Sony Killed Physical Games - WAN Show July 3, 2026

Summary

The WAN Show Podcast Summary

Episode Title: Sony Killed Physical Games – WAN Show July 3, 2026
Date: July 4, 2026
Hosts: Linus Sebastian, Luke Lafreniere, David “Cave” Johnson

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Episode Overview

This week’s WAN Show centers on Sony’s decision to end production of physical game discs for PlayStation in January 2028, marking a seismic shift in video game media. Linus, Luke, and David unpack the implications of Sony’s move, the backlash, market trends, and mourn the decline of physical media. They riff on related industry events, including the fate of game ownership, console differentiation, legal battles over IP, memory price-fixing, evolving streaming norms, and much more—blending their signature tech-savvy analysis, nostalgia, and self-aware humor.

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Main Topic: Sony Ends Physical Game Discs

[02:09 – 14:59]

Sony’s Announcement & Immediate Fallout

• Sony PlayStation will stop manufacturing physical disc games in January 2028 for new PlayStation releases; future releases will only be available as digital codes in retail packaging.
• Existing games can still be ordered in disc form by developers after the cutoff.
• Announcement arrived simultaneously with news the PlayStation 3 and Vita digital storefronts will close in July 2027—purchased games can still be downloaded but not newly bought.
• Sony Pictures Core removed 550 movies from users’ libraries due to licensing, even for those who “owned” them.

  “...these will no longer be available to you even if you owned them.” — Linus [03:38]

• A massive online backlash erupted:
  • Petitions with tens of thousands of signatures demand physical game continuance.
  • A Brazilian lawmaker requested a consumer agency investigation.
  • Already, demand for the current PS5 disc drive add-on is up; Sony is limiting sales to one per order.
• Sony shows no sign of backtracking, already repurposing disc plants for new optical products (e.g. microlenses).

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Discussion: Impacts on PlayStation, Competition, and Consumers

• Physical Game Fans vs. Digital Majority

  • Luke, a self-identified physical collector, doubts the change will hurt PlayStation’s bottom line, since physical sales are only 22% on PlayStation, vs. 78% digital. On Xbox, the split is even more lopsided at 10% physical/90% digital.
  • Younger/newer users have shifted almost entirely to digital.
  • The next-gen Xbox will also drop the disc drive.

  “If your option is no disk drive versus no disk drive, guess what you’re gonna buy.” — Linus [08:23]

• Secondhand Market and Lending

  • Physical media provided resale, lending, and value that won’t survive in a digital-only model.
  • Rise of digital means the loss of these consumer benefits—especially for consoles with “locked” ecosystems.

  “Buying games secondhand is just an outstanding freaking value compared to just about any other way of acquiring them.” — Linus [21:14]

• Game Pricing & Monopoly Power

  • Will Sony increase prices or kill sales/promos? Linus doesn’t expect overt price hikes past ~$70—except for “tentpole” AAA releases (GTA 6, etc.).
  • Sony and Take-Two may use digital launches to control pricing and suppress secondhand disc availability.
  • Linus reiterates: Sony can’t diverge too far from PC storefronts (Valve/Steam) due to competition.

  “They will use the non-existence of these other pressures... to maintain game pricing higher.” — Linus [09:56]

• Will Future Consoles Have Disc Drives or Blu-Ray Playback?

  • Unlikely—mechanical drives are increasingly costly, unreliable, and supply-constrained (like hard drives).
  • New consoles (PS6, Project Helix) could cost $1000+ due to skyrocketing DRAM and NAND flash prices.

  “Microsoft, I think, has been pretty up front that Project Helix could be over $1,000.” — Linus [13:20]

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What Differentiates Consoles from PCs Now?

Extensive nostalgic and analytical discussion from [29:28 – 37:37]:

• Consoles historically offered lower entry costs, exclusive games, “immediate play” simplicity, physical media, and multimedia value (e.g. PS2 as a DVD player, PS3 as a Blu-Ray player).
• With digital only, higher prices, PC-like hardware, lost disc value, and PC’s open ecosystem (controller support, diverse storefronts, and customizability), the gap is closing.
• The only enduring unique selling point for consoles is exclusive titles; Nintendo has mastered this (Switch 2 is the second-fastest-selling US console ever).

“What else could possibly compel someone to buy a PS6 if it isn’t Sony exclusive titles?” — Linus [33:12]

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Nintendo’s Physical Cart Controversy

• Switch 2 “physical” carts are really licenses—games may require download; if Nintendo closes the store, playability is uncertain.
• Linus argues for piracy as the ultimate form of game preservation:

  “The best hope for game preservation is and probably always will be piracy.” — Linus [37:30]

• Luke relishes the tactile joy of physical carts and lending/sharing.

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Secondary Highlights & Notable Segments

[51:13] dbrand’s Steam Machine Companion Cube Legal Drama

• dbrand engineered, tooled, and launched a Steam Deck “Companion Cube” case (Portal-themed) without Valve’s permission; Valve forced its removal, and dbrand issued refunds.
• dbrand took responsibility (unlike past controversies with Sony), but Linus & Luke lament how strict IP law blocks cool, enthusiast-driven products.

  “The whole thing makes me sad more than anything else, because it would have been cool.” — Linus [54:54]

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[20:03; 22:27; 25:15] Why Physical Games Matter More on Console

• Consoles historically embraced “locked” multiplayer/online ecosystems and shut down digital storefronts.
• Buying secondhand, lending, or preserving games is harder on closed consoles than on PC (thanks in part to platforms like Steam/GOG and competition among PC game stores).
• Steam’s resilience and Valve’s approach have allowed better PC game longevity than on Nintendo and Sony consoles, which regularly sunset old stores and abandon content.

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[24:45] Will We See Third-Party Game Stores on Consoles?

• Ongoing legal/regulatory pressure mirrors the forced opening of Apple/Google app stores.
• Linus speculates Sony and Microsoft may eventually have to allow competing stores to avoid monopoly charges.

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[96:43] California Law: No More Loud Streaming Ads

• New law makes it illegal for streaming platforms to play ads louder than content in CA.
• Linus: Should cut down on the “obviously intentional” volume spikes.

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[100:23] Xbox’s In-Testing “Disc-to-Digital” Feature

• Lets owners turn Xbox physical games into digital licenses, tying access to the disc’s presence/ownership. Details remain unclear.
• Linus: It’s not truly different from the install/validate model unless it allows real lending/resale flexibility, but “more options are better.”

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[103:42] DRAM Price Fixing Lawsuit & Memory Market Woes

• Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron sued for allegedly coordinating DRAM price hikes and supply crunches (prices up 700% in 4 years; historically not their first collusion case).
• Meta now builds custom CXL chips to use old DDR4 alongside new DDR5 servers, recycling “decommissioned” memory to fight supply issues.

  “When even a company the size of Meta is raiding its own decommissioned servers to harvest usable RAM... that tells you how bad the memory shortage has actually gotten.” — Linus [110:18]

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[41:09–48:33] Steam Library and UX Frustrations

• Luke and Linus critique Steam’s UI/UX for not making library browsing visually engaging post-purchase:

  “Why do you only care about exciting me when I’m on the store page?” — Linus [45:16]

• Suggest wishlist features (showing ProtonDB compatibility, improved sorting, more compelling “owned game” pages).

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[76:12] Flock Surveillance Cameras & “Anti-Flock” Community Mapping

• Residents in US cities startled by stealth rollout of Flock “gunshot detector”/ALPR (automatic license plate readers) on private property.
• Grassroots movements now mapping and avoiding Flock/ALPR cameras (“Anti Flock” and “Flock Hopper”).
• Luke: A textbook example of cryptocurrency for “bounties” on surveillance mapping.

“There’s all this infrastructure popping up around the fact these cameras exist. That’s the fascinating part.”—Luke [81:17]

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[69:06] Netflix Cracks Down on Shared Accounts

• Netflix enforcing unique email/password for each profile, further restricting “household” sharing (part of continuing anti-sharing campaign).
• Framed as improved security, but Linus and Luke see it as a privacy and usability downgrade.

“Now instead of just being able to share your email and password when grandpa forgets, you’re now going to have to try to figure out what the heck his password is…” — Luke [71:56]

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[132:45–139:51] Apple, AI, Copyright, and “Fair Use” Double Standards

• YouTubers suing Apple for scraping their public videos (via a dataset of YouTube URLs) for generative AI model training.
• Apple’s defense: if it’s publicly posted, and only download-blocking—not actual access restrictions—exist, it’s fair game.
• Linus and Luke point out the hypocrisy: Apple is notorious for enforcing takedowns of their own “public” archival content.
• They speculate if Apple succeeds, it’ll undermine copyright itself—something even Apple may regret.

“If Apple wins this, do you remember when Apple demanded that old ad collateral of theirs be taken down?” — Linus [133:33] “I don’t hate Apple. I hate hypocrisy.” — Linus [140:22]

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[157:34] AMD FSR 4.1 Arrives on RDNA 3 (Steam Machine Impact)

• FSR 4.1 supports much improved upscaling quality and image fidelity, though with lower frame rate boosts on RNDA 3 hardware.
• Not expected to radically change the value proposition for handheld PC gaming, as bottleneck is “not enough raw chutzpah” even for upscaling.

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[160:45] 474W CPUs: Power Limits for Future PCs?

• Leak suggests Intel’s forthcoming Nova Lake CPU will ship with up to 52 cores, drawing as much as 474W under turbo.
• Linus and Luke share personal anecdotes about home offices “cooking” due to high-powered PCs, while noting this trend furthers the gap between average users and enthusiast hardware.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Game preservation and piracy:

  “The best hope for game preservation is and probably always will be piracy.” — Linus [37:30]

• Why physical secondhand games matter:

  “Every time we’ve looked at it, buying games secondhand is just an outstanding freaking value…” — Linus [21:14]

• Digital game monopolies and pricing:

  “They will use the, the non-existence of these other pressures, these outside pressures to maintain game pricing higher.” — Linus [09:56]

• Steam’s library experience:

  “Why do you only care about exciting me when I’m on the store page? Sell me on the game that’s in my library.” — Linus [45:23]

• Hypocrisy in tech giants’ legal positions:

  “I don’t hate Apple. I use their products... I hate hypocrisy.” — Linus [140:22]

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Additional Segments and Sidebars

• Console/PC price comparisons, nostalgia for “Scrapyard Wars,” and advice on surviving the RAM price crisis ([116:00]-[122:27]).
• Nintendo and Sony storefront shutdowns’ impact on game access and preservation.
• Japanese capsule toys: collectible PC parts with official licensing ([89:46]-[94:14]).
• Floatplane announcements and LTT Store product plugs (socks, cables, etc.).
• Musings on the future of Steam library UX, Steam Deck/Steam Machine, and “big picture” PC gaming.
• Behind-the-scenes company banter, failed channel migration views, and “nobody’s watching” self-deprecation.
• AI copyright case’s downstream effects on all creators and generative AI training data.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:09: Headline topic: Sony killing physical discs / PS3 & Vita store closure
• 05:11: Physical vs. digital sales discussion
• 07:14: Platform regional differences in physical/digital sales (PlayStation vs. Xbox)
• 13:00: Drives, pricing, hardware cost projections for next-gen consoles
• 19:53: Value of physical media on PC vs. console
• 29:28: What differentiates consoles from PCs (historical perspective)
• 35:37: Nintendo Switch 2 physical/digital “cart” controversy
• 41:09: Steam library UX rant, wishlist for improvements
• 51:13: dbrand vs. Valve Companion Cube legal saga
• 69:06: Netflix’s crackdown on multiple profiles/sharing
• 76:12: Flock surveillance & anti-surveillance communities
• 96:43: California streaming ad loudness law
• 100:23: Xbox “disc-to-digital” conversion program testing
• 103:42: DRAM price-fixing lawsuit, memory shortage, Meta’s DDR4 reuse
• 132:45: AI copyright & Apple’s legal stance on data scraping
• 157:34: AMD FSR 4.1, upscaling on Steam Machine
• 160:45: 474 watt CPUs; is “enthusiast” hardware outpacing home power setups?

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Tone & Style Note

The episode blends Linus and Luke’s classic banter—mixing nostalgia, skepticism, and exasperated humor. They balance tech industry cynicism with genuine affection for classic gaming experiences and open platforms. Rants and asides are frequent, offering comic relief and audience relatability, especially on consumer frustrations with gaming, streaming, and PC hardware megatrends.

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Concluding Thoughts

The July 3, 2026 WAN Show is a sweeping tour through the end of an era for physical gaming media, a sober warning about digital monopolies—and a celebration of the resilient, creative, and irreverent gamer spirit. Whether critiquing corporate hypocrisy or reminiscing about “Scrapyard Wars,” Linus and Luke remind listeners that, as technology’s tools and rules evolve, savvy consumers, pirates, and tinkerers will always find a way.

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

This episode is brought to you by Starbucks. That is fire.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whoa, that's good.

[Linus Sebastian]

This might be the drink of the summer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, I like this one too. I'm rocking with it. Okay, try it for yourself. Starbucks refreshers concentrates are coming home.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours.

[Linus Sebastian]

What is up, everyone, and welcome to the WAN show. Obviously, the big news this week is Sony has announced that effective January 2028, they will no longer be manufacturing physical game discs.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You have another one?

[David "Cave" Johnson]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't interrupt. This is a moment of silence. In other news this week, Valve has dropped the dbrand Steam Machine Companion Cube case down the legal incinerator after its makers neglected to get their permission to make it. This has to be just about the most dbrand thing ever. What else we got this week?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Memory is a problem for everyone. Meta is using custom chips to run DDR4 in servers designed for DDR5.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. It's legitimately actually really cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is. That's why. Yeah, it's interesting. It's. Unfortunately, that's really interesting right now. That's the world that we live in.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't make the most.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man. I had another one, but I don't remember where it was.

[Linus Sebastian]

Too late. Too late. I'm rolling the intro. You're out of time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a flock camera that appeared in someone's yard and they were like, what? And we're gonna talk about flock cameras again because I feel like people should know about them.

[Linus Sebastian]

The show is brought to you today by Factor Meals, Odoo Ahrefs, and Green Man Gaming, along with our rap partner, dBrand, our laptop partner, Razer, and our chair partner, also, Razer. Why don't we jump right into our headline topic this week, Sony PlayStation made waves when they announced that physical disk production will be ending in January 2028 for new games released on PlayStation consoles and that future games will be available at retailers in digital formats only. That is likely download codes and boxes. After that date, developers will apparently still be able to place orders for game discs of titles that were previously released. This comes the same day. The same day, actually, let's. You know what? No. This comes the same day as the announcement of the closure of the PlayStation 3 and Vita digital storefronts in. In July 2027, where the games that you purchased will remain available for download, which I guess is good, but you will no longer be able to buy any more, which is bad. Also, this came the same week as the removal of 550 movies from Sony Pictures Core Due to licensing issues, these will no longer be available to you even if you owned them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is Sony Pictures Core? Am I the only one that doesn't know what this is?

[Linus Sebastian]

I assume it's a streaming service.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Never heard of it. Sony Pictures Entertainment app for PS4 and PS5.

[Linus Sebastian]

There you go. You're not a PlayStation gamer, so you don't know. Way to go, Luke. I guess I didn't know what it was either.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This epic quality, limitless entertainment. Unless we remove a bunch of them, there's definitely a limit.

[Linus Sebastian]

This perfect storm has resulted in huge backlash online, including multiple petitions to have Sony continue physical game releases with multiple tens of thousands of signatures, and even a lawmaker in Brazil sending a notice to a consumer protection agency asking that Sony needs to be investigated. Despite all of this, however, Sony is unlikely to backtrack as they've been preparing this transition for quite some time, with employees reportedly already starting to test, develop and deploy new manufacturing processes for optics such as microlenses in what used to be their disc making facilities. We have an optional neat fact here, by the way. This announcement has increased the demand for the current PS5 add on disk drive and Sony has limited sales to one per order. Yes, because that is of course the solution to a company behaving in an anti consumer monopolistic fashion. Let's buy their stuff fast, quickly, quickly. Buy their stuff as fast as we can. All right, discussion question.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's a lot of them.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's quite a few discussion questions. I think there's a lot to discuss here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think there is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you think this change will have a big impact on the sale of PlayStation consoles and games in the future?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I am very much a physical disc guy. I really bought a decent amount of Blu Rays in the last little while.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, name one. I'm not saying you have low 11. Apollo 11.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Apollo 11.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not. What's Apollo 11?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's why I got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is that a movie? Apollo 11. Yeah, but like, you mean 13, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nope.

[Linus Sebastian]

Apollo 11 movie.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What the.

[Linus Sebastian]

What the devil is. Oh, documentary. Oh, cool.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Okay, all right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, okay, cool. Okay, all right, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyways, yeah, I very much like physical media. I also bought. I wanted to get pickopia for Emma.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So. And I have a switch too. So I didn't do the digital download. I was in Japan recently, so I bought the Japanese version which if you put a Japanese or any other language as far as my understanding goes cart into like an English or any other language switch, it'll just play it in the language of your local switch. There's no, there's none of that old. Those old problems we used to run into.

[Linus Sebastian]

You got a lot of region locks, right?

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So it's cool to have the case and the cart be in Japanese, but then still be able to understand what the heck is going on with the game. So I like physical media, always have. But I don't think it's going to have a big impact. If we look at the percentage of sales of people who have actually been buying physical media, it's not that high compared to people buying digital. And when the new wave of consoles comes out, as far as my understanding goes, the primary competition is also going to have no disk drive.

[Linus Sebastian]

And this is, this is quantifiable. So according to Daniel Ahmad of Niko Partners, the current full game physical digital sales Split is about 22% physical to 78% digital on PlayStation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm honestly surprised it's so high for

[Linus Sebastian]

physical and more like 10% to 90% over on Xbox.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So more digital and I suspect that's. Oh, I wonder why. That's a really big difference. I wonder if Xbox is more popular in the North American market and less popular elsewhere. And the North American market is more tuned for digital.

[Linus Sebastian]

US does skew more digital.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes. Yeah. But I wonder if that's like, like, is there any other explanation? Is there less Xbox is sold with like physical drives?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't think so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it, is it, is that 12% shift, which is an over doubling realistically, because it went from 10% on Xbox to 22% on PlayStation. So I don't think it's just. I don't think calling it a 12% shift is even fair enough. That's an over doubling in the amount of people that are buying physical media and it's on the much more popular platform, which is also interesting. Yeah. But yeah, I think, I think when the next gen of consoles come around, people are going to buy a console and if your option is no disk drive versus no disk drive, guess what

[Linus Sebastian]

you're going to buy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And Xbox just keeps doing the stuff they've been doing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're probably going to buy a PlayStation and it's not going to have a disk drive. So like I.

