff going on.
Luke Lafreniere
I7 6969X says people should be informed. Noble sentiment.
Linus Sebastian
How many things do you not know about? You're speaking English. Do you know everything that's happening in China right now?
Luke Lafreniere
I don't like I know Hassan's bilibili Stream got turned off.
Linus Sebastian
Sure, sure. Do you know, like. Yeah. Do you? I don't know. There's. There's so many layers to that. And, like, your level of knowledge does not mean that everyone else's level of knowledge is inferior. Superior. It's. There are an incredible amount of things that I know nothing about that I'm sure are incredibly important, and I have no clue.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. And again, like, we're not trying to argue that that's the way it should be. That ain't the argument. We're just pointing out that that is how it is. Not everyone cares about AI or AI Slop or.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, dude, the amount of people that are just totally ignoring and don't care about that at all.
Luke Lafreniere
Super high.
Linus Sebastian
Very high.
Luke Lafreniere
And the number of people who are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's go. Also very high.
Linus Sebastian
Yes.
Luke Lafreniere
And that is fact. Sorry, yeah. Am I gonna have to do a shirt over this? Sorry. AI is a thing. Like, I. Oh, man. Because I'll. I'll do a shirt. I don't mind. I could do. Trust me, bro. AI is the thing. Hashtag adblock is piracy. Just. We'll come by all the scandals.
Linus Sebastian
It's like, sorry. The things that you do know are probably less important than the myriads of things that you don't.
Luke Lafreniere
Ooh. Wow. That's. Okay. In other news. What the heck is this? Facebook and malwarebytes. Okay. I recorded this on my computer. Okay. I. Here we go. So I got my. My obs interface here. There we go. I got this email from Facebook. Okay. And I was a little irritated. Wow. This quality, though.
Linus Sebastian
This is really blurry.
Luke Lafreniere
One moment, please.
Linus Sebastian
It's actually not just my eyes this time.
Luke Lafreniere
There we go. Okay, okay. Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right. So I was told that A post from 2015 was flagged for copyright infringement. Okay. So I clicked through and I made my way over to our. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Right, right, right, right, right. Hold on. Okay, let's get the story right. So I got an email from Facebook asking me about something feature, and I was trying to figure out how to turn off emails from Facebook about all their page management nonsense. There was no unsubscribe. There was no. Because I don't want to block every email because occasionally, because it's for the page manager email, like, occasionally, they might send me something about my payment method being wrong or something. So I can't just block emails from Facebook. So I'm like, okay, there's no way to unsubscribe to this. There's no link to the interface where I can. Where I can change my contact. My contact settings. So I clicked through to my Facebook page to try to figure out where the heck in the interface I was supposed to disable this stupid email, notify me of some stupid feature that I don't care about. The first thing that came up was that I had a copyright claim against a post from 10 years ago. Okay, so here we go. All right, so let's watch this. Here's what happens so far. No one else can see your post because it was reported for copyright. Okay, so here are my options. Oh, yeah, I went back to the beginning. No one else can see your post because it was reported for copyright infringement. This is the post. Lifetime Malwarebytes for $20 on Amazon US. Go, go, go. And it's a link to a tweet. Okay, I don't see how that could infringe on anyone's copyright.
Linus Sebastian
That actually sounds awesome. I kind of wish I did that 10 years ago.
Luke Lafreniere
Who cares? So I click it. I'm like, okay, so it's a link to an Amazon search for malwarebytes. Okay, so I click. Continue. Who could possibly care about this? Malwarebytes Corporate Holdco or their authorized representative managed to find a post from 10 years ago.
Linus Sebastian
Well, they crawled it.
Luke Lafreniere
Well, right, but why? Who cares? And also, what are you talking about? How does it infringe your copyright? Okay, so anyway, we don't allow content that. Whatever. So I can accept the decision. I can submit an appeal, or I can contact Malwarebytes Corporate HoldCo. I think I'm about to dox Malwarebytes Corporate HoldCo. So, yeah, there's their email address and phone number. Anyway, submit an appeal. Nothing happens. Go to form. Go to form. Go to form. Hello? It doesn't open another window. Nothing. It doesn't do anything else. Go to form.
Linus Sebastian
Strategic bugs. I like it.
Luke Lafreniere
What the heck is this? What is going on right now? So here's the. Here's the email from Facebook. How do I start a fan challenge? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No unsubscribe. I'm fairly certain that this email is illegal in Canada. Like, what is it? What is it? Can spam again? There is no. I have not opted into this. I went into my Facebook notification settings later, actually. Yeah, I think it was after I turned off the screen recording. I have everything that I can find turned off and they sent me this bullshit from a stupid like malwarebytes claiming copyright infringement that I can't appeal. I don't even care. I don't need a 10 year old post on Facebook. Facebook. It's just. How is this so broken? No, I'm not getting fished. It goes, it goes to actual Facebook. What the heck? That's all, that's all I have to say about that. I was just, I was in between rounds at my badminton ladder going through my email like, I was like, what is this? I don't know how to deal with this right now.
