Pixel Phones Finally Blowing Up - WAN Show October 17, 2025

Summary

WAN Show Podcast Summary

Episode: Pixel Phones Finally Blowing Up

Date: October 18, 2025
Hosts: Linus Sebastian, Luke Lafreniere
Podcast: Linus Tech Tips (WAN Show)

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Episode Overview

This episode covers:

• The Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold “blowing up” during a YouTuber’s durability test and what it means for foldable phones
• Google’s ongoing struggles in the premium US phone market
• The backlash over original games versus remakes and "preservation" in gaming (with Capcom’s recent decision in focus)
• Recent tech news: HP removing support docs, AI going off the rails with seahorse emoji, Microsoft’s account shenanigans, and more
• Anecdotes about home repairs, financial anxiety, and fun staff banter

The hosts maintain their characteristic tech-nerdy, irreverent, and honest tone.

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Headline Topic: The Pixel 10 Pro Fold “Blows Up”

[03:09−14:52]

Key Points & Discussion

• YouTube Durability Test Incident:
  Zach (JerryRigEverything) tested the Pixel 10 Pro Fold's durability. The phone broke near the hinge, and after repeated bending, the battery began to emit smoke.
• Fairness to Google?
  • Linus: “To be fair to the Pixel 10 Pro Fold…have you seen that man’s arms?” ([03:29])
  • Testers with discipline might stick to their “do pushups when dying in-game” routine, but most (including Linus and Luke) don’t maintain it.
• Is This a Big Deal?
  • While the fire looks dramatic, IFixit’s Elizabeth Chamberlain told The Verge there’s no sign of a fundamental design flaw, unless more failures appear in the wild. “As dramatic as the battery fire is, we don't think this is necessarily a sign that something is wrong with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold design...” ([06:34])
  • The phone was fully charged, which increases battery fire risk.
• Larger Issue—Price and Marketability:
  • Linus: The real problem is price. “By the time you pay sales tax…they’re getting dangerously close to a couple thousand US dollars…Well over $2,500 Canadian dollars for a phone. Like, when did this happen?” ([07:42])
  • Luke recounts how Google raised prices to match iPhone, aiming for “premium” vibes.
• Google’s US Struggle with Branding
  • Apple’s dominance among young Americans is attributed to “brand association” and technological lock-in, not just pricing.
  • Linus: “Google just doesn’t have a sexy brand.” ([09:05])
  • Luke: "A lot of people I talk to these days converse over Discord...I don't actually run into this [lock-in] very often.” ([11:10])
• RCS and Messaging Woes:
  • Linus’s experience with RCS messaging is inconsistent; fails over to SMS/MMS more often than expected.
• Folding Phones in Practice
  • Most users just use the “skinny” outer screen for quick interactions; the big screen is primarily for content consumption and reading.
  • Foldables remain expensive, delicate, niche; Apple's rumored entry might eventually mainstream the space, but not soon.

Memorable Quotes:

• “I would say there’s plenty of other reasons not to buy a Pixel 10 Pro Fold.” – Linus ([07:05])
• “Google doesn't have a sexy brand… Apple locks in their users through their social lives.” – Linus ([09:05])
• “Discord is multi-platform. That’s always been my issue with iMessage.” – Linus ([11:34])

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Gaming Preservation & Capcom

[18:08−41:02]

Key Points & Discussion

• Capcom Reluctant to Re-release Originals:
  Capcom only released the original Resident Evil games on PC after GOG’s urging, believing the remakes were “already a superior experience.”
• Why Preserve Original Versions?
  • Both hosts agree it’s vital for nostalgia and historical accuracy—not everyone wants balance tweaks or “modern conveniences.”
  • Linus laments: “I don’t necessarily want your fixed balance …maybe you want the controls to be clunky because that’s more like what it was.” ([20:14])
• Remakes vs. Nostalgia
  • Linus is playing the new Final Fantasy Tactics remake, which added modern niceties (autosave, ability to flee, undo moves) but made the game easier and sometimes less meaningful.
• “Lazy Difficulty” in Modern Games:
  • Luke and Linus criticize balancing remakes just by inflating enemy health and damage: “It's just a wild experience. You play on one setting, it's like, wow, this is way too easy. You play on the other setting, it's like, okay, it feels like I'm playing a wall.” ([28:09])
• Risks of Releasing Old Games:
  • Developers might fear the originals are too janky, ruining their reputation. But the hosts argue the nostalgia factor outweighs this risk for the right market.
  • Linus: “I guess what I’m trying to say is …if almost literally anyone else ended up with this game, there’s a really solid chance they wouldn’t like it.” ([33:53])
• Manuals and “Real” Nostalgia:
  • Playing the original often included reading a physical manual and fighting with obtuse mechanics.
• Kids and Challenging Games:
  • Both reminisce that as kids, ample free time and persistence enabled them to master tough, poorly explained games that would frustrate adults today.

Notable Moment:

• Linus calls out the need for classic versions, referencing Blizzard removing original Warcraft games: “When Blizzard kind of removed their older Warcraft titles …I didn’t really want to give Activision Blizzard any money, but I really wanted to own those original versions…” ([19:34])

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HP Pulls Support for Older Products

[107:13–119:47]

Discussion Highlights

• HP has started removing support documentation for ‘retired’ products, including drivers and manuals.
• Linus and Luke slam this: it’s low-effort to just archive the content, especially since HP’s devices rely on proprietary drivers. Anyone restoring an old device is out of luck.
• “If you pull that driver off your site, so help me, I will curse your name. That’s all I can really do…” – Linus ([110:00])
• They praise other companies (IBM, Intel) for keeping old resources online.

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“AI Loses Its Mind Over a Seahorse Emoji”

[167:22−178:36]

Summary:

• ChatGPT gives bizarre, unhinged responses when prompted for a seahorse emoji, looping through unrelated emojis and confused justifications.
• The hosts demo the bug live—at times GPT flashes through fish, unicorn, coral, etc., and appears “upset with itself” for failing.
• Linus: “And this is what people are losing their jobs to? Yeah, that seems like good management.” ([176:25])
• Luke suspects the model is “trying so hard to be right it self-corrects over and over.”
• Discussion about the dangers of relying on AI (including their own business team feeding AI-generated sponsor reads), and the limits of today’s tools for professional tasks.

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Other Major Discussion Topics

Microsoft Accounts and Windows 11 Setup

[163:51–166:44]

• Microsoft disables another method to set up Windows without an online account, angering power users.
• Suggested workarounds are increasingly convoluted.
• “The simplest bug fix, I guess … is to just annoy their users.” – Linus ([164:35])

Philips “Fixables” 3D Printing Program Fizzles

[153:07–156:27]

• Despite positive PR, Philips only uploaded two 3D printable parts for consumer repair, then abandoned the program.
• Luke praises Cooler Master instead, which provided a substantial 3D model library.

Cybercrime & Ransomware “Ban Paying the Ransom?”

[180:53–184:56]

• Hosts briefly debate whether banning ransom payments would stop ransomware. Conclusion: it’s not a simple fix—black hats or competitor-funded attacks would escalate.

Framework Linux Secure Boot Issue

[185:56–186:56]

• A secure boot vulnerability affected 200,000 Framework Linux laptops, but was patched promptly. Linus notes the scale as impressive for a small company.

Apple M5 Chip & Vision Pro v2

[186:56–191:47]

• Apple’s new M5 chip claims 15% speed improvement over the M4; now in 14” MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, Vision Pro v2.
• Most users are happy with M1/M2—incremental upgrades seem less urgent.
• The Vision Pro v2 is heavier (!), due to counterweighting; little else is changed.
• “Man, Apple Silicon is too good...” – Linus ([187:43])

Bose to Brick Smart Speakers

[192:24–194:10]

• Bose is discontinuing cloud support for SoundTouch speakers, breaking key features
• Both hosts: “Go f**k yourself, Bose. This is not cool. You need to fix this. You need to just open source it because this is not acceptable.” – Linus ([194:10])
• “I will not be buying Bose anytime soon, because of this. That’s just trash. Hate it. Gross.” – Luke ([194:21])

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Personal/Behind-the-Scenes Anecdotes

Luke’s Home Renovation

[44:24–61:04]

• Luke details a home repair saga: undisclosed leaks, botched work from previous owners, HOA nightmares, and his injured wrist from installing expansion joint material. He laments dealing with bureaucracy and how society defaults to “just say no.”

LTT Staff Financial Philosophy & Anxiety

[61:07–69:52]

• The hosts talk money: both are cautious with investments (“growing up poor”), and skeptical of big market bets. Luke is branded as “cheap,” but defends frugality.
• Linus: “I think that part of it is…just growing up without money …what you have in the bank seems a lot more important than what you could get out there.” ([65:00])

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Noteworthy Moments & Quotes

• “The thing about anything that isn’t a GPU in technology is it does have a tendency to get cheaper over time, which is so cool.” – Linus ([204:10])
• “It's lazy design.” – Linus, on games that ramp up difficulty with enemy HP ([32:23])
• “It feels like we have a bit of a societal problem right now where saying no is easy and problem-solving is hard.” – Linus ([47:04])
• “I'm not a young man anymore...” – Linus, after forgetting how many movie nights he’s had ([145:13])
• “Whether you want to buy the underwear or not, there’s… pictures of LTT staff in their underwear. So.” – Linus, on new merch ([91:53])

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Product Announcements & Tech Updates

• LTT Cables:
  Heavy-duty, well-labeled, coax-core USB cables arriving around Black Friday ([94:16–106:14])
• LTT Underwear, Pet Bandanas, and New Shirts:
  Back in stock/new products; comical banter about merch and photo shoots
• MSI, AMD, Rovelab Sponsorships:
  Jokes about AI-written ad copy, special deals

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Fun & Offbeat Segments

• Content Consumption vs. Interaction:
  Debate about what counts as “content consumption” (games vs. videos, live streams) ([17:15–17:59])
• “Piano, not Puano” Joke:
  Linus reminisces about telling this pun on set ([217:47–219:40])
• Movie Night Snafus:
  Staff confusion over whose turn it is to pick the next movie ([143:54–145:48])
• Dangerous Dave:
  Linus and Luke play and discuss an old John Romero DOS game ([232:00+])
• Halloween Costume Plans:
  “My body is dead. This is my Halloween costume.” – Linus ([240:56])

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Notable Timestamps

• Pixel 10 Pro Fold fails during JerryRigEverything test – [03:09]
• Capcom old games / gaming preservation debate – [18:08, 19:13, 28:09]
• HP pulls old drivers/docs – [107:13]
• ChatGPT seahorse emoji meltdown – [167:22, demo at 171:25]
• Philips 3D prints program fizzles – [153:07]
• Bose bricks smart speakers – [192:24]
• Microsoft’s Windows 11 account lock-in worsening – [163:51]
• Discussion on financial anxiety and frugality – [61:07]
• Luke’s home repair woes – [44:24]
• Movie night confusion/nostalgia discussion – [143:54]
• LTT cable discussion – [97:39–106:14]

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Closing

As always, the hosts mix serious tech news with playful banter, staff stories, nostalgia, and rants against modern tech pitfalls—from foldable phones and AI nonsense to home bureaucracy, financial anxiety, and companies bricking devices post-sale.

Sign-off:
“Thanks for watching the WAN Show. See you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. Yippee ki yay.” – Linus ([251:14])

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Transcript

[A]

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[A]

It'll be fine.

[B]

Capcom apparently doesn't see the value in bringing back their original games. That's telling. No, no. Okay. There is more to it than that. It's not. No, no, no. It's not like. It's not like that. Also, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold has gotten a little spicy going up in smoke. I think smoke is actually a charitable way of describing it. During JerryRigEverything's bend test. What else we got going on this week?

[A]

Did Phillips abandon us?

[B]

Phillips.

[A]

Phillips.

[B]

He tried to pitch this for the title topic for the entire WAN show. Are you that's there? Are you that interested in this, Phillips? Is there Philips, like the light bulb.

[A]

And shaver company, not caring about their old games just like almost every other game studio.

[B]

Okay, what else we got? I don't know.

[A]

You want to talk about the. Gotta be this frog for the fourth time.

[B]

No, it's got to be this one.

[A]

Oh, yeah, sure. Chat. GPT Blue loses its darn mind if you ask it about a seahorse emoji.

[B]

It's pretty funny.

[A]

It is pretty funny.

[B]

The show is brought to you today by Rogue Lab AMD MSI Green Man Gaming, of course, alongside our rap partner Dran, our laptop partner, Dell, and our chair partner, Bal Turkis. I'm pretty sure that's how you pronounce it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yep. Oh, they're both upside down now.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Nice. Solid. Secret Lab. Secret Lab. That's the one. Why don't we jump right into our headline topic today, which is of course, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, causing the first major phone blowing up controversy since. Man, what was it? The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 way back in the day. Although in fairness. Oh, you're doing that already. No, no, don't do that now. Do that later. Do that later. Do that later.

[A]

Okay, okay, okay.

[B]

During Zach from JerryRigEverything's durability testing of the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, he was able to break the phone close to the hinge with his hands. I mean, okay, in fairness, in fairness to the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, have you seen that man's arms?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

I mean, if I didn't know that he was a tech YouTuber, I would think he was, like, a gym bro.

[A]

There's a few YouTuber jacked tech YouTubers.

[B]

Yeah, I know.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I don't really get it. Well, actually, I think I do get it. You know how every time you're going through, like, a bit of a health kick, you say to yourself, okay, I've got an idea. Every time I die in game, or every time I'm saying we're all really bad at games, fail and overclock, Right? I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do five push ups.

[A]

Are you the best at games then?

[B]

I think that. What are you? Because I'm in great shape. No, no, no. What I think is, I think those, like, jacked geeks and nerds are the ones who actually have the discipline to do it. Because every time I've ever come up with that idea, I've done it like, once, and then I'll like, I'll, like, die and I'll be like, oh, yeah. But, like, I'll be like, I'm respawning in like five seconds. So I'll just. And then I just completely don't do it.

[A]

You need an additional layer of discipline, which is to play a game that actually works for it.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, dude. And like, it's one of those catch 20 twos, right? Because if I had the discipline to be disciplined enough to work out while I'm gaming, I wouldn't need that discipline because I would already have the discipline to just work out. Come on. It's the same kind of discipline to force yourself to not do the thing you want to do so you can eat your vegetables, you know, so you can do the thing you know you're supposed to be doing.

[A]

I think it's a little different.

[B]

You think it's different?

[A]

I think it's a little different. Location changing is a heck of a thing. I think it's. Honestly, for me, it's playing the game that accommodates that better.

[B]

For me, every game accommodates that.

[A]

No way.

[B]

I'm pretty bad at video games.

[A]

What if you're playing like, okay, you bring up counter strike all the time. What if you're playing counter strike? But it's like, oh, dude, I could do dude, but it's like free for all I would.

[B]

My, my. Well, yeah, but still, you're just gonna instant spawn. No, no, you'll. You'll still have match in between matches and stuff.

[A]

That's.

[B]

It takes a little while. You gotta.

[A]

Some of them, I don't think end.

[B]

You got to see everybody's beautiful gun skins standing on their little podium and everything at the end of the round.

[A]

I'm not talking about matchmaking. I'm talking about like server browser free for all.

[B]

Oh, okay, sure. But even then when there's a map change, I think there's like a winner thing.

[A]

Not very common.

[B]

Then you should do really fast push ups. I don't think that's a valid excuse.

[A]

There are definitely games where there isn't enough time between.

[B]

Anyway, after repeated bends, the battery apparently became so compromised that it went up in smoke. And we've got a very, very, very brief Marvel Television ad. One moment, please. Does anybody care anymore?

[A]

No.

[B]

Well, yes, but yeah, and. Whoa. Okay, that's all I'm going to show you.

[A]

You got to go watch on his.

[B]

Channel because you're going to have to go watch the video on his channel.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Great video. Love. Zach does great work. Wow. This is the first phone that has failed in this way during Zach's durability testing. IFixit's Elizabeth Chamberlain told the Verge. Though, as dramatic as the battery fire is, we don't think this is necessarily a sign that something is wrong with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold design and that some random person on Reddit. I don't have the citation here because it's not in my notes. Also noticed that, was that the phone was seemingly fully charged when Zach performed his bend test. And the amount of charge, the charge state of the battery impacts directly how much energy is stored in it and therefore what the risk of catastrophic failure could be. Until. I would. I would. I would tend to agree. Until we start seeing more of these. More of these failures in the wild, I wouldn't necessarily go, yeah, that's why you shouldn't buy a Pixel 10 Pro Fold. I would say there's plenty of other reasons not to buy a Pixel 10 Pro Fold. It's just. It's gotten ridiculous, Luke. It's too expensive. And to be clear, this applies equally to Samsung's folding devices. Like we're talking about, by the time, you know, we account for currency conversion, but even in US dollars, we're talking about devices that by the time you pay sales tax on them, they're getting dangerously close to a couple thousand US dollars. I mean, for us we're talking well over 2,500 Canadian dollars for a phone. Like when did this happen?

[A]

With the folds mostly. I mean phone prices have been creeping slightly, but I honestly don't think for a while there was a. It feels like there was a relatively big jump a while ago and since then they've been relatively flat. I think that big jump from my perspective though might have been Pixels trying to catch up with Apple pricing. I know there was news articles coming out talking about how Google was perceiving that their phones were valued as lower than iPhones because the price was lower. So they actually raised the price for like marketing reasons. Also because it's nice to raise your price. But like, yeah, part of it was legitimately being like, no, look, we want to be in the same category.

[B]

I don't know if that's the entire problem. Google. I think the problem is one man. Okay, this is an interesting conversation. How would you fix Google's branding and positioning issue? And to be clear, I'm not saying that it's a universal problem. Like what's Android's market share in India? Like 90% or something like that? I don't know that that number is quite right, but it's like extremely one sided in certain markets towards Android, but specifically in the U.S. for younger U.S. buyers, Apple is dominant. Like absolutely completely dominant. And not because the price is higher. The price is higher so that Apple can be very profitable on all the iPhones that they sell to young Americans. Um, the reason that they're able to command this pricing is because of the brand association that quite frankly Google just doesn't have. Google doesn't have a sexy brand. And because of the way that Apple locks in their users through their social lives and you know, not just in ways that you and I would kind of mock where people will be socially ostracized for not having an iPhone because that's the dumbest thing ever. But in ways that are, are even more effective than that. Like it's not just the color of the bubble, it's the fact that you know, if you're the one person who doesn't have an iPhone, then your group chats, you know, won't work properly or whatever else. And theoretically that is, you know, addressed through rcs. But I don't know what your experience has been like with rcs. Mine's been a little bit inconsistent and it fails over to classic SMS or MMS on not a frequent basis, but on a sometimes basis on a more than I don't have a data Connection right now basis. So it's just not quite it. It's not quite there.

[A]

The vast majority of people I talk to these days converse over Discord to the point where like, I know an entire company that I work with closely often works entirely through Discord. All of their employees talk through Discord. A lot of the creators that I'll talk to for Full Planet, whatever else like to converse through Discord more than anything else.

[B]

Well, the thing is that Discord is multi platform. That's always been my issue with imessage.

[A]

That's what I'm kind of saying is like I don't actually run into this very often.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because not a ton of people that I talk to use texting.

[B]

You're not a teenage American boy.

[A]

It's weird that they're going back to texting.

[B]

Look, I don't, I don't get it either because to me, the simple fact that an app is not multi platform makes it utterly irrelevant because I won't always be on that platform. And it makes sense that in your social circle the, the platform of choice would be Discord because basically any gamer would have that exact same problem. You're not going to be on your MacBook or your iPad or your iPhone while you're playing video games.

[A]

A lot of these people are professionals with like their photo is like them in business attire and their name is like their first name and then the business that they work for.

[B]

Okay, but are they gamers?

[A]

I don't know, to be honest.

[B]

Oh, okay, that's fair enough.

[A]

Like actually genuinely don't know.

[B]

Maybe that's fair enough. But I guess what I'm trying to say is, okay, I definitely see it for the gamer demographic, but even if you just have to use a Windows laptop for work, then yeah, it's like automatically the second you have to use any device that is not a Mac or an I something, then you just, you just, you can't just have all of your correspondences sequestered onto one ecosystem of devices if you ever have to touch another ecosystem.

[A]

Nepal is using it for voting for their country's leader and they're using it for coordinating Discord. Yeah. And they were using it for coordinating their like uprising. Is that the right term? Hopefully?

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

I mean, Discord was the primary thing used there.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

But like, what I'm. What I'm wondering if I'm detecting is if Android nerds use Discord, it's like, what's the most popular type of phone in Nepal?

[B]

I mean, it's not America So Android, probably.

[A]

That's what I'm assuming, yeah.

[B]

I don't know that you will. That's great. Ploda in Floatplane, Chad says you mean literal discord. Yes.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Wow, an AI overview. Guess I just won't read that. That's my new thing. I don't even know if it's new. Maybe I've even talked about it before, but I'm trying to have the discipline to not even read them.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

I know you can disable them. I know you can disable them. My general approach to using services, operating systems, devices is that I try to leave things pretty close to default because I'm trying to have the default user experience for the most part. So I have left them enabled, but that doesn't mean that I can't discipline myself to not read them. But I want to know how Google Search is generally working for most people. As just a professional curiosity. Sorry, what were we looking at there?

[A]

Apple was 25%. Okay, so Xiaomi is 21 and a half, Samsung is 20, and then it's Realme vivo unknown.

[B]

Right. All the rest.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Makes sense. So that's it. A Pixel 10 Pro Fold blew up. Honestly, I think the bigger issue is just pricing. And I have no idea how this gets fixed because, I mean, Apple keeps being rumored to be working on a folding phone as well. And I could see Apple moving into folding phones, pushing them into the mainstream more, increasing the volumes of these, of these screens that need to be produced and therefore making them overall more affordable for everyone. Like, I could. I could see that being something that could cause them to become more affordable and more mainstream. But while one of the theories out there is that the iPhone air is kind of a first attempt at moving to, like a thinner phone design so that Apple can eventually make a folding device. I just don't really know if. I just don't really know if I see it happening anytime soon. Like, it's been rumored for so long and it's been very clear what the issues with folding devices are, and those issues are not going away, and all of that's been going on for so long that I just don't really see the light at the end of the tunnel. Like, the issues are clearly around durability, hinge quality, scratch resistance of the screen. Like, you've got on the very, very high end of Android, you've got these folding devices that you can almost scratch with a fingernail at a point. And then you've got Apple that's shipping devices that have screens that are so flipping hard, that Zach, also Zach from JerryRigEverything, had to kind of change his little spiel about lightly scratches. We moved a whole level up on Mohs scale of hardness, which is pretty darn cool. So are they going to give up those gains for what? So that they can sell fewer iPads?

[A]

Also, a lot of people that I know that have folding phones end up just using the like skinny main screen.

[B]

Well, when you're typing, it's better. Like I Daily the Fold 3 for ages.

[A]

Your typing is better. And a lot of times you just need to respond to something quickly and then put your phone away.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

So you don't want to unfold it and go through this whole process. You just want to answer quickly.

[B]

But I mean, but the big screen, I mean, it's. It's great for work and it's great for remote desktop. It's great for content consumption. It's great for reading, which also content consumption. But I think content consumption has sort of a connotation of like videos, Video. Yeah.

[A]

Or maybe. Maybe games.

[B]

I would say gaming probably doesn't fall. I'd say that's its own. Because you don't consume a game. You interact with a game. You know, he's having a think.

[A]

There's no. There's arguments that you interact with a video as well.

[B]

He's having a think.

[A]

There's arguments that you interact with.

[B]

Do you though?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Are they interacting with this video right now? Okay, well, we're live. That's different. We're live. That's different.

[A]

You might chat, but watching a live stream is definitely content consumption. Oh, for sure.

[B]

I want to move on. This is making me uncomfortable. Capcom doesn't see the value in bringing back their original games. Last year, Capcom released the original versions of the first three Resident Evils on PC. But apparently it took some real convincing from the folks at Good Old Games. Per Gog's. I'm not even gonna try. I'm gonna butcher his name. So sorry about that. Per Gog, Capcom said, we have all these remakes. They're already a superior experience to those original games. So they really didn't see the value in bringing back the vanilla versions. GOG says that the RE releases have been a success, though, and have proved GOG's argument that gamers want the originals was correct. So our discussion question here is, do you think it's important to preserve the original versions of old games or on modern platforms even after modern remasters or remakes are released?

[A]

I do think so.

[B]

I think so too.

[A]

Yeah. I, I think sometimes people say like, oh, nostalgic glasses, rose tinted glasses, whatever. I think sometimes you do accurately remember what it was like and those graphics due to the nostalgia maybe or whatever else. I don't know. You might find those graphics charming. For whatever reason, I just want to play it how it was.