[Linus Sebastian]

And at the end of the day, we know that gamers are going to just buy it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

If, if GTA 7. Okay. Comes out for the PlayStation 7 or 8 or whatever. However many PlayStations we get, by the time you get. We don't even have GTA 6 yet. You know, you're Gonna, you know, you're gonna buy it. I mean we, we talked last week about how GTA 6 is not going to be available physically out of the gate.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right. And I had speculated that even though they are going to make a disc available later, that this does appear to be a tactical move to capitalize on all of the initial sales in that window and make sure that they don't have a big wave of second hand market discs to compete against. You know, three months in as they're trying to continue to charge full price for this game. Right. Anything that they can do to extend that window where they control the market pricing for the game is going to be something that's going to be very appealing to a company like Take two and very appealing to a company like Sony. Like our next question here is do you think Sony will use their new monopoly to raise the price of games or eliminate sales? Not necessarily. I think that like, like promotions, if

[Luke Lafreniere]

anything they seem to be ramping up promotions.

[Linus Sebastian]

They seem to be, yeah. They seem to be very competitive when it comes to promotions. These and competition does still exist for that, for that dollar even if it doesn't exist within the PlayStation walled garden itself. Right. Like Sony can't be completely out to lunch in terms of their pricing compared to, you know, what Valve is doing over on Steam. At least not forever or eventually. Something's got, something's got to give. Right. But what I do think that they will do is I think they will use the, the non existence of these other pressures, these, these outside pressures to maintain game pricing higher. I don't think they're going to get rid of sale sales and promos entirely. I don't think they will necessarily, you know, try to push to, you know, $90, $100, $110 retail for a game. Gamers have shown that there is only a certain percentage of people and only for certain tent pole releases where they're willing to spend more than that like 60 to 70 US dollars.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Unless it's a skin,

[Linus Sebastian]

which I, I

[Luke Lafreniere]

got to make sure. Unless they're getting way less for it and then no problem. But if they're getting a full fat game, there's no way, don't even consider it. Yeah, thank you for that 250 re skin. Stick it in their veins, brother.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, our next, our next discussion question is do you think there's any chance that a PS6 or a project Helix will have a disc drive for backwards compatibility and 4K Blu Ray playback? I think. Oh, oh this is hilarious. There's really little text here. Copium reports say no for both and I'm sad. Please give me Copium. Did David prepare this topic? It was, it was David who made, who prepared this topic. David, we're not, we're not getting it. See, the thing is that optical, optical drive mechanisms are one of those things kind of like hard drives. Like you know how it's kind of confusing, right? How you can have a 30 terabyte hard drive and you can have a 1 terabyte hard drive and the cost per terabyte varies wildly. Right. As you get up towards the very, very high capacity stuff, it's really expensive per terabyte and then as you get to the very low capacity stuff, it's really expensive per terabyte and there's this sweet spot kind of in the middle. And the reason for that is that there's just a certain bare amount of bill of materials that has to go into manufacturing anything that has like a motor in it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And that's super high end now you're paying a premium and it's probably fancier, newer, lower capacity engineering, blah blah blah blah. Yeah, and the premium, if you're on the low end now, you're dealing with bill of materials issues and shipping and all this other kind of stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

So in the same way, optical drives, what I'm trying to illustrate is that no matter how many, you know, gigabytes you can store on the disk, so you'll have your cutting edge ones that are really expensive and then you'll have your like old ones that actually are really expensive per amount you can store. And the sweet spot could kind of end up in the middle sometimes because there's just a certain amount of stuff that you have to put in it. It has to have a motor, it has to have like an optical laser. Like it has to have a lens assembly, it has to have a laser in it. It has to have all this stuff and they have to be reliable mechanisms. They're prone to failure, they're prone to getting dust in them. And they are adding to the cost of Project helix and the PlayStation 6 at a time when I'm not expecting anybody to feel bad for our corporate overlords, especially as they're ripping away movies that people paid for and taking away physical media and the ability to lend it and trade it that comes with it. But they are under pressure due to local. Thank you for that. Due to worldwide shortages in both DRAM and NAND flash that are going to drive the prices up for these consoles to the Point where I'm looking at it going, holy, are they even going to sell? Like Microsoft, I think has been pretty upfront that Project Helix could be over $1,000. And I wouldn't be surprised by that. We saw Sony proactively increase the price of the PlayStation and David and I were talking about this sort of, is this 4D chess priming us for the PlayStation 6 being more expensive, like maybe matching this new price for the PS5? But I mean, looking at the way that DRAM contract pricing is continuing to ratchet up, I think it could be even more than that, I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Would you considering. Would you consider delaying your console release to see if RAM is going to come down? Or would you just sign a fat contract for RAM and just set the price and hope it works? Like, okay, let's position.

[Linus Sebastian]

Who am I? Am I, am I Sony or am I Microsoft?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's why I just kind of like popped into action real quick.

[Linus Sebastian]

Am I trying to survive or am I playing from a position of strength here?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think, I think we have to position you as Xbox because the PlayStation answer, I think is more obvious. I think you just go with your plan, set your price as it is, blame it on RAM because it's fair and keep moving. But for Xbox, you barely even have a market, so you got to find a way to enter it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, here's my risk though. For a little while, the Xbox Series X could still be usable because now that PlayStations are just computers over the 4, 5, 6 generation, where it's an AMD CPU and an AMD GPU, forwards and backwards compatibility of games pretty much just comes down to. Okay, not quite, but let's change the graphical fidelity knobs here and here and here and here. And this is how it runs on this version, and this is how it runs on this one and this one and so on and so forth, right? So it is very conceivable that we will see a PlayStation 6 launch that goes very much like the PS5 launch did, where it was. It was sold alongside the PS4 with the same games available for both consoles, in some cases even with a single license where you could just use the PS4 version of it. Like we did this in Scrapyard wars, my team, where I bought a PS4 version of Cyberpunk and then it entitled me to the PS5 version on my PS5, right? So we could see these consoles exist alongside each other for quite an extended period of time. So looking forward, PS5 and PS6 could also be just higher and lower fidelity gameplay Versions of what is effectively the same kind of generation of console for the games that come out around that launch period.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's an interesting point because I was also going to point out that right now it feels like gamers almost want a different thing. They're around here if you can find them all. But the games that people seem to be really excited about lately are like Peak Mecha Chameleon, these, like, I actually

[Linus Sebastian]

bought both of those on Steam summer sale. Planning to play Peak with the kids.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. But it's games that are actually just fun again. And I don't see console performance pushers pushing massive numbers right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

So that actually ties in perfectly to where I was going with this because the way that I see it, the Xbox Series X could survive as a competitor in that market as long as Sony and as long as the game developers and game publishers who are targeting the PlayStation 6 are still concerned with, okay, but will it run on the PS5? Right. So they, so I think they will be, so they will be for some time. Especially if the PS6 is a slow burn, if it sells slowly, and especially

[Luke Lafreniere]

if it's just so expensive in the current climate, people might be able to afford a game. A lot of people don't want to buy a console or a computer or anything.

[Linus Sebastian]

So Microsoft could still sell Xbox Series X during that time. But here's the challenge. They can't just go, okay, dram's cheap now press go, right? That's not how a console launch works. They need to be developing AAA launch titles three years prior to launch, four years prior to launch, maybe even they need to be working with third party developers around what, you know, their library of games is gonna be for this launch. So it's not like they can just turn on a dime and go, okay, we're gonna hold, hold, hold, steady, steady. Okay, okay, go. Like, it doesn't, it doesn't really work like that. And so if they were to try to execute on something like that, where Sony launches the PS6 and Microsoft goes, okay, no, we're gonna be like a value competitor and we're gonna, we're gonna eat them out from the bottom. And then once we've got people back in the Xbox ecosystem and excited about Xbox again, boom. Project Helix, it's going to be, we're going to do our mic drop to 99, you know, whatever, we're going to have our moment. And, and all those games, all those like triple a games for PS6 are going to get ported over and we're like, it's Going to be great. I just don't. A, I don't think it's going to work like that and B, I don't think Microsoft Xbox Gaming, whatever they're calling themselves right now, is looking like a competent enough organization to pull it off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah, that feels pretty clear. Yeah.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Hey yo. What?

[Linus Sebastian]

From the bottom, Come on, you knew what I meant. From the bottom of the price band. Calm down. Float plane chat. You relax.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Next discussion question. Because there's quite a few in here, but they're good. What makes physical releases more important for consoles than PC? And then there's a little sub note of shout out to Gog. I think there's a fairly obvious argument which is like I'll call it preserving. Preserving games on consoles is harder.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean, I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't even think they're locked ecosystems.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think you have to be all tricorn Hattie about it. I think that. No, I think that's very true. Especially when you look at the, at the. How much earlier consoles engaged in the very locked down style of multiplayer where there was hosted servers. Everything was based on your subscription to Xbox Live or PlayStation equivalent. I can't remember what it's called. I think that. Oh man. What makes them more important? Because one of the things that makes them so important is the ability to acquire them secondhand and lend them. Right? Like that's where the value is. Every time we've looked at it. Buying games secondhand is just an outstanding freaking value compared to just about any other way of acquiring them. But I have to admit that as someone who is an adult with a job that limits my time, right. I no longer go on Facebook Marketplace and try to find a used disk. It's just not really in my vocabulary. I just will, you know, I'll put it on my wish list, wait for a Steam summer sale or if I am really desperate to play it, I will just play it. And as a PC gamer for whom I went through a very frustrating experience back in the mid-2000s, I had Lord of the Rings, the Battle for Middle Earth. Great game by the way. You'd think as an IP licensed game, probably sucked or whatever, but unironically outstanding rts, Lots of fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I remember this game.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it was really fun. I somehow like, like, I don't know, water got in it or something, whatever. My CD key, my license key got like obscured somehow and I've never found a way to get it back. And so I just like couldn't play it anymore. And so I guess I grieved this 20 years ago and maybe that makes it a little bit easier for me, but. And so maybe that's what makes this more important for consoles and for PCs is that I saw what happened to us. I saw how the orange box, you could buy it at EB Games, but what was in it? People memed on it at the time. The code, it just had a piece of paper with a code on it. Yeah, orange box memes paper. I bet there's. Wow. This like doesn't exist anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's been too long. Internet does forget. I think so. Okay. There's the. It's, you know, you can definitely pirate on both, but it's easier to pirate on PC or sorry, preserve the. The other one in my mind is that consoles have more of an ability. Is it just Steam? Is it just the fact that Steam exists? I do think I was going to say consoles have more of a. More of an ability and history of like shutting down access to things. I do think I have to be that vague.

[Linus Sebastian]

But yeah, good guy Valve, and not just good guy Valve, but Valve's staying power.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The fact that they continue to exist.

[Linus Sebastian]

Competition on the PC platform helps us out a lot. I mean, you mentioned gog. GOG exists. Epic Games, Epic Games store. You might not love it, you might not want it on your computer, but it sure as heck exists. Steam exists. Does Origin still exist? EA Origin.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think it's called Origin anymore.

[Linus Sebastian]

EA app, EA app exists. Other marketplaces do exist. Whereas on PlayStation, on Xbox. That's kind of the whole point is that they don't exist. With that said, I would be very interested to see what happens over time with that because we saw or we're watching in real time what's happening with the erosion. Again, shout out Epic games. Here they get another mention, the erosion of their ability to maintain their exclusive app store.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did I say Apple already? Whatever. Yeah. So looking at what's happening on the iPhone and on Android and how the pressure is finally mounting to allow third party marketplaces on these devices, if I was Sony or I was Microsoft, I would be watching that very intently and I would be trying to get out ahead of it, lest I be perceived as a monopoly at some point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I'm not necessarily sure. I think, I think in some ways PC already lost this war. I do think there are things that make it more important. I think we've seen from Nintendo, them and just now from PlayStation, right, they shut down the PS3 and PS Vita digital storefronts. We've seen Nintendo do the same thing in the past. I think it was like the Wii, there was this really legendary story of Super Mario Maker. There was this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, they had to beat the. The very last not yet beaten. Yeah level or something like that and they pulled it off like, like minutes or hours before. Yeah, it was no longer going to be accessible anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like that's, that's. I'm happy that like really cool story came out of it. Like the group of people that tried to complete like genuinely complete every map and then they figured out that the. The one map. So to submit a level to Super Mario Maker he had to beat it yourself. But they ended up figuring out that that one that they had such a hard time beating was tasked. So tool assisted. So it wasn't an actual person who played it, but then a real human actually did end up beating it before the timer was up, which is just so sick. Like that's cool. But the environment around it sucked. The environment around it was. People weren't gonna be able to play these games anymore I think. Or at least not add new levels or something. I'm not.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it was that it was no longer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Something was changing. Something keep of sure something was substantially changing. And I think largely because of Steam staying power, a lot of that hasn't been on the platform level on PC. It has been on the individual game or publisher level. Yeah, we've seen Ubisoft do this, we've seen EA do this, we've seen big groups do this.

[Linus Sebastian]

But MMOs, I mean PC players were the first to lose entire games that not only had they bought like that. This is A crazy thing, MMOs, you used to buy the game and it only came with like a month of access. So not only did you buy the game but you would, you would pay years of subscription potentially and then you would pour hours of your life into it and then it would just be gone. You just can't log in anymore. Your character's gone, your armor's gone, your achievements are gone, Everything's gone. Goodbye. So did we just like, did we grieve it already? Is that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. And like there's weird things like I don't know the full story there but didn't go. Didn't something super weird happen to go

[Linus Sebastian]

go like, like ancient. Oh that go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry. I should have given a lot more information than I did the board game.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, from like ancient times.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My bad. I thought, I thought like didn't they like overwrite source or something?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I Can't. I can't remember what happened with CS Go.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not a CS person, so I don't well anymore. So I don't really know. Upgrade. Yeah, that's not fair.

[Linus Sebastian]

CS Go was kept as a CS2 beta and is now a separated game as well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, so they have like maybe fixed it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Basically updated to CS2. Yes. Yeah, that's what you're thinking of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, CS2. I forgot CS2 even existed. I thought Go was the new one.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

You need to stop touching grass.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it's, none of it's gonna matter because Condition Zero is coming next year, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

So, hey, let's go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Shout out. Counter strike. Condition Zero. There's something no one played or heard of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. Yeah, I mean, I still, I think I still have a box that has like an ad for Condition Zero on it or something.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

More like Sales Zero.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, got them. But yeah, I think there's, like, PC is not without its flaws in this arena. No, but I think they're not as

[Linus Sebastian]

maybe brutal and not as fresh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but we've, we've already lost a lot of those battles.

[Linus Sebastian]

Moving on, our next question here is what's going to differentiate consoles from PCs in the future? And this is a big question mark for me. I mean, okay, okay, let's, you know, let's go back, let's go back generations, right? Let's go back to when I was a kid. You got the NES, you got the SNES. What differentiates consoles from PCs? Well, how about the fact that like you can go from not playing video games to playing video games in like five seconds. Yeah, a kid can do it. And also that's the literally the only way physically and softwarely to play that game. Okay, there, that differentiates it. Okay, so we move on to, you know, N64 GameCube. You know what, don't forget, forget Nintendo. Okay? We move on to the PlayStation.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Right?

[Linus Sebastian]

So now, well, piracy made the PlayStation dirt freaking cheap for, you know, your college age students, your high school age students, big time. The graphics, what you could get in terms of, like, man, the PlayStation looked so good. You probably spend less on an entire PlayStation than you would spend on just the graphics card to put in your computer that you had to have. And computers were flipping expensive. Not everybody even like had them yet at that point. Most people had a family computer, but not everyone. Like, it was a different time, guys. It was a different freaking time. Okay? So way better graphics.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A lot of the family computers were not playing games like that, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like it wouldn't be gaming.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're having fun in paint and space. Pinball. Like it's not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah dog.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so you had the enormous game library that could be like fairly easily pirated if you knew someone with a CD burner and then just you know, unassailable graphics. And the price, the price. The PS1 was what? 300 bucks? PS1 price? No, no, no. Launch price at launch. Yeah, 299. That was it. Okay, so we fast forward to, you know, the PS3. The PS3 was a very compelling value. It was the best. It was like the cheapest Blu ray player you could get. Oh and this was true of the PS2 as well. So it was the cheapest DVD player you could get and it played a bunch of video games. And then the PS3 did the same thing. Cheapest Blu ray player and it played video games. It's like, yeah, I wonder why these were successful. And they were sitting in everyone's living room. PlayStation 4. Once again, Sony went back to basics. Okay. 499. Yeah, it's a higher price but like inflation and whatnot and all of that and like really, really good performance for the money still like we tried to build a PS4 killer back in the day and we found that it just playing with brand new hardware was not possible. You couldn't build, you couldn't build a PC system no matter what you used. I mean even the PS5 as recently as like a couple of months ago without resorting to secondhand hardware, you could not build a competitive PC for that price. So it's always been kind of the same story. No matter how far back you go, you've got really compelling performance per dollar and exclusive games and or killer features that are, that are added on in order to increase the overall value of the package. Oh yeah, right. And as recently as the PS5 the ability to buy disc games and freely lend them and resell them. So now what we've got project Helix and PS6 which are rumored to be like 1000 plus dollars even today. If you give me a thousand dollar budget I can build a pretty decent PC. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And adjusted for inflation the, the PS1 would have been like 650 bucks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, so. So okay, you're not gonna have like just the, you know, the price point anymore. Okay. You're not gonna have discs now. You've got these lockdown game marketplaces that I am beholden to their, their blessing of when I can have a good price on something. Okay. So that that blows chunks. You've got locked down peripheral compatibility in a world where SteamOS exists and I can plug in any controller I want and Windows also exists and is still like a single powershell command to pirate. I don't know why I accept that I have to use a certified peripheral in this day and age. You've still got your exclusive titles. And I think this is a big part of why we're seeing Sony pivot, because I think they recognize that there is absolutely nothing else. What else could possibly compel someone to buy a PS6 if it isn't Sony exclusive titles, which Nintendo figured out forever ago and never unfigured out and just continued to only publish on their own platforms. Which is why the Switch 2, for all the memeing on it about, you know, having a crappy screen or being overpriced or also being raising its price or whatever, is selling great. So you see it, you hear it's like the second best start for a Nintendo console.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not too surprised about that. I'm also not too surprised that it didn't keep going super well, if that makes sense. It's still going well as far as my understanding goes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Six days ago, Nintendo Switch 2 becomes the second fastest selling console in US history after its first year. Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just feel like most people are probably playing such Switch 1 games on it for a lot of their gameplay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure, why not?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean is fair enough.