Linus Sebastian
That's very annoying.
Luke Lafreniere
What I do know how to deal with is a big shout out to the LTT forum Folding team. We had a record breaking event folding month. Eight in total. The team produced over 230 billion points. That's nearly three times last year's total. We had 369 participants. Nice. And user Stobin demolished the previous record of 6 billion points and earned 112 billion points. I don't know exactly what that means. Oh, the previous record was 6 and it was 112. Wow. Special thanks to Livin, Mr. Chook, Karl Cote. Yeah, Pancrest. Yeah, yeah. Sulaimate, Jawa, Juice, Bricksider, Dogwitch. And an anonymous forum member for donating a total of 55 prizes to the event. Additionally, 20 participants will be walking away with a $100 LTT store gift card. Justin Miller, a scientist from the Bowman Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, was very impressed by the total simulation time that the LTT or that at FoldingHome contributed of 8.6 milliseconds during November. He said that sounds like a small amount of time, but that is a ton for the types of motions that we like to study and roughly two to three orders of magnitude more than most simulation focused papers tend to have on their own. So massive. Thank you to everyone who participated. The final rankings and Justin's complete summary can be found in the final blog at. Well, this link. Dan, do you want to throw the link in the various chats? But basically here. Yeah, super cool. Heck yeah. Folding month. And I think we've got just one more topic before we get to after dark. The world's first flying car. Here it is. Well, it's a flying. The world's first flying car is now being handmade in California and. And this right here, See all the dust and see all like the air being blown up is exactly why I think I'm convinced that this is, pardon the pun, never going to take off.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I mean that's been the argument, you know.
Luke Lafreniere
Alef Aeronautics, a US startup has started building its electric flying car The Model A by hand in California, becoming the first company to put a drive and fly car into production. The flying car can drive on regular roads and can take off vertically to fly with around a 220 mile driving and 110 mile flying range. Apparently the startup has already received 3500 pre orders, which is a lot considering that the flying car is expected to start at around $300,000. But there are a couple of small problems that are not included in our notes that are kind of hilarious. As cool as it would be to dunk on the cybertruck by literally flying.
Linus Sebastian
Over looks so sketchy. Have you watched this? Yes, I have, I just watched it. It looks so sketchy. Then the wheels are so thin, It's like, oh man, I feel like they just put like a, like a fiberglass frame on a like high carrying capacity drone.
Luke Lafreniere
A detail that was overlooked is that at this time it can only take off from and land at airports. So like what is the point of it? The whole idea behind flying car, like the whole connotation of car is that you park it at your house and you like drive it to work or you go get groceries and you like.
Linus Sebastian
Park at your house again, drive to the airport and then, and then not like have to get out and get into a plane. You could drive to the airport and then just take off from the airport. This was pretty great. You can drive 220 miles with a 110 mile flight range. Wow. So it's only half the. That's actually.
Luke Lafreniere
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Less than a year later, I haven't seen it drive. Have you seen it drive? Is there a video of it driving? I've only seen it somewhat sketchily fly.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't think I've seen it drive. As soon as I found out that it's slow, has crappy range, is expensive, has all the issues of any other personal flying vehicles with the big one being, I forget what it's called, washout or something like that. Basically the displacement of air that they need is so big and the propellers that they can accommodate for any kind of VTOL functionality are so small that they have this like tiny cone that basically blows away anything anywhere near them. Like there is with the laws of physics being what they are, as far as I can tell, no reasonable path to driving one of these from your front driveway to your parking lot at work. They would blow so much crap around on the parking lot that you'd be denting and scratching everyone's car that you're anywhere near people would hate it. They're so loud. Much larger propellers can help with the high pitched noise and all of that. But you still have to deal with all that air displacement in order to lift this like hundreds of pounds vehicle plus whatever people and cargo that you want to carry in it. Like, it's just, it's just not going to happen.
Linus Sebastian
Or you could buy a really nice, really sweet car to drive to the airport and then get in your own just like experimental craft.
Luke Lafreniere
That thing looks pretty sick.
Daniel Besser
What's the side impact crash rating on this flying car?
Linus Sebastian
For sure, just nothing. The cripple is you.
Daniel Besser
Like, come on.
Linus Sebastian
You are expected to crumple your bones. Yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
It will absorb the impact.