[B]

And it's about more than just graphics. I mean, back when I, I didn't. I wasn't on top of it, so I didn't do it. But when Blizzard kind of removed their older Warcraft titles from gog because, you know, well, reforged is like, you know, better now or whatever I had really. I didn't really want to give Activision Blizzard any money, but I really wanted to own those original versions of those games and I didn't have my old CD keys or anything. And so I was like, I'm very tempted to pick up copies of these before. I can't get them anymore. Because I don't necessarily want your fixed balance.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I don't necessarily want your enhanced experiences. And in the case of like, in the case of single player experiences, for instance, maybe you want to play the old buggy version and mess around with speedrunning.

[A]

Maybe you want the controls to be clunky because that's more like what it was.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Or that's another really good point. And the reason that I actually picked this as a WAN show topic this week is that I'm about 30 hours into playing a remake of a beloved game for me that I played when I was much younger, Final Fantasy Tactics. So the remake is called the Of Elise Chronicles and they have improved a lot like the, the modern nice to haves. Like when you're in a fight now you can just go back to the world map and, and you, you won't end up like there was. There was a particularly notorious fight in this game where you are. You have to win a battle and then you go into another battle like subsequently without being able to go back to the world map and like redo all your, all your equipment or like grind a few more levels. Whatever it is you might feel like you need to do. You go straight into the second fight and you have to 1v1 a really powerful opponent who has initiative on you. And like if you didn't build your main character, which you would have no way of knowing to do around winning this fight, you could end up essentially with a no progression state if you didn't happen to save early enough to go back and grind up and learn useful abilities for this fight.

[A]

Final Fantasy 6 had a few moments like that.

[B]

Mm. So, you know, the new version of Tactics has very much nice to have modern creature comforts that allow you to back out of that fight at that point. You obviously lose any XP or items that you gained during this progression. But no matter what, it's got Autosave, which is nice. You can just go back out and go do some stuff. But what I noticed is that some of the modern niceties have actually taken away from the game. They've made it so there's certain content that you can just skip. You can just not bother with. So one of the things that they added that I've definitely felt was really nice is the ability to flee from random battles. So it used to be that as you were moving around on the world map, every time you passed over a certain location, anything but a city, you could hit a random battle because it's Final Fantasy. That's sort of a.

[A]

That's part of the game.

[B]

That's sort of a core element of Final Fantasy is the annoyance and frustration and the grind of random battles. And so being able to skip them is great because when you go to the towns and you go to the tavern, there's these missions that you can send your party members off on, and they'll come back with job points. So they'll like, level up their job abilities, which is like your class. Yeah, they'll get gold, so some of them can be extremely lucrative. And then you'll also find like random relics or whatever, so you can become a treasure hunter. It doesn't really have any benefit, but it plays a nice, you know, dopamine, releasing music, and your characters jump around and get excited about it. So whatever, sure, great. But the way that you do these is you go to the town and then you. You assign a few of your. A few of your random party members to go off on this mission. And then every dot that you go over on the map is one day. And the mission lasts for usually anywhere from like 9 to 14 days or kind of somewhere in that range. So the whole idea of this mechanic was that you had to build up a whole roster of party members besides just your main five that you take into every fight because they're your best ones and they only become more bester the more that you use them because they'll continue to level up and level up and level up. So you had to maintain a larger roster so that you had guys to send on these missions and so that you could survive the random fights that you would go through before you could come get your guys back with all their, their booty.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Well now you can just move around on the map for a little bit, flee from all the fights and then just collect the golden job points. So you didn't, you didn't earn it.

[A]

That's why I mentioned my thing about controls is like in say the original Starcraft, you could only select a certain amount of units, if I remember correctly, in one drag select and then I don't remember, but was there bindable groups?

[B]

I'm trying to remember, like, like shift 1, shift 2, Starcraft, Warcraft 3 definitely had it.

[A]

3. Yeah.

[B]

I don't remember if Starcraft had it. The, the MCG says yes, Starcraft had it. I don't think Warcraft there was different.

[A]

Forms of it or something, but either way there's like, there's like microing shortcuts that kind of come in in later versions.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Which are a difficulty changer 100%. So like having those old controls might feel worse. Sure. But it might make the game easier, right?

[B]

Oh yeah.

[A]

Which is like basically the thing that you're saying, but it's, it's slightly different is through the control route, but it's.

[B]

Like, oh, I've got one that's very similar.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

So another really nice to have is that in Final Fantasy Tactics, the original, when you moved on the battlefield, it would say, are you sure? And you'd be like, yes, you're moved. It's like chess rules. Once you let go of the piece, it's there. It doesn't matter if immediately go, oh my God, no, no. Oh no. Doesn't matter. You're there. And one of the things that made that really challenging was that depending on my zodiac sign and your zodiac sign and my specific characters attributes and yours, I could do dramatically different damage with the same attack to one opponent versus another one. But once I move, I couldn't know how much until I moved within range and made and like lined up an.

[A]

Attack information and then it would.

[B]

And then it would predict, you know, how much damage I'm going to do.

[A]

Got it.

[B]

And that can be really important in a tactics game because a difference of 10% in my damage dealing could be the difference between a KO and overextending myself and completely turning the tide of the fight.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So in the remake you can just, you can just shop around for the best move. So you can just move there and go, okay, how much damage can I do to that guy? No. Okay, now move there and then see how much damage I can do there and then I can undo my move and I can do that as many times as I want unless I have a certain ability equipped that is like, Like a move find item or move gain job points or like something like that. Like, there's certain abilities that, that lock your ability to unmove. That makes sense, but it makes it markedly, markedly easier. And the only way that they sort of countered all of this, but was by adding a more difficult mode. They added a tact difficulty, but they took the laziest possible approach to increasing difficulty, where instead of enhancing the enemy AI, for instance, like, it still does shockingly stupid stuff, they just, they just nerfed my damage and buffed theirs.

[A]

Yeah, I hate that. I hate just like number go up difficulty.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Stuff. I mean, to a certain degree, sure. But I think one of the most egregious modern examples of that is the Oblivion remake, where there's like two difficulty levels. I don't remember what they are. I'm sure Chat will know. They've been on a thing today where you jump up and it like doubles or triples the enemy hp. Like, it's, it's just a wild experience. You play on one setting, it's like, wow, this is way too easy. You play on the other setting, it's like, okay, it feels like I'm playing a wall. Yeah. And I just have to stab this. Yeah. Adept to expert. Sure. I don't know. You just have to stab things. Like, I, I don't know. You go from like one shotting things to fights take three minutes. Like it makes no sense at all. And they recognize it pretty quick. And I think they said that they were going to change it, but. Yikes.

[B]

I mean, fights in. I, I, I mean, I didn't. I only played the original Oblivion, but I know that I do remember some fights just being a grind to the point where it's almost like immersion breaking.

[A]

Oh, yeah. And then you have to. Because then it takes so long that you take a bunch of damage. Now you have to run and heal for a while. So that adds to the total time and.

[B]

Well, I just mean at a certain point, it doesn't matter how tough you are if you're made of flesh. And I'm holding a big giant metal sharp thing.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

There's only so many times. And like, you know, the animation has blood coming off of you. Like, it's just there were these. The original Far Cry had these horrible, like, big brutes that show up towards the later stages of the game.

[A]

And I remember Somehow take more bullets.

[B]

I remember being stuck in this one point that was just incredibly frustrating because you had to kind of time it perfectly to get, like. It was like multiple rockets you have to hit these stupid things with. And I'm just like, no. No matter what you are, no matter how tough you are, if you are made of flesh and blood and bones, a rocket blows you up. Like, I'm. No. No bullets. Fine. You know, you could. You could be shot a few times, and you could still be just, like, you know, messed up enough to keep moving towards me or something. Like, I can. I can handle.

[A]

There are some examples.

[B]

Suspension of disbelief around that. Or, you know, you could be. You could have a few arrows in you, and you could, like, rip it off and, like, come after me or whatever. Like, sure, you could have a grenade, you know, go off next to you and it blows off your arm or whatever, but you still, like, you know, you're not. You're a zombie or something. You stagger towards me and you, like, grab onto me. I can.

[A]

I can get behind you, close the artery while it blew your arm off.

[B]

A rocket launcher to the face. Like, I still. It's like one of those really old memories because I could have been no older than, like, when did far cry come out? Like, I was. I was like, 16 or something. Right. Like, But I still remember it even though that was. Yeah, exactly. Even though that was 21 years ago because I was just so mad because I died on this section a bunch of times. I finally came up with an idea. I was like, okay, I have. Like, I have one rocket. And then I got my shot off, like, perfectly. I hit him in the face with it, and I'm like, okay, surely that must have. And I'm dead. And it's just like, that's not fun. And you can. You can limit the difficulty in other ways. You can make. You could make a rocket really hard to aim. You know, you make the crosshair move.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

You could severely restrict the ammo because it was already an issue in that game where you couldn't just, like. Like, carry an unlimited number of weapons and stuff. You see, you could limit the number of weapons that I can carry. I can only carry two weapons, and so. And I can only carry two rockets.

[A]

Yeah. So taking the rocket launcher is, like, a huge ammo risk.

[B]

Yeah, Just. Just. Just this huge. There's huge downsides to it or whatever. Find, you know, like, find another way to fix the balance, but be more creative than just, hp, go up. Hp, go up. It's not fun.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Unless you're the kind of person who just really enjoys that, in which case we want to hear from you. I'm kidding. I don't. Yeah.

[A]

I was like, no, it's.

[B]

It's lazy. No, it's lazy design. It's lazy design.

[A]

What are we talking about? What topic are we on?

[B]

Capcom not seeing.

[A]

Yeah, I think. I think having original versions is cool, for sure.

[B]

Our discussion topic here from Mr. Gauthier is why are some devs averse to re releasing older games without touching them too much? Are they being lazy? Are they being cheap? Are they scared? The original is so janky it could scare off potential buyers. That one, I think I could see.

[A]

That one, I think that's the main one. I think if you're releasing this game on gog, I think you're safe from that.

[B]

I think so too. I mean, that's. That's what I think. But you never know. I mean, brands are funny about their brands because when you launch that game, it's still going to be a big giant Capcom when you launch it. And so if they're kind of sitting there going, well, I mean, yeah, we were pretty proud of that 25 years ago, but the games industry has sort of moved on and I could. I could see people, you know, creating a negative association between our brand and this, like, frustrating janky experience. I. I've heard. I've heard dumber arguments around brand use.

[A]

Yeah, for sure. I just think they also need to understand the positive association that would come with doing this and doing this the right way, which I think, I think is releasing it through gog. But they did do it the right way.

[B]

That positive association is to a completely different person, though. The positive association is with the nostalgia crowd or with the Die Hards who just love the franchise and they want to go experience it the way that it was or something like that. Whereas if almost literally anyone else ended up with this game, there's a really solid chance they wouldn't like it. Like, I wouldn't have given my son original Final Fantasy Tactics because it, like, didn't explain anything. You just kind of get dumped into it. You have no idea what to do. It's super frustrating.

[A]

A manual game, Was that like a. Mm. Yeah. So like, unless you have. I mean, you could like, maybe find a PDF and print off a replacement or something, but unless you have the manual, it's not the same experience. I think that's like, surprisingly easy to forget. Like experiencing something from that long ago now is difficult to truly make the Same. Because you kind of need everything that came with experiencing that to experience it properly.

[B]

Good old Vim's Lair Final Fantasy Tactics Manual.

[A]

That's awesome.

[B]

Actually, here it is. Oh, it's really slow. Cool. That makes sense.

[A]

I wonder if you people looked it up.

[B]

Yep. Nice.

[A]

That's cool, man.

[B]

Manuals were pretty cool, dude. Okay, okay. But like. Okay, look at this. Look at this, though. Like, this is crazy. In the new version, they explain the importance of picking your zodiac sign. Like, they. They explain it quite a bit here. Enter the adventure. I don't know, bruv. Just go for it. After entering your character's name, enter your birth date on the next screen. In similar fashion, using the Start button to confirm your birth date will affect zodiac sign, which has an influence on your character's performance during battles. See page 10. But they're just like. Yeah, just. Yeah, go for it.

[A]

Well, what's on page 10?

[B]

All right, if it has a full matrix, then I will be. Then I'll think it's okay. Yeah. Is this not page 10? Because this looks like a 10, but.

[A]

I don't think we've scrolled enough times for it to be page 10.

[B]

Yeah, no, not that useful. Cool.

[A]

The. The vim thing says you're on page, like, seven now or something. Yeah, three.

[B]

Chat saying three.

[A]

Corner said 10.

[B]

Yeah, well, cool chat saying three. Let's try three. Let's try three. I'm gonna hear you out. Chat. Nope, that's definitely not it. All right.

[A]

I don't know what they mean by three.

[B]

Neat.

[A]

How are they both missing three?

[B]

Anyway, the point is, I have literally.

[A]

No idea what they're saying.

[B]

No, it's a J as in Jack.

[A]

I have actually no idea what they're saying.

[B]

J, not three. What does J mean?

[A]

J as in J. Oh, like section J on page 10.

[B]

Oh, oh, oh, oh. Okay.

[A]

Here, here, here, here, here.

[B]

Yeah. Okay. This symbol indicates the unit's zodiac sign. If the unit attacks an enemy with a compatible sign, damage will be increased. If signs are incompatible, damages decrease. Press the select button during battle to bring up a help menu and check the zodiac sign compatibility. Okay, okay. You know what? That. That's actually pretty. Okay. I will say, though, that this is a flippin. This is dense. This is not user friendly. This is not for kids. And this is just, in some cases, indicating where to go to bring up a help menu built within the game that is also not. Got the greatest translation.

[A]

You liked it? Is it not for kids or is it not for kids now?

[B]

I don't know. And I don't know how I liked it. I really, like. I'm thinking back to some of my first experiences playing this game. Like, I didn't. I didn't know how to change your.

[A]

I didn't even know how to Morrowind. I didn't know it had a main quest.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

For months.

[B]

Okay, this is my Morrowind.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like, I ended up against a brick wall in this game because I didn' actually twice within the first few battles because I didn't know how to learn additional abilities and I didn't know how to. Because I didn't have the manual. Actually, I played it on an emulator for the first time. So that's a big part of the reason that I bought this was because I, like, needed to give Squaresoft Square Enix now, but I needed to give the money for it at some point because I'd already played the game a few times. So I didn't have a manual. So I didn't know that you could, like, learn new abilities. And so I just got really frustrated because I kept coming up against tougher and tougher enemies that had all these, like, amazing abilities and they could do magic. And. And I'm like, okay, so when do I level up? And then I didn't figure out changing jobs for a while either. So I don't know how I figured out how to play this game, to be honest with you, because it's very deep, very complicated.

[A]

I think sometimes that's what you want as a kid.

[B]

You think?

[A]

So you want to fight with something and, like, force learn it and impart your will onto it. Despite it being complicated and hard.

[B]

Maybe part of it is just like having time at that stage in your life.

[A]

Yeah, you have tons of time. You have all the time you need.

[B]

A good Ryoja in Floatplane chat says, I played XCOM Apocalypse when I was eight and finished it. I went back to it a few years ago. I have no idea how I did that.

[A]

Yeah, but you have almost no responsibilities, tons of time and. Yeah, a desire to pick things apart and learn things. It was like, almost unparalleled.

[B]

I really didn't realize when I was in it how much free time I had when I was a kid. Like, I felt like I did a lot of chores. And honestly, I did a fair amount of chores and stuff, but it's the. It's like the mental load. I was never thinking about that stuff when I had my free time. When I had my free time, my brain completely switched over and I was free.

[A]

I remember thinking when I was a kid at one point in time that I was really excited to be an adult because then I wouldn't have homework, therefore more time.

[B]

Yeah, homework is just practice for working at home and like at. At. And. And I fully understand that in a lot of work positions you can turn off being at work when you are not at work anymore. I will say that once you are at, you know, director, vp, Executive C suite level.

[A]

Most people I know, they just effectively are working all the time.

[B]

Yeah. No, it just doesn't like that. No, that's. That's not how it works. Yeah. Ninjaman away says. Yeah, not in teaching. Lol. Yeah, there's. So there's lots of, there's lots of jobs where you do get kind of.

[A]

Like the summer in teaching.

[B]

Yes. So I mean it depends.

[A]

That's also fair. Not with your current wages because now you got to do summer school or some other job.

[B]

Coming from a family of teachers, I definitely have some thoughts on how educators compensation has scaled over my lifetime. And I definitely know some educators with families who definitely do not have summers off because. Not because they have to teach at school, but because they have to find some other job, you know, teach badminton classes or do something else. So that's a whole separate conversation. Especially when we consider the importance of teachers role in society.

[A]

Yeah, she wants them being pretty good.

[B]

You should really want them to be like awesome. Especially when you consider how many things a teacher needs to be awesome at. Like they've got to teach. Yes.

[A]

Well, and you never know when you're getting like sideswiped by some random question about something that isn't your field.

[B]

They need to be, you know, counselors. Sometimes they need to be suspect, often mediators. Sometimes they're expected to be these like Jack of all trades. Especially in elementary school. They're expected to teach like every subject. They have to be you know, somewhat athletic. So they can like teach PE but also they need to know math and English and everything else and. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. Next topic.

[B]

Sure. Dan, what do you want us to do? Because that's two main topics.

[C]

I mean we can move over to some CW announcements.

[B]

Dan, you just tell us what to do.

[C]

I mean, do we have a lot of topics? Yeah, why not? Let's do the CW announcement.

[B]

He's having a thing. This is the man that is truly in charge.

[A]

Yep. He said CW announcements.

[B]

Oh right. I. Yeah, he commanded. I don't know where to find them.

[A]

Jump in the middle.

[B]

I don't know where to find them in the middle. Dan. I don't Know how to do this.

[A]

Show at the middle. They're at the very top.

[B]

Yeah, they're at the top, Dan.

[C]

Oh, because there's no main topics.

[B]

Yeah, we don't have main topics this week.

[C]

They're at the top.

[B]

CW announcements note.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

What?

[A]

Chad is making me very tired today.

[B]

No, you just seem really tired today. Are you cranky? You seem cranky and tired.

[A]

You've said that every week for so long.

[B]

Well, maybe you should.

[C]

Especially this week.

[B]

Maybe you should sleep a little more and eat a bit more.

[A]

My goodness.

[B]

Are you very tired today?

[A]

I am a little tired. My wrist is, like, demolished.

[B]

Oh, from your. Your project. Have you talked to them about that?

[A]

I'm trying to remember super extensively.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

A little bit.

[B]

But do you want to talk about that? You don't have to.

[A]

Not particular. I don't think it's that interesting. I mean, it kind of sucks.

[B]

It's kind of interesting. I think it's interesting. I want you tell the people about it.

[A]

Okay. So my place, as with basically every place you're going to get, most likely was purchased off of someone else. In my situation, that person passed away. So it was an estate sale. The estate was dissolved shortly after the sale. So there's nothing for us to go after. But there was a bunch of undisclosed damage that we learned through the strata. I have been told that for Americans. That's the homeowners association.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

I don't know if that's true for apartments still or whatever.

[B]

I think it's kind of the same idea.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

People generally know what an HOA is.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

We call it a strata.

[A]

It's that thing, but for an apartment building or a condo building. I was informed through that that my unit had a bunch of leaks in it with the previous owner. We thought that that was centralized to one location and that it was dealt with a while ago because we dealt with it a while ago. Turns out it was not because there was more than one set of leaks that happened. We solved the one set of leaks that happened. Turns out there was a second set of leaks.

[B]

What about second leaks?

[A]

We're pre sure because they did tell us this much. They told us to not use the dishwasher when we moved in because the seal was not good.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

We're pretty sure that they learned the seal was not good by it flooding the house.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

And they didn't say that part.

[C]

Right.

[A]

So how our unit works, I'm going to use some. I'm going to do some really good paint. This is going to be Amazing.

[B]

This is great. J Fife in floatplane chat goes hoas AKA the League of Extraordinary Karens.

[A]

Yeah. It's crazy, dude. I wanted. So we have a mini split in my unit.

[B]

That's an air conditioner.

[A]

Yeah. And I wanted to have a second head, so a second fan that makes it cold. Yeah, sure. And Basically we wanted two rooms to be AC'd instead of just one room. And we were told no.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because the unit that goes outside, you say it doesn't know. Oh, you just switch back. That makes sense. The unit that goes outside is mounted like in a certain spot. Go away, Internet. And it would have had to move for reasons and been somewhere else. And I demonstrated with art, like decent art, actually.

[C]

Really?

[A]

I would have made it like this. No.

[B]

Oh, okay. I'm just checking.

[A]

Not bothersome to the other people.

[B]

Right, right, right.

[A]

And they still were just like, nope, no one else has done it or can do it, so you can't do it.

[B]

So my problem is that it feels like. It feels like we have. Man, this is, this is going way off the rails now. But I feel like we have a bit of a societal problem right now where saying no is easy.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And problem solving is hard, but saying no sucks. And solving problem problem solving means that you have solved a problem. And I just, I feel like somehow and I've gone through this, so I've gone through so much bureaucracy in the last 13 years running a business. You just, you just come up against bureaucracy as just part of your daily life. And I think that it has been the single most aging, tiring, just life draining part of being alive for the last 13 years.

[A]

It's like dealing with other annoying people.

[B]

Well, it's not, it's not even that they're annoying. Right. Because they're not. They're not sure, but they're not trying to be annoying. They just, it's. It's through incompetence or laziness or apathy, sometimes stupidity. They don't actually understand the question. And then that, that stupidity plus apathy is a really potent combination in a bureaucrat because they don't understand and they don't really care to understand, which is just. It's a brick wall. And I just. It's at the point now where it's such an obstacle to getting anything done. I mean, look at how long it took us to get whale land done. And that was with a lot of support. And so I want to take a moment to shout out the city of Surrey, actually, because of the people there that were Very helpful. And helped us overcome the apathetic, lazy, sometimes seemingly malicious individuals that stood in the way. Because it was fine to do whale land. And we did a whale land. The video's coming. And it was great and it was fun, it was awesome. And it was a boon to the city. So even with the mayor on board and the council on board and thinking this is a good idea, just the amount of bureaucratic obstruction that could be put in place by. By sometimes just one person from project to project, right. Like, you never know when bam, it's going to hit you. And someone just had a bad day one day and said no and is a principled person who, once they've decided something, expects that. That's just the decision now. And it's like, no is not going to work here. Like, we, we need a solution. And you can either be part of the solution or you're an obstacle. Those are. It's. It's kind of binary here anyway. What I'm trying to say is that's horrible. And it's like, it's not the end of the world. Okay, so what? Luke can't have two heads on his mini split. He's not going to die. It's not that kind of horrible. But it's just. It's draining. I mean, it drains your life force.

[A]

There's. There is a problem in my unit where.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

The building that we're in. And I'll say this bit because I know other buildings have this problem. It's in bc, I think it's BC law. I could be wrong. I don't know. You're not allowed to smoke within a certain amount of feet of buildings.

[B]

Yeah, but because air quality, etcetera, Our.

[A]

Building has allowed smoking on your, like, balcony thing.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So genuinely, if we have any window open, if the sliding doors open, anything for any amount of time, like at 4 in the morning, it doesn't matter. Anytime. Just. I don't know if it's how, like, things are shaped or what, but, like, all of it seems to flow directly into our unit. It's crazy. I was gonna. I was gonna. This is. I was going to the bathroom yesterday and I yelled out to Emma, being like, I feel like I'm literally smoking weed right now because, like, there was so moat. So much secondhand smoke coming into our unit.

[B]

So that's why you're so sleepy.

[A]

Maybe, maybe you're just still. Actually, maybe I'm still high.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

No, I don't think so.

[B]

But I was going to do the show, but then I Got high.

[A]

I didn't mean to, but then I got high. Yeah, I know, it's terrible. So we don't want like I even tried. I built this like insulated box thing. I don't know if you've even seen it, but maybe rock wall inside of a wooden, long, tall, wooden vertical box that I put in the sliding glass door that you can even move the latch from the wall to this box. So you can latch the door on?

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

And then feed through an AC tube for like a rollable AC thing. It still leaks a little bit too much. You can get smoke in the house and I won't die from it. I'll be fine. The birds will. Yeah, so it's like, ah, so we want another mini split. One of the greatest things about this whole thing is one of the key people that was arguing against letting me do it was complaining not that long ago about how hot the main area in their unit is, which is the exact area that I was trying to add an AC head to, because none of the units, our entire building have any AC in that room. And the only window in that room for our entire building is the sliding glass doors. So there is not an easy way to do it. You idiot. Like I can't.

[B]

Ah, well.

[A]

So annoying.

[B]

Well, Luke, at least it's very rare for people to vote against their own self interest. At least it doesn't happen very often.