[Linus Sebastian]

I Enjoy playing Switch 1 games that you know better. Fidelity for like an extra 10 bucks,

[Luke Lafreniere]

whatever it was, if you never upgraded. So if you had the Switch one the whole time and you never upgraded to like an OLED or whatever the other little things are.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyway, if you never upgraded and stuff and so your refresh was what, like seven years or something? I don't know how long it's been

[Linus Sebastian]

since the original seven or eight years

[Luke Lafreniere]

or something like that. That's not too bad. Realistically to gain the jump in performance and everything else.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then it's very portable, it offers it. Oh, that's another thing. Right. So that's another thing that the PlayStation 6 and Project Helix won't do is they won't offer a different enough gaming experience. The Switch 2 I can take with me.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can undock my one controller and I can use it as two crappier controllers while I'm on an airplane. My PS6 won't do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Play with a buddy or whatever else.

[Linus Sebastian]

Exactly,

[Luke Lafreniere]

yeah. So I don't know. Speaking of Nintendo. Speaking of Nintendo, one of the One of the lines on here, I think we might be jumping a couple, but I think it's relevant right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is how good does the switch to at $450 US soon to be $500 US look these days. What do you think of their game cart game key cart situation?

[Linus Sebastian]

I have to admit that I didn't pay as close attention to the game key cart situation as maybe I should have. So the last thing I want to do is take a firm stance on it when frankly I just don't really understand it that well. From what I understand and chat. Help me out here. Okay. The controversy is that there's no actual data on the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can't play off of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. But in the same way that it always has been. That cart is still a license for the game. So I can still.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can trade it, you can sell it, you can lend it. I like those things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Then I don't give a fuck.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I still do because it still requires a download. What if Nintendo shuts the Switch store down because the Nintendo box is out and now they have the box store or whatever. Now I can't download my game for some freaking reason.

[Linus Sebastian]

I forget what prominent person said this earlier this week, but they, they said it very well. The, the best hope for game preservation is and probably always will be piracy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Piracy.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I'm not concerned about that because somebody will crack the encryption and that game will always exist.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, sorry, unique username said. So you'd rather be stuck with a crappy pre alpha quality build? No, because I'd rather download the update. But if I can't, I'd like to be able to play the game. That does not mean I'd rather be stuck with it. You've had, you've had like put the disk in, update the game since like the mid 2000s. Like that's not when everything was physical games.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that's why I guess I don't really care as much about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I still want to be able to possibly launch it. That's, that's the, the thing for me. I would like to.

[Linus Sebastian]

But they could block you anyway. Like if they really, if they really wanted to fuck you, then they could like. I mean, it's Nintendo, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Buy a new one. Buy it on the new console.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We're turning them all off. It seems like not a completely unfair strawman argument, but like a little bit of one that makes sense because that's, that's another step. I, I see where you're going.

[Linus Sebastian]

So. Okay, hold on, hold on. No, no, I'm I'm not going at something quite that unrealistic though. I'm talking the console has a way new firmware update and that old version of the game just like doesn't run. That. That's what I mean. I don't even mean intentionally.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. Okay. Yeah, that makes more sense. That's what I was saying. Like it's not that unreasonable.

[Linus Sebastian]

You could be locked into a game won't launch situation if you have a like grossly outdated game and you can't download the update regardless of, you know, Nintendo's intent. And so for that reason I just don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're beholden to them anyway.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've been pretty okay with game key cards, which is one of the reasons why I buy them. I don't think I've bought any digital games on my switch. I have a bunch of carts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I wish the game was on it but I'm not like raising hell over it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I do really like that I can and have done. I do really like that I can pass carts to people and let them play my games. That's very cool. I. That is worth it for me. I will basically only buy physical cards. It's also an excuse to get things from Willow or buy the cool, you know, Japanese, Japanese, Procopia or do whatever else. I like the experience. I like having physical media. I think it's cool. I. I get. I get not. I'm not going to say negative, but I get not a positive feeling. Scrolling through my Steam library. It's fun to go through game cards. Like I have a. I have a kill switch. I have a kill switch case for my switch. When I take the top off and it has all the games mounted under the lid and I'm like going through trying to think what I want to play. That's kind of cool. I get. I get like oh nice. I get to like sit and play Switch now. Cool. What do I get to check out? I never have that particular experience sitting down with Steam.

[Linus Sebastian]

I find big pictures better that way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That could make sense. It's better like I very little experience with big pictures.

[Linus Sebastian]

I ran into something really frustrating was this earlier today. This might have been earlier today because I bought a game and I was trying to tell someone which game I bought and I couldn't remember. And maybe you can help me because maybe I'm an idiot but I couldn't figure out how to sort my games list here by recently purchased.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I had this problem very recently.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very very recently.

[Linus Sebastian]

So then I jump into Big picture. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Shut up. I jump into big picture. I go to my library now and it's as simple as press Y to sort by and ba ba da ba ba ba Data edit to library. And it's right there. And I was like, oh, yeah, it's Alabaster Dawn. Radical Fish's new game, which I have not been paid to endorse and have not even so much as opened yet. But given that Radical Fish is incredible and already made like one of my favorite games of all time, Crosscode, I would happily give them another $25.49 Canadian just for having made Crosscode. And by the way, this looks awesome and I can't wait to play it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, dude. Yeah, major cross code vibes.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I was trying to. So I was trying to. It was my son, actually. This was last night, now I remember. So I was trying to be like, yeah, I bought this new game. Bloody hell. What one was it? I couldn't find a way to sort the damn thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I don't know, I just thought I was kind of stupid. I had that problem recently.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just above the filter, there's a sort by recent activity. Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Activity.

[Linus Sebastian]

I haven't launched the game yet, so

[Luke Lafreniere]

I sorted it by recent activity and could not find the game that I had just purchased. So, like, yeah, I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh my God. No key says on normal Steam. The only way, as far as I know this is pathetic, is to go to account details, view licenses, product keys, and it's sorted by day of purchase in the form of a list.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, so like, what's going on?

[Linus Sebastian]

Come on, what happened?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did they just like accidentally disable a thing or something?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. But AI hallucinated a way for me to do it in the desktop interface, which made my life even more difficult because I was trying to follow along with hallucinated instructions.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that's funny.

[Linus Sebastian]

So annoying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Another thing I would like is like, let's see here. Given Tarkov does not play on Linux. I know that. And it's on the front page, so it's easy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Should I be going to your screen?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. I just. I. I had this recently where I was looking at something. Oh, I saw Marathon was on sale.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you want to full screen your Steam interface just so it doesn't look so messy?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. I don't know if it's going to be up here. Yeah, whatever. I'm just going to keep using Tarkov because I know Tarkov. Doesn't work. But this is also Windows. It wouldn't show up anywhere. But you know how you can sort your games? Like if I go to my library and again, it's not going to be here because I'm on Windows, but there's usually a little penguin icon and you can click it and then it will only show games that work on Linux.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know necessarily what the threshold for that is, but sure, why not? It would be pretty cool if when I'm in the store and maybe it's here and I just couldn't find it, but it'd be pretty cool if when I'm in the store it would show the Proton DB rating and have a link to protondb for it. So I could click on it. So if it's like gold, I could click on it and see why it's not platinum or whatever. That'd be pretty neat.

[Linus Sebastian]

While we're coming up with wishlist features, I love yours, by the way. That's really good. Can we make it so that when I look at a game in my library. So here, let's go with Alabaster Dawn. Okay. Why does this page look like but. And why is it that none of these other tabs here are not but why is it that if I want to see the not but version of this game's information where there's like cool trailers and cool artwork and stuff, I have to go to store page, wait for that to load and then all the cool, like information about it, I think, like how many players it supports and if it's local multiple multiplayer and like all this interesting stuff only shows up on the store page.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think this is actually genuinely one of the reasons why I said like looking through the Steam library is just kind of because you click on stuff. You click on.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is so unexciting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

This does not make me excited to play the game. Why do you only care about exciting me when I'm on the store page? Yeah, this is so much prettier and better.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, if I want to access like reviews and stuff. What if I want to look at the reviews of a game I bought? Why is that not just here?

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's also like. And you know, I can't be the only person watching this that does this. The summer sale's on right now, right? Steam has had incredibly legendary sales for many, many years. I remember when they first started doing things like the summer sale. Yes, I'm that old. How insanely exciting they were and how much disgusting amounts of money I spent on it. There are a bunch of games I'll find during one of these sales through you know, super deep discounts or going through the like discovery queue or whatever else. And I'm like oh wow. Yeah that actually looks really cool. And it's like pretty good rating. I'll pick that up and I'll pick up like three or four different games and then not have time to play them and then see them in my Steam list like a year later.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not even remember why you were excited

[Luke Lafreniere]

for and I just see the title. I don't remember what kind of game it is. I don't remember if it's a shooter. I remember if it's an rts. I don't remember if I bought it because it's a co op game. I don't. I basically just have to go to the store.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, hold on. Someone in On Hike Edge or however I pronounce that in Floatplane chat says you can click this little info thing here and it gives you some information like full controller support and the developers radical fish games. But then if you click another game it goes away. You have to click that every time. Why?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Helps a little bit but I'd still just rather go to the store.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why is it that random patch notes seem more important then I have maybe

[Luke Lafreniere]

read one of those patch notes probably less than five times in my life.

[Linus Sebastian]

With that said, once again Big picture is better for this. So this may be the kind of thing where Luke, you just need to use big picture. Join. Join the current year and use Big picture more.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that a thing?

[Linus Sebastian]

Although even this. No, no, actually this is just as bad. So this needs to be fixed where it's just like yeah Boca Bola added Far Cry 4 to their library. Who cares who even is that guy?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know it would be a lot better than this. You know it'd be a lot better than that in my opinion. Is a friends recently active like in this particular game. I think that would be really cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah that we have played previously and we have on their wish list.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But no, previously doesn't to me mean like anything top right of the game

[David "Cave" Johnson]

played recently with an hours count normally under the bottom right of the top banner.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They can't see what we're seeing right now.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

I can't see what you're seeing either.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know you're talking about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't see anything.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, but. Oh, oh, only if someone played it recently. Yeah, no that. That one's a thing I think but anyway I just. I want the game page to be a little bit more exciting and feel a little bit more like where's, where's the box art? You know, where's the, where's the concept artwork? Where's the, where's the sales pitch? Sell me on the game that's in my library. And I do wonder if that's, if that's intentional to a degree. I mean, why would Valve want you to play something that's already in your library? They'd much rather you play something that's in the store and go buy a new one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I like to think that

[Luke Lafreniere]

Valve does seem super.

[Linus Sebastian]

It seems like it's usually apathy rather

[Luke Lafreniere]

than I, I, I, I will malice give them the, you know, the credit here.

[Linus Sebastian]

That benefit of the doubt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's probably not what they're doing. I, I just, I doubt it, Man. This Steam account. Oh, it's Lounge 4 4.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why are you locked into Steam on that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't, it's not tape.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

When we did the tape to tape. Oh, that's why you got Steams on them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I launched Steam and I was expecting you to log into myself and it was already logged into something. I was like, what the heck?

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool. All right, Jump into another topic. You want to pick one that. Well, that was a, that was a high protein topic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We can get into, we can get into talking about stuff like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

A lot of meat on it. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Monk DZ said I do like the Recommended by Friends feature. That's been really nice to see my friends. Yeah. I've noticed that Mr. David G does actually review things on Steam. He's a big part of the. I never actually talked to him about it directly. I heard you after the fact said that he liked it, but I saw him review 007 first light on Steam and he was quite positive about it. And I was like, Dave is super positive about a shooter. I will try the shooter.

[Linus Sebastian]

Imagine we'll just buy it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So I did and it's been great. So I like that part. There's tons about Steam that I really like. There's just, you know, just like everything on the planet, I think there's ways it could be better.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just like anything. Yeah. Anything we love, we tend to be very passionate about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which can come out really positively and can also come out really negatively.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Speaking of things that can be positive or negative, Valve dropped the dbrand Steam Machine Companion cube case down the legal incinerator after its makers neglected to get their permission. Dbrand has canceled its Portal Themed Companion Cube case, refunding every buyer for one simple reason, it just never asked Valve for permission to use the IP. The case, launched June 22, became dBrand's second fastest selling product ever, behind only its Switch 2 case. And then Valve's legal team reached out to point out that the Companion Cube is Valve's intellectual property and DBRAND had no license. Dbrand took it all down, appealed to Valve for an official license and got a no, which probably shouldn't be way too surprising. What makes this wild is how much dbrand sank into it before checking. The company says it put a whole 1,000 hours into engineering, built 44 sets of injection molding tools.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's expensive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is expensive. That's probably worse than 1000 hours.

[Linus Sebastian]

I would not be surprised if those two things combined got into the seven figure range. Just from the context that I have from, you know, having a company that makes physical goods with injection molding, that's pretty good context. That's nuts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's pretty good context. They redesigned the whole thing from scratch. Redesigned it, oh, more than once to get the console to cradle perfectly and even rented out a university campus to film the launch video. The dbrand's credit, they owned it completely, saying Valve didn't do anything wrong here. That's a real change in tone for them. Back in 2021 they make the dark plates. Oh, I remember this. Replacement backplates for the PS5 and openly baited Sony with a go ahead sue us on the product page. Sony sent a cease and desist over the faceplate design and its knockoff PlayStation button symbols. And Dbrand fired back by Sony by calling Sony terrorists before pulling the plates and quickly re releasing a tweaked version. A full apology to Valve is a very different DBRAND than that one.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't agree, actually, I think that, I think I see where you're going with this, but let's let them cook.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If they just made a case for the Steam machine, I don't think it'd be a problem. The problem is that they very, very specifically made it look like the Companion cube. Even the PlayStation symbols, I mean their X's and circles and stuff like there's. They might have been able to try to get away with it. I think if you go to a court, the court's gonna be like bruh, it's on the controllers. You didn't use any ones other than the four that are on the controller. So they might have still lost. But I'm also not surprised that they pivoted to plates that they could sell. But yeah, this is just very specifically. I don't know, it's. It's like if someone made a like holster for the LTT screwdriver and you're like, okay, that's neat. But then they like put your logo on it and then it's like, okay,

[Linus Sebastian]

now, now we're, now we're in trouble.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Now it's like kind of weird or not even that put like your face on it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or, or I'm trying to think of

[Luke Lafreniere]

something that's only made by the IP

[Linus Sebastian]

made a launch video in the style of an LTT video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Even that. I think you just kind of think it's funny.

[Linus Sebastian]

It depends. Okay, it depends. Did you watch the launch video for the companion Cube case?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was very like. I'm pretty sure there was like a not modified Aperture Science logo in it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, see that kind of stuff. That's the stuff where it's supposed to become a problem with the, like the PlayStation 1. It was a problem because of the symbols.

[Linus Sebastian]

The tone was very portally and like there was a character, Dave Johnson, explicitly not to be confused with Cave Johnson. Like a lot of. And, and the kind of. The plot for it was that Aperture Science had been acquired by dbrand. So now we're getting into like potential like canon narrative. If this is an official product, like

[Luke Lafreniere]

you can make, you can make a third party accessory for a Ford F150.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you put Ford's IP on it now, it might become a problem. Unless you get it licensed now, it's trouble. But you can make the accessory. It doesn't. It doesn't. I understand what the writer is saying.

[Linus Sebastian]

The whole thing makes me sad more than anything else, I think because it

[Luke Lafreniere]

would have, it just would have been cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

It would have been cool. I mean, I got mine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So allegedly.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I'm on camera with it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, but you totally incinerated it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. Yeah, I know. I said I got it. I didn't say I kept it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right, that makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I, you know, I at least got to experience it. And that makes me sad that this product doesn't get to exist. And I think that dbrand is very right to accept the blame for not seeking permission to make it. But that doesn't change that the outcome for me is sad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I would have liked to see a different outcome. I also, I mean, I, I understand, but I would have liked a different outcome and I think that a lot of people would have liked a different outcome. And what I am hoping More than anything else is that this isn't the end of the story. I hope that, you know, some someday, you know, dbrand could really get into making licensed products because they've got the quality, they've got the. They've got the execution, they've got the distribution, they've got their finger on the pulse of, you know, what gamers and enthusiasts want. And so, you know, if this was the, like, hard slap on the wrist that it took for them to kind of go, okay, hold on a second,

[Luke Lafreniere]

look how well that was going to sell. Yeah, the information from this is very valuable.

[Linus Sebastian]

How could we do this differently and crush it? Right. Well then maybe that's. Maybe that's the best possible outcome from this. I. I don't know, man. Valve's a weird company because, like, from my. From my point of view, you know, I might have looked at it and gone, well, yeah, I mean, okay, just you. It's. Give me a cut of the, like, you know, however many dollars that you're making and, you know, fine, let's. Let's do it. Why waste? You know, waste not, want not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I might also have a hard time partnering with certain companies because of their prickly external Persona. They might like. I could see a certain. I don't know if Valve would really care, but I could see some companies not wanting to associate with a brand through official licensing. Who's going to say F you to customers on.

[Linus Sebastian]

On social platforms, man, I would hate for them to kind of lose their. The chip on their shoulder over this. But then also, I think losing the chip on your shoulders is part of growing up. I mean, I said stuff on WAN show ten years ago ago. I wouldn't say today. No, I mean, you know, that's true.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Doesn't like, it doesn't mean that, you know, what I said then was not, you know, valid and, and you know how I felt at the time. But I was, I was late 20s instead of late 30s. Still allowed to say late 30s, right? A little bit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Currently legally acceptable.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

All right, cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

10 years is just. It's a long time, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Swapped Persona dbrand, where they turn into like

[Linus Sebastian]

rebrand.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, oh, wow. Oh, wow. That's a really good name for it. D. Licensed products being called rebrand is like, actually pretty sick. I like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, I. I'm sorry for this outcome. I know a lot of people really wanted it and were really excited about it. It was one of the most exciting things about the Steam Machine for me at launch. Now I'm more excited about the Steam Machine, man. I've been making. I've been enjoying the crap out of my week with it. Do I get to do another. I'm talking about the Steam Machine again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, sure. I have a. I have a little thing I want to add after that, so you go for it first.