Daniel Besser
It's just going to hit the batteries. Yeah, sure.
Luke Lafreniere
Like, like, come on.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, very fun. Very cool. Very good.
Luke Lafreniere
Looks cool. They go out of their way. It seems to make it really hard to see how skinny chicken these, dude.
Linus Sebastian
They're so, they're so narrow.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, man.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, you can see them there.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, they look like wheelbarrow tires.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, yeah.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh my gosh. Yeah. So this is.
Linus Sebastian
Damn, dude.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, this is.
Linus Sebastian
You said they got pre orders?
Luke Lafreniere
Apparently.
Linus Sebastian
That's the craziest part.
Luke Lafreniere
It says in the nose.
Linus Sebastian
I'm working on. This is cool. I actually have no issue.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay, so we just had a huge long conversation with the audience about ignorance. Remember, not everybody is an engineer and a lot of people would think, oh, well, you know, they got, I forget what body they got approval from, but they like are making progress to this being a product that they actually ship. And so if I heard that they got their. Yeah. Airworthiness certification from the faa. They got an airworthiness certification. That's huge. Right? So I'd be like, oh yeah, flying car. I see this picture, I go, I mean, what? Yeah, 300 grand. I mean that's, that's only, that's only 10 times the price of a car that doesn't fly. Right. It has so many more degrees of freedom. That's so good.
Linus Sebastian
Honestly, if they just never released this video, I feel like they'd do better.
Luke Lafreniere
Well, they've been doing pretty good up till now. They got their pre orders and. Yeah, not everybody, not everybody's an engineer. So. Yeah, I could see people pre ordering it if they just don't do the math. Like, it wasn't until for me too, that I came across like a really good article. I wish I could could find it so that I could bring it up. I read it and then I like kind of lost it and then I Never saw it again. But it was a really good article that basically kind of walked me through the math of how this is just like kind of impossible. And they're like, at the end of it, they're like, look, don't, don't short it because you know you can't stay, they'll stay irrational longer than you'll stay solvent or whatever. Like, I'm not saying you should like short these companies and try and make a bunch of money on their downfall or whatever. I'm just saying don't invest in them, don't pre order this stuff because this ain't happening. This is not happening. I'm like, oh, okay, bummer. Because that would be awesome. Like I'd be so down.
Linus Sebastian
I, I hope that, you know, they got their, their flight worthiness thing, whatever. I hope that it ends up being awesome because like, why not? Yeah, just that video wasn't awesome. Does not make it look good. But hey, I mean, all power to him. Good luck. Oh, cool.
Luke Lafreniere
Hilarious.
Linus Sebastian
No fun. Is that it? After Dark.
Luke Lafreniere
I think it's time for after dark.
Linus Sebastian
Nice.
Luke Lafreniere
Mr. Daniel Besser. Hit us.
Daniel Besser
Let me just get the banner and the button.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh yeah, not, not financial advice. Just throwing that out there.
Daniel Besser
Always got to throw that out there. Okay, let's see what we've got today. Hey dudes, aside from YouTube, which single company sudden shutdown would have the money most immediate detrimental impact on lmg, which would be the most beneficial.
Luke Lafreniere
A beneficial shutdown. I don't know if there's anyone. We're all about kind of we're all about partnerships. I don't think there's anyone that I would look at and go, yeah, them shutting down would be highly beneficial to us. Would be beneficial.
Linus Sebastian
I usually see the, like the competitor.
Luke Lafreniere
Maybe, but I don't really see us as having competitors in a traditional sense.
Linus Sebastian
I usually see especially the space worth in not all spaces, but the space we're in is rising tide lifts all ships.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, me too.
Linus Sebastian
I think the more people that are interested in tech will help all of us and if other people in the tech space are making good content, I think that will help us, not hurt us. Yeah, I've always seen it that way.
Luke Lafreniere
I mean this is really interesting so that, the timing of the release of that, that interview that I did with John, I was talking in the interview about how our viewership has kind of struggled lately. Right. But I did that interview a couple of months ago and so that obviously there's a ton of comments on the interview with people giving me their Brilliant ideas for what I can do to fix my channel. Or how talking about how, you know. Yeah, it's all because, you know, Alex and Andy are gone or whatever the case may be. Right. But what people don't bother to do is check and see if there's any truth whatsoever to their hypothesis. And to be clear, I'm not saying that, you know, I wouldn't, that I don't love working with Alex Nandy or whatever, but we've actually had a nice little resurgence lately and we are back to the kinds of numbers that we were doing, you know, earlier this year, slash, you know, before the recent dip. Like, in fact, we're quite a bit higher than that now. We're tracking to do probably more like 80 million views for December, it looks like. So that's back up at a level that's sort of closer to sort of November of last year. Like there tends to be kind of, There's a seasonality to it, to a degree.