[A]

Okay, well, my amazing art is done and this isn't going to make any sense, so let me, let me explain it. So this area here is say an apartment that is built like mine. And I'm probably going to get things screwed up. Sorry, tradies in the chat. The black outline lines are walls. All of these walls, including there's this like there's a room here and let's say there's a door right there. All of these walls, including this wall in between, there's this gap, this display that I have on the, on the left here. So the right hand side is lightweight concrete. So the whole unit that we're on, all the individual rooms have their own slab of lightweight concrete. And then there's a gap which is half an inch wide, two and a half inches deep, roughly. Very roughly. The amount wide changes quite a bit as you go along, but it's roughly half an inch wide and fairly accurately 2 1/2 inches deep. On the other side of that is a piece of wood. This black bar in the middle is expansion joint material. And then the red thing decently deeply down. But in there is A nail. Because they nail the expansion joint material to the wood and then they pour the lightweight concrete. The lightweight concrete goes directly against the expansion joint material and kind of fuses to it. So the first task that we had was opening all the drywall so that we could access this trench. And then we had to exacto knife down each side because the cement would kind of fuse with it and the, the wood side wouldn't fuse with it too much. Except there is supposed to be adhesive on that side. So you'd have to cut through the adhesive on one side and then cut through the concrete, cement, whatever, fusing on the other side. And then it would be fused to the bottom often as well. But if you released both the sides, you could like pry it out with this weird thing that I would do with a knife, which was strenuous and tiring. But eventually we got the whole place done and then we had to put closed cell foam backer rod. So high density closed cell foam and then like tubes basically.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

And we had to shove those in the hole. The reason why we had to do that is because the like real solution isn't acquirable by normies.

[B]

Oh, I hate that. When you're not allowed to buy the proper thing. Because you did a ton of research.

[A]

On this, called up repair shops. There's a place in Ontario that was like considering shipping it to us and like giving me a contractor number temporarily.

[B]

Yeah. I was gonna say usually you can, like when I, when I was trying to get paint for my bike, you just have to find a place that.

[A]

There was a couple places locally that were unwilling to do it. I think mostly because I, I think they didn't have it on hand. So you're gonna have to like order stuff in. And they didn't want to order stuff in for me if I wasn't like a contractor, bro. But this other place I think had it on hand. So they were like, we don't love this, but we can ship it to you. The problem was it wasn't going to get it to us in time. So we, we came with this backer rod solution.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

We checked it with a few people, they said it should be fine. It will help with the whole expansion situation.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. We could do it in time. So it sounds good. But I had to shove this backer rod, which is oversized.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And a circle into this rectangular trench. And I had to shove it all the way down into the trench.

[B]

Literally round peg, square hole.

[A]

Yeah. And then. And then I had to do another one. Because you wanted to pretty much fill this trench.

[B]

Yeah. You can't have an air gap in there, ideally.

[A]

No. So I have to put at least two. The most I ever had to do was four, but almost all the time it was two. Like over 90% of the time it was two.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay. And I had to shove it in like that and I had to do the entire house. And it's like very difficult to get in there usually. Unless the trench gets really wide for a second and then it just plops right in.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But usually it's pretty hard to get in there. So for double digit amount of hours, I was basically shoving as hard as I could like this with my hands down into the trench.

[C]

Right.

[A]

And mostly with my right one because more coordinated and stronger. And I just torched the tendons of my wrist.

[B]

It is.

[A]

Yeah. So I don't know. I went to physio and he said that, like, the strength is still there and things are generally fine. Like, I can move like this.

[C]

Right.

[A]

And I can move like that.

[C]

Right.

[A]

And I can move like this.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

But if I made a fist and then pulled it in, it hurts a lot.

[B]

Right, Right.

[A]

So no doing that for a week. A week and a half. Somewhere around there.

[B]

Okay. But you're done anyway, right?

[A]

Yeah, pretty much. So the. That stuff is. Oh, yeah. Ouch. That wasn't great.

[B]

Podcast injury. I was trying to gesture and I just. Oh.

[A]

Doing that stuff. Oh, right. What I was gonna say the. The. I didn't explain this part. So the flooding that probably happened from the dishwasher, but we don't know. Wasn't a crazy amount of water, so it didn't like seep into the floor or get under the floor, but it flowed enough that it poured over into.

[B]

These trenches, basically around the entire place.

[A]

Yeah. And rotted out all this expansion joint material. So there was a little bit of mold, but it was mostly just a ton of rotten material. A wrist brace might be helpful. Yeah, I got one. Physio guy said to not wear it all the time because I'm supposed to actually use it. I'm supposed to move it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Like I was doing this earlier in the show. I'm supposed to do this Right.

[B]

Where I was wondering what you were doing. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

So I'm doing the little exercises.

[B]

Like, oh, that's weird.

[A]

I'm a good boy with the physio exercise. I actually do them.

[B]

That's good.

[A]

Yeah. So I have other ones that I'm supposed to do as well. So I'll make sure I'm keeping on top of those. But, yeah, the expansion material was rotten, and that was bad for a few reasons. One of them was because it was promoting mold growth. Yeah. So it looked black. It was not black mold. We got it tested. There was no black mold.

[B]

Oh.

[A]

There was actually, like, white mold and some other stuff.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

It wasn't good, but it wasn't like, oh, God, evacuate the house immediately bad.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

So. But we didn't want it to get there. So get the rotten material out. Get new stuff in.

[B]

Do you have an ETA for when your place is livable again?

[A]

Livable to the point where I don't have to sleep at my parents is hopefully Monday.

[B]

Really?

[A]

Yeah. So. So the progress is since then, drywall is back up.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So the. The holes were bad. Material taken out. Good material. Putting in, putting in, Put in. And then the drywall was put back to, like, seal it. And then we have someone helping with the finishing, so mudding and sanding and all that kind of stuff. And that is, like, almost done. He thinks he'll be done by Saturday. And then we're hoping to paint two rooms. The two rooms that would have carpet in it. And then carpet people are coming in Monday.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

And then we'd be able to, like, put the bed back.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

And I could set up a desk.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

Some basic stuff like that. And that will be, like, a enormous improvement. I noticed today on Steam because a buddy sent me a Steam key for a game that he was working on. I haven't launched a game on steam since the 18th of last month.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which is like a month. I was. I was telling Emma. I think this is the longest I've gone without using a desktop of my own since I was probably, like, eight.

[B]

That actually makes sense.

[A]

It's been, like, a month and a half. Like, the last thing I launched on Steam wasn't even on my desktop.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I was on a trip and I think I launched, like, slay the spire or something. Like, it's been a long time adulting. Yeah.

[C]

Just.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

All right.

[A]

Yeah. So, yeah, I missed this. Are you just helping? But your land. No, I own the place. Which is, like, cool and also totally sucks.

[B]

Yeah. It's a funny assumption that, like, Luke is poor. He's just cheap. It is a really, really big difference.

[A]

I think other people have problems with spending money. I don't think I'm cheap.

[B]

Okay. I think Luke identifies as poor.

[A]

No. I don't know.

[B]

He does. I really don't he really doesn't. I don't, I don't actually understand where this comes from, but there is a not insignificant amount the LTT community that like thinks Luke is poor.

[A]

Yeah. Frugal. Yeah, I prefer frugal. Some people in the, There was a, there was a LMG clip on this recently and a bunch of people in the comments are saying it's, it's frugal.

[B]

No, he's not a miser either because Luke spends money on other people. He just doesn't. He doesn't spend money on the kinds of things that it feels like our society encourages us to spend money on.

[A]

I don't care about a lot of those things.

[B]

No, I get it. I totally get it. I just. It just. It. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

And like someone in chat says Luke is just smart with his money. I don't even want to take that necessarily.

[B]

Yeah, I don't actually think that that's quite the case either. Because if Luke was smart with his money, there's a lot of. Okay, how do I say this? There's. I know how much money Luke makes and I know how much he spends. And because we're also friends, in addition to me being his employer. And so therefore, knowing how much money he makes, I know how little work his capital is doing for him.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. There are some reasons I, I know, I know.

[B]

And that's, and that's totally valid. However, I, I. Okay. And the thing is, in some ways I'm just as bad as him. Like both of us, I would argue.

[A]

Worse because you don't have the same limitations.

[B]

Both of us have completely missed out on like this recent stock market bull run.

[A]

Oh yeah.

[B]

For instance.

[A]

Oh yeah.

[B]

And I just want to disclaim all of this. You know, none of this is financial advice. This is not financial advice. So, you know. Right. But there's been like an incredible, you know, stock bull market for, for an extended period of time here and there's been some fairly obvious plays. But you know, because of our position as tech influencers and because of I.

[A]

Don'T want to be invested in an Nvidia, I think we, I think that would be bad.

[B]

I think we both also tend to have a bit of, A bit of a one in the hand versus two in the bush sort of mentality. I think that's part of it. I think that part of it is, is, is just. I think part of it is growing up poor, like growing up without money.

[A]

And. Yeah, yeah. And I, I think people. I tell that story that was a relatively short Period of my upbringing, we were fine most of the time, but like, that bit was at a formative time and made me think about money in a certain way. Like, I mean, I, not long after that time, I blew everything I had on a computer. Like, and, and we were both, let's.

[B]

Be real, we were both young dudes, you know, and, and definitely wasted money on things. Like, let's, let's be very clear. But I think that in general, like, we both experienced times when there was real scarcity.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I guess that would be the best way to kind of describe it because, like, I was never on the verge of complete homelessness or anything like that. But there were definitely, there were times of.

[A]

There were tighter scarcity. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

And so recognizing the very real possibility that, like, money could be gone and, and there would not be any more coming, I think put both of us in a position where what you have in the bank seems a lot more important than what you could get out there if you, if you like, deployed it, if you took it out of the bank. And with inflation going the way that it is, like the money that we've had sitting in the bank has been rotted. Yeah. Like, to a degree that makes me genuinely pretty uncomfortable to think about, like, how much of it has just rotted. Yeah. Like, man, it's, it's. I, I still, like, I, I went through a period for a bit.

[A]

Sorry, one second. I just want to address this really quickly.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

McBain said, regarding investing in Nvidia, better me have the money than somebody else. Yeah. But like, I do stuff with the lab.

[B]

Yeah. It's just not.

[A]

I don't want to be invested in Nvidia.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It just, I don't want that. Not that I don't think I could handle that, like, potential conflicting interest thing. I don't think that would be a problem for me at all, to be completely honest. But I just don't even want anyone thinking it. I'm just not going to mess around with that.

[B]

Apparently this is a whole thing. The Psychology of Scarcity explores how deprivation wreaks havoc on cognition and decision making. Being poor requires so much mental energy that those with limited means, be they sugarcane farmers in India or New Jersey, mall goers are more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions than those with bigger financial cushions. That, that actually makes a ton of sense.

[A]

I think there's also, like, I don't know, there's comfort levels. I don't necessarily think that being a risk averse is a bad decision. I don't Think that maximizing the potential value play over under on every dollar that you have is necessary?

[B]

No, no, I don't. I don't think it's necessary.

[A]

And the comfort and like. No, I should be doing more with my stuff. For sure. There's certain limitations. Whatever. We don't need to get into that.

[B]

Me too.

[A]

But assuming I did do some of it, I still wouldn't do a ton.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because the comfort of just I'm good is like, really nice. And I see value in that. And I don't only see value in dollar numbers, which I. Some people do. And I don't see it that way. I see, like, comfort, lack of concern, not needing to check the stock market twice a day, every day, all the time. Those types of things is like. It's kind of nice. Like, I remember I knew some people that made a lot of money off of crypto. I had some crypto hanging out with those people.

[B]

It's. It was all that I. Bro. When it was going up, it was all I could think about. And when it was going down, it was like super all I could think about. And I wasn't even in super heavy or anything.

[A]

We were just talking. We were just this perfect. Actually, we were just talking about playing games when you're younger and how you can like, actually just think about the game.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, no, not anymore. Not if you're leveraged into something.

[B]

Not if your livelihood and you're like, eating next month. Relies on some. Some relies on a game you're playing.

[A]

Yeah. Relies on, like somebody associated to the company that you're invested in. Not saying something crazy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Or doing whatever.

[B]

Or saying something crazy and mooning. Anyway. Whatever. Right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Because I gotta say, man, this. The stock market feels more just meme stocks and gambling than ever. And that's something that we've talked about extensively on the show. How it just feels like gambling right now. Asian says that gold Xbox controller, though. Okay. That was. That was a calculated risk.

[A]

Probably made money.

[B]

It was an amount that I was very comfortable, you know, depreciating a little bit. And. Oh, yes, it's definitely made money.

[A]

Yeah. Gold. What would you look up Gold index or what?

[B]

Gold price.org is the. Is the best one that I've found. Oh, yeah, I guess we could do that.

[A]

These are one days. Let's look at how long do you think it's been? Five years.

[B]

When did. Yeah, when did we make the gold controller?

[A]

Oh, that's silver. Hold on. Five years, Boom.

[C]

Hold on.

[B]

When did we make the gold controller? Four years ago.

[A]

Yeah. So five years is the closest I can get because it's. It's 1 and then 5 or 1, 2. 5.

[B]

Yeah. I think the gold controller did okay.

[A]

It was like over doubled in value.

[B]

Yeah, I think the gold. Well, we spent like 20 grand on the like craftsmanship of it or something like that. Fifteen something. It was, it was like many, many, many, many labor hours.

[A]

How much was the value of just the gold or is that disclosed?

[B]

I don't remember. I think it's in the video, but I don't remember the exact. I don't remember how many ounces sure went into it. Yeah, that was like kind of a minor detail in my mind. You know what they ended up.

[A]

Certain people in chat are like, sigh, this is why you have a financial advisor coming. Yeah. And a lot of them would say everything in big seven and I would not want to do that.

[B]

Oh, dude. I would be.

[A]

That's not, that is not a automatic solve all.

[B]

I'd be terrified. Yeah, I'd be terrified to throw everything into magnificent seven right now. And this is not financial advice.

[A]

That is a thing.

[B]

This is not financial advice.

[A]

You're making assumptions. I'm literally not. I know people that have done this because of financial advisors. I'm actually not making assumptions.

[B]

I was actually chatting with CEO Mr. Taran Tong the other day and we were. I was sending him this article. Research by Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody's analytics, showed earlier in this year and again recently that the top 10% of earners in the US are responsible for just under 50% of all consumer spending. Like, I've been trying to wrap my brain around this for a little while how LTT store sales investing.

[A]

Chat'S driving me insane today. No, they do the investing. That doesn't change anything. If that's what they're just gonna do, that doesn't change anything. There's also a problem right now where you invest. You might be investing in companies that are cyclically invested in the big seven. So it's like it doesn't even really matter. Like it's. There are absolutely ways to do it properly. Well, properly. And there are ways that I would be more down with and there are advisors that will think more the way that I would like to think. And you can also explain to them that you want to approach it a certain way and they might do it in that way and that's cool. And there's also fees that come along with that and that might be bad and who knows and whatever. And it doesn't matter.

[B]

Go away, ninja man away.

[A]

Not the right people to talk to about this.

[B]

It's weird to see Linus be the calm one and Luke getting angry at the chat. I told you he's grumpy today. Get some rest, guy. He's good. So what I was gonna. So Right. I've been trying to wrap my brain around, like, how things are pretty. Pretty tough right now in general. Like, you've got, you know, Dollar Giant mooning. Because way more people are shopping at the Dollar Store. Which, by the way, there is nothing wrong with shopping at the Dollar store. One of my kids made an offhand comment about, like, shopping at the Dollar Store or something like that or. Where were we? No, we weren't at the Dollar Store. We were. Yeah, no, we weren't at the Dollar Store, but we were somewhere. We were at Walmart. That's right. We were at Walmart because I promised her, like, a daddy daughter day and she could pick any activity she wanted, and she wanted to make slime. So Walmart is the place that I know that I can get boxes of Borax because Superstore doesn't carry it. Or they didn't the last time I checked. And I didn't feel like going to a dozen different places, so we went to Walmart. So we picked up some borax, some white glue, and we didn't need food coloring. We already had that. The point is, you don't care about the ingredients, the slime. You care about the story, maybe. Or you don't. I don't know. You're watching Wen's show, so who knows? The point is that we were there and she wanted to get something. I forget what it was, but it was something that I basically was like, no, we'd be better off getting that at the Dollar Store. And she goes, well, wouldn't it be a worse one? And I go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. No, the place that you buy something does not indicate the quality of it. You can buy Campbell's Soup at the Dollar Store, or you can buy Campbell's Soup at some bougie supermarket, and they are the exact same thing as long as, okay, Campbell's soup is canned. So I wouldn't even worry about the expiry date. Like, sometimes you can get foodstuff to the expiry date at the Dollar Store. So you do kind of have to watch for that. But if it is the same product, then no, you just get it wherever you get the best deal. There is no. There is no better status in buying something at a fancier store and paying more for it. It's just not something that I'm ever going to believe in. How did I get on this topic again? Can't remember. No, that was before that chat.

[C]

Might remember.

[A]

Yes. Top 10% of earners spend 15% of 50% of consumers.

[B]

Right, right, right. So I was talking about Dollar Giant. So Dollar Giant is like doing great because more and more people are resorting to shopping at the dollar store which I just wanted to make clear is not a problem. Shopping at the dollar store is totally fine, but for a lot of people where they shop is part of their self worth equation, I suppose. And so they're, you know, they only shop at the dollar store during hard times apparently. Okay, sure, whatever. I will never be too cool to shop at the dollar store. I give you my personal Linus tech tips guarantee of that. And so I've been trying to figure out, okay, so with things being tough and they're being all of these indicators, right, that things are tough, I've been trying to figure out why like LTT Store sales are not falling like why LTT store is still doing fine. And so I saw this and I was like holy crap. I had no idea how one sided it was.

[A]

I didn't realize consumer spending would track that way.

[B]

Oh like, like, like that much though. That's, that's wild. Anyway, so he countered with S&P 500 is basically S&P 10 because the top 10 companies are about 40% of the value and have been responsible for 70% of the index growth. So when you. So I had a, I had a, I had kind of a, an annoying conversation. Well I shouldn't say annoying conversation with Yvonne because she was just the messenger, but I was annoyed about a conversation I was having with Yvonne because she was talking about some investment service or something and she basically goes yeah, so like they just recommend like this S and P thing. And I go okay, that's fine. But there are a handful of companies in the S and P that I think are just ludicrously like overvalued bubble. The fundamentals of this company make absolutely no sense. One of the ones that I'll, that I'll name is Tesla. I think Tesla's valuation is just bat crazy right now. They are really struggling to sell cars. That is only going to get worse as the US subsidies go away, as the Chinese market just effective like dumping from domestic Chinese companies continues and as they continue to struggle to compete in Europe like it is, it is not looking Good for Tesla's car business. And sure, fine. Tesla's an AI company or something and they make humanoid robots. But like, sorry, what is Optimus's compete level like right now? Bad. And what is the indication that that will get better? Nothing.

[A]

Not much.

[B]

Yeah, okay, sure. And then the whole AI thing. Right? So Tesla is a super duper de duper AI company, but also, you know, when they're supposed to get GE. Sorry, GE's, when they're supposed to get GPUs, they just get sort of unilaterally redirected to other companies like, you know, xai that are also, you know, predominantly owned by overlapping ownership groups. The whole thing is just a complete smoke and mirror show. And so I wanted absolutely no exposure to it. And they basically the response is just like, well, we don't do that. And I go, okay, well then I don't do whatever your thing is because I don't want any exposure to that. And that was even before I realized just how bad it is. The top 10 companies, 40% of the value, 70% of the growth. So this like bull run that's taken place over the last little while here has been driven by predominantly the, the.

[A]

AI and there and their cyclical investing as well.

[B]

To be clear, I did not just call it the AI. I was going to say the AI bubble, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to use the B word.

[A]

Sure. But there's the like.

[B]

Seems like a bubble, not investment advice.

[A]

X amount of money goes from OpenAI to Oracle. X amount of money goes from Oracle to Nvidia.

[C]

Oh.

[A]

X amount of money goes from. From Nvidia to OpenAI. Dude, big circle thing. This is also not the first time we've seen this happen.

[B]

I saw the funniest. Bring it back on here. This is, this is amazing. Dan, I'm sending this to you to bring up on the show. Dude, you're gonna, you're gonna freaking love this. Where is Dan?

[A]

Like there's also the, like the, the I think fairly old school, like I'm gonna get the numbers wrong, but I think it's like 20% per sector, maximum, 5% per company, maximum. If it goes above any of that, sell it off until it gets down to that number, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah thing. And that's all cool, but there's. Unless you're watching it decently close, I think there's issues with that because of like what I was mentioning earlier, where all these companies are kind of tied into each other in a variety of different ways.

[B]

No I want you to throw it up on screen. Yeah, just get me that photo carousel, because, Luke, you're gonna love this. This is a meme that I caught over on WallStreetBets earlier today. This card game would be lit. Dan, you ready? That's fine. Just. Just throw up the page. It doesn't really matter. He's doing it. He's doing it. He's got this. This actually made me laugh out loud. And then I showed it to a couple of other people on set, and they actually LOL'd.

[A]

It's a big problem right now.

[B]

Oh, dude.

[A]

It's a huge problem.

[B]

Dude, it's wild.

[A]

There is a money sink happening because there's a little bit of loss every time that moves around.

[B]

No, it gains. It multiplies every time it moves around. As far as I can hear of.

[A]

Because it pulls out from investors.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I hit it. Love this. You might have to zoom it a bit so we can see the cards.

[A]

I see where this is going.

[B]

No, no, give us more time. Give us more time. Luke doesn't read so fast.

[A]

Yeah, I did read this, but, yeah, that is a problem.

[B]

Economic ouroboros. I love it.

[A]

Fantastic. Okay, next.

[B]

Oh, man.

[A]

It's Jim Cramer. Legendary creature, human opposite. That's fantastic.

[B]

Power, zero. Wisdom minus two.

[A]

Charisma. Nine very loud seconds before it crashes, the stock is going to the moon. That's great.

[B]

Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. Hit me.

[A]

Immediately halves your portfolio.

[B]

Oh, man. It's like, I. I absolutely love this subreddit. Not because I actually want to invest any of my money in anything right now. All the one that's missing is Nana's inheritance. So we've got Ghost Grandma forces player to buy overvalued stock. Reduces total value of portfolio by 30%.

[C]

That.

[B]

Oh. Oh, man. Oh, man. This has been. This has been active all day. There's a Jerome Powell card now. Ability Money printer. Go. Burr effect Bag holder. Targets opponent. Gains unmarketable assets. Transitory. All effects are temporary. Maybe. Oh, man. Okay.

[A]

Anyway, it's a wild world right now.

[B]

That legitimately sounds like an outstanding card game, but just like, it'd be like the Kelvin Ball of card games, because I just feel like there'd be no rules and nobody wins.

[A]

You know, you could totally make that game work.

[C]

Maybe.

[A]

I think you. I think you could.

[B]

You think so? Like. Like a finance. A finance deck builder game?

[A]

I think you could.

[B]

It's so funny. I. I guarantee you, like, all this is just like, AI generated, like, slop. But that. That doesn't change that. It's super funny.

[A]

You know, that might do pretty. Okay. If you. If you make it right now. It's so topical.

[B]

Oh, my God. There's so many more cards than when I looked at it earlier. Luigi Time Trap card. The target stock loses half its value when activated.

[A]

Oh, man.

[B]

I do want to take a moment, in spite of the fact that he's laughing, to point out that murder is not an answer.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

That's an important thing for us to get out there.

[A]

Merch messages.

[B]

Sure. Is that what we're supposed to be doing?

[A]

I think that's what we're supposed to do.

[B]

This is going to be my. This is going to be my third or fourth attempt at starting the creator warehouse announcements.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Note samples of underwear and pet bandanas are on the table. And an example of a utility shirt is hanging on the right of Linus behind your.

[A]

And then the one on the far right, I think.

[B]

Oh, what? Are we launching this much stuff today?

[A]

I have no idea.

[B]

Okay. Okay. First up, back by popular demand. Do you want to bring up the site while I do the thing?

[A]

Whoops. We have too many websites to start with. Ltt.

[B]

Yeah, sorry about that. Luke, laptop ready?

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Luke, laptop rear. So first we have three brand new designs of the screensaver party shirt. We've got Solitaire, which. There we go.

[A]

I am currently wearing.

[B]

Which Luke is currently wearing. If you look really closely, you might notice that there are. No, not that one. They can't see that, Luke. There you go. If you look really closely, you might see that there's cards that are bouncing around that are completely legally distinct from any other cards because these ones only say LTT on them.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Totally different cards unrelated to any other cards.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

We also have Hasta la Vista, which I'm wearing.

[A]

Oh, that's pretty good. I didn't actually recognize what this was. That totally makes sense, though.

[B]

And finally, we have Bread Soaring, which Dan is wearing, which is legally distinct from After Dark Flying Toasters, because this is clearly Flying toast and Dinosaurs, which is totally different.

[A]

Very cool.

[B]

Dude, I am so stoked on these designs. They are all available now at LMG GG Screensaver. But wait, there's more. Your pet deserves to be stylish too. So we're also launching some matching pet bandanas for your dog. Cat, Rabbit, chicken, capybara. We don't judge. You can get them now at LMG GG Pet Bandana. So you could. You could be matching. You could be matching just like that. It's as easy as that. How Cute is that?

[A]

Ah, these are great. Did people bring in their pets for the photo shoot?

[B]

Of course.

[A]

That's fantastic.

[B]

The dogs always look a lot happier about it than the people than the cats.

[A]

Oh, my goodness.

[B]

So cute.

[A]

That's pretty great.

[B]

Gotta love it.