[Linus Sebastian]

Where's my Steam Machine notes? Actually, I don't even have my dock open on this computer because even though this is my portable computer and therefore it's the one that I can bring with me to set, I haven't been using it. I have been carrying the Steam Machine between home and the office.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. Jaden, when he was working in office for a very. We didn't have like computers we could give him at that point in time. So he just unironically used his Steam Deck for development and at work and at home. He would just dock it when he was at home. He'd dock it when he was at work and used it for software development for quite a while. Like unironically.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Floatplane built on Steam Deck.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, we're crazy. For a bit.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're Linus Media Group. How did we not have any computers?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was. It was like. It was laptops or something. I don't remember what it was. I don't remember what the. What the deal this was of quite a while ago at this point. Like years.

[Linus Sebastian]

K. I don't like it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe it was monitors was the problem.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

We have always had a shortage of monitors. It might have been my entire time I've been here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't. I don't remember what the actual issue was, but there was some reason where it like actually did make make sense for him to work on his Steam deck.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anywho, overall, I still love it, but the honeymoon period is definitely coming to a close. I was trying to copy files off of an iPhone recently and massive credit. KDE Connect. Very cool. Anyone ever tried to transfer 200 video clips over KDE Connect? Okay, well, doesn't work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What happened?

[Linus Sebastian]

Nothing closes. Oh, just dies. And so I kind of went, oh my God. Because on Apple and this is on Apple, their interface sucks for selecting the photos that you want. Like, there's no. There's no obvious way to batch it so you can like do a few. And then I resorted to taking a screenshot of where I left off with what I had selected for the last batch so that I could continue selecting for the next batch. That just sucked and was slow. So I started with like 20 at a time and it was working. And then I went up to I think 45. And it got as far as transferred 35 out of 45 and then just closed. No indication of like, other than manually reading the file names on my computer. And then the thumbnails are obviously a little different because why would they be the same? And then having to like check the detailed thing on the phone to try to match up which ones went and which ones. It's 200 plus files. It's not practical.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I eventually gave up and used a Windows computer. Android works fine. It's actually great. But the iPhone in KDE is apparently just not a thing. Never. At least KDE not on Steam os. So that was a. That was a downer. I. Man. What. What else did I discover? I was okay. Blah, blah, blah. Oh, oh, dude. Tail scale with that AI guide. Took me like 40 seconds to set up. Dude. Having access to. So like, once I had the files on the computer or like I copied used a Windows machine to copy them from my iPhone to my nas and then I was like, okay, but I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna go easy on my Steam machine because I could have just used tailscale to copy it from my Windows machine to our network storage here. But I was like, no, I'm gonna do that on the Steam machine, dude. So fast, so easy. Just the network location mounted. Done. Good to go. Freaking awesome. Oh yeah, the. The process of downloading zipped files off of Google Drive and then trying to do anything with them is absolute dog poo. Yeah. Not sure why. But also uploading sucks. You can't just drag and drop.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, you can't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, you can go in Google Drive and you can go upload file and then you can select files and you can upload them, but just dragging and dropping them. No dice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've drag dropped, but I'm not technically on the same thing.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

But my goxlr worked flawlessly out of the box. And when you compare that to the current Windows experience, where there's like a GitHub repo that has some mismatched version. Like, I was not able to get my goxlr mini working on a brand new installation on a laptop recently. I spent like an hour at it and I kept having it like it was detecting a different firmware version for both the goxlr app and then the goxlr control panel, both of which, as far as I can tell, you need. So while it still works perfectly on my old machine that like has everything set up with my full size goxlr, I could not get The Mini working on a new machine and there was no obvious step by step resources that I was able to use. And it doesn't help that that Mini had been sitting for like two or three years. So it was on old firmware that I think I then like updated maybe like too far on one of them and like I can't get it matching anymore. I don't know what happened. But meanwhile they go XLR just worked on SteamOS, which was pretty cool. So yeah, I'm definitely running into some bumps, but also it's just comfortable for the most part. For the most part it's really good. I'm really enjoying using it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it time for my quick aside topic?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are you tired of the price of computers? Is the price of ram?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Getting you down?

[Linus Sebastian]

It is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is the price of groceries getting you down?

[Linus Sebastian]

It is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is the price of gas? Because America just keeps bombing everyone getting you down. Well, I have for you a great one of the best first person shooter games of all time is on sale for. For $6 Canadian. Even less if it's in USD 85 off. Overwhelmingly positive 95,000 reviews. Buy the game. Wow. Now is the time to buy it. Now is the time. Check it out.

[Linus Sebastian]

I thought you were transitioning into another topic or for those who are watching along, it's Titanfall 2. I don't know if he ever actually said listening along. It's Titanfall 2. Yeah, I don't know if he ever actually said that. No, it is really great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's fantastic. For $6.

[Linus Sebastian]

For US$6, you should just buy it and say it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Canadian.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's right, US$4.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And the system requirements are pretty modest these days. Yeah, it came out in 2016.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It still looks pretty good though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, it looks fine. Yeah, it looks acceptably fine. It's kind of like how like 2016 era movie CGI was also like, it's fine. If they put the budget into it, it was good enough. You could totally still watch it today. You know what actually is holding up really well? One of my kids has a really tough time with emotional moments in movies. She's just a. She's very empathetic. Yeah, sure. Yeah, definitely. Very empathetic creature. And so for a long time she's avoided intense movies. And then we visited Universal Studios in. Was it in Japan a while back? I don't know, whatever. The one that has a Jurassic park ride where you like hang out of the thing. And she was like super proud of herself for being like, for like riding this like pretty scary Coaster. And. And I was like. I told her at the time. It was just like an offhand comment. I was like, man, if you can handle Jurassic park the ride, you can definitely handle Jurassic park the movie. Even though I know generally you find movies scary. And she was on this, like, high of, like, having done it, that she was like, yeah, I want to watch Jurassic Park. And so I hadn't gotten around to it. This was, like, a while back. And so we finally started watching it together as a family the other night. It's kind of my laundry folding routine. I can excuse passive entertainment as long as I'm folding laundry. So, yeah, it would have been. Yeah, it would have been on Wednesday night, I guess I was doing laundry. So anyway, we flipped on Jurassic park, and, dude, it holds up pretty well. I was like, I was pretty impressed with 1994, man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

94.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, I don't know where I was going with that and some of the

[Luke Lafreniere]

animatronic stuff when they put a lot of work into 93.

[Linus Sebastian]

93.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Super good. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, dude, the egg hatching, like, obviously, as a, you know, grown adult, like, I'm looking at it going, oh, that's a cute little, you know, puppet or whatever. But, like, for the. For the kids, it wasn't immersion breaking. And that's the line, right? Like, you could have modern CGI that's just like, it's not believable and it breaks your immersion. Or you can have, like, old robots or makeup or whatever. Whatever it is, there's always a line where it's like, I know it's special effects, but I can keep my suspension of disbelief versus, like, oh, my God, that's made of cardboard. You know, like, come on. Yeah, right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, really, really enjoying the heck out of it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And if you need something you'll enjoy the heck out of what now? I was just making a meme about Titanfall 2.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Yes, Titanfall 2.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Good game. Yeah. Speaking of not enjoying things, I guess. Netflix now requires every user profile to be tied to a unique email address. Address, profile, not account, user profile. Netflix is now requiring nearly every profile on an account to have its own unique email address and separate login. A permanent change, a Netflix spokesperson confirmed. Started rolling out June 15. Kids profiles are the only exception. This turns what used to be simple profile slots up to five under one login into something much closer to individual user accounts. It's still rolling out gradually, so not everyone has been prompted yet. Netflix frames it as a convenience. That's a. That's a. That's a tough jump and security upgrade.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Your own login means easier sign on on new devices, independent account recovery two factor authentication and settings like language and playback tied to you instead of the account holder. Critics see it differently. Tying each profile to an identifiable email is the next logical step in the password sharing crackdown that started in 2022, since it makes casual sharing across households harder and gives Netflix cleaner per user data for its ad supported tier. That's the one Netflix's own privacy policy notes. Email addresses may be shared with marketing and advertising partners.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool. For now, there's a workaround users report you can go into account settings, into the security section and turn off feature testing. Okay. That's a temporary solution. Oh yeah, to remove the prompt, at least until Netflix makes it mandatory. It also breaks a less common use case. People who set up multiple profiles to organize content by genre rather than by person now have to tie each junk profile to a real email. The real email part doesn't bother me too much. You can spin up a Gmail in 17 seconds flat and with password managers, just slap that email into the password manager and then forget about it. But that is obviously along the path to worse things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean, it's all about the login sharing crackdown as far as I can tell.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that the extra user data and extra email addresses is kind of a happy accident. Not fully. I mean, I'm sure they've figured out that that's going to be good. But I suspect the main impetus for this is, you know, hey, now grandpa can have his own email address and account so that when it's time for him to log in, you don't have to share your email address and your password with him. Isn't that good if we all just stopped sharing our email addresses and passwords, which actually is a good thing for us to not share email addresses and passwords. It's just that clearly security for your

[Luke Lafreniere]

Netflix account, like, I'm not that worried. But also now instead of just just being able to share your email and password when grandpa forgets, you're now going to have to try to figure out what the heck his password is when he calls you anyways and tries to get you to help him log into his thing and he's changed his password and you can't find it anywhere because he refuses to use the password manager properly and you want to pull your darn hair out. So I, I actually don't think this is more convenient. I think there's going to be more deep annoyances like that. Even the, like, oh, everyone has independent email recovery account recovery thing now. It's like, is that. Sorry, is that helpful? Was that required in the past? No, because you didn't have independent accounts for things. So, like, I don't even see that as a benefit. I see that as a required new feature for the thing that they're pushing. It's just how the system works. If you have independent logins, you're gonna have independent recoveries. Like, what are we even talking about?

[David "Cave" Johnson]

About.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not better. Anyways, Sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I'm enjoying the energy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

We should probably do a couple sponsors.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not that Dan would ever tell us he put up a two more topic sign, like, four topics ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Way to go, Dan.

[Linus Sebastian]

Way to go, Dan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's technically what we're supposed to do next. So as long as he leaves it up there, we're just supposed to loop two more topics constantly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Factor Meals. One of the things nobody tells you about being an adult is that for the rest of your life, you're gonna need to figure out on your own what's for dinner every single night. Which after work and all your other obligations can be annoying to say the least. But Factor Meals can help. They offer fresh, never frozen meals right to your house. They have over a hundred different rotating weekly meals inspired by flavors from all around the world. So you're always gonna have something to be excited about. Factor also launched a bunch of ready to eat salads. And just like their main dishes, everything has vibrant ingredients like, oh, my God, these are pretty bougie ingredients that I don't even know how to pronounce. Miso edamame. I know that one, but. Elote corn. Elote corn. No idea. James from the business team actually spent a sizable amount of his childhood in Texas and misses that southern style. Well, Factor right now has a creole shrimp and smoky cheddar green grits option that might just satisfy his nostalgic taste buds. Everyone has different dietary needs, so if you're bulking up or if you're trying to shed a few pounds, there's meal option for you, including their muscle pro collection.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You look confused.

[Linus Sebastian]

For strength and workout recovery. It's because I didn't know how to do a deadlift and David was kind of explaining it. And also this uses like a tensioning thing rather than weights. Yeah. So it's a little different. Yeah. Factor is going to do the shopping, prepping, meal planning for you, and then they deliver it to your door ready to be cooked in just a couple of minutes. Head to factor meals.com when 50 off and use code when 50 off to get 50% off and free daily greens per box with new subscription only while supplies last until September 27, 2026. The show is also brought to you by Odoo. People like to have options too soon and they don't like jumping through hoops for their options options. This is true of how people run their businesses as well, and our sponsor Odoo gives you the options without being forced to use multiple apps. Odoo is the all in one business management software that has just about any app your business could need integrated into one platform. So if you and your team are ready to take your disc business off the ground, Odoo's Projects app can help you get started. Once your project starts flying along, you can then use their CRM application to help you start sending quotes to clients or schedule important meetings on how you plan to continue making your discs or whatever it is you make. They even have an app to help you manage your inventory. You can set up MIN max replenishment rules or Odoo can trigger purchase orders manually so you never run out of what you need to make the disks your customers want something that makes Odoo even cooler. If you only need a single app, you can use it for free. Use our link to get a 15 day trial with no credit card required, or you can book a demo with their expert team to learn how Odoo can help your business grow. All right, I assume you picked one. Sounds like I'm getting I picked something Energy from over there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah Woman surprised when Flock surveillance tower appears in her yard without warning Yes, a Virginia woman came home to find a flock surveillance/ gunshot detection device suddenly installed on her property with no warning or notice from the city. Even the responding police officer wasn't sure what it was at first, having to physically inspect it before realizing it was part of a city approved rollout of gunshot detection tech. What a thing. The big issue is that the device wasn't on the approved install list, so residents are now worried about surprise unannounced surveillance popping up in residential areas. And one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this is the the Flock Security thing has been an ongoing topic on Wancho for a while and of large concern for people who have them installed near them. And I just think it's funny and interesting how the community's responding to them because there's I don't know anything about this these guys, but there's sites like Anti Flock that I'VE seen show up, which is a public Mac map of flock safety, ALPR cameras, anti flock catalogs and automatically license plate readers spotted in public. Built on OpenStreetMap and community submissions. Find a camera we don't have, we'll pay you in crypto. Wow. And there's other similar bounty systems for flock cameras out there. And it's, it's interesting like this. You know, we've talked at length for many years on the show about like appropriate uses of cryptocurrency.

[Linus Sebastian]

This seems like a prime use of cryptocurrency.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Awesome. Actually. It seems really awesome. Like I remember there was some really interesting stuff in Ukraine when the Ukrainian currency got all whack when, when Russia first invaded and there was people who were like trying to buy cars and stuff in order to escape and they were using crypto and that was like, oh wow. Like okay, a naturally interesting use for crypto. But this seems like you've talked about your brother in law.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, with his like drone mapping company. Yeah, yeah, that's my brother.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's pretty cool. This is a pretty interesting solution. Yeah, it's interesting. It's very interesting. But yeah, I think there's, there's probably a reason why people want a map of where they all are. And I think there's people taking actionables based on the map to a certain degree. So maybe submit new cameras to the map if you find it. Just an idea. Oh, wow, man. There's such interesting things, man. This is wild Flock Hopper. So you can see where all the flock cameras are and then if I read the, the short description properly, you can use this to map yourself to places while avoiding the flock cameras.

[Linus Sebastian]

No way. But you're telling Flock Hopper where you're going.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Which, you know, maybe who knows who that like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is this a honey pot?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean it might be OpenStreetMap powered again, but yeah. You are telling them where you're going? I'm going from the Seattle Convention Center.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sfo.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's go to sfo.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To sfo?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we're gonna go down to Cali down California way. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Avoidance settings.

[Linus Sebastian]

Camera distance.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Go there.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, exceeds maximum. Routes longer than 300 miles are not supported.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The straight line distance is 690 miles. But roads longer than 300 miles are not supported. Okay.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

So you could just go to. I don't know, Microsoft had headquarters.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

All right. What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Aren't they in Seattle?

[Luke Lafreniere]

They are in Redmond. I feel like that should be close enough. There we go.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Direct route.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, because it's not just flock. So I think that's what flock cameras are, is these ALPR cameras.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So they're detecting theoretically all the different kinds. Direct privacy. Interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh wait, what's the privacy one?

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I think a direct route. So basically this is the most direct route and there aren't any flaw cameras.

[Linus Sebastian]

Got it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But if there was a direct route that might have a few cameras or a privacy route, you could decide between the two.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's on iOS.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's interesting. There's. There's all this like, infrastructure popping up around the fact that these cameras exist. That's been the fascinating part of the story.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like the, the craziest part of all of this is I feel like the kinds of people that are going to get caught then in what they're doing are going to be the ones that are either like, in many cases just like too dumb to use these tools. Like, you're not gonna, you're not gonna spot someone who, who, who plans their crime if that's, if that's the justification for all of this surveillance. With that said, man, I mean, I've watched enough true crime stuff to see that a lot of criminals are pretty, I. Yeah. Pretty incompetent. Yeah. Like the number of people that just take their cell phone with them to murder somebody is like mind blowing to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I, I agree.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep, we've talked about that a bit. There's. There's someone in chat said there's a. Your city is voting on these soon tracker. That's. I haven't, I didn't find it, but that's interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's pretty cool.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

There's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's just. There's a ton of stuff. I just find it very interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what I find interesting? Creator Warehouse announcements.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hey,

[Linus Sebastian]

No new announcements this week. FP announcements then. Thanks. If it flows well, Sammy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Thanks, Sammy.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, I have a couple things for. I actually have a couple things for LTT Store. We have, we have cables in stock right now. They are our top selling item at the moment. So if you want to send a checkout message, now is a great time to do it and pick up some of our true spec cables. You'll find them under electronics cables and bipiti boppity, A to C, C to C, you name it. Oh, they're not all in stock anymore. Okay, well, a lot of them are in stock. You can still get like the 5 foot 20 gigabit per second, the 1 meter 40 gigabit. We still do have quite a few decent options. So now's a great time to go check them out. People are flipping loving these cables. Freaking loving these cables. So, so freaking excited that they're finally in stock. We have more of them coming. Also, we're still running our end of season apparel sale. Boop. So there's a lot of stuff here that has, you know, fewer sizes in stock, but if you check it out, you might be able to find some pretty good deals in here. This one's 60 bucks off for the thermochromic jacket. All over print hoodies. I think we still have some of these. Yep, yep. There you go. So go check it out. And hey, while you're at it, maybe send a checkout message. We don't do twitch bits. We don't do super chats. We are all about checkout messages. We feel like if you're gonna throw money at your screen while people are streaming at you, then, hey, maybe you should probably get some high quality apparel or tools or cables in return. So just head over to lttstore.com, add anything you want to your cart, like, oh, I don't know, maybe our Precision Pro multiband screwdriver. Sure, why not? That. You can type a message, select any color you want. You can make it anonymous, or you can show your first name and last initial and go ahead and check out from there. It will go to producer Dan, who is wearing that sweater again, who will pop it up, or who will reply to you, or who will curate it. And why don't we do a couple of curated comms so we can show you guys how it works?