Linus Sebastian
Yes.
Luke Lafreniere
Right. So we are, we are higher than probably in the, in the next month, we'll be higher than probably about eyeballing this 70 to 70% of the months of the past, like 18. So thank you for your advice and your analysis of why LMG is failing or whatever the case may be, but we're not failing. And a big part of why we don't fail is we are constantly looking inward, looking outward, figuring out what it is that we need to do differently, how can we generate excitement, how, how can we elevate our content, how can we optimize our processes? And the answers are always going to be different in an ever changing world that is competitive, even if I don't see other YouTubers or other media outlets as competitors. Does that make sense?
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. And we've had great people leave. And we will have great people leave. And we'll have great people join.
Luke Lafreniere
Yes. And then leave.
Linus Sebastian
We are a business in constant flux, just like every single other business. And we will have different eras because there will be different people here at different times.
Luke Lafreniere
And like Taylor Swift, I may do a tour about my eras.
Linus Sebastian
You might, you might not. And this is all extremely normal.
Daniel Besser
Yep.
Linus Sebastian
And that's okay.
Luke Lafreniere
Everything is a normal thing that is happening right now. And. And you know what's another normal thing? For there to be times of unusual strife. Yeah. That's also normal. Even if it is abnormal. And so there will be times of abnormality. There will be future times when, you know what, we might hire a lot. There will be future times when we might have a Lot of turnover. There will be future times when our content is not performing well and there will be future times when our content is performing well. Really well. And all of that is just part of the natural ebbs and flows of running a business in a fast, fast, fast changing world.
Linus Sebastian
Maybe Steam will release or Valve will release a bunch of hardware all at once.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, that was nice.
Linus Sebastian
Let's go.
Luke Lafreniere
What a Christmas present that was for us. You know, it was encouraging, right? You know, because it's not like I totally was. It's not like I'm immune to, you know, feeling a lack of confidence sometimes. Right? Like, yeah, you know, I see the content not performing, I go like, do I even. I haven't got this anymore. You know, like I'm always asking myself that. And then someone does me, the, the like bare minimumist favor of releasing some hardware that's interesting. And we get like what, 4 million views on one of them and like four and a half on the other. Three and a half and 4.8.
Linus Sebastian
And 4.8, right?
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, something like that. And I'm just like, oh, okay. No, no, I still do. I still do know how to do this. I did those videos in like two hours each.
Linus Sebastian
Just. The Steam machine won't cost what you think got 2.6.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, like it was a good video.
Linus Sebastian
Just cool, interesting stuff.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah, no, I.
Linus Sebastian
Sweet.
Luke Lafreniere
I think not.
Linus Sebastian
Just.
Luke Lafreniere
I. I think we've still got it. I do think that we have. I mean, you guys were even talking about this before the video, before we started wan shows just like looking at some of the process bloat and stuff.
Linus Sebastian
We have, yeah, we have problems. There's gonna be. There's gonna need to be some work done on kind of addressing how things flow through the company and I think so. You know, we've existed for so many years at this point and we've. We've kind of always just built. There hasn't really been a lot of removing things, cutting back on certain things, trying to see, hey, if we cut out a bunch of processes here, what, what would happen? Yeah, because sometimes like there's, there's process that was originally designed to help solve problems which due to misuse or rot or improper initial creation actually just creates more problems creating more cycles for people have to do, especially cycles that suck and they don't want to do ever. That is like absolutely a thing that happens. So yeah, we have things to address, but we're working on it and that's normal. Especially as far as my understanding goes, when companies get to around this size?
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Like this ends up being a major problem. When companies get around the hundred plus ish size, which is exactly where we're at, everything changes. Yeah. So this all makes sense.
Luke Lafreniere
And there will continue to be change. Someone asked. Here we go. Capture the bomb Asks Speaking of ebbs and flows, how's the badminton club doing? I don't know. You tell me. Here's a live feed. Okay. Looks pretty good to me. Got some. Got some people playing some badminton all up in this.
Linus Sebastian
How embarrassing would it be to just Biff right now?
Luke Lafreniere
They'll be fine. Solid players. Actually. It's a good club. Yeah, no, it's. This is, this is one of those ones where like, it was a passion project that like, you know, was never really like, intended to make money. And it's still, it's. It's still a little more complicated than like, yeah, you know, yo, I'm making money. See? So yo, world, I hope you're ready for me now. Gather round. Yeah, you know, like, it's not quite that right? But it's.