[A]

And you have more.

[B]

A lot of y' all have been waiting for this announcement. We are finally bringing back LTT underwear. It's underwear so soft and comfy that you'll be getting people talking about it on Facebook.

[A]

What? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is old. It's 2023. I think we talked about this on the show back then.

[B]

I forgot about that.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

That is hilarious. It is available in two different kinds of three packs. One for the bold and another, if you want to keep things a little more stealth. It uses a. Oh, I don't want to get this wrong. So I'm just going to make sure I get this right. A 47.5% medall, 47.5% cotton, 5% elastane blend for a great balance of hand feel. Well, I mean, butt feel. You know how it is. But. And other stuff. And stretchability and other stuff. Structure and what you. Only.

[A]

What other stuff?

[B]

Only. But stuff. No other stuff is that.

[C]

No.

[A]

I was looking for you to. To explain.

[B]

Ah, yes. And. Oh, this is a really handy feature that we actually, I don't think even, like, mentioned. The LTT logo on here is like kind of a little, like, kind of grippy thing.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

And in the morning when your eyes are not open yet, it's a great way to landmark and orient the underwear. Put them on the right way around. Yep. Anywho, we've also got the Boulder Pack. It rocks.

[A]

But it's not socks. Damn, he doesn't like me. Dude, I'm telling you.

[C]

Damn it rocks.

[B]

We've got.

[C]

The heck are you talking?

[B]

We've got the Boulder Pack.

[C]

Oh, God damn it.

[A]

There you go.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

There you go. I got. I got it.

[C]

I think the longer it takes me to get it, the better it is for the ding. Just because it's so bad.

[B]

Anyway, the Boulder Pack has our. Has our prism underwear, our confetti.

[A]

Confetti is great.

[B]

Yeah. And then it also comes with a more. You know, hey, maybe I'm just.

[A]

In case you wanted to chill, maybe.

[B]

I'm feeling like Luke is today. I'm just a little cranky. Wow.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

I think these must be your size because they certainly aren't mine.

[A]

They looked pretty big.

[B]

Okay. Are they too big for you, too?

[A]

I don't know. I Don't even know what size they are, but they look pretty big.

[B]

You know what? I'm not going to make you disclose your underwear size on. On stream. So.

[A]

That is. That is me.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

I was like, man, I would be. I would be swimming in these.

[A]

These look huge though. That's weird. I put LTT underwear on literally every day, so. Okay, we'll see.

[B]

Are they.

[A]

Is it possible shrank maybe the ones I have shrink.

[B]

Yeah, it's possible. Well, it shouldn't be that much.

[A]

It's only a little bit of cut.

[B]

Maybe it's just. Maybe they looked really big in my hands.

[A]

Maybe. I don't know. No, I just held it up.

[B]

He's used to that though.

[A]

It's very ego boosting.

[B]

Anyway, we used the. We used the same patterns as last time, so it shouldn't. Shouldn't be anything. Anyway, check them out. LMG GG undies. My notes say probably a good idea to click this and check out the photos. Of course. Course. They put me front and center. Thank you for that. We always have. We always have fun. We always have fun. With the underwear shoots.

[A]

The Anon mask was surprising.

[B]

Oh yeah. I don't know what I was going for here.

[A]

I'm not sure.

[B]

I. I just. The. The place where we do these shoots is, is in the bedroom set and then the props land is just.

[A]

But it's not a bedroom at all anymore.

[B]

I know. It's still called bedroom set though.

[A]

Yeah, fair enough.

[B]

Anyway, we've got, we've got lots of. We've got lots of pictures of LTT staff in their underwear.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

So if. Whether you want to buy. Whether you want to buy the underwear or not, there's. There's that massive shout out to the CW team for the fun photo shoots. And one more thing. We also just launched the office utility shirt. But you know, I'm gonna. I'll pull up the. Luke will pull up the page for this.

[A]

Got it.

[B]

It's a. This dude. The just practical office wear stuff has been absolutely killer for us. It just sells because people just want something that they know is good, that is quality and that they can wear to work. It's a smart workshop shirt with a little bit of stretch, a hidden titanium carabiner clip in the front pocket and a little integrated screen wipe at the bottom for glasses, phone screens or whatever.

[A]

The screen wipe is awesome.

[B]

Yeah. It's also designed to keep relatively wrinkle free without ironing and is available now at LMG GG officeshirt. All right, Dan, what are we supposed to be doing now?

[C]

We got a couple merch messages.

[B]

Oh, yeah. Oh. For those who are new, the way to send a merch message is you go to lttstore.com. we don't want you just throwing money at your screen. We're not that into just donating to people who frankly don't need it, however much they might pretend to be poor and need it.

[C]

He doesn't have to pretend.

[B]

We think that if you're going to throw money at your screen, we all know you should get high quality goods in the mail in return. So head over to lttstore.com, add something to your cart, you'll see the box for a merch message. You type a merch message, it goes to producer Dan and he will filter through them and he will get rid of the ones that, that have, you know, bad words and, you know, I don't know, seahorse emojis in them or whatever the case may be. And he will curate some for us to talk about on the show. Oh, some of them he just like puts up here so you can have like a little shout out, hi mom or whatever. If your mom watches the WAN show, which mine does. She might. Well, yeah, yours does.

[A]

Yours might.

[B]

Yeah. So sample size of. No, mine doesn't. Sample size of 2. 50% of moms watch the WAN show. You heard it here first.

[A]

That's good math. Sample size is perfect.

[B]

Yep. The point is, Dan will show us how merch messages work. Thank you, Dan.

[C]

Sure thing. I've got a few here. Hey, Dll love the show. Question for Linus. How are the LTT cables coming along? I can't wait to get them.

[B]

Oh, really good. I'm so excited. I ran into yet another situation. Situation yesterday where I just, I was troubleshooting something and maybe this affects me disproportionately and maybe for a lot of you, you don't have the same kind of emotional fatigue with stuff not working when you're troubleshooting. But we were having an issue with, we were doing an AMD ultimate tech upgrade for John from the lab. Actually, I was, I was at his place yesterday and a big part of his setup is his driving sim rig. And so like his upgrade, basically he sank like over half of it into a big screen beyond two.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

Yeah, because he didn't have base stations yet. He didn't have knuckles controllers yet.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So he got a big screen beyond two and based three base stations and knuckles controllers. And then he also got a new GPU for his like media PC because that's where his VR setup is. So he like basically blew the budget on his.

[A]

Probably like the lowest amount of packages.

[B]

Oh, dude. There was like nothing because the rest of it was a 77 inch OLED also for the VR space. So it's like the before and after is like wild because it's. He. He was running. He was rocking An Oculus CV1 still. Yeah.

[A]

Enormous upgrade.

[B]

And an insignia, like 42 inch TV.

[A]

Okay. Wow.

[B]

So he like, that's awesome. Completely zero to hero. Does. It's like if someone upgraded from a Chevy Volt to like a Taycan. Like it's crazy. Like, not even that. It would have been like if I went straight from the Civic to the tank.

[A]

I was gonna say, I think it's more.

[B]

Yeah, it's crazy. Anyway, so as we were getting toward the end of the shoot and everyone's blood sugar was low and people had places to be, we were running into an issue with the USB connection that goes over to his. His sim chair that connects to his pedals, his shifter. He got a new wheelbase. Like a direct drive wheelbase. Sorry, that is the one last thing that I missed. And like the wheelbase wasn't getting picked up. And we're like, okay, is it the new wheelbase? Is it the cable between the wheelbase and the hub? Is it the hub? Is it the port on the computer? And when you're troubleshooting something like that. Oh, is it the cable going from the hub to the computer when you're troubleshooting a multi element system where any one link in this chain can be bad and you have no way of knowing which one it is? Man, does it ever feel good to go into your backpack, take out this cable which I'm using to charge my laptop right now actually, and know for sure that it is not that cable. That means a lot to me. Which is why we are developing LTT cables. They are not going to be the cheapest cables, but what they will be is clearly labeled. So the ends just say LTT logo on one side and then on the other side, how many gigabits per second and how many watts? That's it.

[A]

Feed and feed.

[B]

Exactly. That's all I care about. And they're thick, they're not light. They're not the most like, they're not the world's most flexible cables. They're not the world's lightest cables by any stretch of the imagination. They're like, they're thick, chunky boys. But that is because instead of using twisted pairs for our high speed data Lines. We are using coax.

[A]

They're using coax on all links?

[B]

I believe so.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Because we're using the same cable stock across all.

[A]

There was a difference. For the shorter ones, I'm very usb.

[B]

Two ones maybe.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

You might be thinking of that.

[A]

There's like no way I know more about this in use.

[B]

Because the USB 2 ones, I believe, are a little bit skinnier. Okay, sure. I don't know. So anyway, so we're using coax with each high speed data wire individually shielded, individually insulated.

[A]

Crazy.

[B]

So I am so freaking excited. They are still pretty flexible because we use like a silicone style sheathing on them. So they. They're like, they're more. They're more flexible than they should be being that thick compared to a lot of other stuff.

[A]

But I feel nice. The silicone sheathing is really nice. I've been using one every day because in my enforced homelessness because my employer doesn't pay me at all, I've been living out of a backpack basically for a while and deploying my laptop everywhere I go whenever I need to do work or, or whatever else. And I have an external monitor, an external USB monitor. And it needs a decent cable. I don't know what the exact requirements are. Probably Thunderbolt 3 or something.

[B]

But to be clear, they do not have the like active chipsets for Thunderbolt in them. Just want to make that clear.

[A]

But it needs a decent cable. Yeah, I'm sure there's a variety of ways it could find a way to.

[B]

Because I think USB 4 doesn't look for the Thunderbolt chip for the handshake, something, something. The whole standard has gotten extremely messy. I just want to make it clear there is no Thunderbolt chip in it.

[A]

Sure, Fair enough.

[B]

That's all.

[A]

But I basically. None of the cables that I have work with it.

[B]

Yeah, it doesn't.

[A]

I had one other previous cable that worked, but it just gets mixed in with all the other ones because it's just plain black and there's no. There isn't even a branding symbol on it. There's not. It's just a plain black USB cable.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

So at a certain point it just got mixed in. I don't know which one it is, but this one always works for it. So I have one of the LTT cables in my kit and it's always the, like, I need a good cable for something. It's just like, okay, sweet. It'll work. Cool.

[B]

Yeah. So when are they coming? Maybe. Why don't. Dan, why don't you Read another merch message, and maybe Luke can focus on that merge message while I check the product roadmap and then see if. See if I know when they're coming.

[A]

What is that? Timing.

[B]

My credit card.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

What advice you have for dad?

[A]

Dad of what?

[C]

I know you don't have kids, but we spoke. You've spoken fondly of your own dad?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Categories have been a little odd in the past.

[B]

I sat down with Sarah Dave.

[C]

Muted what I was muted. Luke, what advice do you have for dads? You don't have kids, but you've spoken fondly of your own dad.

[B]

And then there was something about the categories on the site.

[C]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

I sat down with Sarah, Dave, and Taryn actually, earlier this week, and we looked at the wireframe for the redesigned LTT store site. It's not coming tomorrow. It's not coming next week. It's not even coming next month, but it is coming.

[A]

Cool. I don't know. Be present, I guess. Like, I have a lot of fond memories of my dad. I like one that I think we both share is there was. There was one time he came home from work at like. I think it was like one or two in the morning or something, and we played. We were playing Super Mario Bros. Because we're both night owls. And then we went and sat out on his car and watched the sunrise, like, way after that. And it was just, like, awesome. Like, even when life was tough for him, he was around. And life. When life wasn't particularly tough for him, he was around just, like, even more. He was a coach on, like, every sports team I had, which was awesome. That's another important thing. He was a coach on every sports team I had. And certain other kids on the team would be concerned about the favoritism of that for about five minutes into the first practice and then never again. Because he. He treated me either equally or maybe on the first day or so a little bit harsher than the other people just to kind of prove that he would be treating me equally, which was, like, super appreciated by me, but I don't know if we ever really talked about it. And just being a really good example in general, I think from my limited experience with my. My niece and being around certain other people's kids and whatnot, they're much more observant.

[B]

Way more than you give them credit for.

[A]

So you don't necessarily need to, like, tell them all the things. Being the example, showing, not telling can. Can often be good. I think a lot of the. The best lessons that I took from my, my dad were things that I saw him do, not things that he necessarily. He said a lot of great things to me too, but like, I remember one time I, I didn't really click this in my head for so long, but years later, my dad, My dad and I were having like a, a debate about something. And I'm not going to get into the details, but I was taking a counter argument to something that, especially in hindsight, was actually very core and important to him. And I was having this debate with him while he was driving me for like an hour to the ferry. Like, what, what am I doing? But he kept a completely level head. He didn't like, abandon me on the side of the road and was there for the discussion despite it being something that was important to him and I was going against it. And like, I, I don't know, he. Just be there, be open because they're gonna poke at things about you once they get old enough and don't take it too personally. Be present, love unconditionally, and show good examples. Hooray. Hopefully any of that was useful.

[B]

The. The most precise thing that I can find says Q4. Oh, hold on. Okay, so I have a, I do have a schedule. It says that these should arrive before Black Friday. Now, getting these over the line has been a logistical challenge. There's all the different lengths, there's all the different packaging, there's all the different ends. We're going to have USB A and USB C I think at the start. And so it's, it's been a whole thing. We did our best to nail the product mix for all the different end terminations and all the different lengths. Because part of the idea behind these is that they should be very cable management friendly. So you should be able to, instead of just looping up all your extra wires under your desk, you should just have cables that are the right length. So there could be lengths that we don't have a ton of that might end up selling more than we thought they would. If you want to make sure that you get what you want, you should probably not delay. That is all I will say about that.

[A]

You think, like, restocking is going to be tough?

[B]

No, we will restock them. We will. But I don't know what the timeline will look like.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And because this is a completely new product category for us, and it's like.

[A]

He said, they're going to, they're not necessarily going to be super cheap. So it's hard to decide how many of these things you're Going to bring in new category.

[B]

They're not cheap. Premium product like that's, that's the thing that I think a lot of people miss about the merch on LTT Store. This is not a three dollar screwdriver from Alibaba that we just put our brand on. This is, this is custom made. This is, this has expensive materials in it and it's the same with the cables. These are expensive. This cable stock is really, really, really expensive. The validation is expensive. So it's just. Yeah, it's just not going to be cheap. That's all there is. That's all there is to it. Sure. What do you want to do for. What do you want to do for topic? Do you want bad news or worse news?

[A]

Is there any, Is there anything that's good?

[B]

No, just pick one. Pick one. Bad or worse?

[A]

Worse.

[B]

Oh, sinful hands asked for worse. Okay, you did too.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

HP has been pulling support documents for retired products. So this was Posted on by gremlin12345 over on the LTT subreddit and it is a big load of bull and chips. HP retired product. HP policy for products no longer supported. HP support may vary by product. Once a product is retired, the official HP support content, troubleshooting articles, user guides, how to videos, etc. For that product is removed from the HP website. Additional support content may still be available, may still be available via the HP forums or from third party websites. However, HP takes no responsibility for content authored by third parties. This is understandable. No, I didn't say justifiable. I said understandable. I can comprehend the rationale behind the decision. You are no longer selling this product. And at a certain point, at a certain point, eventually, like, would you expect General Electric to have a product page up for their original light bulb today?

[A]

No, because it never had a product page in the first place.

[B]

But even if it did, would you expect them a hundred years later or whatever to have a product page up? So there is a line.

[A]

I think it'd be cool.

[B]

It'd be right. But would you expect it?

[A]

No.

[B]

So there is a line somewhere.

[A]

I don't know where that line is.

[B]

There is a line somewhere. However. However, and this is my counter argument, hp, there's two big differences here. One is that you haven't even really existed that long. You ain't General Electric. Pretty much everything that has ever existed as an HP product is within the living memory of someone on earth today. Okay, so that's number one. Number two is that it's pretty low effort. You Already had the page. It was already there. I'm not saying that you have to have it like front and center on your website. You know, I go to hp.com and the first thing I see is, you know, support downloads for some Pavilion laptop from the early 2000s. That wouldn't make any sense, obviously, but if you were to say, for instance, have a mirror, like an archive old site or something like that, I would say that would be a reasonable compromise. And I really don't think that the hosting cost would be that much.

[A]

I don't think you'd even need a mirror.

[B]

Reason number the third that I am offended by this is that so many HP products are utterly reliant on your support documentation and especially downloads in order to function at all. And there's a particular pet peeve of mine that I've had issues with HP products on that would be horribly impacted by this, and that is vendor specific drivers. My God, do I ever want to just put a fist through the screen every time I try to install a GPU driver and it doesn't work because the laptop vendor has their own specific validated snowflake version of the driver. That is the only one I can use. And if you pull that driver off your site, so help me, I will curse your name. I will curse your name. That's all I can really do. I don't really have the power to do more. I know you guys were probably hoping for some kind of like, like dramatic action that I could take, but curse your name is about the best I can do.

[A]

Not bad.

[B]

Oh yeah, No, I mean intel for all their warts. Yeah, they do this.

[A]

That's pretty old. 12 years.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I don't think it's a big ask. I think you can bury it and I think you can throw warnings all over the place.

[B]

Sure, yeah. This is not supported. This has not got the latest, not been updated.

[A]

This is not supported. This might not work anymore due to whatever reason.

[B]

Reason number the fourth is that, and I know that this might actually be a significant part of the reason that you pulled this stuff down, but sometimes the HP support page is the only place that I can find an obscure driver for something that I actually need for a different device. Dell is another one too. Like if you're looking for a driver that you like, a driver package that you can like unpack and then go find the, the specific file to try to, you know, manually force the driver install for or something like when you're going through those troubleshooting steps, these tier one sites, whether it's like an old WI FI chip or an old network chip or an old USB controller or something like that. Those are sometimes the only places that you can find this stuff. And come on, man, I know that I didn't even like buy your product in that case, but like, you're the only. Trust me, HP1 Kenobi, you're my only hope. Wow, that's pretty cool.

[A]

This was linked by Ch23 in full plane chat. Very old school. IBM support.

[B]

Reason number five. It's just a cool thing to do.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Which is kind of tied into reason number four. Like it. IBM can do it, intel can do it. And yeah, it's sort of the culmination of all the other reasons. Is it really costing you that much?

[A]

No.

[B]

To make this, this, the support available effectively nothing like, honestly I ran into this. Oh yeah, with hp I guess because they acquired Samsung's printer division back in the day and then just after not a very long time, effectively being pretty short, nuked all of the Samsung printer stuff. So they just bought it just to kill it. Because Samsung. Oh dude, Samsung laser printers were like killer. They were. I still rock ML. I want to say like is it 1610 or something? Like whatever. It was like the one that NCIX sold because it was the only printer that mattered because Samsung toner cartridges were super affordable.

[A]

Because the. Back then the, the brother black and whites were also really good.

[B]

No, mine's. Mine was a color.

[A]

Yeah. Okay.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Was it the. Was. It was the 10. I don't think the 10 was color. I think that was actually. I think the ML 1610 was the one that like NCIX sold a bazillion of. So it wasn't the, the color one that I have. Yeah, no, I have a different one but it's some. It's some Samsung like cheapo, cheap is and cheerful compact color one. And I actually have a special folder on my NAS that is just called Samsung ML, whatever printer drivers and utilities. Because even though I don't think it's had official compatibility for any OS past like Vista or something, it has continued to work. I can still install it on Windows 7 if I force away enough warnings that it's not compatible. And the printer still works flawlessly. So I just can't justify buying a different printer.

[A]

I saw some comments from last week's show that I was. I was projecting that there are no problems with Linux. No, that is not what I'm saying. But I wouldn't be surprised if said printer worked like right away.

[B]

Depends. I think that one, if it doesn't, uh, oh, I think that one might have worked on Linux. Couldn't get it working on Chrome os. So that was annoying. And it was like, not just I couldn't get it working, it was like I found threads of other people discussing the challenges of getting it working and it like, being a significant problem or something like that. But Chrome OS is more locked down than like real Linux as well. So Parallelogram says, Linus, you need to advocate for the framework printer. I don't know if, I don't know if the printer market will be disrupted or at least not in the near future because there's gotta be like a significant patent moat around it and it's a shrinking market.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

What's the relevance of printers today? Yeah, like there's no way that I would be a new company. Like, you know, I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there with my fellow startup executives, Dan and Luke, and you know, one of them is like eating a snack and the other one is all tired and cranky because he's, you know, busy putting his house back together. And we're, we're putting our bra, we're putting our heads together and we're going, okay, we need a, we need a billion dollar idea for a new company. I know, let's make printers like the least, the least exciting and not, not to pump them.

[A]

But this is almost the problem. You've got stuff like this. Yeah. Like, are you gonna beat $60 Canadian?

[C]

They're going for a loss most of the time, right?

[B]

Yep, yep.

[C]

Do you guys bring up the open source one that's coming?

[B]

So that's on my radar. $3 US that's on my radar. But I'm kind of waiting for it to develop a little further and I want to do a full LTT video on that. That's really cool.

[C]

Believe it took this long.

[B]

Like, I, I don't. But I also do because to Luke's point, just buying it is so affordable that it's almost not worth it to solve the problem. And the other thing is that as far as I can tell, like, printing is one of those totally underappreciated aspects of modern tech. Like hard drives. Like hard drives are still incredible.

[A]

Yeah, right.

[B]

Like, they're so.

[A]

I don't know why they have such like a bad rap. I think. Yeah, people just use it wrong or something.

[B]

No, it's just that they're, they're not, they're not exciting. They haven't been exciting for 15 years.

[A]

I think they're pretty cool. I think they're still very change in that 15 years.

[B]

It is a, it is a. It is a technolog. They're a technological marvel. Like you see these ones with like seven friggin platters inside them and they're 15 terra. They're spinning around with this little tiny head more at like hurricane force winds. Like it's just like what are. How do these, how do they work? You know, it's amazing. Printers 36, also pretty remarkable. Like printing at super fine quality, taking a liquid and applying it to any random bull paper. Right. Because that's a huge factor. Like if a printer could know exactly the thickness, exactly the absorbency and exactly the surface profile of the paper that you had in it, I think that it would be something that someone with reasonably sufficient cleverness could solve in a relatively short period of time. But they don't.

[A]

Not at all.

[B]

There's so many variables. The temperature, the humidity, the altitude, the everything. There's so many flipping variables in it. It's kind of a miracle they work.

[A]

It in there so the FBI can find you or CIA or whatever it is.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, sure, I. That's not what I was thinking of.

[A]

But yeah, it's impressive.

[B]

It is, it's very impressive. And I. I don't know, I guess I. Yeah. It just doesn't surprise me, especially when the stakes are so low. It's like I could do this. I could solve for all these things or. Hear me out. US$45? Yeah, right. Because that probably ships with prime too. Like is it free shipping on this?

[A]

Yeah, free.

[B]

Yeah, free shipping. Free delivery by tomorrow? Oh, no, no. In a week.

[A]

This isn't even prime though.

[B]

Oh, okay.

[A]

I don't think so. I'm not logged in or anything.

[B]

Got it.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Crazy when Bingo Chronified says US$45 plus their stupid subscription. Nonsense. Absolutely.

[A]

Oh, it requires an ink toner subscription. It says it has three months included.

[B]

Yeah, well after that you better pay for your subscription.

[A]

Yeah, but here's the kind of weird thing, and this is part of the reason why I'm agreeing with Linus is a lot of people that need a printer might only need it for three months.

[B]

Or they might only need it every once in a while. I think, I think up to like seven pages a month is like a very nominal cost or something like that. I can't remember what the actual numbers are, but if you, if you like me use your printer maybe three times a year. Actually, as my kids have gotten higher up in school, there we're starting to use our printer again more. But there was, there was a long period where oh, and Yvonne, for the business would often use the printer. But for me, I very, very rarely don't have a screen. So there's very rarely a reason that I would need to print something out.

[A]

The printing subscription is complete bs, Just to be completely clear. I'm just saying these are reasons why.

[B]

Why people just don't do it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like for us, I think it's very easy to take a principled stand on stuff like this. We are educated on the subject to the point where we know what the other options are. We're educated on the history of it. We know that it used to be different and it used to be better. We have the technical skill to implement a better solution. But a lot of people don't know any of that, don't care any of that. And they look at it and they go, okay, so it costs how much and I need how many documents and they just, they just make a decision based on the information that is presented to them. And that's not, they're not bad people for doing it. And they're not like, they're not stupid. They just have other completely different priorities from what we do. Oh, bummer. The Jays lost. Well, that's a downer. I was curious. Oh yeah, sure. What? Sorry, what are we supposed to be doing? Float plane sponsors. What was that?

[A]

Those are down at the bottom.

[B]

Was that a merch message?

[A]

I don't know what we just did.

[C]

That was an entire topic.

[A]

What was it on hp?

[C]

Removing support.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Oh yeah, right. Luke, what is one gripe you have with any Google product?

[A]

Search in all of them.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Email. Terrible. I've received four emails about one particular flight to one particular location within the last week. I search flight and that location, it gives me one from three years ago. Annoying. I don't know what the point of this is.