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah, I've got a couple here for you. Hello, lld. How often does your distributor get audited? Crossing my fingers for getting the correct size on my second replacement garment.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think they do annual inventory audits. But as far as, like, you know what you're asking. I think you're asking, like, how often do we check in on them? And it's very, very regularly. There's just been a lot of flux over the last year with various tariffs and logistical challenges. And people have been a lot busier working on mitigating dumb bullshit and had a lot less time for just doing their normal jobs and making everything run smoother. These things don't happen very often, but when they do, it's obviously very high profile and very embarrassing. What's more likely than anything else is like a master carton of that garment got mislabeled in the wrong size and it was not properly investigated after the first return. And so it just the exact Same error was made again. It doesn't. Our ship accuracy is actually not that bad. Like, we do track this stuff internally, and it's, like, very good, but that doesn't mean anything to the 0.1% of people who get the wrong thing. I get that, but we got you. We'll get you taken care of. Thank you for your patience.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Hi. Std, short, tall, and Dan. Shooting a bit of whimsy your way. If adventure was a color, what would that color be for each of you and why? You guys are the best. Wishing you an awesome weekend adventure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was a color.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Forest green.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm gonna say forest green. It says wilderness to me.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, wilderness. Like, I like. Like. Like. Like that. That. Like, pine needle green, you know, that almost has, like, a smell to it, you know? Pine. Yeah, I'm gonna go with pine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You tend to adventure in.

[Linus Sebastian]

You just asked, you know what color would be. I could. Could I not? I could.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like you don't prefer those adventures.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, what adventure would I prefer, sir? I assume an adventure is outdoors, so that rules out a lot of adventure for me in terms of what I would choose to do if left to my own devices.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Fair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

More the red. I'm a huge fan of type 2 fun, and red is, like, a little aggro. And type 2 fun is usually pretty aggro when you're in the middle of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Similar vein to Luke. I'm going with, like, free range egg yolk orange. A little bit more on the warm side of things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Just kind of screams, like, I have to wear clothing that I can be seen from a helicopter in.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's when you know it's gonna be good.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah, maybe that's type three fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When you end up in the hospital when you. When you wear the bright colored backpack, not because you're trying to, like, be, like, stealthy and cool and camo, but because you're like, oh, dude, I will break my leg.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Someone finds me with a blinking light.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, there you go. That's when it's like, nice. We're doing good.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Some people are wondering, so I found this helpful graphic from semirad.com.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

oh, yeah. Type three. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Type two is the way to go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Miserable when it's happening. Fun in retrospect. All right, cool. Yeah.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Masochism orange.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I find there those things are more often notably memorable. Like, you struggled through something with other people.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

And, like, I kind of like it when type one fun accidentally turns into type two fun and doesn't necessarily cross over into Type three.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's have a fun day out.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Wow, this is great. Oh, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. That can sometimes be really fun too, actually, because then you get to rise

[David "Cave" Johnson]

to the occasion and it's awful when it's happening and then you look back on it, it's. It's kind of sick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Type three is no good.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

No, no, I don't think that's. I don't think that's fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I think it said right in it. Not fun. Yeah. All right. You know what is fun, though? Japanese company Tarlin International launches hyper realistic capsule toy PC parts that you can assemble and play with. Tiny motherboards, cases and CPUs are coming after Tarlin Inks, a collaboration with the big four PC parts makers. Do you want to fire up the site? We'll go to a screen cap for you. These look super cute.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So you can actually assemble the parts into a working tiny tower made through official licensing deals with ASRock, Gigabyte, MSI, and Intel. That's a really odd big four. I don't see ASUS there. And also, if we're talking CPU makers, AMD is not there. And no Nvidia anyway.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They have like server racks.

[Linus Sebastian]

The teased first wave includes three branded miniature motherboards. Wait, where did you access this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

This isn't even it. This is from the Dock toys. One Japan list of products is what I went to. Okay, so I think I just got to go to Tom's. Basically, Tom's has the.

[Linus Sebastian]

There you go. Okay, so the teased first wave includes three branded miniature motherboards, the ASRock Z890 Steel Legend Wi Fi, the Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite Wi Fi 7 Plus, and MSI's Meg Z890 Ace, along with an Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus CPU that installs into any of the boards. There's also case fans, a power supply, and a tower case. It's Gachapon, so each is about. Each $3 pull is random and you need roughly five drops to complete a build. Tarlin also sells licensed 1:12 scale Palm Network equipment Capsules that recreate real data center and enterprise gear down to to the model number, spanning Cisco rack mount switches, Lenovo Think Systems, Dell PowerEdge, Fortinet Fortigate Firewalls, Extreme Networks, NEC, NetApp and F5 alongside past oddities like a temporary toilet series and an articulated Crayfish. They even had an earlier Intel Core i7 8700 CPU capsule back in 2024. There's no final release date. For full parts list or full parts list for the new PC line. Yet obviously I wouldn't spend $3 on this, let alone multiple $3 so that I could do multiple polls. I think it's cute that it exists and if someone else buys it, I will look at it and I will say that's cute. I'm glad I didn't spend my money on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How would you feel about being forced to spend your money on it through an employee, spending money on it to make like a short or something? Because realistically, I don't know, I guess the Gacha pawn part of it is that you just buy the capsule. So it's like, is that one of the tourney things or is it a claw machine thing? Because you have a claw machine so you could recreate the experience with a claw machine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, if, if. I know. I think this is a random. I think this is a random chance one and I'm not really that into it. Although one of my, one of my badminton friends recently told me that apparently for a. A lot or at least some Gacha stuff, if you're willing to buy an entire master carton of it, it's guaranteed to contain everything. Oh yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So he cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, he had a bunch of them and I was like, oh man, you're like. You didn't waste a bunch of money to like get every single one, did you? He's like, no, no, no, no, no. You can just. If you like them enough that you know you want all of them, then you can just buy the whole thing that I don't mind. Yeah, Crystal says depends on the thing. But yeah, so that I don't mind so much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. If I know what, I'm still just buying the thing that you want.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I'm still just buying plastic junk, but at least I'm buying a plastic junk thing that I know I want. I don't want to just spend money on something I don't know what it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So yeah, I'd be fine with that. I mean, oh man, there's. There's no money in shorts. Like you know that, right? Like I probably, I don't know how much these cost, but I probably wouldn't get it back for shorts. Like we uploaded a short today on the main channel that has. Oh actually no, I should use one from, from an earlier day just because monetization has like a half a day or one day delay on it or something like that. Here. Racing with Steam controllers got almost 900,000 views and made $108 literally not even enough to buy the multiple Steam controllers we used. Like, it's, never mind, you know, paying people to work on it and edit it and whatever. Like, it's, it's purely just a, an awareness segment of the funnel thing for us. Except when it manages to go somewhat viral like Shorts. Revenue is trash. It's a, it's a mystery to me that YouTube is pushing it so hard because I just don't see how there's a, a viable business model in there for them. Like in cases where the short purely exists to promote our products, then it could kind of make sense. Like we did. We did this one a little while ago, asking how many of our magnetic cable management arches does it take to hold up a PC? And it's just like your classic short. Oh, escalating stakes. We're going to keep trying it and then eventually, you know, we succeed. That made. Let's see. Oh my God, I hate when I. When I click a video in the studio app and then I go back, it doesn't take me back to the studio app. It locks me in the. In the YouTube app. So that did two and a half million views and made $300. So good thing that was on an already broken PC, otherwise we wouldn't have even broken even on the parts for making the video. Even as it is. Like, I'd be surprised if that even covers the labor of making this video, but presumably we might have sold some cable management arches or something. But like, Shorts is brutal from like a revenue standpoint. We just, we just do it to like be there if that kind of makes sense. Kind of like how we started the WAN show just to have a foothold in live. So we were doing something around live. If live ends up being the entire future of online media, then we won't be starting for live.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, we are there. Yeah. Ads are about to get a bit quieter in California. On July 1, it has become illegal for streaming platforms to play ads louder than the content being watched in the state of California. I love this idea. Interesting how it's going to be in execution. Governor Gavin Newsom signed this bill, SB576, into law back in October 2025, before it was only broadcast cable and satellite TV providers that were affected by the Calm Commercial Advertising Loudness Mitigation act, which was signed back into law in 2010. It is still not 100% confirmed if this will only apply to users in California, if these streaming companies will keep ads at their current volume in other states. Streaming services in the past have argued they are already trying to manage the loudness of advertisements that come from server side ad insertion that may be inconsistent with the loudness of the programs. Also argued it's tough due to the broad range of output devices, including including TVs, tablets and phones. That part I don't know about that. But the one thing that does have me kind of wondering is like, what if you're watching like effectively a silent stream? Is the ad just muted? Like, is there a minimum? Because like TV and stuff, I can feel like it's going to be a little bit more measured. But streaming is weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it can be all over a

[Luke Lafreniere]

lot of really weird stuff with streaming.

[Linus Sebastian]

That said, it's also very obvious though, that they're playing the ads louder on purpose.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

So if at the if at the very least this forces them to target a loudness that is probably pretty close to what the content creator was running their loudness at, then that's probably good enough to the point where people will stop complaining about it, which is realistically what this measure is meant to achieve.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So someone also said ASMR Stream for the win I. I don't know. I don't know if ASMR is technically quiet.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I don't think so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's more about the nearness of the recording and the delivery. Yeah. Not necessarily the quietness of it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're like whispering, but it's high gain and they're right next to the mouth mouse. M.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is hilarious. Avon Fox says it's been illegal in Australia for decades on free tv. So what they do is they highly compressed ad audio so it sounds louder.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's kind of what I'm saying with ASMR is like it doesn't necessarily seem like it's loud, but it might be the same loudness as other content.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's hilarious. All right, what else we got this week? Oh hey. In other console disk related news, Xbox is testing a disk to digital feature. The Verge reports that Microsoft is testing a feature that would let Xbox One and Xbox series owners insert a physical game disc and convert it to a digital license that is tied to their account. The system would make physical games behave like digital purchases with perks like cloud streaming or play anywhere support. But the license would still be tied to the disk itself, so selling or lending the disc would affect access. How the crap would that work?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

I shall read on. Apparently not all disks are going to work, and the Verge article says that Microsoft is warning its internal testers that. But it all depends on how and when the disk was manufactured as it may not have all the features needed for this program. Huh, Fascinating.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Judging by what's going on in the market, this is likely part of a bigger shift towards more digital Xbox future. Like a next gen console without a disc drive while still giving current disc owners a way to preserve their libraries.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, so that way I could pull my old Xbox off the shelf and still play my like backwards compatible Xbox games on my Project Helix. Assuming anybody buys it by converting that disc to a digital license. But what I'm having are to the previous one. But I'm just having a really hard time understanding how if the disc is still the license for the game and if you're going to have to put it in in order to validate the license, then how is this any different? Because realistically no one's gaming off of the the disk anymore anyway. You have to install the game.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe you have to do it every once in a while. Or maybe as long as that disk is not detected in another online connected Xbox.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I could see that for a

[Luke Lafreniere]

certain period of time then you are still given the license.

[Linus Sebastian]

It allows you to swap games and such without needing to swap discs. Yeah, no, no, I understand that. I'm just asking how it can use the disk as the license while enabling that functionality. That's, that's the question. But yeah, I could see them doing like Steam offline mode for for example.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean sounds good. More flexibility is more better. I can't say that I would strongly recommend doing this. It seems like leaving the game and the disc as one thing is the most consumer friendly version of this that, that consumers could enjoy having the friendliness of. But I will never say no to more options for how to use the media that I have paid for. We can jump right into. You want to talk about the memory stuff? Class action lawsuit?

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Samsung, sk, Hynix and Micron sued over alleged dram.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Alleged.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, sure. Alleged alleged DRAM price fixing amid record memory costs lawsuit claims coordinated HBM shift was cover to curtail DDR3 and DDR4 production. Samsung yeah, blah blah blah. Hit with class action lawsuit on June 25th in the Northern District of California where 17 plaintiffs, a mix of individuals and small PC building firms, accused the three of illegally coordinating to restrict DRAM supply and inflate prices. The complaint says prices have jumped roughly 700% over four years and the three companies together control around 90% of the global DRAM market. It's filed as Garcia Gwire, sure. I think. Versus Samsung Electronics under the section one of the Sherman act, which you are all obviously super, you know, aware of.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's my favorite section.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What it is? It even name drops the Rampocalypse. The core claim is that the trio used. The trio used the industry wide shift to hbm, this, you know, stacked memory as a pretext to wind down DDR3 and DDR4 production, choke conventional DRAM supply and drive up prices. The plaintiffs argue that in a truly competitive market, at least one of the three would have ramped up conventional DRAM output to capture those rising prices. But none did. I also think if you look at precedence at all, you'll know that these boys be enjoying this type of activity. It is worth being clear on how hard this is to win. Showing that all three cut output and prices soared isn't enough on its own. The plaintiffs have to prove that there was an actual agreement to coordinate not just three companies independently chasing the most profitable product, which would be apm, which is also. Yeah, what did I say?

[Linus Sebastian]

Apm. Pretty close.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I meant hbm, which is legal. The suite learns leans. Oh my goodness. The suit learns leans on history to argue a pattern. Samsung and SK had explained guilty to criminal defense price fixing back in 2005. Apparently I can reset it by yelling. That's good to know. Part of a DOJ case that levied. I got it. $731 million in fines. The plaintiffs are seeking

[Linus Sebastian]

treble that you're reading it correctly, that might be just a typo in the notes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Damages and a court order to end the alleged squeeze. Alleged. I still think alleged is no trouble.

[Linus Sebastian]

Damages is a thing, a legal remedy that allows a court to triple the amount of actual compensatory damages awarded to a prevailing plaintiff. It's a punitive measure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Got it.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Let's try Lexan.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, cool. It's cool that someone is doing something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hopefully they win.

[Linus Sebastian]

This isn't going to work. No. But I think it's, you know, I think it's cool that they're doing something. That's cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

But like H. HBM is the most lucrative product and so I think it would be pretty easy for these guys to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah, obviously the reason why I'm shooting down the allegedly part so quickly is just that like the precedent for this is so deep and so thorough. Obviously. Yeah, yeah. They're all chasing the most highly profitable thing. They're also all doing it in lockstep because that's even more profitable. Nice. Like, it's just. I don't know, it's so obvious.

[Linus Sebastian]

I doubt they would be stupid enough to have a formal agreement again. But again, everyone. Everyone knows, you know, which direction the industry is going to. You know, there's only. So that's the thing, there's only so many players, right? So when you're.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Until China steps in, when you're in

[Linus Sebastian]

video and you're basically just like, well, we need 1 billion HBM stacks. Yeah, everyone's gonna know about it, everyone's bidding on it, everyone is on the same page about it. So they don't have to have a formal agreement. They just see the demand forecast, they see the production forecast and they go, oh, demand here, production here. Oh, price go here. But hey, this is kind of neat. And legitimately, Meta is using custom chips to run DDR4 in servers that were designed for DDR5. And to be clear, that was the headline from. I believe it was Tom's hardware. Yeah, Tom's hardware's headline is Meta fights soaring hardware costs by reusing old DDR4 server memory in new DDR5 only servers. They're not quite just putting DDR4 memory into DDR5 servers. Those servers still have to have DDR5 in them. But Meta built a custom chip that lets it pull old DDR4 memory out of decommissioned servers and then run it alongside DDR5 memory at a slower speed in their newer servers. The chip is called Vistara, and it's apparently already running across millions of servers. Normally, servers get retired after three to five years, but the memory is good for seven to ten. So Meta was tossing perfectly usable DDR4, which in this day and age, in this economy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

On top of that, about 40% of its fleet couldn't have its memory expanded at all, which in this economy, when everybody needs more memory. The trick to overcome this is cxl, a standard that lets you attach memory to a processor over the PCIe bus instead of over normal RAM slots. So Vistara is a custom CXL chip that bridges the old DDR4 to AMD's DDR5 only epicture CPUs over PCIe. So each of these MEM servers has 768 gigs of fast DDR5 and then about 256 gigs of recovered DDR5 for about a terabyte total. Now, obviously, the DDR4 is much slower. It works out to roughly 10 times less bandwidth. Oh, my God, what a way of phrasing that. So a tenth of the bandwidth versus the directly attached DDR5 and then meta handles that in software, so the system will automatically shove rarely touched data onto the slower DDR4 while keeping the frequently used stuff on fast DDR5. And it works well enough that Meta says it cut the number of AI servers that it needs by up to 25%. Our discussion question is, in this economy. No, sorry. It's when even a company the size of Meta is raiding its own decommissioned servers to harvest usable RAM instead of buying new, what does that tell you about how, how bad the memory shortage has actually gotten? Okay, so I was only partially kidding our discussion question. In this economy.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

If you were wondering if it's all fake and a conspiracy, this basically answers your question that they would go and create this chip in order to do this. Tells you everything that you need to know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really cool. I mean, I wasn't aware of a standard that allow you to run more RAM over PCIe.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, CXL.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Super cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's actually sweet. I never heard of that. That's awesome.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it can be used for like, like contemporaneous RAM too. Just if you need to add like buckets and buckets and buckets around because the latency is still low. It's just the bandwidth is constrained by the PCIe. Bandwidth.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, very interesting. But like, oh man, God, it's so brutal to be into computers right now. I think for a lot of people they're just not. They're pausing. Yeah, I think for a ton of people, they're just pausing.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, you had talked about that earlier. Could Microsoft just pause the next Xbox? Could they just think the market is

[Luke Lafreniere]

not going to be super excited right now, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

See, I don't. I know that contract prices are still going up. I think Microsoft has said what they're expecting RAM to like double again by next year or something like that. I like, I forget, I forget exactly, you know, what the forecast is. But, but hold on a second. Okay. I made that video a little while ago right when I was like, okay, the worst might be over.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I pointed at how there's actually been some dips in prices. I, I came across a 32 gig kit for 300 bucks earlier this week. Like, there are. Okay, there, there are some cracks that are starting to show and like, funny,

[Luke Lafreniere]

because that's so bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's so bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

But recovery is better than going.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I know, it's just, it's just so funny that like, that actually sounds like a steal right now. I know, but like, my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

But hold on, hold on. And it's, there's always cycles though, like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I hear you. It's just.

[Linus Sebastian]

I remember. Okay. Oh, man. I was having like a dinner at CES with my old crucial rep back when I was a product manager at ncix. And he was old school, right? Been in the industry like his whole adult life. And he was joking about like the, not literally, but like, you know, the hookers and blow days of the, of the memory industry. Because he was like laughing, he was like, yeah. And one stick was like $1,000. And you couldn't keep the things in stock. They were selling like candy. It was like a nonstop party and everyone was invited. And now you can get gigabytes and gigabytes and we're selling them for like 3 points margin if we're lucky. It's crazy. And so these boom and bust cycles and have always been part of it. And I feel like, what's the, what's the noose? The noose meme.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The noose.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, this. I feel like this guy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

You know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

First time guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. It's bad, it's bad that it's $300 for a kit. That is bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This too shall pass.