Linus Sebastian
I wish it was a little bit taller.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, yeah, well, that, that. Yes, but.
Linus Sebastian
Oh, I honestly wasn't even meming that. I just.
Luke Lafreniere
No, no, no. Well, that's the different artist, different song. I. I was Humpty Dance. Like totally different.
Linus Sebastian
Like that song. It's fine.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay. The point is that, yeah, we kind of accidentally. We kind of accidentally. A good sports facility that's actually doing really well.
Linus Sebastian
Like there's probably accidentally a successful business.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, there's probably a solid like 60 people in there right now. There's people in the concession. There's some people hanging out in the lounge. There's people in the retail shop.
Linus Sebastian
Is the concession like a thing yet?
Luke Lafreniere
But we do have those like Japanese style, like hot.
Linus Sebastian
Okay, cool. I mean, that's nice.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah. So Smash Champs will use them except when there's wh Land.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, sure.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
Is there. Is there any progress on having an actual concession?
Luke Lafreniere
No.
Linus Sebastian
Okay.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, the, the managers feel extremely strongly that we need to have a steam room and a sauna. I'm really not sure that I agree that's that important. But we also want to put in some more showers. We only have a couple right now.
Linus Sebastian
Showers I could see.
Luke Lafreniere
We should, we should add more. Um, I think that a steam room and sauna is a very optional thing for a badminton club. But yeah, I basically told them, look, look, you're allowed to put it in as long as it doesn't cost any of our floor area. If you don't Use up floor plate. Then like, if you can put them above the showers at the back or something like that, I'm open to it. But they pitched me like splitting up the gym and putting that at the back and putting the like sauna, steam room, shower stuff like upstairs. I'm like, no, we are not doing that. A gym is a way more relevant thing to a badminton club than that.
Linus Sebastian
I can see people wanting to do sauna. Doing sauna after physical activity is pretty sick.
Luke Lafreniere
Sure.
Linus Sebastian
But yeah, if you just try to make it additive, if possible. Also, the concession will help money for sure.
Luke Lafreniere
Yes.
Linus Sebastian
No, actually, people are constantly exercising.
Luke Lafreniere
I heard that other clubs that have tried to do them, it's been break even at best. So we may be better off. I think we get a pretty narrow margin on those vending machines, but we may actually be better off. Off with the vending machine. So. Interesting TBD website. Bump that.
Linus Sebastian
Interesting. I do know as far as my understanding goes, you usually have to make the concession, like, actually pretty good. And then it ends up also getting things like Uber Eats orders. Interesting because there's. It's actually very rare that you can get like, actually pretty well like balanced meals on Ubereats. So, like, I could see that Gold's Gym in Langley has like a.
Luke Lafreniere
Protein shake.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah. And also some like wraps and stuff, but they're like more protein heavy. Like they don't have high sugar counts and all that other kind of stuff. So, like, if you did like, oh, it's a badminton gym, so there's things.
Luke Lafreniere
That like, you know, we could do a Smash burger.
Linus Sebastian
I think that's pretty far from the point I was trying to make.
Luke Lafreniere
But it's great for the branding.
Linus Sebastian
It is great for the branding. It is absolutely, absolutely. Like something I mean, I would personally appreciate. I don't know if this is the right fit for Smash Chance. Probably not necessarily, but I think it maybe should be. Is if you had like a protein shake kind of thing and it had like 5 grams creatine, I think that would be sick. It's hard to get boosted juice does it, but there aren't that many other places that do.
Luke Lafreniere
Interesting.
Linus Sebastian
So, like, I think there are ways to make it make sense, but I think you have to kind of to open up the interest in that where it's not necessarily just the. The badminton club that would be interested in it.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, I'd be down for that. There would be. The thing is, like, you have to find someone to kind of spearhead that. Right. And right now we're just. We're busy figuring out how to run a sports facility. We haven't even been open to the pub. We haven't even been. We've been open a year, but we haven't been taking money for a year. So we've been like soft open. But our grand opening was less than a year ago, so we still. We still have a lot of little things to figure out. Yeah, I realized. Sorry. The numbers I was showing before didn't look like we were tracking up that much, but last 30 days, 85 million. So that's actually like quite, quite up there with our top months over the last 1875. It's like almost on par with like August 2024. So we're. We're tracking back up and we'll track back down.
Linus Sebastian
Yep.
Luke Lafreniere
And that's okay. It's okay. We'll survive. We will survive. Oh, as long as I know how to tech, I know we'll stay alive. Dan. Hit me.
Daniel Besser
Hello, my parasocial friends.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, hi there.