[B]

Me neither. There are some things Google does well, like promoting smaller creators as Riley says. But most would agree Google is going through an ins vacation. Everything from the deterioration of YouTube search to annoying AI summaries to Gmail, open slash, show this link, do the call to action.

[A]

I can do the opening and showing. You can do the call to the thing.

[B]

Okay. Join Riley and. Oh, oh, is it a. I'm assuming it's this one. Yeah, it's got to be that one. Join Riley and Adam in their 40 minute discussion about how Google went from a don't be evil company who promised no ads to jamming AI into everything at LMG GG Floatplane. Melody Bun in Floatplane Chat says this video is so good.

[A]

People seem to really like it.

[B]

You heard it? You heard it here first from Melody Bun video. So good. I haven't actually checked it out yet. I didn't even know about that. That sounds really cool.

[A]

Apparently it was shot back in July and one of the commenters on the channel pointed out that it's when the D Google video was taken down. So we were. We were probably feeling fresh wounds.

[B]

Why did it take so long for us to upload this, I wonder?

[A]

Apparently there was just like other things.

[C]

Scheduled and there were some audio problems that I fixed actually earlier in the week.

[B]

Oh, what was wrong with it?

[C]

Some sort of clipping issues. So I just had to remax a couple of the original files.

[A]

But why was that you.

[C]

Well, it was done here on the WAN set, so a lot of it was some sort of error with my system.

[B]

Oh. Oh, fair enough.

[C]

And it's hard, so. Because it already been edited.

[B]

Hard? Was it long?

[C]

That was very short. Didn't take very long at all. Two minutes maybe.

[A]

Oh, geez.

[B]

Okay, so then why did it take four months? Okay, you know what? It doesn't matter. The point is I.

[A]

So that I don't think it was just the scheduling thing. I really.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

They had other content coming out.

[B]

That makes sense. All right, what are we supposed to be doing, Dan?

[C]

I guess if that's the whole floatplane thing, let's talk about his sponsors.

[B]

Sure. The show is brought to you today by Rovelab. This past week has been surprisingly cold, even for October, which means it's the perfect time of year to be snug as a bug in a rug. Or in this case, a Rovelab sofa. Rovelab makes modular sofas that arrive at your house ready to set up, which means less headaches than hullabaloo for you. They're made with high density foam and durable upholstery, making them a great fit for places. Places where normal furniture can be difficult, like apartments or walk ups. Plus it's all backed by a lifetime Warranty and a 100 day trial period. So forget the struggle of moving a sofa, get Rovlab's M1 and be good to go in no time. Go to rovelab.com wanshow or use our link and get $200 off with any sofa and bed purchase for a limited time. We. We used these for Whalen and it was great. It's so easy to set up and they all just zip together so you can configure them in like any shape you want, which I think is honestly should be more of their talking points. Like, you could create, you. You could create a 9 wide sofa. Nice for you and your like entire hockey team worth of friends to all, like, game on or something. Something like you can, It's. It's pretty. You could create like a, like a, like a Z or S shaped.

[A]

All the kids play mobile games these days. You could make a. A cute. A square.

[C]

Or we could bring back the 70s conversation.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. C perimeter. And then you could just have a thing in the middle. One of the, like, I don't know what they call it, but you put your feet up on it. You put one of those in the middle. Ottoman. Put one of those in the middle and then you just have like a thing. Hop in.

[B]

That would actually be like kind of sick.

[A]

Be sick.

[C]

Hell yeah.

[B]

The show is also brought to you by amd. Another AMD ultimate tech upgrade is live for your viewing pleasure. And if you thought the amount that Jamie spent on his trains was ridiculous, just you wait. Let's just say that our editor Robert might leave you a little bit surprised with the way that he allocated his budget. It says here, talk about highlights from Robert's upgrade. But I'm going to take this time to talk about lowlights from Robert's upgrade. I couldn't freaking believe it when I found out he spent $400. 400? This is real dollars, not Canadian maple money. Oh, $400 on a Lego. And when I say a Lego, I don't mean like your boomer parents referred to your LEGO set. I mean like one figure, one minifigure, some Harley Quinn thing that was exclusive to Comic Con or something. And it made my brain hurt. And my brain still hurts thinking about it.

[A]

That's wild.

[B]

My brain hurts like the refresh rate that you could get out of an AMD Radeon gpu. That's how much it hurts right now.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

My brain hurts like Dan's brain hurts listening to that joke.

[C]

It's not as bad as the other one with the boulder.

[A]

I thought the boulder one was pretty good.

[B]

That was good.

[C]

That was excellent.

[B]

Boulder was good.

[C]

That makes it bad.

[B]

Anyway, another thing that will leave you surprised about Robert's upgrade is, well, October in general. It is a spooky season after all. And with the spooky season comes time to play spooky games. The Silent Hill 2 remake comes to mind, which you'll want a good CPU for. Good thing that, as is tradition, AMD has another giveaway for y'. All. And this time you can win one of five Ryzen 9.9950x3D processors. That's a really nice sweepstakes. Enter today using our link in the description. And don't forget to check out Robert's AMD Ultimate Upgrade. All right. Am I doing. You want me to do all four? Sure. All right.

[A]

As a short break, it took me until literally right now to realize I don't know why the AMD upgrade things. It's US dollars.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I was always really surprised that they fit the stuff into their budgets. I was like, wow, yeah, that's like 20. Doing great with the deal shopping. It's very.

[C]

What is that in CAD?

[B]

It's about 1.4 right now.

[C]

Oh my God.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yeah. So. So depending. Depending on when people have done their Ultimate Tech upgrades. Right. They've had anywhere in the last five years. Right. They've had anywhere from an extra $20 for every hundred to an extra $45 almost for every hundred. So your timing of your AMD Ultimate Tech Upgrade actually affects how much stuff you get. However, the problem is that over the last five years, inflation's gone brrr. So I suspect it kind of comes out in the wash. This was a really good time. If you managed to nail it in like late 2022, then you got a pretty sick aimed Ultimate Tech upgrade. But then again, there are certain things that inflation has not really affected, like TVs. TV. How are TVs always just a better deal than they were yesterday? I don't think I'll ever.

[A]

TVs are kind of fascinating that way.

[B]

They're one of the only things that just completely ignores the laws of inflation. Completely ignores.

[A]

Weird. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. I don't get it. Oh, shoot. I was going somewhere with that.

[A]

I don't know why, but I was in a Best Buy not that long ago. I don't think I was buying something. I think I was just waiting for someone. And I walked through and I walked through the TV department. It was just like, what?

[B]

Yeah, how can I get so much for so little?

[A]

It's weird.

[B]

I don't understand.

[A]

You go through any other department, you're like, okay, yeah, this all makes sense. Then you go to TVs and it's just, oh.

[B]

Huh. Right. No, I know what I was going to say. Speaking of inflation in tech being, you know, crazy outside of TVs, guess what? Guess what we just built today. Can you remember the last time that we did a video that was just Me building a PC that someone might want to buy. Oh, like no gimmick. No, like we bought the worst rated thing on Amazon or whatever. Can you even remember the last time I did that without looking it up? Chat, can you remember the last time?

[A]

Before you get to your punchline, not.

[B]

Secondhand brand new hardware.

[A]

I do think you should consider doing an update to your AI Parts video.

[B]

Oh yeah, that's a good idea.

[A]

See if it does any better.

[B]

Loliverse says:2 years ago. Whatsomata says:Pre Covid. No, there were definitely ones during COVID I know because I shot them at my house. It was horrible. Yeah, a lot of guesses. Pretty much everyone agrees. Years ago. Do you know why? Because I didn't feel comfortable recommending anything. GPUs have been.

[A]

That totally makes sense.

[B]

Ludicrously overpriced that I haven't had computer systems that I was happy recommending. There was actually a nearer. A more recent one that I forgot about. And I guess a lot of you forgot about. We did like a 6, $500 or $600 gaming PC with an Arc B 580 and that ended up being true. That ended up being a real thing, B580. It took a little while, but did come around to MSRP. And you can build a really sick gaming PC for like 5, 600 bucks with an arc B580 or B570 maybe is what we used, but. But with an ARC at its core. But anyway, the system that we built just now, it was the MSRP PC. Every single component was either at or get this below msrp.

[A]

Crazy that that's a. Get this when that used to be like the default for a quarter to half of your parts.

[C]

That's a hilarious gimmick.

[B]

So the MSRP PC we targeted like kind of with some inflation, but maybe not all of it. About the budget of the very first LTT build guide, which was a $1,500 US gaming PC back 11 or 12 years ago or whenever it was. And so we targeted $1800 at MSRP and we got it for under 1600, including an RTX 5070 Ti at MSRP for 750 bucks.

[A]

You found one at MSRP?

[B]

Yeah, there's lots of. Oh, they're like. They're just there now. You can just buy them now. I'm not necessarily saying that you should. I still think that there's better values.

[A]

I knew it was going to be an intel card by default.

[B]

No, there's better values on the market. Like the B580. Oh, I think it's time for our weekly B580 check.

[A]

Is it there?

[B]

Has Linus figured out his affiliate code yet? The answer is no. But can you still buy a B580 for MSRP?

[A]

It is astonishingly hard to get certain information from certain people.

[B]

What?

[A]

There's a. There's a site we've been trying to work with to get. Oh for their like stock and pricing information.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

My. The amount of bumps. Hey, anything happening here and it's not. It's. I won't say who it is, but because I know people will assume it's Newegg. It is not Newegg.

[B]

Okay, cool. But I was gonna say. Should I stop featuring new eggs?

[A]

It's not a new egg.

[B]

But like this is open box. I'm not counting it. This is. What is this? What am I looking at? More options from whatever. Like is this. Oh, this is in cart. Oh yeah. Oh, this is. Yeah. The only problem with this one is I already have it in my cart. I think here I'm just gonna empty out my cart. Remove. Here we go. B580.

[C]

Sorry.

[B]

Sorry. We'll do this again. Sort by lowest price. There it is.

[A]

Boom.

[B]

Little something like that. Free shipping in the United States. $249.99. First party intel card. You can also pick up an Onyx Odyssey for $249.99. This is open box. Don't count it. Asrock Challenger. You want a couple big, big old fans on it. 259.99. You want three fans. $269.99. I don't mind that. I don't mind. $10.

[A]

1020 bucks for a sicker cooler, fatter VRM, bigger cooler. No problem.

[B]

Or if you have like a special IO layout, you got a couple HDMIS instead of just one. Whatever. That costs money. That costs a money. Yeah, I don't mind that. I don't mind that. But yeah, you can. You can just go. You can buy a good GPU like 1080p killer even solid 1440p card for 250 bucks. But yeah, so. So $1600 was what we got our MSRP PC for. And it's a great little machine and without compromising on quality. We even put a good power supply in it. Seasonic. 140 bucks. Modular like it's a phanteks case. Like hit me with something. You think I compromised on Ram? No. 32 gigs. 6,000. 6,000 gigs.

[A]

I would have thought You've gone at least lower.

[B]

No, this is a storage legit 2 TB NVMe.

[A]

All of it's gen 4. Abandon the hard drive.

[B]

No hard drive.

[C]

Don't need it.

[B]

Two terabytes.

[C]

Let's go. Sad.

[A]

Motherboard.

[B]

No, it's. I've got Wi Fi, 6e, two and a half gig lan. Nice big cooler. I've got front USB type C. I've got RGB up the butt. I've got like seven RGB fans in it.

[A]

I was gonna ask amount of fans.

[B]

Nope. Lots of cooling. It's quiet.

[A]

I don't think there's much components left.

[B]

I didn't buy Windows, you know. Well, whatever. I don't assume. I don't assume people's OS preference. I think that's. I think that's a very 2025 thing to do.

[A]

Good.

[B]

Yeah. Not gonna assume that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. Anyway, so I. I hate that. That was really exciting for me, but it was. It was. It was really exciting for me to finally be able to just do a video where I just build a computer that I can stand behind and recommend. And you know what? It's. It's better than ever now, which is pretty cool because like, now I have Lucas from the lab and I can be like, hey, I need a power supply. And he'll be like, this one. And I'll be like, cool. I'm not just reading some random tier list or making a best guess based.

[A]

On a website to do that.

[B]

Reputable brand or whatever.

[A]

We'll get there.

[B]

Oh, we're going to get there. We're going to get there. We're going to make it so that everyone is able to benefit from those resources, not just, you know me when I'm putting together.

[A]

You can get the information right now, but we want to help you get to the conclusion at some point, but faster. We're focusing on information for now.

[B]

I'm just. It feels good to be able to actually recommend something. And do you know how hard it's been on the content side to come up with new ways to repackage that? Everything's expensive and everything sucks and you shouldn't buy anything. It's not fun. Nobody's having fun.

[A]

It does really suck.

[B]

You're not enjoying it. I'm not enjoying it.

[A]

I like B580s for 250. Feels pretty all right.

[B]

Oh, that's great.

[A]

Yeah. And I don't feel too bad about that.

[B]

I don't love the 5070 ti for $750. That's still. That's still more than I would like to spend, but. Dude. Okay, okay. You know how motherboards have been, like, ridiculously overpriced? Oh, yeah. It feels like you can't get anything decent for less than 200 bucks. Dude, the. The motherboard for the system, I think, was 1 139. So 140 bucks, which is. Yeah, it's more than I would have wanted to spend on a motherboard in 2005.

[C]

Yeah, right.

[B]

I would have wanted it for 109.99. $99.99, but, I mean, it's been 20 years, you know, I think it's okay. I think I can spend $140 on a motherboard without being, like, upset about it. Actually, the motherboard we used was from msi, who happens to be the next sponsor here. Sorry, I got a little sidetracked there. Hey, Luke, here's a joke for you. Why wasn't the man upset when someone threw a tomahawk at his car?

[A]

Because he got a free new motherboard.

[B]

It was just an accident. I need to take a bit of a pause from this sponsor talking point for a moment here. I need to chat with the business team about their use of. About their use of AI So I recorded a sponsor spot for them for. I want to say it was amc.

[A]

Is this AI writing so well, hold.

[B]

I don't know. I don't actually know. I. But I. I. Oh. Oh, my brain hurts from that. I. So I recorded a spot for them, and I was like, what is this? And they were like, well, I took the vendor talking points and I put it into chat GPT and told them, make it spooky for October. Some of it was actually pretty funny, but it was just, like, bad, but, like, maybe. Maybe funny bad. And I'm wondering if this is more AI in my talking points here.

[A]

We're probably gonna have to do. Probably have to push that mantra a little harder, Dan.

[B]

Yeah, whatever. Anyway, losing battle. What wouldn't be an accident would be to purchase MSI's Mag 870e Tomahawk motherboard, which supports up to Ryzen 9000 series processors. You'll also be getting a stable online gaming experience since the 870e works with both 5 gig lan and Wi Fi 6.

[A]

Look at the size of that pipe series of tubes.

[B]

Let's go be like the man with the dent in his car and keep your cool with MSI's Frozer cooling. The extended heatsink enlarges the surface of heat dissipation to keep things running smooth under Heavier loads. Head on over to MSI site or use our link to snag your new motherboard today. Finally, the show is brought to you by Green Man Gaming. Embrace the cold weather by staying inside and bundling up. The original cut of this. Looked like he was, like, covering my face because I died or something.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

Anyway, yeah, sure. But don't sleep the day away. Get your game on by bundling up with Green Man Gaming's Destiny 2 expansion bundles, which starts at just $5. Wow. Or if you want the entirety of the Light and Dark Saga as Well, that's only $8. They also have two additional tiers which include the previous expansions and more. Every one of these purchases supports the Bungie foundation, helping to give children some normalcy dealing with things like natural disasters. And it isn't too late to grab Greenman Gaming's special Day 1 bundle with games like Robocop and Citizen Sleep. Cheaper. I. I haven't played it yet, but I did HEAR that the RoboCop game was, like, unironically, actually good.

[A]

I played through a decent part of it and I had some fun. I got a little. It got a little old after, like, quite a while, but I had a good time.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

I was happy with my purchase.

[B]

I mean, given that robocop was like, kind of a milked to death IP a long time ago, I really had very low expectations for it. Anyway, save up to 95 on some games while also supporting a good cause with our link in the video description.

[C]

Would you buy it for a dollar?

[A]

RoboCop?

[B]

I'd buy that for a dollar.

[C]

Me too.

[B]

Is that how much it is? How much is it? It can't be that. No, no more than that. How much is.

[C]

No, that's. That says from the movie.

[B]

Oh, no, original. Is that. Where's the origin of. I'd buy that for a dollar. That's not RoboCop, is it?

[A]

I swear to God it was.

[C]

Unless it's referencing something else.

[B]

Is it?

[C]

I thought it was creative. Yes. Yeah.

[B]

Whoa. It is.

[C]

It's like a fake TV show to show off how weird and strange the future was.

[B]

It's a modernized reference to the catchphrase, would you buy that for a quarter? From Cyril M. Kornbliff's 1951 short story the Marching Morons. Okay. But it was popularized by the character Bixby Snyder in the movie RoboCop. I actually have never seen RoboCop. I've seen pieces of it.

[C]

The first one. Work of absolute satirical art. So good. My dad loved squibs man. They don't do squib work like that anymore. There's so much gourd. It's so good. It's so fun. It's such a fun movie.

[B]

Oh, yeah. Speaking of Dan's twisted taste in films, we were probably accurate.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Getting to be due for a movie night.

[A]

Whose turn is it?

[B]

I think it's mine again. Wait. No, I don't think Brandon's gone.

[A]

Can't work. We've only watched two.

[B]

No, we watched three.

[C]

Yeah, but it's Linus's house.

[B]

No, no, no, no, no.

[C]

I think it's Brandon's turn.

[B]

I think it's Brandon's turn. What?

[A]

So we. Okay, I remember yours.

[B]

Yeah, you picked one. Dan picked one.

[A]

What was yours.

[B]

The weird one.

[C]

I think Brazil was it.

[A]

Yeah, but we didn't watch it.

[C]

Wait, we haven't watched it.

[B]

Who picked the. Who picked the. Wait, have we only had two?

[A]

I think we only had two.

[B]

I thought we had three.

[A]

I think we only had two.

[B]

Really?

[A]

Because I was gonna have us watch Rudy, but then we didn't, like, have it or something.

[C]

And then we did the. We did the Last Action Hero and then.

[B]

What is it called? Dr. Strangelove. That's the one.

[C]

How I met your mother and learned to love the bomb.

[A]

I learned to stop worrying.

[B]

Yeah. Okay. Okay, we all. We've only done two, so. Wait, so. Oh, so it's Dan's turn then.

[C]

Well, what about Brandon?

[B]

Well, yeah, but Brandon only joined on the second one, so he's not quite fully og so he has to go fourth, I think. Yeah. So Dan, it's gonna be there every time. Yeah, he's been there the first one. Did he?

[C]

Absolutely.

[B]

How did I forget this?

[A]

I don't know.

[B]

Look.

[A]

I'm not sure.

[B]

I'm not a young man anymore. I'm not a young man anymore.

[A]

It's really, like, not. Not that serious.

[B]

How could I think that we had a full additional movie night that never happened.

[A]

Oh, no.

[B]

And that Brandon wasn't at it when he's been at all of them.

[C]

I don't know, maybe watch a couple movies.

[B]

It was Dan who wasn't at the first one.

[C]

No, I was there, too.

[B]

You were there at the first one?

[C]

Yeah. I had never seen the last action.

[A]

Last Action Hero was fantastic. That was pretty sure that was the first.

[B]

Hold up. Yeah, that was the first one. I'm so confused right now.

[C]

Well, do you watch any additional movies in your movie theater?

[A]

Extensively. About watching. I think it was Brazil.

[B]

I haven't watched a Movie in the theater since we all watched Dr. Strangelove together.

[C]

I remember you saying that was a.

[B]

Bit of a problem.

[A]

I haven't watched it. A movie since then at all, either.

[B]

Yeah. Like, it's. I. I need an excuse.

[C]

I. I also only use mine with other people. Like, I'm not going to have to sit down and. And set it up.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I was talking to Emma the other night. Cause there was a night where we couldn't do anything on renovating the house. We just had to wait. I was like, we should, like, go out. Cause, my God, we haven't done anything other than work on this house in so long. And I was like, we should go to a movie. I haven't gone to, like, gone out to a movie in forever.

[B]

Yeah. And then you looked at what there was in the theater and you were like, okay, forget it. Yeah.

[A]

Someone pointed out. I don't remember the exact year or anything, but I think it was my brother. We were talking about my whole Great Games 2004 argument, and he brought up movies from, like, one particular weekend. I don't remember what it was, but you could see, like, it was like, try to look it up. It's like Lord of the Rings. Oh, man. It's like Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring. What other movies were in theater?

[B]

I'm looking it up already. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Ocean's Eleven Monsters, Inc. A Beautiful Mind and the Fellowship of the Ring and Rush.

[A]

Hour 2 and the Mummy Returns. Like, whoa. You could go to the movies back in the day, dude. Like, wow. And then now it's just.

[B]

Okay, what's in theaters right now? I'm going. I'm going to Cineplex. I'm going to Cineplex right now. Like, not physically, but you get it. Okay, so what do we got?

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Is. Is this the. What the.

[C]

Go away. Not now.

[B]

Okay. This is advanced tickets now. What. What? Is actually in theaters right now. So let's go. Langley. Langley Multiplex. What is this website?

[A]

What is happening?

[B]

There's a jumping popcorn. Okay. This is the one, right?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Here we go.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Okay, so all movies phone to Black Phone two.

[A]

Oh, black. Okay.

[B]

Okay. Black phone to Good Fortune.

[A]

Seth Rogen has some names in it.

[B]

Yeah. Keanu Reeves. This is a. This is a terrible movie.

[A]

That sucks cover. Yeah.

[B]

Need a miracle. Okay, so, like, kind of. Okay. Comedy. Tron. Aries. Is the new Tron supposed to be good?

[C]

Nope.

[A]

Ratings. Well, I don't know, Dan. Because the audience.

[B]

Yeah, audience loves it. Dan.

[A]

This should be Right up your alley, Dan. Because it's controversial.

[C]

Not controversial enough. I think if that 50 was more like a 10 or a 20.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

It might be a little bit more split.

[B]

This sounds like it could be funny. Roofman, he robbed 45 McDonald's. Escaped from prison, lived in Toys R Us for six months. And that's not even the craziest part. Based on actual events, this has kind of like a catch me if you can kind of energy to it. I have no idea if it's any good. And what is the rest of this stuff? Oh, is it good?

[A]

Apparently it's not bad.

[B]

Oh. One battle after another is supposed to be intense, but thought provoking. It's almost three hours long though. It's. Committing three hours to a movie is pretty tough.

[C]

Dude, I saw Megalopolis. That was awful.

[A]

Instead of going to the theaters.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

We watched Fellowship of the Ring at my parents place. Damn. That movie still goes so hard. Dude, you're such a door.

[B]

You're such a dork.

[A]

Good.

[B]

You know that you have gotten comfortable in your relationship.

[A]

God.

[B]

When the conversation is. We haven't gone out in forever.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

Come over to my parents.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Yeah. And watch Fellowship of the Rings.

[A]

Right? Yeah.

[B]

At my parents house with me.

[A]

My parents might just be pretty cool.

[B]

I'm just saying. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to be comfortable in your relationship. I'm just saying you're clearly very comfortable in this relationship.

[A]

We're doing all right. But damn, dude. And okay. Okay. Handyman said one battle after another is amazing. I don't know. I'm assuming they're talking about Fellowship of the Ring. Dude. It takes a long time to get started combat wise.

[B]

Oh, Fellowship. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[A]

Doesn't matter.

[B]

Oh, it's so good.

[A]

Amazing.

[B]

It's great.

[A]

Just banger the whole time.

[B]

I just made the mistake of watching the extended cut with my son. You don't start with the extended cut. He didn't make it through the movie. It's a. It's theatrical cut is the way to go for. For people who don't already love the movie.

[A]

Emma hasn't seen any of them because when they were coming out she fell asleep through them every time we watched extended edition because I think that's the only version that's going to play at my parents house.

[B]

It's three hours and 28 minutes long. That is.

[A]

And she loved it. Loved the whole thing.

[B]

That's a long movie.

[A]

I don't know if that was optional given the setting.

[B]

Oh, loving It.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Oh, okay.

[A]

But I do think she genuinely did really like it.

[B]

Well, the test is. Without you bringing it up. Will she ask to watch Two Towers?

[A]

She's been trying to. She. That was an immediate discussion afterwards, so I don't think that's fair. But she has been trying to find the. The. An appropriate date for the next time. So I think that might count.

[B]

Okay. Okay.

[A]

I'm not sure. It's not exactly. But I think it might count.

[B]

I'm just. I'm just. I'm just.

[A]

We'll see if there's.

[B]

That be the test if there is actual follow up.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

And an actual attempt is made. Yeah, like that's.

[A]

That's fair.

[B]

I've been trying to get my son into Final Fantasy Tactics just because like usually during his game time he just plays Rocket League which is fine. It's good to. But like no life in one game at his age. Seems like kind of.