[Linus Sebastian]

But. This too shall pass.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Pass.

[Luke Lafreniere]

China's gonna waddle over to the memory area and be like, hey, guys.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey. Remember what we did with displays?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And practically everything else.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so, and so I'm looking at, and like, and some of the other cracks that I talked about in that video are not just still there, but they're starting to widen. I mean, the big news from Facebook earlier this week is that because apparently, just like XAI, they're not 100% sure what to do with all the bloody AI compute capacity they built and they're starting to lease it out to other players. That's a good thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is very good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's a good thing. Because what that tells us is that the insane parabolic ramp up in building is, I mean, it's gonna plateau if somebody has excess capacity.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not only just that, it's got a plateau for all the capacity that gets rented out. That's could be in a, in a fun accounting way, capacity that isn't being now built, if that makes sense, because it wasn't being fully used by them. So this new upstart company is not building another dc.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's exactly it. Yeah, that's exactly it. So I'm, I, I'm, I'm, I'm looking at it and I'm going, yes, the contract prices keep going up, but like the deals on the street are not going parabolic. The cracks in the. In the insatiable appetite are starting to show. I want to see how I. We're gonna. I mean, obviously we have no choice. We're gonna have to wait and see how it plays out. But I'm. I think we're gonna be okay in a while. And if you can put off a memory upgrade right now, I'd strongly recommend that if you're building a new system, DDR4 is still attainable at reasonable ish pricing, and you can still get really good performance. I mean, this is something that's so important to highlight. And we talk about this in every CPU review, right? Where we'll put up all the numbers from labs and we'll go at 1080p. The new one is the fastest. It's the bee's knees. Buy all the fastest things. Consume, consume, consume. Oh, by the way, when you turn the resolution up to even 1440p, which I might remind you right now, a 1440p gaming monitor, okay, we're gonna go 1440p, 240 hertz. Okay? We're talking a flipping gaming can be had for. For under US$200. These are Canadian rubles. Guys. This is AOC. This isn't even some random brand that you've never heard of. Acer Nitro 255 CAD. So that's times 0.7 to get to US dollars. So it's 60. It's 75 off from that. So we're talking US$180 for a 1440p gaming monitor. Like, if that's not the upgrade you're making right now, while RAM is super expensive, then maybe your priorities are not quite right. And if you have a 1440p gaming monitor, we've seen it time and time again. The performance difference between the latest and greatest CPU and one that's even a few generations old. It's not that big. Use the older platform. It's okay. There's no shame in it. Like Luke and I have advocated for years, that you got to find your Scrapyard War spirit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The whole reason why Scrapyard wars exists is because we were trying to scrap. We were making. The popular term for it back then was Lambo Videos. I think these. Now it's more appropriately called, like Halo Halo products. But we were trying to find a way to make it so that people wouldn't just watch the like 780 video.

[Linus Sebastian]

780, nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But like, actually that's the era we were in.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So we, we were trying to figure out, like, how do we find a way to make it? Because like the 60 series, if we're going back to Nvidia cards, the 60 series cards are the ones that basically everybody buys. Nvidia's tried to shove that price performance number up to the 70 to get more dollars out of people, but historically, especially back then, it was.

[Linus Sebastian]

You mean succeeded?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Succeeded. Yeah, it's the 50, 70 now. But back then the 60 series cards were the, the primary cards from video that people actually bought. The 60 series cards would get like the least views out of all of them that we would talk about. And the 80, or in rare cases, 90 or whatever series card would get by far the most views. So we were trying to find some way to promote, you know, more frugal or more cost effective or whatever you want to call it, lifestyles while getting people to actually click on the darn videos. It's very hard. And like one of the only things that we really thought of to do that was Scrapyard Wars. We went from the other end with another series. It had a more ridiculous name. It wasn't like overkill was. You still do them sometimes. Compensator. Yeah, yeah, the compensator.

[Linus Sebastian]

We meme on the top end stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So we're kind of attacking from both sides. Yeah, but. But you can't just release like the review of some card and it be like the one that everyone buys and have it actually get views. It doesn't work. So we're trying to find something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Parallelogram in chat says I'd like to see you try and Scrapyard wars with the RAM Crisis. Yeah, it's TDR4, baby.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's. It is DDR4, but it still sucks. I mean, actually, those prices.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, 50 bucks is fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What the heck?

[Linus Sebastian]

If I can get a 16.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Those prices have come way down.

[Linus Sebastian]

If I can get a 16 gig kit for 50 Canadian rubles. No, that is not fast. DDR4. Not my, you know, favorite thing. But here's a crazy idea. Learn to overclock your memory. Take a time of hardship and learn something new. Scrapyard wore it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That did kind of look like DDR3, someone pointed out in Flowpoint chat. But there is also a lot of heatsinks across generations.

[Linus Sebastian]

It says four right on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think they had very similar heat spreaders on. On three. Those rip jaws in the top left I like. I swear they had DDR3 kits that looked exactly the same or Very close.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean we can double check.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not even rip jaws, it's ballistics.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, this is DDR4 lead free. Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But yeah, I, they, they will very often have heat spreaders that look effectively the same across gens.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it doesn't matter like dude, it's like, yeah, is it, is this a great situation?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did DDR4 used market RAM go down?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, that's the thing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I swear it was higher.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's the thing about the secondhand market is brand new. Brand new is going to be based on like hype. It's going to be based on marketing, it's going to be based on shiny. But the secondhand market, no product can hide from its true value. And sometimes that means that something's worth a lot. And you know, a perfect example of that would be something like 30 90s still be worthing. There's, there's still much money.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There is, there is still market manipulation on the used market.

[Linus Sebastian]

But to, oh, to such a lesser degree. Yeah, like, like if something is still, you know, really useful because it has 24 gigs of VRAM or whatever, it, you know. Yeah. But if something's just actually plentiful and not that in demand, then the used market is unforgiving. It will go down because people got to move it. It's that simple. Right? Someone like an Nvidia, they have the luxury of going, well, I will allocate my wafers to my super profitable data center hardware and my networking IC and I will just simply make less G force in order to make sure that the price of me. Joe, Joe GPU clearance v9 sale doesn't have that luxury. These got to move.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What's going on there?

[Linus Sebastian]

That's in Chilliwack, baby.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You want to go whack some Chili's, dude?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, buddy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hell yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I, it sucks. And I realize that, you know, me being removed from, you know, the, the scrappy, I buy things for as cheap as I can and like fix them and stuff like that. It probably comes across grating to some people for me to say this stuff, but it's not like I didn't live this. It's not like there weren't periods of stuff being more affordable and less affordable while I was working south. And that's a huge part of why I have the knowledge base and the troubleshooting skills that made me be able to build the media company that I am speaking to you from today. I think it's a great opportunity to learn and get the most out of you Know what is out there. And DDR4 is out there, man. Just, you know, you gotta be, you gotta be savvy though. Don't go and try and buy an X3D chip. So that's an example of something that's older gen but still really expensive because the demand's really high because Everybody knows the X3D branding. Like what's a Ryzen? Let's see what we can find. And I kind of want to see, I kind of want to see what there is on like AliExpress for like pre bundled boards and stuff. Because we're getting to the point where there's got to be some harvestable like mobile stuff that's like DDR4 era at this point. I legitimately am just thinking out loud right now. I have not looked into that and oh man, this site is insufferable. Like how am I supposed to interact with your website? Oh, I have to see this X here that I didn't even notice. No, don't allow. Go away. Motherboard. Let's see what we got. Motherboard. CPU, DDR4. What are we looking at here? Oh gosh. And how bad x99s anyway?

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Sorry, was that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How bad are these?

[Linus Sebastian]

Nothing wrong with those.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do they affect performance at all?

[Linus Sebastian]

They don't affect performance except that sodimms typically are not rated as high. Yeah. And so especially for sodimms you're going to be hard pressed to find something that has really tight timings. So it might be rated for like a good mega transfer per second speed but your latency is going to suck. And so I would avoid those unless you get an outstanding deal on some harvested sodimms or something like that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Especially because they have their own cost. Right. So like we'd have to offset quite a bit.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can't believe how many options there are for old x99 boards still. You know those like remanufactured server chips at once.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wonder why? Well, I think use for mining a bunch or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, there were just so bloody many of those chip sets to be harvested from data centers that are throwing them all away. And the same for the chips. Like here's a board. What is this? A board, a CPU and 16 gigs of DDR4 RAM for 64 Canadian rubles. That is a slow CPU. Now it has 10 cores.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is very slow though.

[Linus Sebastian]

But that is a slow cpu and

[Luke Lafreniere]

not only are the Gigama Hertz slow, but that's going to be some, some rough IPCs at this point too.

[Linus Sebastian]

Mm, mm, mm. Okay, here we go. What are we looking at here? Engineering sample. Engineering sample. 0000 product performance refer to the i7 11800H. That's a functional. No, that's a. That's a functional CPU.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I just. I just.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a 2.3 GHz or 2.2 GHz engineering sample.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We won't tell you what it is but it's refer to this thing Max

[Linus Sebastian]

Turbo 4.5 though apparently it does. I mean yeah, maybe I should. I should buy one of these 200 CAD. So that's. That's 140, 140 US and that includes your motherboard, your CPU but not your DDR4. You'll have to pick up some DDR4. But then as we saw DDR4 are 50 bucks CAD. So we're talking 250 CAD. So that's like still less. Way less than 200 USD for your CPU, motherboard and RAM. And that's a. It's not a great performing CPU but it's a cromulent CPU. It's a little more modern than these like X99 combos that are just like. You will run into games where literally they. The CPU doesn't support like instructions you need in order to run the game now like they're too old.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've been kind of interested in. I watched a basically homeless video recently where he built a cyber deck and I've noticed a couple different tech creators in the tech creator space have recently done videos on Cyberdex.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. We talked about in writers meeting like a few weeks back.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. It seems to be like a. Seems like a mild trend. Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Really trendy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And something that caught my eye when he was talking about his Cyberdeck was this company which I had never heard of before.

[Linus Sebastian]

Lattepanda. Yeah, we've talked about them before and

[Luke Lafreniere]

some of their pro. I probably just forgot.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't remember brand names very well but some of their products are like very cool. Pretty skookum.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This thing's kind of a beast actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like I was kind of looking into the different various things you could do with this and it's pretty impressive.

[Linus Sebastian]

They were either the first or they were among the first to do like a powerful X86 SBC.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that was kind of how they made their name.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's like pretty serious business. Obviously there's a. There's some trade offs but like we

[David "Cave" Johnson]

have an Alpha from 2018. It looks like. Yeah, it's kind of cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's pretty wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

I found. I found another motherboard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Kind of fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

Want to find some old Epic Rome chips.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Whoa.

[Linus Sebastian]

And put them on a huananchi H12D? Yeah, I want to. I want a Chinese remanufactured board for my dual Epic server. Sorry, I just. I love AliExpress chips. No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, okay, okay, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

No. Just a matter.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was gonna, like, buy that now.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is just a crazy pants motherboard that I was just like that. Dang. That's a crazy pants motherboard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was ready to whip the phone out and make a purchase.

[Linus Sebastian]

AMD gaming NAS motherboard. No ram, no rom, no os.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is this, just a block of gray?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. What. What is this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Powered by mobile engineering sample chips. Interesting. Oh, here we go. Here we go. Here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is this?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So you get a motherboard and a 7845HX, and this uses DDR.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Oh, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

This has got to be DDR5, then. What kind of. What kind of DDR is it? Sorry, I'm just, like, shopping at this point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, this is fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

Specifications. Here we go. It's got to be DDR5, though. Yeah, I think so. I think they don't want to show any serial numbers or anything. Yeah. AM5. Yeah. All right, well, I'll. I'll keep looking on my own time, and I'll see. See what I can find for, like, mobile. Mobile chips. Adapted old, harvested mobile chips on motherboards. It looks like 11th gen is kind of where. Where it's at right now for that in terms of what's actually, like, affordable. Seems like could be not a bad thing. All right, what else we got to talk about today? Oh, this one. You want a funny one?

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Three YouTube channels, H383 Productions, Mr. Short Game Golf, and Golf Holics sued Apple back in April, alleging that they deliberately circumvented YouTube's protections against video scraping to train their AI models.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I remember this.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that Apple profited substantially, quote, unquote, by doing so. The same trio have also filed parallel suits against Meta Nvidia, ByteDance, and Snap. Here's some background context. Apple seems like a strange company to sue, given their lack of public frontier video models. But. But back in December 2024, 14 Apple employees co authored a research paper called Stiv Scalable Text and Image Conditioned Video Generation, which is a text image to video generative model. The paper references its training data, and one of the data sets listed is Panda 70M. Panda 70M was originally compiled by Snap and is built from around 3.8 million YouTube videos chopped into about 70.7 million clips. The data set does not contain the actual video files. It's just a list of links to YouTube content. So to actually train on it, somebody has to go to YouTube and download every referenced video themselves. The downloading step is what the YouTubers are arguing required, circumventing YouTube's anti scraping protections. This week Apple has responded with a motion to dismiss, arguing that the videos were free for anyone to watch with no login or paywall. So whatever download blocking YouTube has doesn't legally count as an access lock. And the DMCA claim only works if there was a lock on access in the first place. Full legal document quote from MacRumors for reference here. Plaintiffs allege that they posted audiovisual works to YouTube and that any number of the public can see them there. No password, no payment, no lock, no key. Allegedly, YouTube employs technological measures to prevent unauthorized downloading. But because YouTube provides public access to the videos, the alleged technological measures do not control access to the works as Section 1201A requires. This is fascinating.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Using the Atlantic tool to check Panda 70M LTT has 4701 videos listed there.

[Linus Sebastian]

So basically Apple is arguing that surely they cannot possibly have violated my copyright on those videos, which I definitely own because those videos were posted on YouTube. If Apple wins this. If Apple wins this. Do you remember when Apple demanded that old ad collateral of theirs was taken down? Do you remember this? Someone archived old Apple like keynotes and product imagery.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Seems like it was publicly shared to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Seems like it was publicly accessible to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

With no lock and key. Apple's website is publicly accessible with no lock and key.

[Linus Sebastian]

Does Apple really want to win this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like that would be insane.

[Linus Sebastian]

If they do this would completely scrap like copyright as it currently exists. And there might be some people who are going to root for that. I don't think Apple is one of them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So basically you're saying that if I have a downloader that can, you know, get it and you know it was publicly, where's the line on the downloader?

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're, they're just accepting the fact that they circumnavigate and circumnavigated the download limit limitations. Yeah, they're just being okay with that.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is wild. What an argument. They're not even, they're not even pretending that they didn't just take it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very interesting, very interesting discussion question. You both lived through Napster, through the Napster era, Is this the Napster moment for AI where the lawsuits don't really fix anything. It ends up with someone building a licensing pipe. I mean I feel like something like that will happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

What does that look like though? I mean I, I tried to raise that back at Creator Summit where I was basically, basically just like, okay, so you know, ultimately if Google uses like builds a licensing agreement for other companies to access YouTube videos, what does my compensation look like for that? And I couldn't get a clear answer out of anybody because what I suspect is that they would just kind of

[Luke Lafreniere]

go, eh, they want to pocket it for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think we'll just keep that. Kind of like how YouTube avoids engaging in a deeper conversation with me every time I ask about what happens to of the money from the AdSense on non partner program videos. Because it used to be they just didn't have ads on them. Well now they have ads and YouTube just I guess takes 100% of it because they don't have to share it with anybody.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And there's rampant perverse incentives when it comes to that. I saw it was shared a video recently. I'm trying to remember the details. There's like this weird robot arm that scans over this lady's actual real arm thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it like looks like it's putting a tattoo on her arm with a laser or something. And it's like just very obviously AI. But the reason why it was shared to me was it was someone that I know, but they had watched the WAN show segment where we were complaining about how YouTube is going down a bad path. Practically all of the comments and with tons of upvotes we're like, Is this what YouTube has become? Look at the fall of YouTube.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Seems like there's a lot of room for competition now that YouTube is like going to whatever else. And it was just like, whoa, I haven't seen comments like that on YouTube ever. Like the entire comment section wasn't going oh gross. This video is AI. They were going, oh gross. YouTube has no mechanisms for solving this. Like there's no dislike button. So you can't flag to other users that it is very easily. Comments are super easy to bot. It's just, it's brutal man. They gotta figure this out. They gotta figure the shorts thing out. Because the other thing with shorts is they're so short lived usually. Yeah, they'll blow up and then disappear. And if you're trying to spread some misinformation, whatever else, that's fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. But if you're trying to find a

[Luke Lafreniere]

Short again after you've seen it once is like, who knows?

[Linus Sebastian]

So just for fun, let's play a little game. I'm playing this on the WAN show. Oh, I'm recording it. I am profiting from it right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To me, it seems like it's freely shared with no lock or key.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. So therefore there was nothing for me to circumvent. Therefore I am well within my rights to have this and profit from it and benefit from it in whatever way I see fit. Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Seems like it. Based on their argument. Right. Plaintiffs allege that they posted audio visual works to YouTube.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And that any member of the public see them there with no password, no payment, no lock, no key. Allegedly YouTube employs technological measures to prevent unauthorized downloading.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, clearly I'm able to. Clearly I'm able to get around this. This by recording my screen while I watch the video. So that just seems like if Apple didn't want anybody to have this, then they probably shouldn't have posted it on YouTube. That seems, that seems. Is there anything inconsistent between my argument and Apple's argument here?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, they. They specify at the end, but because YouTube provides public access to the videos as they are with this one, the alleged technological measures do not control access to the works. So we're good to use it based on Apple's claim.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. And to be clear, there's a lot of people who agree with Apple's response to H3, Mr. Short Game and Golfholics. I just don't think Apple really agrees with Apple. And it will be fascinating to watch them bend themselves into a pretzel trying to reconcile this stance with their previous stances. How much you want to bet that I get a copyright strike on this video from Apple?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, Almost guaranteed. They do that normally.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're like Nintendo.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If it was Nintendo, I would be sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hard to say apple.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not 100% sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

I do know that the person who archived all the old Apple marketing collateral was no longer hosts it. That's. That's publicly available information.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Very.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right, what do we got next?