Daniel Besser
I'm not a floatplane subscriber because I already have two similar subscriptions and my brain refuses to let me have another. Do any of you have arbitrary rules like this?
Linus Sebastian
Oh, tons.
Luke Lafreniere
I don't think that's arbitrary. I think limiting the number of subscriptions you have is totally fair. Totally not arbitrary. I mean, the two, I guess is an arbitrary number, but I think two is a pretty good number.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, it seems pretty reasonable to me.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, it seems pretty reasonable.
Linus Sebastian
I really don't. I probably have.
Luke Lafreniere
Huh.
Linus Sebastian
I think I have one. I'm not even trying to find Netflix.
Luke Lafreniere
Nope, no Netflix. Oh, that's right, you ditched it a while back.
Linus Sebastian
Long time ago.
Luke Lafreniere
What do you have then?
Linus Sebastian
YouTube.
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, yeah, just YouTube Premium. Yep. Okay.
Daniel Besser
My company got hacked last month through a zero day exploit in center stack.
Luke Lafreniere
Bummer.
Daniel Besser
It looks like we paid the ransom for the encryption key. Have you guys known anyone who has paid? What is the process?
Luke Lafreniere
I haven't.
Linus Sebastian
I actually don't.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, right. Yeah. Good call. Who's there? Scammers? Fuck you, man. Get out of here. No, I've been here for months. Yeah, sorry. I don't know anything about the process.
Linus Sebastian
Bummer.
Luke Lafreniere
Sorry to hear that. Okay.
Daniel Besser
Hi. LLD. Linus, do you still daily drive a 7900 xtx? What's your take on where rdna3 is headed after being missing in Wednesday's Redstone announcement?
Luke Lafreniere
I mean, this is kind of classic amd. I think for the most part they do their best to support their older products, but like, like they are A much smaller company than Nvidia. Still, even after all the success that they've had on the CPU and the, and the APU side, I'm not surprised by it. The 7900 XT just does not have the neural processing to do what they would want it to do with FSR Redstone as far as I can tell. I'd love to be wrong, but it just doesn't really seem like it. And yes, I'm still daily driving it in my PC upstairs, but I've actually been doing more than half of my gaming on my PC downstairs because that's like where my kids are usually sitting and Yvonne doesn't game. So I would either be sitting by myself upstairs or if I was streaming I would be upstairs. But I haven't streamed in like forever. So yes, it's still in my, in my main machine but I haven't been gaming on it. It as my like primary card for a little while.
Daniel Besser
Hi lld. My partner and I are combining our skills to go into business together. My question for Linus is was there anything you should have discussed with Yvonne before working together?
Luke Lafreniere
Oh, yeah. I think something that we even to this day are not perfectly aligned on is where's the endpoint? What is the target we're trying to hit? And I think that having that agreement, especially if you're going into business with it, sounds like a romantic partner. Having that agreement in place is going to be critical to maintaining harmony in your relationship. Because if one of you has the goal of, you know, achieving a better work life balance by running your own business and being able to set your own hours, and one of you has the goal of conquering the world and taking, you know, the business fear by storm, then it's going to be hard to agree when you've achieved success because you both have completely different goals and talk about that. Yeah. Mary.
Daniel Besser
Mary. Linus. Luke and Dan.
Luke Lafreniere
Hey, Mary.
Linus Sebastian
Mary.
Luke Lafreniere
Mary. Mary. Pippin.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I like that.
Daniel Besser
What about Second Mary?
Linus Sebastian
Lord of the Rings is based.
Daniel Besser
I'm looking into. Wow, take there, Luke.
Linus Sebastian
You know I'm bringing those spicy ones.
Luke Lafreniere
Really gonna piss off a lot of the community with that one.
Daniel Besser
No offense, but I thought the Lord of the Rings was pretty okay. I'm looking to introduce my mother to a new video game this holiday season. Any recommendations with good story that would be easy to learn for the elderly.
Linus Sebastian
For the elderly.
Luke Lafreniere
Good story you learn for the elderly. I mean, I feel like games are getting harder, not easier.
Linus Sebastian
Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and I'm not Typ casting because it's grandma. Those are just. Just like Animal Crossing in particular. I know was widely accepted by a non gaming audience. I think Stardew Valley is also a potentially lower lift in regards to non gaming audience. Outside of that, I think very like narrative heavy games. If you try to think of the types of games where like yeah, people would enjoy chilling on the couch while you play because it's like fun to watch and then you pair that with. They're not mechanically overly difficult. I suspect that would work pretty well.
Luke Lafreniere
Promortus says Guitar Hero. Yeah.
Linus Sebastian
How about not Ben Bob said Elder Scrolls Daggerfall, which is.