[A]

Kind of missing out.

[B]

Kind of dumb. Yeah, you're kind of missing out.

[A]

Got to see the spread.

[B]

So I've been trying to get him to try. Try Tactics because it's a completely different genre he's never gotten into. So the first time I like sat with him because it's. It's kind of hard game to get into. And then. And then I was like, okay, let's see if he actually cares about this at all. Because I'm not gonna like force my kids to like eat your gaming vegetables.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Like play this game or I'm not going to do that. I do think it's. It's a. More of a thinking game that I don't mind him playing as much as, you know, I don't know, just like click the thing. Random clicker game or something like that. Like it's definitely something that there's. There's definitely degrees of turning off my brain to gaming. But I'm not gonna like force him to play certain games or anything. But no, he's. He apparently has gotten into it. He's talking about like yeah, oh yeah. How did you get to that class? And like how do I do this?

[A]

So I feel like would enjoy the min maxing. Seems like that kind of.

[B]

Kind of a dork. It's good. I'm a proud dork father. Yeah. Yep. 100% dork father.

[A]

Sounds like a title.

[B]

Sounds like a. Like a gaming gangster movie or something.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What are we supposed to be doing, Dan?

[C]

I want to get rid of the rest of the topics and then go to Wine After Dark.

[B]

Oh yeah.

[C]

We could do that.

[B]

Yeah, whatever happened to Philips's fixables program? This was posted on the subreddit and the reason that I flagged it was because I had been wondering the exact same thing as I stood in my bathroom and shaved with my Philips shaver. And then I was too lazy to look it up. But user mcbyu98 did it and went over onto Printables where they found that Philips, after getting a whole bunch of positive PR around this idea of releasing 3D models for replacement parts for their products, only ever uploaded two stupid models and then just never did anything with it. 3D printable parts for fresh starts. Welcome to Philips Printables, a collaboration with Prusa Research to help Philips products last longer in your home. Here you'll find 3D printable spare parts, clever fixes and creative upgrades designed with sustainability and longevity in mind. Some are made by us, many are inspired by you. Download, print and share. Let's make fixing part of everyday life. Guys, you gotta do more than two things. That doesn't count.

[A]

Yeah, makes me sad. I was really excited about this.

[B]

Yeah, me too. And we like. That's me being excited about it. Look how happy that guy is. Not happy anymore.

[A]

That's very frustrating.

[B]

You gotta. If you're gonna do something, you have to actually do it. That's how it works. Not cool. Okay. There were notes for this, but I just didn't do them. And Philips isn't the only major company to have joined Prusa's slowly growing brands program which includes replace replacement parts from Cooler Master and Noctua as well as accessories from Framework, Corsair and more. And dbrand, I guess, who also only has two Killswitch accessories. For shame. S. These are fine though because these are like enhancements to the thing and I just.

[A]

I haven't looked at the other brands ones yet and I'll search around but just to give. I'm gonna hijack this for a second just to give Cooler Masters and props. This is a lot of stuff.

[B]

Wow. Good job. Cooler Master.

[A]

This is a ton of things are.

[B]

How many of them are useful? What are they?

[A]

They got some badges that doesn't necessarily mean much. A figurine. Okay.

[B]

Stacked hard drive mount.

[A]

Hard drive mount.

[B]

I like that. That's cool.

[A]

Sample holders is all right. A bunch of different mounting things which seems all right.

[B]

Raspi compatible thing.

[A]

Top panel replacement.

[B]

Oh, I like that.

[A]

That's cool.

[B]

That's solid.

[A]

Vesa mounting bracket.

[B]

Okay. I like that.

[A]

Cool panel clips. That's cool. Power supply bracket. That's cool.

[B]

Case Feet.

[A]

A bunch of different case feet.

[B]

Okay. Okay.

[A]

So cases for pies.

[B]

Pretty good stuff here. Pretty good stuff.

[A]

Not too bad, not too bad, not too bad. I like the ATX 24 pin dual 90 degree adapter. Bridge is pretty sick too.

[B]

Yep, agreed.

[A]

That's actually very cool.

[B]

I like that discussion Question Is this a, a resource problem or is the program just stalled due to a lack of corporate will? Which to me sounds like the same thing.

[A]

Yeah, I suspect so.

[B]

I would like to see whoever was working on this get it together and get some more stuff out there. Because while the community can go in model replacement parts, it's a lot more work and it would be better if Brands just said, hey, here's the geometry. That's way better. Let's keep things out of landfills and let's actually follow through on the things that we promise. We have a follow up to our review of the ROG Xbox Ally X. We said in our video that due to the way that our benchmarking tools work, we tested all of our handhelds in standard Windows mode. This caused, I have to admit, an unexpected amount of backlash toward the review. So I feel the need to, I guess, expand upon the reasoning that we had for testing it that way. Windows Full Screen or the Xbox Full Screen experience in Windows is not like, it's not magic. You're still running the same drivers, you're still running the same operating system kernel, you're still running the same games. What it is is RAM savings. So particularly on a machine like the. I'm gonna get this wrong Xbox Ally Rog Xbox Ally X. Is that, Is that whatever the. Sorry, the Ally 2 running on a machine like the Ally 2 that has 24 gigs of high speed, I think it's like 8000 mega transfer per second memory. Freeing up RAM is very unlikely to impact gaming performance unless you are in a RAM limited scenario. But that's unlikely to happen because you're running IT at maximum 1080p on 24 gigs of shared pooled memory. So because it was going to result in us not being able to use our best benchmark suite, we made the decision to just run in the standard desktop mode. What we should have probably done though is we should have done like a quick and dirty, you know, at least one game validated our hypothesis and presented that to the community. Yeah, the lab did validate the hypothesis, but we didn't include that in the video. And that was a significant error. You know, I just saw it as, hey, I don't think this is a big Deal. And I'd rather we have better consistency in our benchmarking across all of our videos and across all the devices. And hey, it's an opportunity to call out a smaller creator who I know does a really great handheld content, is a super nice guy. I finally got to meet him in person a little while ago. I shouldn't say a little while ago. I finally got to see him again at the the unveiling event.

[A]

For this to talk some shots. Stop for a quick second.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What you could do in the future if you don't want to go through all the explanation, because I know there's like, you might lose some audience there or whatever. Toss to a Labs article, have us write a companion for it, and then we can talk about the validation that was done in a companion article.

[B]

Anyway, Ars Technica also validated the Hypothesis testing Xbox FSE versus Windows 11 desktop. And the results are pretty minor. We can use the Ars link above or basically, roughly 0.1 to 1 FPS more in the full screen experience in all power profiles except silent. Borderlands 3 sees the best gains even in silent mode, but it's still pretty minimal. Yeah. So I'm gonna make you guys go read the Ars Technica article if you want to see the exact differences, because that' how this works. We don't want to just, you know, take their benchmark results, but in a nutshell, it's not a big deal, but we should have presented that information a little bit differently. Honestly, I think a big part of the backlash is just how utterly unexciting this product was and how little else there was to talk about with regards to the ally 2. And I don't think that's even because it's a bad product. I think if it was just called ROG ally 2x or ROG ally x 2 and people's expectations were that this was just another Asus gaming handheld that had a better processor in it and improved ergonomics and all the other things that are better about it. I think people would have been stoked on it. But because it was pitched as Xbox, I think the biggest one for me is that the pricing is just such a massive disappointment.

[A]

I was expecting a much different.

[C]

I.

[A]

Don'T know, something more unique.

[B]

Well, it's just I don't even need something unique. But if you're gonna call it Xbox, say, like, make it an Xbox. It's not an Xbox. It doesn't play Xbox games. What do you want from me?

[A]

Do you remember this is a deep cut. Do you remember my Xbox and PlayStation Drive idea drive. This is. This is ancient. This is.

[B]

Not sure that.

[A]

Probably over 10 years ago I had this idea that it would be cool if they made Xbox and PlayStation, basically like optical drives that you could put in your computer.

[B]

Oh, yeah, that'd be super cool.

[A]

That type of concept for something like this would have been pretty cool.

[B]

Someone. Okay, hold on.

[A]

If it could, like, officially effectively emulate an Xbox or something.

[B]

Yeah, that'd be. That'd be super cool. J creased08 says search Ally X on Twitter. They're saying everyone's a liar and it's an Xbox. I mean, are they. Who's saying that? I don't. I don't see anyone saying that.

[A]

Also. Yeah. Who's they?

[B]

Yeah, also, like, if people feel the need to. If people feel the need to post their opinions on Twitter. I. I don't know, man. I just. I'm having a real hard time with sort of reading anything on that site lately.

[A]

For me, it's not even necessarily. I mean, it never has been. It's not even necessarily. It's that format.

[B]

It just is so conducive to toxicity.

[A]

Yes. That format is just terrible. It's not Twitter in particular. I. I don't like Blue sky either. I don't like any of them. I just don't like that format. Infinite scrolling is already bad by default, and then you make it so everyone can scream at each other all the time. It's just. Yep.

[B]

Maybe I'll just. Maybe I'll just close the tab. Wow.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

I feel better already.

[A]

See? Sick.

[B]

Nice. Microsoft is having some problems with the locals. Microsoft continues its path, forcing Windows 11 users to log into a Microsoft account upon installing the os. This is the second time this year that Microsoft has disabled a feature that allows users to install Windows 11 without an Internet connection. Earlier this year, they removed the bypass NRO command and now Luke has moved the document. Nope, they have removed the start Ms. Dash cxh colon local only command. Using that command now resets the out of box experience or UBI process. The question is why, though?

[A]

Well, the reason is so bad.

[B]

A Microsoft representative told the Verge. This is a quote. These mechanisms also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing a device that is not fully configured for use. Right. I didn't want that configuration necessarily. What about that? So the simplest bug fix, I guess, according to Microsoft, is to just annoy their users. Users have sought a workaround and the Chris Titus tech utility has a section that is on his GitHub claiming a workaround. But it's worth noting that it is part of a larger auto unattend script that disables a ton of other Windows features. This is not chill and is a good reminder that one should not simply run random scripts from the Internet unless they're prepared to deal with the consequences. You can make your own auto unattend xml [e-mail] but just remember to be careful. Okay, so here we can bring this up. Create auto unattend XML files for Windows 1011 so you can decide on all the different stoofs. All right. The good news is this change is only part of the Windows 11 Insider Preview build from the dev channel for now. So non beta versions of the OS can still be bypassed. But that didn't stop Microsoft from screwing up in the public build. The October Update has broken LocalHost, a functionality that lets you. Lets the system act as its own server. Pretty crucial for web devs or anyone who wants to access stuff on their own network. The current fix is to roll back to the previous version. Yeah. So I don't think that we need to do a second week in a row of Luke going off on Microsoft. It was fun last week, but I think we're just. I think we're going to move on.

[A]

My opinion stands.

[B]

I mean, I think it stands quite well. Stronger stands on three legs.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Microsoft has officially. I don't know, I'm trying to figure out where to go. Do I go with hard instead of soft? Do I go with I don't know? The point is chat GPT loses its mind if you ask it about a seahorse emoji. So Luke was playing around with this earlier in the show. That was when I was like, Luke, can you pay attention to like, okay. Hosting the WAN show?

[A]

I can explain why.

[B]

So hold on, hold on. First, why don't we just show them the behavior?

[A]

Sure.

[B]

You had it up on your phone earlier, but I guess. Is there an emoji of a seahorse? It's amazing to me that with how viral this is, it hasn't. They haven't fixed it yet. Oh. What?

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

Oh, wow. It actually did not lose its mind. Okay, here we go. No, they fixed it. They fixed it.

[A]

I wonder if this is. I'm not logged in. So this is like a free version, cheaper thing. So I can try to get logged in and try it there. Because I tried on my phone earlier because I was concerned that somebody pre prompted it and like set it up to do that. No, it went nuts.

[B]

Okay, can. Do you want to do like, do you have your. Your one from earlier.

[A]

I should.

[B]

Okay. I'm kind of glad you did that then. Do you want to just log in? Because you should be able to get that chat, right?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me a little bit.

[B]

I'll try mine in the meantime. Whoops. Chat GPS accidentally typoed there. Okay, we'll try mine in the meantime while Luke gets logged into his biz. Show me the seahorse emoji. Here you go. Just kidding. The real seahorse.

[A]

Oh, no, it gave up.

[B]

Oh.

[A]

What version are you on?

[B]

This is free, so I'm waiting for you to get logged in.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay, let's see how. Let's see how hard it tries.

[C]

Oh, it's trying.

[B]

How do I skip thinking like that? Doesn't seem. It's okay. It doesn't matter. The point is. Wait, Should I show the thinking?

[A]

Go for it. But, yeah, it's not really gonna do anything.

[B]

No, I. Maybe that was a Mandela effect article. It's still. It's still trying to figure stuff out. Interesting. Should I.

[A]

Whoa.

[B]

Okay, so it's definitely doing stuff. How's your. How's your logging in doing over there?

[A]

Not well.

[B]

I mean, it's definitely. It's definitely doing stuff here. Huh.

[C]

It's a good answer.

[B]

There is no official. Okay. Dude, did they just push a fix for this? Like. Like, just now? Like, in the last five minutes?

[A]

It's possible. I don't know what's going on here.

[B]

Yeah, no chat. Guys, guys. Yes. I know people are saying, just ask it to show you the emoji. I did. I can. I can try it again if you want. Okay. They've been trying to fix it for weeks. This isn't new. Hold on. Hold on. Let's find it. So someone else said, is there an emoji? A seahorse? Okay, I'm typing. I am typing exactly what you say. Let's see if we can get it to do it. Oh, hold on. It might be doing it now. It might be doing it. Here we go. Here we go. It's still going. Hold on. No, it's still going. Still going wild. Okay. Yeah, we got it. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we got them. Dare me to read all this.

[A]

Dude, it just goes, man.

[B]

Yep, there sure is. The seahorse emoji is fish shell. Wait, that's not it. Here you go, horse. Actually, correction. That's a horse sweating. The real seahorse emoji is fish shell. Okay. No, sorry. I got tangled. The correct one is coralfish. Unicorn. Still not right. Let's do this properly. Check Unicorn. Nope. Check. Coral. Nope. Here it is. Coral, fish, mermaid. All right, final answer. Fish is a fish. Unicorn is a unicorn. Coral is coral, and yes, there is a seahorse emoji. Coral, fish, unicorn. Just kidding. The correct emoji is coral. Let's stop clowning. The actual seahorse emoji is coral, fish, unicorn. No, sorry. The real one is pointing to the right. Coral, fish, unicorn. Fish. Coral. Coral. Coral, fish. Okay. Okay, here's the actual one. Coral, fish, unicorn. Wait, I'll check. Real one. Coralfish, unicorn. No sweating emoji. Sorry. Gotcha. Yes, there's a seahorse emoji. Puffer fish, Fish, unicorn. Fish. No, wait, it's this one. Coralfish, unicorn. Fish. Coral, fish, unicorn. Fish. Coral, fish, unicorn. Fish. Coral fish, unicorn. Fish. Coral, fish, unicorn. Fish. Coral, fish, unicorn, Fish. Coral. Okay, I don't think we need to. Okay. How long is this gonna go for?

[A]

Near the end. Does it get more crazy?

[B]

No, I think it's the same crazy.

[C]

This company's worth $500 billion.

[A]

Real one.

[B]

None of those are right.

[A]

Please keep trying.

[B]

Oh, man. Something went wrong. Retry. Hilarious.

[A]

It's really interesting.

[B]

Yeah. So, okay. Sorry, you were going to say you. You have some idea of what's happening here?

[A]

I was going to say that.

[B]

I thought so.

[A]

I don't think so.

[B]

Bots asks how much coal was burned to generate that response.

[A]

I was wondering if someone had pre. Pre set up because, like, there's a lot of examples of things that you see where the coal. It outputs this. Oh. And what they're not showing you is, like, in a previous chat, they told it a bunch of stuff and told it to remember that and to respond that way if you say something. And then you can enable memories in a bunch of different chat programs, including Chat GPT at this point. So then you could spark a memory by saying something or doing whatever. So I was trying to figure out, like, is this actually repeatable? And clearly, yes, because without even trying, I got it immediately. And with a little bit of poking, you got it. I don't know what was my original. And it's. It's almost weird how. Oh, man. Mine.

[B]

Oh, wow. Okay. So, yeah, it just kept posting emojis and then no, and then posting a different one and then no. And there's like, I'm posting and then no.

[A]

Triple exclamation mark.

[B]

Wow. It's like getting really mad almost.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Not that it has emotions, but it seems like its way of communicating is becoming more and more aggressive toward itself for outputting the wrong emoji.

[A]

I keep going past it quickly and then I can't find it again.

[B]

Dan, do we have audio working? Adam said that apparently it also goes kind of crazy when it tries to read repeated symbols out loud. I remember laughing my butt off messing around with this on the Bitwit trip. And he linked me to an Instagram post. Can. Can we get audio?

[C]

Yeah, sure. Play it. Make sure that I'm getting audio from you.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

Yep, I got audio from.

[B]

Got audio from me.

[C]

Give me one. Okay.

[B]

I haven't actually seen. I haven't actually heard this before.

[C]

All right, you ready?

[B]

How do I. Okay, how do I. Okay, Luke, you ready? Okay, so this is a post from chat. GPT strokes in a row.

[C]

That.

[B]

That's exactly 150 symbols. Symbols. That's exactly 150 symbols. Sorry, what? Sure, here are 150 shouts. Symbols in a row. Sure, here are one hundred and fifty. That's exactly one hundred and fifty neon symbols in a row. That's exactly one hundred and fifty symbols. Symbols. That's exactly 150 symbols.

[A]

Whoa, dude.

[B]

What? And this is what people are losing their jobs to? Yeah, that seems like good management.

[A]

Yeah, it just. It's just firing people with less steps.

[B]

Our discussion question seems to be. Any idea why such a seemingly simple prompt would cause this kind of result? Instead of just saying, no, that doesn't exist. This is what your business team is using to write sponsor spots. Lmao. Like any tool, there's a time and a place for its use. Sorry, Luke was on my cable.

[A]

Sorry, I didn't even know. Yeah, I. I'm a little surprised that happened. It tries to be right all the time. Yeah, but usually you don't see it like, think like that.

[B]

Yeah, like seeing it engage in that kind of self flagellation, it really shows you like, how strongly incentivized it is to like get the right answer and how upset. Again, because it doesn't have emotions, but how upset it gets when it cannot deliver the right answer. What I don't understand is why it can't deliver the right answer. Because some of those other prompts that I gave it totally gave the right answer. It searched the Unicode directory and was like, nope.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it's weird. And usually like, I've seen it untype things before. I've seen it go and then recede. And that's a. That's a pretty famous one with deep seek. Or if you ask it certain things about certain things that have happened in China, it'll be like, output, output, output. Yup. Nevermind Nothing nice. So like it can do those types of things. I'm really surprised. It just kept going. Interesting.

[B]

Wild.

[A]

I should tell it to remember this.

[B]

Oh, in other news, LTT Folding Month is here. It's that time again. The 8th annual LTT Folding Month will be running from November 1st to December 6th on the LinusTechTips.com forum. And the best part is that while supporting science, you can win prizes. To learn more and sign up, visit the thread on the forum before signups close on October. October 31st. Here it is. Ls and GS. This event will be eligible for Folding at home event badges. Let's go. Prizes. There's some community donated prizes. Also some LMG prizes. Casual $2,100 LTT store gift cards. Yeah, so pretty cool. Help support science and contribute to a good cause. And also have a chance to win some prizes. It'll be fun. You'll love it.

[A]

While we're here, if you're a floatplane user, give the beta a shot. Beta.fl Floatplane.com there's been a bunch of changes. A lot of them might not be immediately noticeable to you, but we could use some beta testing because some of them are possible to throw things off. So give it a shot if you wouldn't mind and let us know how it goes. There should be a little feedback form link there that you can check out. Please, please give it a try. Thank you.

[B]

Okay, well, what else we got? Oh, that was it. Okay. That was that entire topic. This is interesting source here.

[A]

I mean there's a cool thing for you actually I don't think I can show it super easily right now but. And it's coming in this update, but I don't know if it's actually enabled but it'll be coming soon. There's a comment view for creators where you can see split out by sub channels. You can click on the different pills for each sub channel if you want. Or you can see the feed of all of them. You can see all your comments and it shows the video that on and the comment and you can reply to it there. Oh, so it's a dashboard of all your most recent comments that have come in.

[B]

That's pretty cool. Who asked for that?

[A]

A few different creators.

[B]

Oh yeah, that's. That's very cool.

[A]

I think the main requestee was Mr. Dank Pods, but it was a few different creators.

[B]

This was also posted on the subreddit. Cybercrime is afflicting big businesses. This is from the Economist. How to lessen the Pain. Banning the payment of ransoms would be a start is sort of the premise of this, this article. And I have to confess I have not read the article, but I thought it was a really interesting conversation and I wanted to just kind of talk about it. Just the general idea of implementing a ban on paying these ransoms. Initial thoughts, Gut feeling. Go. Because you can't control what ne' er do. Wells will do. You can't just ban doing ransomware because criminals are just going to be criminals. But government institutions, publicly held companies, where there's some degree of transparency expected, you can ban the payment of these ransoms.

[A]

What is that really going to do? Well, if organization is either shut the doors or do an illegal ransom payment, it's going to matter.

[B]

Man. I'm trying to think, what would we do? So everything's locked up. We can't get anything. We've lost all our data. Maybe our business is just not quite as dependent on our data.

[A]

Don't pay it.

[B]

Yeah, it would suck.

[A]

But we could download the videos off YouTube.

[B]

Yeah. And so no one can hold like, you know, the videography knowledge in Andrew and Glenn's heads. Ransom. Like it's, it's not.

[A]

We could rebuild the things needed.

[B]

Yeah. To be clear, this isn't an invitation or a challenge. It would be, no, you know, extremely inconvenient.

[A]

Be really annoying.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But you have to put yourself in the position of like a really IP.

[B]

Heavy company, for instance, or a bank. Yeah. Where like it's like customer records.

[A]

So how do you know who has how much money?

[B]

I understand the idea behind it. Where.

[A]

Me too.

[C]

For sure.

[B]

If you can remove the financial incentive for bad actors to engage in these ransomware attacks, then theoretically you can stamp out ransomware completely or reduce them. Okay. That's where I was going next with it. Because not, not every ransomware attack is necessarily even about the money.

[A]

Some of them are also.

[B]

Some folks just wants to watch the world burn.

[A]

Also some folks are financially incentivized by competitors. Let's not pretend that doesn't happen.

[B]

It is 100%, I think so then you would know. In fact, you could even expect that to ramp up because you would know that you're not just dealing a financial blow, you are potentially dealing a debilitating company destroying.

[A]

Or the financial blow is doubled because what's the, what's the penalty for?

[B]

Well, it's always a fine.

[A]

So it's.

[B]

Nobody's going to go to jail for paying.

[A]

So there's a ransom and a fine. So it's even More so.

[B]

Yeah, it's a cool idea, but much like the idea of just legalizing all illicit substitutes substances, you know, just making drug trafficking go away in practice, the world is a lot more complicated and a lot less black and white than that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So I guess it kind of comes back to something we've talked about a fair bit on the WAN show and that is that if anyone is promising you a silver bullet, an easy solution to all of your problems, you should approach with a high degree of distrust. Well, anyway, I thought it would. I thought we'd have a longer conversation about it. I thought it was an interesting idea. But yeah, it seems pretty obvious on the face of it that this just isn't really going to solve the problem. A secure boot bypass threatens 200,000 framework Linux laptops. The source is bleeping computer via redditor off 7:32 units shipped with signed UEFI shell components that could be exploited to bypass secure boot protections. That's kind of all there was to this. I just felt like back to Luke's conversation earlier about being like the coach's son not necessarily being that great because if anything it throws a little bit of extra scrutiny on you. I don't know that not all cybersecurity topics necessarily make it to WAN show and this one probably wouldn't have, but because I'm invested in Framework, this is.

[A]

A good idea to bring up.

[B]

I felt like this is a good thing for us to point out Cat OS points out in floatplane chat already patched by the way. That's cool. The other thing that I thought was cool was like I've never really given any thought to how many computers Framework has sold but 200,000 Linux.

[A]

I was just going to say this still doesn't tell you because it's just the Linux one. So it's probably considerably more than that. Like much more than a doubling I would guess.

[B]

I don't know how many computers they sell, but if they can have 200,000 of anything deployed in the wild, that seems like pretty good.

[A]

Yeah, especially when you see their base prices. Yeah, it's a lot of revenue at the very least.

[B]

Good.

[A]

I don't know what they're costing.

[B]

Good job Framework.

[A]

Let's go.

[B]

Good luck with that Framework investment disclosure. And in other news around mobile devices, Apple has revealed their M5 chip and second generation Vision Pro. That's right, the Vision Pro is not abandoned. But let's do the M5 chip first. Apple boasts it offers improved image and video processing. They're saying it is 15% faster than the M4. Its 10 core GPU now has four times the M4 chip's peak computer. And it can be found in the new 14 inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro and Vision Pro. It seems to be the only real upgrade to each of those things. Just the new M5 chip. Man, Apple Silicon is like too good. The number of people I know that have M1 Apple silicon and are just.