[Linus Sebastian]

And I. I often get accused of being like an Apple hater. What I hate is hypocrisy. Yeah, that's what I hate. I don't hate Apple. I use their products. Love some of their products. But I hate hypocrisy. If you're going to, you know, if you're, if you're going to be that guy, that's like strict by the numbers, IP law, copyright, be that guy. Be Nintendo. To Nintendo's credit, they don't steal other people's ip. They are internally consistent, which at the very least I can. I don't have to like, but I have to respect. I have to. That's your stance. That's your. That's your position. You're treating others as you wish to be treated. That's the golden rule. I respect that. At the very least. I often don't like it the way Nintendo does things. But you can't have it both ways. It can't be here's a set of rules for everybody else and here's my rules. No, you. You can't do that. It's not cool, that's all. Oh, you know what is cool is telling you about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you do the full plane stuff? I don't think so, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what else is cool is telling you about Ahrefs? If your business is getting buried in the Google and Bing algorithms, there's lots of reasons for that, but there's a good chance it's because your company isn't optimized for being found online. Thankfully, Ahrefs can help you with SEO that helps make sure your business reaches the potential clients and customers you'd like. They can crawl the web on your behalf and store petabytes of information about live sites. They look for things like AI visibility, keyword rankings, both paid and organic search, traffic, and more. Ahrefs also has a full library of pre built marketing tools and apps built by their team, with the freedom for you to clone and customize them for your individual needs. With ahreps you'll have full access to what you need to turn SEO data into concise answers as to why people can't find you, and then you'll be given recommendations for next steps. So if you're running an ecommerce shop, Ahrefs can help you track hundreds of SKUs and give you insight into not just which products are being searched for, but it can allow you to compare them to competitors to help you understand how to compete in the market. Market Check out Ahrefs Agent A today using our link and take the guesswork and legwork out of optimizing your web traffic. We'll have them linked down below. Finally, the show is brought to you by Greenman Gaming. The Green Man Gaming summer sale is here and you can save up to 75% on over 5,000 games. This includes discounts on great games from some of the biggest publishers like Capcom, Square, Enix, 2K, Ubisoft and and plenty more. Green Man Gaming Works directly with over 1300 different developers and publishers, making them an official PC game retailer. Your game codes are going to work, you're going to save money, and you can support your favorite dev teams guilt free. Looking for something to play with your friends? Well, hey, you and your Buddies can save 63% on Monster Hunter Wilds. They're all going to look dripped out in dragon armor. Or if you're more into Spooky Boy Summer and are looking for something to play solo, check out 2023's Best Narrative Game Awards winner, Alan Wake 2. It's on sale for 70% off. Get even more with free access to their XP program. It's super simple to do and full details are available on the homepage. And you get access to even more discounts. So don't wait. Save big with Greenman Gaming Summer Sale at the link down below. Oh, I guess I'm also supposed to do our floatplane announcements. Wow. We have three early access videos going up on floatplane right now. Tomorrow's video, Monday's video, and Wednesday's videos are all going up. We have. No one is talking about how terrible SD cards are. They really are terrible. We're switching off of them. We're done with SD cards. We also have our next collab with Splave. Okay, this is a cool video. Check this out. Hold on. I gotta just save the post here. Oh, can I do this?

[David "Cave" Johnson]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

I hate anything that doesn't let me open it in a new tab. Okay, there we go. Oh, did I set this one public? Oh, no.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Save.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, here we go. And refresh. Oh, it's not there. Okay, we'll give it a. Let's give it a minute. We'll give it a minute to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What are we doing?

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll give it a minute to propagate. Did I not. Yeah, I did. Okay, well, it'll. It'll post in a second, I'm pretty sure. Also. Oh, no way. We've got the Oshkot Motion Simulator. Holy crap. Okay, this one's a banger. This thing is so cool. I got to try it. And what did you think?

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Banger.

[Linus Sebastian]

Please refresh the page. What the. What the crap?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I'm wondering if you're like, rate limiting things. Oh, I don't know if.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

No, they both just posted.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I don't know if people normally like, spam release videos.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, everything's here.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, this thing. This thing's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It looks crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

It does 90 degrees on every major axis, so it can do 45. 45.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I.

[Linus Sebastian]

45. 45. And what are the other ones? 45, 40. Oh, no, it goes all the way around. Yeah, this thing. And. And they set it up with. They set up like. Like a rock crawler thing. Check this out. So see the car behind me? I'm driving this car. Huh? And it's responding in real time. Dude, it's so freaking cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That, man, if you could wireless into Snowrunner, that would actually unironically be so much fun.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, it was. It was one of the most cut. It was one of the most fun things that I've done in like, I don't know, ages. Like the most fun I had driving, like a sim rig. Is it comfortable? What are you talking about? That's like asking how much fuel economy the Ferrari has. It's not the point. Point?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah,

[Linus Sebastian]

hardly the point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I want to figure out if you can make this work with Snowrunner.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

And then Snowrunner has like, you know, output for force feedback. Sometimes they work.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then this one's great. We got our hands on the first,000Hz gaming monitor and built 1000 FPS gaming PC in partnership with Splave. And this is probably so you use

[Luke Lafreniere]

the chiller paired with Splave.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a great video.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Wow,

[Linus Sebastian]

we have fun here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that's awesome.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Amazing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, we've got early access over on Floatplane for those three videos and we launched our second batch of badges. Is okay, I clicked the link. Cool. Float Plane Sub badges. Whoa. You can get a vessel badge?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I don't know.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Oh, wait, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes you can.

[Linus Sebastian]

What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

They don't exist anymore?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, they don't exist anymore. What are they. What are they going to do?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Alpha, Alpha plus.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What am I looking at?

[Linus Sebastian]

He's never gonna be rid of this helmet. Oh, my goodness. Okay, well, these are. These are great. Love the Tech house badge.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anywho, we have new badges. Not only are we celebrating the tiers of Floatplane Sub, but people who are active during our special weeks, like Luke Week, Dan Week, or Yvonne Week. This is alongside our early release for our flagship series, Scrapyard wars and Secret Chopper. These videos are available early only on LMG GG fpwan. All right, there you go, Sammy. We did the float plane announcements.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hold on. This oshcut thing, is it. You can't buy it. Is that a one off?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's us. It's a several off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Several off. So they made like five of them or something?

[Linus Sebastian]

They made some, yeah. And you can experience them in certain places at certain times.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are you Allowed to keep that one.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's gone already.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

I tried. There's last year at Open Sauce.

[Linus Sebastian]

They might be at Open Sauce again. You're going, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that'd be cool.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

They were creators, only it was a racing track. You had to set a lap time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I remember people doing that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. They are just like super cool guys though.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

They're awesome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wicked, man. And they're getting the shipping accurately. Working with Snowrunner, you could do it. You pair that with like some big screen beyond.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He got.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if I'd need another game.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Like, we're gonna get you into sim. Sim racing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

God. This is why the racing is.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

It's not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

No, no, same thing. Sim, sim car stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not the same.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Like I just drive in Japanese traffic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What I saw was him driving a, you know, rock buggy some. Sure. Over a bunch of rocks and stuff. In Snowrunner, I'm gonna be like sideways, basically.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude. Okay, okay. He got throat.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Ah.

[Linus Sebastian]

One of the things I love about paintball is that the consequences are real.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's. You actually want to avoid being hit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because like laser tag, water gun fight. Everyone just like runs around and like, you go. You go stand right next to. In paintball, you do not. It's walk up to somebody because it freaking hurts to get hit. And I'm talking like actual paintball with the like proper caliber balls. Paintball caliber stop size of 60. 68 cal. 68 cal. Oh, they did that. The local fields, they play it like stupid 50 cal now. And it's just like, let me throw

[David "Cave" Johnson]

ping pong balls at you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. It doesn't. It doesn't hurt. The point of paintball is that it frickin hurts. I want bruises and it so. So that incentivizes type 3 fun. That incentivizes the right behaviors. Because it's not. It's not fun to play a game where there's. Where your opponent doesn't have any consequences for you beating them, you know? So anyway, hold on. Where I'm going with this or like

[Luke Lafreniere]

taking a risk, you rob someone of the exhilaration of taking that risk if there is no consequence to the risk.

[Linus Sebastian]

Correct. Exactly. So driving the Oshkot motion sim crashing sucks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, I bet.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that's actually what I enjoyed about it more than anything else is when I like tipped my rock crawler, I'm like. Like it's. And it's unpleasant.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, I want. I want a situation where my truck is tipping in Snowrunner. And I do. I don't know what it's actually called, but I do something called ninja roping, which is like, while you're falling, you can send out your winch to grab a tree, and it grabs the tree, and then the whole thing is like. Because, like, all the weight of this truck just got caught by it grabbing a tree or whatever. And now I'm stuck in this spot and I gotta figure out, like, how the heck do I get out of here? Like, I. That sounds so fun. All the likeness of off roading, but without the insane cost and risk and everything else.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Well, the neat thing about Oshkut is, like, it's all made by Oshkut. So you could, like, get the plans and have them cut it for you. I mean, the Clear Path Steppers are gonna be gosh darn expensive, but, you know, it was built by their service.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Theoretically, they could make you one.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure they would if you asked nicely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

These guys look awesome. I've just been scrolling through their website.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, they do, like, everything. Super quick turnaround time. Metal fab.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah, basically you. You send them the files. They. I think it's like an instant quote thing. There's a couple of these. They have some competitors around, too, but they mostly just do sheet metal and some bending and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

It's pretty sick cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. That was a fun video. It was nice of them to come up here and let us play with their big boy toys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ballster said one problem with that, it would require Luke spending money. It would require me spending a lot of money.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

One of the Clear Path Steppers would probably make you very unhappy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it was like multiple thousands of dollars per axis. Yeah.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Surprised at all.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Huge and really powerful and really accurate. They're so cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And the thing is, is you. You. You want it to be really powerful because you want that thing to not just be able to move. You want it to be able to rip you around a little bit like they need to.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

And find control because you want to. You want to feel the jiggles.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

You want to rocks, you know,

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Here's a quick one. Usernames are coming to WhatsApp soon, so you don't have to share your phone number. Just a handle that, like, seems like it should have been a thing 10 years ago, but hey, it's there now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It makes me so much more interested in WhatsApp. My goodness.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right now there's a bit of a race to grab usernames oh no,

[David "Cave" Johnson]

How

[Luke Lafreniere]

do we do it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, obviously mine wasn't going to be available. Cool. Linus Sex Tips.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Where'd you find it? Where is that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, I'm going with a classic Linus username. No, it just had a banner for me when I opened up the app

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't have I found one. I found the way Warning Warning.

[Linus Sebastian]

Reserve your thing. That's why I kept my 6 digit ICQ. Nice tall ND and floatplane chat. Nice Context menu asks Isn't this going to get everyone adding you on WhatsApp? Linus yeah, if I was a big enough dumb dumb to share personal information yet again, then it would be Obviously I did not register as Linus Sex Tips.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, the reason why I think someone might have asked about that is that is a decently common name in video games.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I know it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's why I said I have played with people with that username and they don't know it's me.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have never used that username. So if you've ever played with someone calling themselves Linus Sex Tips, it was not me.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah, that's his Rocket League Smurf account. Don't ban.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, just wanted to give you guys a heads up on that. There's not really like anything newsworthy, particularly about it, but if you want to go claim your username, now is probably as good a time as any. AMD FSR 4.1 benchmarks reveal frame rate regression on Rdna 3 graphics cards But AMD has officially brought FSR 4.1 to Rdna 3, so that's Radeon RX7000 by adapting the AI upscaler from its original FP8 implementation to an INT8 model. The update is delivered through the Radeon driver and automatically replaces supported FSR 3.1 implementations without requiring manual game modifications. Performance reviews consistently mention substantially improved image quality with much sharper output, better temporal stability, and significantly reduced blur, ghosting, shimmering and flickering. In many cases, FSR 4.1 balanced was judged to look better than FSR 3.1 quality. However, the trade off is that rDNA3 incurs a larger performance hit, so frame rate gains are smaller than with both FSR 3.1 and with FSR 4.1 on Rdna 4. While the testing found that FSR 4.1 on our DNA 3 frame rates are typically lower than with FSR 3.1, they remain well above native rendering in most cases, so you're not taking so much of a hit that it's not even worth enabling at all. Speaking of which, based on AMD's current roadmap, RDNA 2 is expected to receive FSR 4.1 support in early 2027. Our discussion question asks Are you excited to see FSR 4.1 on Steam Machine? How much will that change the machine's value proposition? I would say honestly, not that much. The problem for the Steam Machine is not that it doesn't have enough upscaling, I think it's just that it doesn't have enough RAW in order to upscale from.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was a good way of pronouncing that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, that's how. That's how. That's how the word is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I'm yeah, yeah. It's funny because before you said it, I was going to say chutzpah and then you did that and I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's only one more topic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do we send it virus464 says didn't listen to that at all. Was securing my WhatsApp handle. All right, I'll give you guys a minute.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think I. I think I ripped my handle out of someone's hands.

[Linus Sebastian]

Really?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's a handle not available, but if you have it on Instagram already you can take it. And I was like I do frickin got him Yoink. And it gave it to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice solid.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Intel's next gen Nova Lake could be Interesting A new leak from LC Tech Leaks backed by known intel leaker Jaykin claims Intel's top end Nova Lake s desktop chip could feature 52 cores and pull up to 474 watts of PL2 power. So that's the short term boost limit that a CPU can hit while turboing, not what it draws at idle or during light use. This 474 watt figure applies to the flagship dual tile model at stock. And drawing more than that would be into overclocking territory, but probably possible. For reference, Intel's flagship desktop chips have sat around 250 watts since 10th gen Comet Lake. The leak also points to high end LGA 1954 motherboards, likely the Z990 series featuring three EPS 8 pin CPU power connectors instead of two or one. Whoa, that probably won't be necessary. A single EPS 8 pin is rated for around 235 watts, so two of them already gives you 470 watts plus another 75 or so from the socket. But if you were going to do any overclocking then I could see needing another. Allegedly. It makes no difference to stock performance though. Okay, so that makes Sense sense. Worth noting that the board photo that circulated with the leak actually showed two EPS connectors plus a PCIe 8 pin, not three dedicated CPU connectors. That would actually be a pretty smart way to do this because that PCIe connector can still do a lot of 12 volt power and you're more likely to have more PCIe connectors already included with your modular power supply. Even though many modular power supplies use the same the same outputs for both PCIe and EPS. So you could like get more modular cables, but it'd be nice if they just built it with something that I'm already likely to have the cables for. Nova Lake is rumored to require the new LGA 1954 socket and 900 series chipsets, meaning that no upgrade path will be available from the current LGA 1851. Intel has not officially confirmed any of this Discussion Question Every generation flagship CPUs and GPUs are creeping higher on power Draw. Are we hitting the point where a high end PC is not reasonable to run in a normal room?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have noticed the room where Emma and I have moved our computers to can cook. Unless there's it's getting hot in here.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, you don't have to talk about that on my end show if you don't want to, but you can

[Luke Lafreniere]

if you know, if we don't have a window open or AC running or something gets hot in there.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

With the computers running like it actually just really does.

[Linus Sebastian]

It really does. Yeah. Cut some chicken. Chicken time.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Chicken and machine learning training.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

So hot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I was going somewhere with this. Nope, forget it.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is the new channel, the WAN Show. Make sure you subscribe if you haven't already.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How many. How bad was it?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it was pretty bad this week. Yeah, it's quite a bit lower than usual. Yeah. So it was nice having a popular podcast. I remember the days when people used to watch the WAN show show. But we had to. We had to do this. It had to be done. Luke and I are 5050 owners of the WAN show and so it has to be broadcast on a different channel.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

What's left?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Why did you bother? Show 10 years of just down the

[Luke Lafreniere]

drain the way show.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh man. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, hey, I don't know man. Do we need to just do a dedicated video over on ltt? It'll get like no views because there's no. There's no floor anymore. Like if it's not like just announcing a thing, YouTube just won't serve it. I don't Really? I don't really know how to. I don't really know how to deal with this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Should it be a combined update?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that. Talking to the audience, like a State of the Union. I'm kind of overdue.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe it'd be nice to do one when there isn't, like, a scandal to respond to for a change. Yeah, I could start. I could do a scandal. No, because then it would get more views.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, let's cut. Let's come up like, dude, my scandals are so lame. I bet we could come up with a better scandal. Okay, what could we do? Okay? I mean, we've already, like, find some

[Luke Lafreniere]

way that it's you that is price fixing all the ram.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, interesting. That's not a bad, like, April Fool's joke, but I don't see that as, like, believable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hey, that's what you would say.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's what someone who didn't tell you about Honey would say.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

I still haven't forgiven you for that. What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so for the people watching right now who saw one version of a narrative. Yeah. That's not what happened.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

You should just bring that up again. I should just apologize again for it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's not bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Collab with Coffeezilla apologizing for all of my previous controversies.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

40 hour video apology videos before. Nobody has done a mega apology apologize this hard.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Learn the ukulele and you go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You find, like, all the ways that people around the world apologize, and you try to do it like,

[Linus Sebastian]

I still. I still have the billet labs monoblock. I keep. No, I keep it in my office.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Apology auction.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was having fun for a little bit. I'm done now.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Shall we do when after dark? I swear, before there's blood spilled on my carpet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Go on, dude, it's over. Don't worry about it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nobody's watching anyway. The VOD's gonna be even worse.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, probably.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Oh, All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know. You know, the word didn't get out for. Oh, man, I shouldn't even make this joke. But whatever. Nobody's watching. You know, the.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's so many people watching.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know, the. You know, the. The channel move didn't do very well when the Bud and Pal video did better than the last wet show.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's not. That's not good. That's not supposed to work.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, maybe the show would be more fun if nobody watched it. We could just say whatever.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

They're already not watching it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Exactly. Yeah, you're fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man. Announce it On Bud and Pal. Yeah, There we go.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

So what's your opinion on. Oh, no, I just.

[Linus Sebastian]

I bleeped it.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Okay. After dark.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, sure, let's do it.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

That button.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How do you know how many live we had on this channel last week?