Luke Lafreniere
Get out.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, not gonna go super well. Pancrat's a good suggestion. Telltale Games, just a bunch of different Telltale games are all probably decent. If there's something in the Telltale Games universe that fits their fancy, then that might be a good way to go.
Daniel Besser
I mean there's, there's Soma. You can turn the enemies off.
Linus Sebastian
Can you actually just turn them off?
Daniel Besser
Yeah, yeah, that would be. That would be fun. The last one I have for you today is. Hi lld. Is there any early stage or emerging tech you're particularly excited about?
Luke Lafreniere
I mean the emerging tech is like all robotics and AI, right? Like that's kind of the.
Linus Sebastian
The big AR glasses.
Luke Lafreniere
Yeah, AR glasses are pretty cool. I. Oh, I don't know if the thing I tried today was embargoed, but it was cool.
Linus Sebastian
Neat. I. I am scared about the current direction of AR glasses, but I'm hoping more AI. Some. Well, yeah, and the people who are winning right now. But I'm hoping that you know. Yeah, it's like actually kind of weird. What the heck?
Luke Lafreniere
We didn't do the second set of sponsors. Hold that thought, Beans. The show is brought to you today by Proton. It's becoming somewhat more common for messaging apps to use end to end encryption. Why isn't that the standard with your email? Well, the folks over at Proton designed ProtonMail with your privacy in mind. It's an email service that automatically uses end to end zero access encryption, ensuring that only you can access your emails. And if you're already using another service like Google, Porting over is just a few clicks away. ProtonMail will even notify you if your email address or other personal information has found its way onto the dark web. Take that security one step further. With unlimited email aliases, which allows you to protect your primary primary inbox from spam, you can check out ProtonMail totally free. And hey, if you love it, you can always upgrade to their Other services down the line. Go to Proton Me Wan and start protecting your information today. The show is also brought to you by Odd Pieces. How many times has someone been given a gift on Christmas just to go hide in their room and play with their new gizmos and gadgets? That's not family time. Isn't the point of the holiday season to come together and connect like a puzzle? Get it? Connect like a puzzle.
Linus Sebastian
That's pretty good.
Luke Lafreniere
Connect like a camera connected to your game quality. No, it doesn't matter. The point is Odd Pieces is a puzzle that, as it's assembled, will tell you a story. So you'll have an image that takes place before. And then the puzzle itself is going to be what happens after a few seconds later. So characters will shift, events will unfold. It's kind of like watching a bunch of little stories happen in real time. Okay. Take like two seconds to mention they sent you a puzzle you did with your kids. Yeah, it was this one. I did this one with my kids. Lots of fun. It comes with the puzzle itself. There's some comics. There's like a fun like. Like a. Like a kind of checklist that you can do to find fun things you. So you can do kind of like a hidden picture or not hidden picture, but like find. Find the thing, game, whatever. I don't know what they're called. The point is, it was more fun than just doing a regular puzzle because there was actually something to do with it at the end. And it's a great way to get the family involved in one activity this Christmas or New Year's. So if you're ready for a puzzle like no other, get 15% off your first order using our link in the video description. What was that? Okay, cool. Neat. Thank you, Proton. And it's about family.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, I mean, I get it. Yeah, that's a meme. You're probably not chronically online enough to know the meme. Wow.
Daniel Besser
Fast in the family.
Linus Sebastian
References family. Cat OS. Drive.
Daniel Besser
Drive car.
Linus Sebastian
Cat OS. Did a really great reminder. LMG GG, Newegg. We're doing a check. B580s.
Luke Lafreniere
Can you get what is there one under MSRP 239.
Linus Sebastian
Another one down here. 239.
Luke Lafreniere
What's our affiliate link again? Again?
Linus Sebastian
LMG GG, Newegg.
Luke Lafreniere
LMG GG, Newegg.
Linus Sebastian
And I'm pretty sure these are going to still have.
Luke Lafreniere
Do they still have the deal? Do they have the deal? No, there's no deal. They don't have the game bundle.
Linus Sebastian
Supposed to still be running though that.
Luke Lafreniere
It'S always while quantities last. We probably sold them all last week.
Linus Sebastian
Ah, got it.
Luke Lafreniere
Okay, like I'm willing to bet because.
Linus Sebastian
I just see 3D mark with this, which is definitely not Battlefield 6 and whatever the other games were like here, check this out.
Luke Lafreniere
I bet if I go to like a lesser known retailer or something, they will probably have it. Yeah, see so like Canada computers, gift code redemption. Because the, the promo is still running. But I talked about this last week.
Linus Sebastian
Is that a Canadian promo? Because I'm looking at specifically the America.