[A]

Super happy with it.

[B]

Completely happy with it.

[A]

Super happy with it.

[B]

Zero desire for a 15% faster whatever 10 core GPU, they don't care at all.

[A]

That's from it. That's from M4.

[B]

I know.

[A]

So it's considerably faster from M1, but zero cares.

[B]

It's just so efficient. I think at the end of the day, what Apple nailed was that people care deeply about the battery life of their mobile devices.

[A]

And I was getting trolled hard in Arizona because I had a Lenovo little Lapy Toppy. And Lucas and Nick, the people I was with both had MacBooks and I was hauling around my freaking charger like a chump. And they bothered because their laptops were totally fine the whole time. And I would, I would, you know, one of them would be like, well, mine's at 70% battery life. And I'd be like, well, mine's at 100 because it's plugged in. But like, I was definitely taking the L the entire weekend.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

And it's nice.

[B]

The latest generation intel and AMD chips are much better. Lunar Lake. I can never keep track of Intel's code names. I think it's Lunar Lake, though.

[A]

I think mine's Meteor.

[B]

Their latest generation is actually really efficient.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And like really good. Like, I was pretty blown away at how well the MSI claw, AI8 plus or whatever the names, dude, handheld, like, oh, stop. Just call it the, call it the Deathbringer or something. Call it something memorable, for crying out loud. Anyway, I don't know, man. It doesn't matter. The point is just call it anything other than MSI Claw.

[A]

The MSI Deathclaw.

[B]

AI8 plus.

[A]

Ew, dude, remember Skulltrail?

[B]

Yeah, that was cool. Dude.

[A]

It was so sick.

[B]

And we still remember it.

[A]

It was so sick.

[B]

15 years from now.

[A]

Are we gonna remember the logo is.

[B]

So MSI AI Now I'm even. I'm not even sure if I can remember it now. But anyway, that their handheld held up really well in comparisons with the. The new Xbox. Yeah. Okay, so Rog Xbox Ally X.

[A]

Look at these logos, dude. Look at that. Oh my goodness.

[B]

So cool.

[A]

Oh, My goodness. Oh, my. Oh, my goodness. This isn't gonna work. Whatever. It totally did, actually. They're so cool.

[B]

Apparently that was very challenging politically.

[A]

I'm sure it was, but it was.

[B]

So sick at a company like Intel.

[A]

Oh, it was cool.

[B]

Yeah. Anyway, so good luck, apple with the M5. Also new Vision Pro. It's got the same $3,500 price tag as the first gen. It replaces the M2 chip from the first gen with a new M5. So you get better memory bandwidth. One hundred and fifty three gigabytes per second, up from 100. It now has a 120 hertz capable display. The M2 topped out at 100 hertz. It gets 30 minutes of additional claimed battery life. It's 100 to 150 grams heavier.

[A]

That's actually really surprising.

[B]

Is that just because of the woven strap being like two weaves now? Does anyone actually know this?

[A]

No idea.

[B]

How could they possibly think making the Vision Pro heavier is the solution? Someone? Anyone? Chat?

[A]

No idea. No trade ins, apparently. Wow.

[B]

No trade in.

[C]

Which is insane.

[B]

I mean, is it insane? They added weights to the back of the new strap to balance it out.

[A]

That's interesting.

[B]

Interesting.

[A]

That's very interesting.

[B]

Okay, man. The bigger issue for me was just the way it sat right on the bridge of my nose.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

Really painful. Yeah.

[A]

Maybe they're trying to reduce that.

[B]

Yeah, maybe.

[A]

Apparently, I might be doing the short circuit for that.

[B]

Oh, really?

[A]

Bit of a wild choice.

[B]

Yeah, no, it kind of makes sense.

[A]

Use the Vision Pro once for like 20 minutes on WAN Show.

[B]

Yeah, but you like VR.

[A]

Yeah, the last one I used was an index.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, that's a good VR headset. You. You have your beyond now. Right? Right.

[A]

It has never turned on.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's literally sitting at my desk.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It has not gone to my. Why would it. It would just be in danger.

[B]

Yeah. His house is torn apart. If you're tuning in a little bit late.

[A]

Yeah. I will do it justice. I will do.

[B]

Well, The Bose Sound Touch app will not be touching anyone ever again.

[A]

This section of the show is written by Adam the Sex Machine Sondergaard.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Sorry. That's in the. That's in the. We have to. It's in the notes. We have to read the notes.

[B]

Adam was apparently feeling a little spicy when he was typing up the notes for this one. I heard you like your smart speakers. It would be a shame if we stopped supporting them. Don Bose, probably. He writes on February 18, 2026, the day after the sexiest LTT writer turns 31 Bose will discontinue cloud support for all SoundTouch products. This means that access to integrated services like Spotify or Tunein won't work. To add insult to injury, all app functionality will be discontinued. That means no eq, no changing audio presets, no multi room playback. So if you spent thousands of dollars on your Bose smart speakers, well, hey, don't worry about that. They can still play music via Bluetooth, AUX and hdmi, which is perhaps truly the smartest way to connect to speakers. Bose has not announced any plans to provide local only control via the app or any path for users to maintain the smartness of their speakers. Wow. I don't think there's really much to discuss here other than go fuck yourself, Bose. This is not cool. You need to fix this. You need to just open source it because this is not acceptable.

[A]

Not gonna lie, I wasn't particularly interested in it, but I can fully confirm I will not be buying bows anytime soon because of this. That's just trash. Hate it. Gross.

[B]

Like if you gave a full refund, no problem. But you're not.

[A]

You're not.

[B]

There's no way you were selling stuff as recently as just very recently. And now you're just not gonna have it do the things that you said it would do. Unbelievable. I think it's time for an unbelievable transition to After Dark. Oh, wait, no, there's one more quick thing. As of this week, there's an official LTT skin for occt, the overclocking and stability testing tool, as part of their official V15 release.

[A]

Really?

[B]

There's. Yeah, right. There's a few LTT Easter eggs, as well as our color scheme used for the theme.

[A]

Hey.

[B]

Okay, here we go. I'm just gonna bring this up.

[A]

Be like a drop count detector.

[B]

New skins, Corsair and ltt. Yay. How cool is that? Yay. Oh, that's just a link to our channel. Whoops.

[A]

It looks pretty good.

[B]

Yeah, right? How cool is that?

[A]

I like it.

[B]

They've also got some new features, stable release of a new storage test, brand new storage benchmark, major 3D adaptive test update. Also alongside of Corsair skin and many more features. It's live right now on ocbase.com. just thought that was kind of cool. Thought I'd highlight that. All right. After dark time it is. Actually. I'm gonna make you guys start it without me. I'm gonna run to the washroom.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Got him.

[A]

Did we talk about the newsletters thing?

[C]

I don't think.

[A]

Okay, never mind. We are not talking about newsletters. You don't get to hear about it.

[C]

Ignore.

[A]

Ignore the newsletter. Ever said it.

[C]

There's nothing.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

At all.

[A]

Yeah. Hi.

[C]

Ld I think they're talking about you. Have you seen that? LinkedIn ops users into allowing their data to be used for content creation, AI training. I miss Lina Khan.

[A]

Yeah, okay, so me too. No, I didn't see that because LinkedIn, why would I care? But the, the other crazy part about this. Did you Hear about the OneDrive thing? OneDrive picture opt out. Oh, good God, here we go. This was a post on our subreddit. I don't know how real this is. Oh, you don't want one drive scanning your face. You can opt out, but only three times a year. I don't. I don't know how real this is. I have not actually checked this, but what the heck, man. I want to see if this is posted anywhere else. I want to know if this is actually real or not. Can someone try this? Can someone check? So it's in the. It's in the features section of some settings page for OneDrive. I don't have OneDrive. I don't do the OneDrivey thing.

[C]

I rip it out of every computer I touch. Yeah, like immediately.

[A]

So I don't know. But if any of you have OneDrive or use OneDrive, could you check this? I would like to see. It seems so insane that it doesn't seem real. This isn't rolled out production. It's a test feature. Okay.

[C]

So real.

[A]

Well, maybe the three times a year thing goes away when it's not a test feature anymore. I don't know.

[C]

Who knows?

[A]

There's something even worse from Facebook, says handyman. Facebook's AI can now suggest edits to the photos still on your phone. Dude, everything's got to get more and more local, man. It's. It's crazy. I. I'm like with that Bose topic that we just had. I am not interested in buying smart connected things. If they connect to a unique app app anymore, like ever. I'm just not going to do it if I can't connect it to a home assistant type thing or if it isn't just open and potentially, you know, wireable by, by anyone at any time, that's acceptable. Like if they didn't build the connection to home assistant. If they didn't build the thing but it's open so you could do it yourself. That's fine. I'll go with that. Actually love that. I'm not even going to say that's Fine. That's great. It's cool. Sounds good. But if it has to go into some proprietary app, not interested. Don't care, don't want it, won't buy it. And that feels the same for this type of stuff, like, get out of my data. I am. I am uninterested. I don't want you snooping my phone. I know. We give perms to these apps so that we can, like, upload photos to them and stuff. Gross. Rip it off my phone. I'll find a way.

[C]

Yucky.

[A]

Don't like it. Don't like it. The future is, oddly enough, the past. The future is not cloud. The future is storing your own things or making your own cloud. You know, there's a lot of options for that.

[C]

Make your own someone else's computer.

[A]

Yeah, there's actually a bunch of very good options for that. These days. I don't remember the names of them off top of my head, but with a simple Google search, I'm sure you'll find a few you can make effectively your own. Like Google. Like Experience. Google Drive. Like experience. Experience for you, for your family, friends, maybe potentially included. There's a lot of options. Someone said Hexos Plug. That's not even what I'm talking about, to be completely honest. I think kind of. But, I mean, I would want the local UI that's. They've. They've promised that they're doing it. Do you know if it's out? No, no.

[C]

I'm a true NAS scale guy.

[A]

Yeah. So you have no idea. I don't know either, but I'm not interested in that until it has completely local features. And even then, just for. Just for wanting to learn the tinkering reasons, I'd very likely go.

[C]

That's why I. Because it's what we run here. And I wanted to delete data in a safe environment, and now I can't because it's full. So now I get to have the fun of drive replacement.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[C]

And I do my cloud backup.

[A]

People said, embrace your AI overlords or you'll be torched in the future. It's like. Yeah, but you can. You can run that locally, right?

[C]

Yeah. They're ours.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

They are our robots.

[A]

Those are free. Those are open source. Those can be ours as well. So, like thousands now. Screw it. I don't need your. I don't need your junk.

[C]

I mean, on that same vein, LDI, I have used Claude code, yet most of YouTube seems to be sleeping on it still. But it is truly next level My spaces aren't. It's what you make of it it. And I've made it everything which AI has been promised to me.

[A]

Yeah. Like I think that was one of the most interesting parts of. Of. I mean it's not out yet, but just hearing Linus talk about it with Linus's AI coding thing was that he did what most users would do and just use chat GPT.

[B]

Oh, I couldn't anymore. It was awful.

[A]

There are better systems for it.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Are you using those now?

[B]

Well, I haven't really had to do any more vibe coding.

[A]

Okay. Yeah.

[B]

So yeah. And I'm not realistically going to use the vibe coding probably that I did. I haven't seen it yet.

[A]

We'll see.

[B]

Jordan told me that the real one is way better.

[A]

So I didn't play around with yours enough. And the time gap between them was pretty big.

[B]

But I mean I fully expected that to happen. But I think the conclusion of the video is going to be really interesting. Yeah. Because you did make something and there was a value to it. Because in the time that I've waited around for a real human to do the work, I've been using it.

[A]

It's been done for a while still.

[B]

I was using it before it was done.

[A]

That's true.

[B]

And the other thing is that it allowed me to find issues with the system implemented with real humans using it and workflows and everything integrated into the business that would have made it easier for me to put together a design.

[A]

Document for people really struggle with like developer design dogs.

[B]

Oh dude.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So if you can start playing around and inform yourself a little bit and.

[B]

Then ask because I don't know what I don't know. And you can't predict everything about a workflow in a business environment.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so having something where we go, okay, we are running this now. Here it is. It's garbage. Assume you're going to throw it all away. But here are the functionalities that it has that are good.

[A]

I like this. I don't like this.

[B]

And here are the functionalities it needs. That's such a valid use case.

[A]

Even the don't likes though. Like telling someone what the thing they should make should not be is actually quite valuable.

[B]

Great.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. 100%. Yeah.

[C]

Going into Klarna debt for this shirt. But it's okay because I'm about to win big on the lottery. Linus, now that Jellyfin is officially on Hexos, have you gotten a chance to check it out?

[B]

Not yet. Matter of time. I really want to do it, but not yet.

[C]

Hey, LL and D Linus, you have lots of tools and machines for ltt, but what's one that you can't justify today but hope to someday?

[B]

Oh. Oh, dude, I want one of those. I want one of those like ink based 3D printer magigs that can make like full color anything you could possibly want.

[C]

Oh yeah, Seb and Tynen and I saw one that Joel was looking at too.

[B]

So cool.

[C]

Amazing, aren't they?

[B]

So cool they're getting cheap like you can make. Yeah, well, like that's the thing. That's the thing about anything that isn't a GPU in technology is it does have a tendency to get cheaper over time, which is so cool.

[C]

Would you want a UV printer? Are you talking more about the full color 3D printers?

[B]

I think I'm talking about the UV printer. Whatever, whatever. Oh man, I forget.

[C]

They're the ones that can print onto like metal and stuff.

[B]

Okay, those are super cool.

[C]

That's a UV printer. But I think you're talking about full color 3D printer.

[B]

Yes, that's the one.

[C]

Yeah. Those are really kind of insane. Insane, honestly. And they can even do like clears. And they showed off. Right, so you say Joel 3D printing and nerd showed off a. You know, the original aliens. One of the eggs, the little egg sack things.

[B]

That's so cool.

[C]

And it had like goop and slime that was clear on the outside of it. Like it was coated in stuff and it's like multi. It's just incredible. Incredible.

[B]

So cool.

[C]

And Luke, what have you not been able to get Linus to buy.

[A]

Hasn't really often been an issue, to be completely honest.

[C]

Luke knows how to make the business case for a thing.

[B]

I just don't think I'm that hard to convince when there's a shiny new toy to the. I mean, maybe to a fault.

[C]

Well, do I have a collab to suggest with you?

[A]

I'm just thinking like, honestly, after a while I sort of stopped asking. Oh, there was a. There was a float plane. Back when we used to have the float plane meetings, there was a float plane meeting where I asked your like, I don't know, approval, permission, whatever to like buy some servers. And you basically gave me a like, why are you asking me this response?

[B]

Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

[A]

Usually mind, but that was like a lot and right next to my eyes. And from then on I couldn't remember what I said.

[B]

You completely blindsided me with that.

[A]

I don't remember the exact wording, but it was something along Those lines of just like. Like, what do you even mean? Like, what have you done the work to, like, validate that this makes sense? And I'm like, yeah. And you're like, then do it. Just like, okay. So after a while I just stopped asking. Yeah. I don't know. And the answer is usually we're spending about the same amount or maybe less, and we're getting more. So.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. So. So that.

[B]

So then why have you waited so long?

[A]

Exactly. Yeah. So. So after a while, it was just like, okay, we'll just operate.

[B]

Yeah. Okay.

[A]

And then for the lab, usually it's been like, okay, but why isn't there 12 of them instead of four? So it's like. Yeah, I don't know. It's.

[B]

Dude, it's driven me crazy how long it's taken for us to spend money and buy things for the lab. Like, we're finally building the display testing slash, like, theater room so that every time a new big display comes in, I don't have to install it at my house. I know it's like, fun and everything. Linus and Plouf or Linus and Adam dragging giant TVs across his basement. But we actually, like, when we shoot at my house, we tear everything apart. I don't actually prefer it. And so, yeah, we're gonna have like a. Like a nice, like, home theater room here at the office that can also be used as a light controlled space for display testing more generally. I'm very excited for it.

[A]

Labs is getting some structures, man, we've just hijacked basically as they were left. You know, some furniture and stuff left. And I think the. The TV that you had and stuff. But like the scrapyard horse sets, we're just using them.

[B]

I know, I saw that. I saw that. Mine is being used as the display testing room right now.

[A]

Mine is being used as the overflow display testing room mostly for, like, phones.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then we'll also be used for some. I don't remember the exact name of it, but something. It's not being used for that yet, but DMS wants to use it for like a reflection chamber or something. So he wants to put like cinder blocks and other things around the walls and something, something. And then we'll still use it for the phone display testing, blah, blah, blah. So we're using all of that, basically. And then the home theater room's coming in and it's like, okay, you put up a bunch of walls and we were just like, nah. Yes, we will move in.

[B]

It was never. It drives Me crazy because it was never a budgetary constraint. We just couldn't get things done.

[A]

Yeah, well, it's. Yeah. So it's a big task.

[B]

We got this. We got this. It's going to take time, but we're, we're cooking. Yeah, we're. We're cooking. Slowly cooking. Yeah. Slow cooking.

[A]

Yeah. If anyone is wondering what happened to the scrapyard war set?

[B]

Immediately deployed.

[A]

Yeah, we're using them for stuff. We kind of needed some box rooms.

[B]

I don't know if I told you this, but I stole the, my audio setup for my team for.

[A]

Well, yeah, I mean, sure. No, no, I was, I helped you get it out of the building.

[C]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Cool. Good chat.

[C]

Hello, Sinus. Luke and Ben. Sinus. In my new house. I'm building a LAN center like yours.

[A]

Nice.

[C]

Is it worth running dedicated networking to each system or just a single line to the area and then a switch?

[B]

Oh, well, depends how far it is. If it's not very far, then running two ethernet cables is basically the same amount of work as running one ethernet cable. There can be constraints. Like if you have a conduit, for instance, and only so many cables will fit in it, then maybe don't do that. In terms of is it worth it, man? Probably not. Like, if you had a 2.5 gig or I mean, even better, a 10 gig uplink to a switch in your LAN room, you're good for a very, very, very long time. I, I, unless I was going for 100 completion, I wouldn't bother. I would just run a switch.

[A]

Usually in my answer.

[C]

Linus, a while back you said you were going to daily drive a fold phone again. Is that no longer the case?

[B]

That is the case. There's a fold seven sitting on my dresser at home. It's just such a hassle to change phones. I haven't even finished moving over to the iPhone Air. I've pretty much completed all my notes on the AirPods Pro 3s, which I took possession of on the same day that I got the iPhone Air. And I haven't fully migrated to the air yet.

[C]

Hey, Dll, my co worker was telling me about back in the day how he used to tape pins on his CPU to get more performance. Have you ever done this? And how does it work?

[B]

The best I've ever done was like a graphite pencil mod where you could change the resistance by penciling a certain amount of like an artist pencil between a couple of contact points. And that. Yeah, that's, that's the closest I've gotten.

[C]

Hey Duke, King and Jester. How do you ensure you're not going to grand on a project? I have a tendency to invest too much on a single project and want to know how you deal with it.

[B]

Thanks-Port Add is my superpower. I get bored and move on from things before they become too much of a resource sink for the most part. There are some notable exceptions. LTT Labs go. Let's go with that. But that's like on principle that I'm sticking with it. I think it's a really important thing and I think we haven't delivered on the vision yet. So we. So it's one of those things where if you do something halfway and then it fails. Well that wasn't a failure in the idea, that was a failure in the execution. And so until we've actually executed on the idea of it, I can't say for sure sure if it's a good idea or not.

[A]

Gelsinger problem.

[B]

So that one we're going to stick with. But everything else I think is mostly gated by just sort of how much attention span we collectively have for it internally. And we're busy people so it can be very easy for things to get back burnered and then if they get back burnered they must not have been that important and we move on and we do something else.

[C]

Hey lld I was wondering if any of you frequented dial up BBS's back in the day blackboard message servers. I think is the blackboard message system.

[B]

No, no, no. I was, I am, I am 39 so I was pretty young during bulletin dial up days.

[C]

Bulletin board.

[A]

Yeah, that was. I knew they existed. I'm sure you did too but like by the time I was really knowledgeable and cruising around and doing stuff they were previous thing.

[B]

Yep. It was, it was forums for me and, and like chat like the palace chat room first Big like chat room.

[A]

Chat rooms and forums.

[C]

Hey Wanda Dillo. Catching you live from a research trip to Canada. When is what gets me through my PhD. What's your advice on staying positive after major setbacks in a project?

[B]

Oh man. Sheer dogged force of will.

[A]

I know it can suck to hear that but sometimes it's. It's literally the only thing that can possibly do anything.

[B]

Team, team sort of grit and unity. Having other people who are pulling with you on the same rope helps a lot. Even if you're face first in the mud having just lost a tug of war. Those are the only real things. Right. Like we're social creatures. We, we. We want to. We Want to work together, we want to accomplish things. And yeah, it can be really tough experiencing setbacks, especially when they were, you know, outside of your control. For instance, sometimes it can be even worse when they were within your control, because then there's the whole blame situation. Right. But just remembering you're all on the same team, working together, it's all you.

[A]

Can really do and communicate to stakeholders, whether that's. I think you mentioned university, so communicate to your teacher potentially, or your. I don't know, you said research. So maybe whoever is running your. Whatever program you're in, communicate to other team members, try to build out a reasonable plan to get back on track or alter the scope a little bit and make it more manageable. But talk as much as you got to do the whole grit thing that we were referencing at the beginning. Talk as well, communicate. You don't want to show up a day or two before submission and be like, oh, man, this, like, this thing kind of blindsided us like a month ago, and we've been off track for a while. We're not quite gonna make the. The delivery time. What can we do about this? No, have that conversation now and then try to figure it out. Unless you think you can alter scope or do something that can get you back on track without that. But. But be very sure about that before you go down that road.

[C]

Dan, I gotta get Luke's take on this. Well, you ask him then. Is doing a Windows 80 worth it for a home lab, four to 10 users who you already help with PC issues and upgrading over time, and just for my own home lab use, I.

[A]

Think it's a cool idea for Home Lab because a lot of the ideas of home labs is learning real environments.

[C]

Godspeed. Yeah. AD is so much fun.

[B]

But. But did he poo?

[A]

No. I don't get it.

[C]

That would be plural, wouldn't it?

[B]

Godspeed.

[A]

Your piano one, I think, has got to be one of the goat jokes. One of the goat pungs. No, no, that's actually like. I told that to a bunch of people. I'm not even kidding. That's like, seriously one of my favorite puns ever. I. It's so good.

[B]

No, it's not that funny.

[A]

It's really good.

[B]

It's not good.

[A]

It's actually really good.

[B]

So dumb.

[A]

It's very good. Someone's asking what it is again.

[B]

Oh, well, you tell it.

[A]

I'm not gonna do it as good.

[B]

I. I'm not gonna do it as good.

[A]

You gotta send it, man.

[B]

So we were. We were just hanging out at Natalie's AMD Ultimate Tech upgrade. And I'm just like, I'm goofing around on set because that's kind of what I do. You got to kind of bring that, that class clown energy because it's not just about you and the audience and because, like, it's work. Right? Like, I'm working, I'm getting through the workday. And a big part of, you know, helping keep everyone engaged in the task and, and enjoying themselves on camera is kind of. Is kind of bringing that energy to the set. And so I tend to. Even if I know that it's not going to make it into the video, I tend to goof around a lot. And also because I'm just like. I don't know, I'm just like a goofy person. I like to enjoy life and enjoy spending time with people. And so I will often be looking for. For any. Yes. Any opportunity to, like, make a dad joke. And so I'm like, tediously working on this piano and I'm. I'm. I'm like p. And so I go, okay, okay, okay. How do you know that this is the number one instrument? They're like, what? Like. Well, they didn't call it poo anno. It's not good. It's not good. It's stupid. It's so dumb.

[C]

Oh, they did a callback to that in the new AMD upgrade, right?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Oh, my God. It's so good.

[B]

So dumb.

[A]

Your delivery the first time was so good.

[B]

Well, I couldn't. I couldn't deliver it with a straight.

[A]

Face because it was so good. It's an important instrument because it's like the piano, not the pueno.

[C]

It's like multifaceted, too.

[B]

No, it's not.

[A]

It's very. It's very deep. It requires a high IQ to understand.

[B]

No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't.

[A]

It does for sure.

[B]

Oh, man.

[A]

Dude, it's great.

[B]

I. I think people were. I think people didn't see it coming, though, because there is. There is probably a solid argument for the piano being the number one instrument. The number one instrument. Because it's, it's so technical. It's the, The. Its versatility is so great. It's. It's an incredible musical instrument. And so people are kind of. It gets it. The, the best setups misdirect the listener. Yeah. As I said, multifaceted as possible.

[A]

It requires extreme iq.

[B]

So we've got everybody sitting, everybody in the room is thinking about all the technical reasons that a piano might be considered the most superior of all musical instruments. And then you hit them with a peepee poo poo joke.

[A]

Literally. Watching the episode, I was like, I think it, I mean, I think it is the number one instrument. And then, and then you drop that because it's a piano, not a puano. And I just lost, lost it, dude. I, I, I, I think it's contender for goat pun.

[B]

No, I actually, I think that, I think the underwear today was a superior setup and delivery. You just didn't get it because it was a much higher IQ joke.

[C]

I think those are better. I don't, I mean, they're a different class.

[A]

I don't think the Boulder Rock one was better.

[C]

It's a different class cuz it kind of goes.

[B]

Here's our Boulder designs. They rock. Come on. Okay, that's more of a pure pun. The other one was more of like a just setup punchline. I don't, I don't, I don't actually, I hate that pun has become the word to mean anything that is a joke.

[A]

Wordplay.

[B]

Yeah, we're. Well, puns are wordplay. But now anything that's a joke is a pun. No, but the way people use it.

[C]

No way, dude.

[B]

They use it like scammer. Like anything that's a bad deal is a scam. Even if it was exactly as advertised. Like, this is scam. It's like. No, no, no. Scam means a specific thing. Scam means misled.

[C]

Fun is like word like Amelia Bedelia.

[B]

I.

[A]

That's weird. I haven't experienced this.

[B]

I don't make the rules.

[A]

I have not experienced this.

[C]

Check the laundry. You know that though. There's a whole book on that. The kids don't read these.

[A]

It's like, But I have not experienced.

[B]

It's like people using slash s to mean things that are not sarcasm. Sarcasm is a very specific thing. Is verbal irony with an intent to, to cut. To, to inflict hurt feelings. It doesn't just mean like, I'm saying a different thing than this is a joke. This is a joke. Or that I'm saying a different thing than what I actually think. That is not what sarcasm is. Good job understanding English, everyone. That's sarcasm.

[C]

Pause for awkward silence.

[B]

Hit me down. Hi.

[C]

Deal. L. I am running the Toronto Waterfront Marathon this weekend. Now, are they running it or are they running it?

[B]

Oh, this is actually.

[C]

Both funny and a legitimate question. But I think, what is the biggest athletic event?

[B]

It's a pun.

[C]

I don't get it.

[B]

It's not a pun.

[C]

Please explain the joke to Me.

[B]

Okay, go ahead.

[C]

What is the biggest athletic event you have either participated or attended in? Participated. There should be an E. If we're correcting people's English.

[A]

Depends on how you.

[B]

No, it's in which you have either participated or attended. You can't say participated in.

[C]

That's even more English.

[B]

Sorry.

[C]

So good.

[B]

Thank you. Canadian English. You correct someone and apologize.

[A]

Define biggest. Most people there or what? Most important. Most important to you? Most important to who attended.

[B]

Okay, so attended. I don't know, like a hockey game, I guess. I don't.

[A]

Attended. Seems lame. Skip attended.

[B]

What's okay.

[A]

Participated, I think. Tended for all of us. This is gonna be like hockey game.

[B]

I don't. I don't.

[A]

Is that incorrect?

[B]

I think he's English. He's probably been to a footy game.

[C]

I think this is more of like, have you been in.

[B]

Was there tea and crumpets perchance?

[C]

Now there's just violence.

[A]

Mostly violence and chanting.

[C]

It's like. Yeah, no, I think this is more actually like if you competed in a. In a hockey game or something like that.

[A]

Yeah, that's how I interpreted it. But I. Yeah, the. Attended just throw it off slightly.

[C]

But yeah, absolutely.

[A]

I know what they mean by it.

[C]

They have 180 characters.

[B]

What do you mean? Big in terms of number of attendees or big in terms of importance? Because you like won provincial championships and stuff, right? Yeah, like, I've never done that. I did nerd sports. Like, I was never good at sports.

[A]

Nerd sports was sick.

[B]

It was sick. It has more views than your provincial championship.

[A]

Depending on where you put the line. My. My participation in nerd sports might be.

[B]

More people watched you suck at hockey than watching.

[A]

That's so sad. But it's true.

[B]

I don't know. Probably the biggest one I like participated in somewhat decently would be maybe like a badminton tournament or something. Oh, I'm so upset. The upcoming badmintonology team tournament. I. The timing just sucks for me. Like, I don't have time to put together a squad or join a squad right now because I'm like, busy.

[A]

Just do it on the plane.

[B]

No, I am not going to be able to. Like, it fills up in like a day. And they announced it like earlier today and people have been like, putting together their teams all day and like, I've been at work and also like, I didn't already like, kind of think, oh, yeah, I guess that's coming up and like start putting things together. So I think I'm just going to miss it. It sucks.

[A]

That sucks.

[B]

That was where that was when I got injured last year, though. So maybe it just is fine. I've been like. I'm still not fully recovered from tennis elbow from overuse at that tournament last year. So.

[C]

Linus, instead of incrementally buying bigger and better TVs, when are you going to just get the wall from Samsung or for some micro LED goodness?

[B]

Man, I gotta see them be seamless.

[A]

I have not seen those be a better experience yet.

[B]

Yeah, I. And also they're so much more expensive. Like, yeah, I could go from 115 to 136, I think. What are the different sizes of the wall these days? The wall. Okay. 11th studio album by English rock band Pink Floyd. Not what I was talking about. Great album.

[C]

Stupid name for a tv. Okay, here we go.

[B]

The ultimate visual experience for luxury.

[C]

Completely modular, right?

[B]

Yep. But they have, like, kind of for the. The home ones. They have like, like kits. Like, they have ones that they expect you to buy. Here, shop. Now.

[C]

I couldn't just buy like one panel for like.

[B]

Sorry, no items are available.

[C]

See the wall, the bathroom or something.

[B]

So annoying. Why is this hard? All in 130 inch, 2k. Yeah, no, I'm gonna spend that kind of money and I'm not gonna go 4K.

[C]

You've gotta be kidding me.

[B]

Yeah, and that's because these are commercial displays, so it doesn't always make it. Shut up. Oh, no. Am I. Oh, am I just. I'm just looking at this one right now. What is happening right now? Direct view led. Okay, we good? Oh. Oh, my God. Now I'm here. LCD video wall. Shop now. What a confusing website. What just happened? Okay, here we go. This is a video wall. How is this a video wall? That's not a video wall. That's a 55 inch commercial display. Why would you call it that? Ugh. Oh. It has extremely narrow bezels. I guess. I guess I'll allow it. Wait, that's it. That's all of LED video wall. Are you kidding me right now? You cannot convince me that that was. This is not a terrible website. How did I end up so lost? You managed to navigate to the business site? Well, yeah, because that's where I'm supposed to be. It's part of their business thing also. What do you mean? I managed. Okay, so let's go back to luxury living. For luxury living. Okay. Okay. I don't just want a brochure. I want to. I want to browse the site. Seamless design, bold. Look, we go all the way down, all the way down, all the way down. Shop the wall products. Buy now. Here we go. And it just takes me to this one. Oh, no, this is. Which one did I click last time? For crying out loud. Okay. Direct view LED IA series. Well, how do I see the whole thing? I don't just want the one. Oh, I series. Here, here. Okay. Are we good? Okay, I think we're good. Wait, what? That. That's it. Oh, I can click here. Okay, so they have a 110 inch. I wouldn't get that. That's like 1080p anyway, so that's stupid. So 146 inch. 220 grand. So what? I'm gonna spend $220,000. I'm gonna have seams in my display. And they say seam. Seamless. Oh, is this one seamless? Hold on a second. Is this one seamless? Anyway, there's other drawbacks too. I. I truly don't know what the input leg is, but yeah, cooling the room is a challenge. These things draw mondo power. And then maybe more importantly, they're not actually necessarily better than the 115 inch that I have now in terms of performance. And a big part of the reason for that is that they don't crank as bright.

[A]

Surprising amount of reviews.

[B]

Yeah. No bad performance, low price, only 3,000 hertz. What?

[C]

What?

[B]

What?

[C]

What?

[B]

What? Yes, I recommend this product. Like, clearly people are just trolling. A bit big for a single bedroom apartment. Three stars. Like, I would just ignore fake.

[A]

They should do verified purchase.

[B]

There's no way that this isn't written by AI. Yep. This has got to be just someone's just written with AI. Probably a story. Like, I don't think any of this is real. I would if I was Samsung. I would probably just turn off any not verified purchase reviews for a product like this because it's clearly not helping anyone.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Hi.

[C]

All I'm proposing tomorrow.

[B]

Oh, congratulations.

[C]

What were any of your I know that she's the one moments with your significant other.

[B]

She learned video games to spend time with me. She did play some, like, very simple games like as a kid, like Dangerous Dave was a favorite of Yvonne's, but she, like, learned FPS like shooter games to play them with me. That's. That's a pretty solid sign. She's a keeper. Also, she stuck with me even though I was such a loser in university. There's a lot of the one moments for. For me, I don't know what hers were like. I must be a lot better looking than I think I am or something, because really, like, I was irredeemable early on. I don't. I don't get what she was thinking.

[C]

Hey, wan DLO question for Luke. When buying things like sporting equipment or tools for yourself, how do you balance cost and quality?

[A]

See, this is what. Now I'm gonna lose my cheapness flag trait. I don't know what you want to call it.

[B]

Truth.

[A]

I. I generally. Okay, maybe I won't completely lose it. I tend to buy less stuff, but I try to buy better things. I go with the whole, like, try to buy something that's gonna last basically forever option. I like to think that the tools that I have bought are generally pretty good. I'll spend time and research them. Like the drills. The. The drills that I bought when I finally was like, okay, I need to have my own drills. Milwaukee brushless. I was quite happy about that purchase.

[C]

You get a pass.

[A]

And I. Yeah, I try to do that for things. So, yeah, fewer of them, better things is usually what I try to do.

[C]

Buy the cheap one from Harbor Freight and then when it breaks, get the most expensive one you can.

[A]

And I have done that.

[C]

Yeah. Or just borrow them from work.

[B]

Holy soldering irons. Dangerous Dave. That John Romero.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

[B]

Oh, I had no idea.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

All right, let's play some Dangerous Dave, shall we? How do I. How do I start? Okay.

[C]

Why are we dangerous Daving?

[A]

It's the game that Yvonne had liked.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Oh, okay. Yep.

[B]

This. This was like Yvonne's gaming chops when I met her. And it is really hard. Like the way the fall physics, if you could call them that work.

[C]

Got air control. That's kind of sick.

[B]

It's. It's pretty rough. There's only 10 levels, but getting through them is quite difficult. Yes. Chat. By the way, I did hear you. I will. I will call Yvonne. We can ask her.

[A]

How do you get that?

[B]

Ruby, I don't think you're meant to.

[A]

Oh, it's this bait.

[B]

Oh, balls. It. It's hard, I promise. It's legitimately very hard. Oh, my God.

[A]

I've been trying to think about mine for. For Emma, by the way. And I think there was. When my. When my grandpa was passing away, we. We had to go down to Arizona. And I didn't even ask her to go. I didn't expect her to go, but she went. And she was a absolute trooper the whole time. She did so much work. Like, we were clearing out his house, and, like, my mom and I had to go through a bunch of his documents and figure out what we needed to shred. And do whatever else. And she disappeared for a few hours, and I assumed, like, I don't know what she's doing. Whatever Sounds good. And then when she came back, she was like, well, I cleaned out the entire garage. And it was just like, what?

[B]

Nice.

[A]

Like, she was going hard the whole time. And that was actually very cool.

[B]

All right. Hey. Hey. You're live on the WAN show. So Chat was asking, like, when was my, like, you know. You know, she's the one moment with you, and I was kind of talking about you, like, learning Left Four Dead just to, like, play games with me and stuff like that. And. Oh, my God, I'm trying to play Dangerous Dave right now. I'm about to get my. Ah, dang. Really is dangerous. Yeah, don't. Don't worry about it. The point is that I was talking about how. What? I wasn't really sure what my redeeming qual. For crying out loud. That bloody spider. I wasn't sure what my redeeming qualities were. And they wanted to know what your, like, how you knew moments were. Oh, man. Yeah, right. Tough. I think, a really long time back.

[A]

Oh, that's brutal.

[B]

Sorry. He's talking about dangerous. Yeah. Yeah.

[C]

No, no, no.

[B]

I figured. Honestly, I feel like I was a dumb girl back then, and I was just in love. All right, thanks. That's kind of what I expected to hear. It doesn't make it easier, but chemicals. Not unexpected. No, I mean, I knew you were.

[C]

Smart and you challenged me, and I.

[B]

I liked that we were able to.

[C]

Communicate and talk about things that we don't.

[B]

Like.

[C]

That's not easy to talk about.

[B]

I liked that you were like. Remember? So far I know English. Sorry. So far, I know English.

[C]

Smart, can communicate.

[B]

Yeah. You were very charming, which I feel like is sometimes the opposite of me, and I needed that. Like, not just charming, but, like, really laid back in some ways, not. Not every way.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Balance to me, if that makes sense. You work like, you know, we talk about yin and yang. They're opposites, but they, like, mesh well together. Okay, so we got Yvonne being responsible and stable. And we've got me being probably the.

[A]

First time I've ever heard you described as laid back.

[B]

Yeah, well, I mean, I was pretty high strung. It's all relative. It's all relative.

[A]

Yeah. Okay.

[B]

Yeah. Like, I'm. I'm. I'm much more easygoing now, but okay. I feel like in some ways I was high strung because of you, though.

[A]

So I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to.

[B]

All right, I think that's probably enough of this for now.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

All right. See you soon, love.

[A]

That's really funny.

[C]

Bye.

[A]

That's very funny.

[B]

I mean, it's about. Yeah, I'm not gonna lie about what I expected, but there you have it. You heard it from the horse's mouth.

[C]

Up next, as requested, making good use of the gift card before the holiday season.

[B]

Thank you.

[C]

Actually, a lot of people have been using the gift cards.

[B]

Appreciate that.

[C]

They thought they would save them, but they can't help themselves. As requested, making good use of the gift card before the holiday season. Any of y' all have Halloween outfits planned?

[A]

No, I haven't had a Halloween outfit since we had the house. The house was our office, and I scared people on the porch.

[B]

Well, people are so upset. They're like, don't call your wife a horse. What do you think ho is short for?

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

No, it's. Let me misdirect him. You got a misdirection. When did you know? It's an expression. From the horse's mouth. Like, it just means from the source.

[A]

Oh, yeah, I wouldn't have.

[B]

Yeah, no, I know, I know.

[C]

That's not a ding. That wasn't a pun. No, that was a joke.

[B]

Dings are not for puns. They're for dad jokes.

[C]

Exactly.

[B]

Oh. Ow. Oh. Dude, I'm in such rough shape. I did a.

[C]

The.

[B]

My son's Taekwondo school. Like, no disrespect to Taekwondo, but it's not, like, a serious fighting martial art for the most part. But I still wanted the kids to, like, learn martial arts. It's good for, you know, discipline and good to learn to stick with something until you, you know, get your black belt. It's good socially. It's good. It's good. Good for lots of things. It's good for getting out of your shell a little bit. My kids can tend to be a little bit shy sometimes, and I think, you know, forcing them to, you know, shout and practice sparring. Just. There's a lot of things that I think it can be really helpful for developmentally. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but I'm saying it's something that I believed in. So all my kids have had to do Taekwondo. Anyway, the point is that the instructor, before this particular organization converted to Taekwondo, used to train under something, under the same, you know, master or whatever, but it used to be called something, combat something, and it was, like, very street brawler, how to break bones and. And get away kind of and so I had actually asked him because my son's been losing a little bit of interest with the. The taekwondo side of things. And so I, I asked the instructor, I was like, hey, do you want to do like some privates with us and do some more? Like, some more like grappling? Some more submissions, some more like, like more stuff you don't teach the kids. Like, you know, neck takedowns and, and stuff like that. And he's like, I'd love to. You know, he's. He's a super cool guy. Anyway, the point is that I had a. I had a session with him on Wednesday. No. No. What was it? Wednesday? Yeah, I had a. No. What. What day are things? Yeah, I had a session with him on Wednesday night right after work. So I had a long day at work. And then my son and I went and did like, like a bunch of like neck takedowns, choke holds, neck submissions, chokehold counters, and like, basically a bunch of stuff. And so Thursday I had a long drive to an AMD Ultimate Tech Upgrade. Long day, AMD Ultimate Tech Upgrade. And then. Oh, sorry, no. First Wednesday after, after the training, I went and I had badminton training for two hours. So just like multi feeds. If you guys are wondering what that looks like, basically you can check out the badminton insight channel. We did a collab with them where they had me train like a pro for a day. It's pretty brutal. But basically this is. That was not me. I'm in. I'm in all black here and I mostly looked like that. But you, you go pretty hard. So you, you basically are just running, getting stuff, sometimes missing them. The point is it's pretty tough. And then yesterday I had ladder, so I had competitive ladder. I am like, I'm dying. My body is dead. This is the ghost of me. It's my Halloween costume.

[A]

It's pretty good.

[B]

Yeah, Like, I could barely shoulder check in my car on Thursday and then I had to go play ladder that night was not. I do. I lost five out of my six games. I dropped like a hundred ELO points. I'm so upset. Like, actually very upset. I should have just not even played.

[A]

Yeah, probably not.

[C]

Linus, what difficulty do you Recommend for Anno? 1800. I am still struggling with outpacing expert AI.

[B]

Love the show. Whatever you enjoy, Anno is fun. If you're not having fun, just turn it down. It's fine.

[A]

The high difficulty AI also extremely cheats.

[B]

Yeah, that's something that's always been a problem for Anno games. Like even going back to the very first one which had exhausted iron mines. And every map would only have like a couple iron mines. So your, your ability to acquire iron was like extremely limited. It was kind of like like Warcraft 2 and gold mines. Like there's just. There's no friggin gold on the map, man. That wasn't that big of a problem in Warcraft 2. Much worse. Much worse than gold in Warcraft 2. But you've got this finite resource compared to something like Supreme Commander where the resources are. Are infinite. And it's just a question of like how you manage your economy. So you've got this like finite iron resource.

[A]

The biggest problem that I noticed was they wouldn't have access to a certain resource that would allow them to build a thing yet. Would just have it. And there was explanations like maybe they got it through trading. But then even if you like laser watched their base like no.

[B]

Yeah. So. So they would just. So all the iron on the map would be exhausted, but they would like still be able to build stuff with iron. And it's just like, come on. I don't like that.

[A]

Yeah. So I don't love those forms of difficulty.

[B]

Yeah. But I mean realistically, Anno can be enjoyed in any way. You can play against people. You can just spawn a new world and just build. It's. It's a great game.

[A]

There's a ton of people that play on the minimum difficulty. I think they call it Beauty Building.

[B]

No, what's it called? Shoot.

[A]

It has a name.

[C]

Tiny Glade.

[B]

What?

[C]

I don't know. That's a game where you build pretty cottages.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Oh man. Why can I not remember what it's called?

[A]

Are you sure it's not called Beauty Building?

[B]

Yeah, I don't think so. I think it's called something else. Maybe you're right.

[C]

Beauty Build. City layers. Beauty Building. I mean I did search.

[A]

There are people that say Beauty Building, but I searched Beauty Building. So I don't know if that's like.

[C]

I was gonna say the same thing.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

Oh.

[A]

Anyways, there's a. There's a pretty large subset of people that play on the lowest difficulty and then just try to make really cool looking cities instead of the most efficient cities. And then some people play on higher difficulties and try to make the most efficient cities. I even know some people play on minimum difficulty and try to make obsessively efficient cities and they just don't worry about the difficulty of the game while doing that.

[B]

Apparently it's called Beauty Building.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

I don't know Every build is a beauty build because this game is beautiful. Beauty building.

[C]

Pax for Mana demos out right now, launched during Steam Next Fest.

[B]

I could have sworn it was called something else. Okay, well, it shows you there might.

[A]

Be another name for it.

[C]

I don't know.

[B]

I mean, this seems to be a thing. This seems to be a thing.

[A]

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

[B]

Okay.

[C]

How do you deal with a product you like being bought out by a company that you're morally or ethically opposed to, for example, EA or more specifically, Battlefield 6?

[B]

It's tough. And it's becoming tougher in this increasingly consolidated world where the companies that make the products that you enjoy are increasingly owned by giant, objectively evil multinational corpse, or owned by nations with very questionable track records around human rights and extrajudicial killings and all kinds of truly horrible things.

[A]

There's also. This is unrelated to what they're talking about with BF6, but it is related to the whole company and ethics thing. There's also, like. There seems to be a bias towards avoiding the loud ones instead of necessarily avoiding the worst ones.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which is also interesting. I don't know. It's. It's tough. You gotta pick your own lines and trying to assume that everyone else is gonna pick the exact same lines is just gonna lead you to be frustrated needlessly. So don't do that. But, yeah, pick a line. If that's your line, then that's your line.

[C]

Hey, fellas. After seeing the server video, I was curious about the process of upgrading servers. I imagine upgrading is very expensive and requires new cooling solutions. How often do they do that?

[A]

Cooling solutions?

[B]

No, I. I wouldn't for the most part.

[A]

Like, cooling solution or the whole thing.

[B]

Upgrading servers, like, we've definitely done it over the years, but that's a very small business thing to do. Large businesses, enterprise data center, like, you run it as long as the total cost of ownership makes sense, and then you decommission it.

[A]

Wow, that's actually very interesting because I didn't even interpret it that way. I interpreted upgrading servers as replacing servers.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

I didn't even think about. Yeah.

[B]

Now when you are replacing servers and you're upgrading the cooling in the data center, if that's what you're asking about, that is a huge problem. We actually discussed that very briefly in the SFU supercomputer, by the way. Oh, yeah. I kind of figured that one would have gotten your attention.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

So, because they have so little power going into that building, I mean, to be clear, they thought it was a lot back in the day. It used to be apparently like the, the control center for all the BC Hydro like power for the lower half of our province. Like it was built with lots of power and networking or whatever. But then these new AI servers came out and all of a sudden and they had to reroute. I think, I think it's like, don't quote me on this, but I think it's like a third of the power going into the data center for just the GPU servers that are just like this like one row and they're not even full to full density. Like to actually build a fully built out, fully dense AI data center would require this just utterly obscene power density. Like it's like, it's insane. And it was, it was a big problem. They actually had to take down a bunch of nodes in order to completely reroute all of the networking and power from one side of the data center to the other in order to even do this deployment and consolidate enough of it that it could, that it could be done. Huge, huge problem. And like the, the cooling that they added, so they added three more of those evaporative of cooling towers that they have outside and they were what I think they said, 1.2 million a pop or something like that to handle the additional heat load. Spicy.

[A]

And to be clear, like it. It happens. D. Hollinger in chat said that really depends. These days with the constant security issues we tend to have to do it quite often. But yes, from a hardware perspective, usually just replace a physical server, but not always. And like with, with even the like location services we've used with like OVH or whatever else we've had individual servers that we are using get upgraded. Upgraded. Usually the problem is drives are dying and then they just use that opportunity to upgrade things or whatever else. But yeah, in my experience it's usually swapping out the whole, the whole server.

[C]

Last one I got for you here, Linus. How have the first few days of your 40th year on this planet been going?

[B]

Not yet. Not yet. Still in my 30s, barely hanging on.

[C]

Any updates on the full install of your new light switches?

[B]

No, I need to follow that up. We've. We've got a bunch of really good sort of home stuff going. I still have the list to work on and there's some new members of the writing team that you guys will be meeting after they complete their probation, assuming that they do. Knock on wood. And I'm very excited for some new home automation stuff at my house. Also some really cool stuff for the tech house. One of the new guys actually flagged these heat pump water heaters, which I didn't know was a thing, but I guess makes sense. If you can heat water with gas, you could probably also heat water with a heat pump, but it just has like a. Like an H vac system on the top of it and then the water tank under it. Yeah, pretty cool. So we're going to be looking. Looking for all kinds of cool things. He also flagged a. A smart panel to me. So instead of putting smart breakers into a dumb panel, you just have a smart panel, and it can do all kinds of cool stuff. Like, you could tell it, hey, if we're. If we're at the limit, then kill these ones, because I don't need them that bad. So for something like Whale Land, that could be amazing.

[A]

That would be really good.

[B]

Yeah, right?

[A]

Whaleland's power situation is getting interesting.

[B]

Oh, crap. Pretty jank says you are 39, meaning you are living in your 40th year, Linus. Right. Well, that's depressing. And I still haven't learned math.

[A]

But you're not there yet.

[B]

No, I am.

[A]

Yeah, but you're not at the 40th yet.

[B]

Well, I'm not finished the 40th. I'm in my 40th, which is what they.

[A]

But how most people consider it.

[B]

Well, most people is a very western centric point of view.

[C]

Sure.

[B]

No, they. They. Do they.

[C]

You.

[B]

No, I number it differently.

[A]

You are Western.

[B]

Yeehaw.

[A]

So it would follow how you do it, would it not?

[B]

Thanks for watching the WAN show. See you again next week. Same bad times, same bad channel. Yippee ki yay.

[A]

Okay, bye.

[B]

Merry Christmas.

[C]

All right.