Luke Lafreniere
Well, I don't, I don't know any America retailers that are not Neweggs, so it'd be hard for me to check. But if they still had smaller retailers then I pretty much guarantee that while supplies last, they would have stock of the promo. Because Newegg did run out of them and then they did restock them. So they have a cost. Right, like intel has to buy more copies of these games so they don't just run them for forever.
Linus Sebastian
Yeah, that makes sense.
Luke Lafreniere
And you know what else doesn't run forever?
Linus Sebastian
This show.
Luke Lafreniere
That. That's a good guess. We'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.
Linus Sebastian
Bye.
Linus Tech Tips | December 12, 2025
Episode Date: December 13, 2025
Hosts: Linus Sebastian & Luke Lafreniere
This episode of The WAN Show spotlights explosive tech news from the week, centering on breaking computational world records, AI copyright lawsuits, wild console sales figures, and evolving tech legislation. Linus and Luke bring their classic humorous, sometimes self-deprecating take on the latest headlines, plus some personal anecdotes and spirited debate. If you care about real-world impacts of technology, drama in the AI space, and want insight from creators on the bleeding edge, this episode is a must-listen.
[03:07–06:17]
[06:17–16:15]
[16:54–22:56]
[28:43–37:45]
[38:29–42:03]
[42:23–53:02]
[53:02–58:14]
[58:34–65:51]
[69:44–72:30]
[72:34–75:16]
[84:33–87:14]
[88:13–105:28]
[105:30–110:43]
[115:01–121:20]
[125:56–129:46]
[148:23–155:26]
[146:17–148:23]
On Getting Their Pi Record Broken
“Someone's got to get 369. And then someone's got to get 420. And then I think the whole loop. We can.” – Linus (01:30)
On AI Copyright Lawsuit
“There’s a difference between you doing that as a person and Nvidia doing that as a corporation.” – Linus (09:47)
On Fair Use & Company Practices
"Are we all just borrowing lightly but not damaging the market for the original content?... as long as everyone kind of goes in good faith." – Luke (09:53)
On Social Media Bans for Kids
“This ain’t gonna work. Overall, I'm not entirely unsupportive… but it's not going to work.” – Linus (47:22)
On Flying Cars
“...it can only take off from and land at airports. So like what is the point of it?” – Linus (149:40)
On Surveillance Pricing
“By harvesting your personal data…companies can charge you more for the same services.” – Linus (116:04)
| Timestamp | Segment | Details | |-----------|------------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:07 | Storage Review shatters world Pi record | Hardware specs, impact, LTT’s response | | 06:17 | Nvidia class action by YouTubers | AI video model, LMG videos used, legal/ethical debate | | 16:54 | Merch & logistics update | Customs, new products, contest entries, planning | | 28:43 | Gaming mechanics/industry cycle | Open world vs. live service debate, indie resurgence | | 38:29 | EV standard talk | NACS vs. CCS, home charging hurdles | | 42:23 | Australia bans social media <16 | Government vs. parents, efficacy, LTT house rules | | 53:02 | Linus’s son: 3D printing entrepreneur | Small business lesson, parenting philosophy | | 58:34 | AI robot shoots BB gun | AI safety limits, Tesla Optimus tele-op speculations | | 69:44 | Intel BMG GPU rumors | Market needs, rumors vs. fact | | 72:34 | Philips fixables update | Corporate response, 3D printability | | 84:33 | AMD FSR Redstone | Feature details, limited support, AMD vs. Nvidia | | 88:13 | Pebble smart ring debate | Disposable tech ethics, use cases, repairability | | 105:30 | Black Friday console stats | PS5, Switch, "Next Playground" outsells Xbox | | 115:01 | Surveillance pricing | Law, examples, market failure | | 125:56 | AI-generated McDonald’s ad controversy | Creativity, job replacement, "AI slop" | | 148:23 | Alef Model A flying car skepticism | Range, feasibility, fun with physics | | 146:17 | Folding@Home record | Community effort for science |
The episode is a classic mix of deep tech insight, friendly jabs, humility amid defeat, sidebars about parenting and business, and honest takes on the problems and promise of current technology. Linus and Luke strike a balance between critique and optimism, often displaying genuine curiosity, occasional bemusement at the absurdity of the tech world, and not a little bit of introspection about their own work and legacy.
For Fans & New Listeners:
Whether you want hot takes on AI copyright battles, heartwarming family stories, or riffs on the future of personal technology, this WAN Show episode is a prime cut of the Linus Tech Tips experience.
(Skip to After Dark for less-structured Q&A, sponsor discussions, and club/life updates from the team.)