[Linus Sebastian]

More than that. Oh, on this channel, I have no idea.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

I think combined it was just a little better than this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, like not combined specifically, just the Wanshaw YT channel.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Oh, about twice as good as last week.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, so it is.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

And it's been steadily climbing like the entire show.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, people are. People are finding it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, it's working.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like not many. It doesn't help when I put the wrong link in the community post on ltt. Yeah, I saw that. Thank you, Dan.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

You're welcome. To be fair on Linus, they changed it to something else because I did the same thing and then they changed it to some identity number and then it broke. Very weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

It auto formatted it when I entered it and I assumed that was right and then I didn't check it because I was busy hosting.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

And then I auto formatted it and then it did the same thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so to give you some idea of how much YouTube buries stuff that is that people are not engaging with, like, hey, here's another place you could find me. This has 14 comments. 14. So by comparison are just like stupid troll statement about how we're. All our view videos will be deleted and you can find them@the VHS section on lttstore.com that has 900 from yesterday. So like YouTube has made it so you can't. There's no mobility, there's no portability.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, man. Sorry. Mecca. Mecca Tortoise in full plane chat said, Linus, socks and scandals. Sebastian socks and scandals. I just thought that was pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's pretty good. What would like. Oh man. Scandals. Scandal sandals. What would scandal sandals be?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was thinking like a sale in LTT store when the socks launch where it's like if you buy the socks and a product that had a scandal, then you get a discount.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Could be funny.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, hey, I shot the. Shot the announcement video today.

[Luke Lafreniere]

For socks.

[Linus Sebastian]

For socks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that's actually really exciting.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

I'm excited for feet plane. The Footstream.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, we're not doing that.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

You don't get to.

[Linus Sebastian]

Have you seen the finished product yet?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Should I go get it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I would love to.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. If there's any comms so you can hit Luke with them while I'm coming back.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure, let me.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Sure. I'm not Sure I have. Any Luke. Specific ones get ripped. Fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because no one's watching.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

The viewership's going up every minute 50 times. Zero. So much more on the physical games discussion. Would you guys be open to buying proprietary USB readers for cartridges? USB reader cartridge for PC games made by Valve. Like a switch cart, but for PC. So like USB cartridge.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So a cartridge.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, sure.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Proprietary USB reader. So it would be like a cartridge. You cut the cartridge reader out of the top of a switch too and then glue it to a USB C cable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, so I'm buying a device.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

You're buying a proprietary cartridge reader and the cartridges are sold by Valve.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, a very long time ago, WAN show at the Langley house on the couch. I remember talking about this idea that I had that optical drives could turn into like authentication bays for consoles so you could play console exclusive games on PC.

[Linus Sebastian]

I remember that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Put the disc in. Yeah. So this, this idea sounds a lot like that. They're saying basically could. Would you buy a proprietary thing, USB reader thing that can authenticate games on PC? So you could have physical versions of

[David "Cave" Johnson]

it, like a Yubikey type of thing, but it's got your game license on it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wouldn't, but someone would. I think it'd be cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think someone would for sure be

[David "Cave" Johnson]

like a CD drive. That's what you could call it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If it genuinely gave you a content.

[Linus Sebastian]

Content designator.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, kinda. If it genuinely gave you like offline access or digital video game device. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If. If it had like some kind of cool right to your data benefit like that, then I could. I could be interested in that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you hiding them because you haven't seen them yet. Yeah, but it's a big reveal. They haven't seen them yet. This is final packaging and everything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, Final packaging, I was gonna say. I'm pretty sure they have seen them. Oh, there's two colors. I really like that. Purple actually, obviously the black and gray, but like the.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I'm telling you guys this a little early, but here they are.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like the colors.

[Linus Sebastian]

We've got the branding nailed down. They're gonna be called the Forever Socks. The branding, actually. Yeah, it actually comes from. It was right after Thunderbolts Asterisk launched and I was like. They were like. We were like, how should we brand these? Because we're giving them the limited lifetime warranty, but obviously nothing actually lasts forever. And I was like, well, I don't know if Marvel can do it on a film. I think we can do it on a sock. So we did. Yeah. Forever Asterisk. Sock, Copper infused. Full crew.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I think it's a great name.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right on it. Not actually gonna last forever, but I

[Luke Lafreniere]

think it's a great name. I think I said this last time too. I really like what's been going on with naming. I think true spec is a fantastic name. I think Forever Sock is a fantastic name.

[Linus Sebastian]

The big selling points are gonna be just the all day comfort. Here, I'll let you. I'll let you unbox one. Which one's your favorite color? You said, do you like the purple?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like the purple. I'd probably get the black and gray ones, but I like the purple purple a lot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. That's a whole conversation. That's like a thing in fashion. You have the one that looks poppy on the website and then you have the one everyone buys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep, yep. This one with yellow imac attract me to clicking on the thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then I'd probably buy the buck.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So the big selling points. And we'll go through this in more detail sometime. Whenever. When people are actually watching in the future. But it's the all day comfort. So we've got so much cushion on the bottom that some of our internal wear testers reported that even though they normally wear slippers, they just like didn't anymore. Whoa.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. But obviously you don't want a sock that's that thick everywhere. So we have like a looser knit on the top so you get like vents. So the breathability is really nice. Wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The difference between the bottom and the top is quite substantial.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah, Yep. The, the natural merino fibers in there contribute to. This is a funny one because we did quantitatively test it and we found that the actual drying time of them, especially the thicker parts, is like not that competitive. But I've worn them and my feet have gotten wet and they don't feel that bad. So even though we don't have a way of testing that, the like the wear feeling wicking is, feels really good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Does merino just wick pretty well in general?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's wool. It's like. Yeah. So even though it doesn't like dry dry because it's like a really dense weave in order to get that really soft cushion. Yeah, it's, it's, it wears really well. So we're not 100% sure how to market that. Yeah. Like rod is in float plane chai. He's like, yeah, wool's amazing even when it's wet. And so. Yeah. So we can't say that it's like it's not like a high performance sport, a quick drying sport fabric or anything like that. It's a wool. Like it gets saturated with water, it freaking is wet, but it still wicks. And so that's really important. And then the big one, the one that inspired the like the color of the forever branding on it is the copper infusion. And that's a big part of what makes, makes them. We're not announcing pricing today, but they are.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Are you, are you not going to be cheap? So true spec cabling this in what sense? Every you, you kept warning everyone about the cost of true spec cables and you said the cost, everyone was like,

[Linus Sebastian]

oh, for what these are, I think they're extremely fairly priced. But for what they are, you know,

[Luke Lafreniere]

socks though, like if you want to, if you want a little bit of shock factor, just look up, up how much like I don't know, darn toughs

[Linus Sebastian]

cost with a limited lifetime warranty and with the copper infusion. So what's really cool about the copper infusion treatment is that this isn't some like, some like forever chemicals cocktail that they spray on it and then it comes off in a couple of washes and is all of a sudden in the, you know, water.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it somehow like in the fabric?

[Linus Sebastian]

So, so Tatiana is actually writing and hosting the section of the video that is focused on the copper infusion. But basically there's like copper ions that are not just on the surface but embedded deep within the fibers that are non compatible with fungus and bacteria, fungi and bacteria. So they like, they can't live on it, they just die. And we did third party lab testing to validate that. I think over 99% of fungi and bacteria in contact with the sock. And obviously we didn't test every bacterium on earth and every fungus on Earth, but the sample ones, over 99% of them died.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe you should have.

[Linus Sebastian]

And we got a competing like copper infused garment just to kind of figure out like, okay, like where are we at on this? Like are we, are we competitive? And what we found out was that it didn't have any copper in it at all. It was just a lie. So we didn't have time to like test another one yet. But that's something that we can continue to explore. But we think over 99% is pretty good. Then I guess given that other people are just outright lying about it and apparently haven't been called on it yet, that's pretty funny. So the copy copper infusion is huge because when it comes to odor control, bacteria and fungus is, like, where body odor comes from. And so what I have found is that as much as this is not the kind of thing that you would admit to, you know, even, you know, with nobody watching, Typically I can wear these if I'm not doing, like, a heavy workout. I can wear these for two, three, four days. And they, like, don't smell.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is. Yeah, you probably. Yeah, you probably wouldn't really admit that too much, but which.

[Linus Sebastian]

For how much they cost, maybe a key selling point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Honestly. Yeah. Wool socks are really, really brutal. I like them. It's one of the things that I. I have splurged on a little bit is having some Reno wool socks. I often do try to wait for sales or whatever, but.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, here's the teal. I think the. I think the team nailed the colors.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I do. Really. The colors are really nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

And they're pretty. Even though they're, like, bold. Ish. They're pretty wearable, which is nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, they're.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a wearable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Purple.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not ultra vibrant. It's more. Is that the right term for it? Maybe not vibrant. Yeah, that's more what I'm trying to say. It's obviously blue, but it's not, like, striking.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is. This is an earlier id. This is from, like, years ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

This would have been a little tougher to wear. Even though it's a more black sock.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The colors are more varied, like, compared to that black sock. I think the blacks and the grays are more similar to each other. And you have that orange strip.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So this is. This is just like a very. Yes, I can. I can wear this with my, you know, school uniform.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also, most of the coloring is in your shoe.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep, exactly. So we. We tried to. Not we, man. We did so many different designs and samples, and whole process has been a nightmare.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But this is a lot of fabric.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a lot of sock in it. Yeah, yeah, they're. I've been wearing them all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you want four times the sock in your sock? Well, here's a sock for you.

[Linus Sebastian]

I want it to cost four times as much or more. They're not going to be cheap. I want to warn people ahead of time, these are not cheap socks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Marino wool products in general are kind

[David "Cave" Johnson]

of

[Luke Lafreniere]

not for the week of stomach. I remember. I think we launched like, a shirt or some underwear or something. Or both.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we've done both.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People were like, what? And then people also just looked up how much that stuff costs, and they're like, oh, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pretty Much. Yeah. But you know what? It's like a Sam Vimes boots economic theory thing. I actually tell the story of, like,

[Luke Lafreniere]

how they do last a long freaking time.

[Linus Sebastian]

How this product came to be in the mainline video. And a big part of why we bothered was that the socks that I used to buy got skimflationed. And all of a sudden I found myself going, okay, well, like, if I'm gonna pay way more for my socks socks, I'd rather pay way more for nicer socks that last longer than paying way more to keep rebuying the same crappy socks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so if that's gonna happen, then, okay, fine, I'm gonna go look for premium socks then. And what I discovered was that, yeah, it totally works if you can buy the better thing up front. It lasts so much longer that you actually end up spending less. So that's where I kind of went. Okay, yeah, we could. We could. Well, we would do a premium sock then. Something that. Total cost of ownership, you know, you come back to like, like tech. Tech concepts.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, what's the TCO of this sock? And I think it's not going to be that unreasonable. Anyway, I'm sure we'll have some more details for you guys whenever we actually launch them, but sure, the CW team is going to be upset with me, but stay tuned, guys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Stay tuned. Before COVID when I started boxing, a lot of the, like, lateral movement and quick dashing stuff we were doing really started wrecking shoes and socks very rapidly. And that's when I jumped the merino wool fence.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I bit the bullet and bought a bunch of icebreakers. And I have rebought, but never because any of them became unwearable.

[Linus Sebastian]

I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because I like, lost socks.

[Linus Sebastian]

It sounds crazy, right, to wear wool socks for boxing? Yeah, it's not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not. Actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

I vastly prefer my LTT socks for badminton compared to just about anything else. One of the challenges that we ran into with a lot of the samples was getting the slip right. So you don't want it to be like sandpaper on your. On your shoe, because then your foot's going to move around in the sock. But you also don't want the sock to slip freely on the insole because then you're going to get friction. Yeah, it's gotta. There's gotta be the right amount of slip.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

At both. Getting it right sucks. There's a lot of work. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Those are very expensive, though. I know a decent amount of people that have, like, a pair and they have normal socks. Outside of that. And then they'll wear it for like certain occasions. A hike or something like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. I only have, I only have two of these in my rotation right now because I haven't gotten any of the final samples. I only have, have pre production samples. I should take these, actually. I think they need them for B roll for the video. But I, I, I like save them for days when like I know I'm playing baddie tonight. Or like when I, when I, when I, when I know I need them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is there a golf set that includes three socks in case you get a hole in one?

[David "Cave" Johnson]

What?

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice. Wait for it, wait for it. Oh, nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That took me way too long.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. All right, well, let's do a couple more comms and then let's get him, let's get him home into bed. That's pretty good. Lord.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Have you gotten in trouble for driving the fire truck?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, surprisingly, I, I daily drove it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I daily drove it for a week and then I drove it like for a couple more days after. And other than people, it was like, it was like hiding in plain sight. It's like, it's like wearing a high vis, High vis, like vest at like

[Luke Lafreniere]

because of how visible you are. You become invisible.

[Linus Sebastian]

Exactly. No one pays attention to a fire truck unless it's sirens are on. You're just a truck going down the road. If anything, you are less notable. Yeah, but, but on the other hand, people like, get out of your way. Like it's, it's actually a horrible, horrible vehicle to drive. It's like, you know, a 90s fire truck. Like. Yeah, it's terrible. You know, compared to my taycan, obviously off the line, it's not, you know, the lines. This line's still in front of us, boys. Come on, harder on the pedal. Here we go. You know, it's not great, but, but in terms of like how much room people give you on the road. Unparalleled. Amazing. Oh, on the subject of parallel. Sucks to park, actually. Nightmare.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have you had to parallel park it like between cars?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, I would just. So like at the office, I would just drive way down the road until there's nobody.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then I would barely be able to parallel park it at all. The visibility and it's terrible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's really fun though.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

I'm sure people would be a lot more respectful than if you were like a 40 foot container type truck. Oh, and I'm sure you could also just like park it on this like curb.

[Linus Sebastian]

You just curb it.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Go on the grass and just be like, yeah, no one's gonna care.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He was. He was pretty good. You take up 80 spots. Was it once or twice?

[David "Cave" Johnson]

I don't remember.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But you drove me around at least once and I was. I was pretty impressed at some of the moves. It was good.

[Linus Sebastian]

You have to turn the wheel so much.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's like a workout.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It looked like a bit of a workout.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah. Terrifying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We made it though.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Up next. Hi lld. I have a second gaming PC in the living room.

[Linus Sebastian]

Show off.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Can I run Hexos or Truenas with Windows or SteamOS virtual machine so my GPU accelerated NAS can still be a game machine? And can you do an updated vid of the UseGame PC? Na.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, that one got cut off. Okay, I think I see where you're going with this. I wouldn't. So what? Sorry, because of anti cheat, in most cases, running your gaming operating system as a VM is not really as much of a thing anymore. I haven't tried it with SteamOS admittedly, but even then you're going to need to pass through a GPU to it if you want like near bare metal performance. And you're running a consumer card. So if you were hoping for your GPU to still continue to accelerate nas, things like Plex transcoding, you got to kind of pick one or the other or install another gpu. And at that point, what are we even talking about here? I think you just have that continue to be a nas and then if I was you, I would probably be looking into how to stream from your main PC over to the living room using something like Moonlight. That that would be, in my opinion the more practical solution to making your main PC accessible in multiple places and then just keeping your nas. Your NAS lld.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

I force my wife to listen to the WAN show each Saturday during our weekend errands. That said, I work for Meta in their data center turn up. What do you think of the NEO Cloud spend on compute

[Luke Lafreniere]

data center turn up?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not sure what a turnip is.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

I learned that NEO cloud is like GPU compute centers. Yeah, never heard that term before.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, what do I think? I mean, I think I feel like I talked about this enough earlier on the show where I kind of went. I think, I think it's out of control. It feels very bubbly how much we're spending on all of this stuff collectively as a species. You know, I would, I would love to see us take a more measured approach to the build out that involves less land grabbing all of the available silicon and more, you know, figuring out what are the constructive ways that we can use this technology. I'm not anti AI and I'm not anti data centers, but what I am is anti consuming all the things with no semblance of a concept of a plan. And that's really what a lot of it feels like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I'm anti the fact that like all of its knowledge was effectively pirated.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it already happened, including what, 4,000 of LTTS videos. Yeah, you're welcome, I guess.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, but like it's, it's already out there. I think the. I think the fact that Mr. Mr. Dario seems to be publicly scared of locally ran open source models.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is like. Yeah, goaded based get owned. And they're already out there.

[Linus Sebastian]

You.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So what are you gonna do now?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But who was it that was crying was this this week or last week about. About their poor AI models getting. Getting scraped by Chinese copycats? Was that anthropic?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I think so.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

The dock freaking so funny. Freaking hilarious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You have. Everything you have was scraped.

[Linus Sebastian]

Freaking hilarious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't feel bad for you at all, bro.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, so. So, yeah, so they were. Yeah, okay. This was, this was the whole thing. So they, they caught, they caught Chinese AI companies because you can kind of reverse ish engineer ish an AI model by asking it enough stuff and then just like taking the outputs of it and then you can use that to kind of develop your own model weighting.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so what they were discovering was that Chinese competitors were sending like across like many, many bot accounts, like hundreds of thousands of requests in order to find fine tune their own competing products. And so they were begging with the U.S. government. Yeah, it was anthropic, says Tim in floatplane chat. So they're begging with the U.S. government. Oh, you have to stop these guys. You have to stop them from doing this. This is our. This is our pride. Intellectual property. Take the king.

[Luke Lafreniere]

L. Well, they also seem to be going after Cheerios. They also seem to be going after locally hosted models.

[Linus Sebastian]

So good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

By saying that it's super dangerous because they can't police like the people and monitor what they're doing with it in an attempt as far as I can tell, to stop outside competition from doing the same thing they did of stealing all the data.

[Linus Sebastian]

Too bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Also make it so that people would have to subscribe and used monthly payment versions and not be able to host things locally.

[Linus Sebastian]

Listen, if my. It's already out there, boy, if my gonna be stolen, then Everyone might as well have it. Yeah, that's where I'm at. Pandora's box is open.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's opened. There's no going back. We unsteel all the data, deal with

[Linus Sebastian]

it, and you don't get to steal everything and then cry foul when somebody steals it. I thought it was all in the name of progress, baby. Yeah, well, this is progress now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And, yeah, like, I mean, you can. You can. You can say that you hate that everything was stolen. Yeah. So do we.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But you. You quite literally can't unsteel it. And you can't unsteel it largely because of everything that got open source, to be completely honest, which I think was part of the reason why some of the big companies started doing that in the first place.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's some pretty 3D chess.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I had. I had that thought quite a while ago of like. Like, why. Why are they open sourcing this stuff? What possible benefit does it give?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I think it gives the benefit of. Of the genie's out of the bottle. You can't put it back in now.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

We did it for everyone. It's out there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not even that we did it for everyone.

[Linus Sebastian]

We could get it back. It's that we could go retrieve it again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyone could get it back and retrieve it again like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's been downloaded by so many people that you can. You can't undo this move. It was. It was. That's. Now that that has happened, there is no putting. Yeah, all the stuff is stolen permanently. You can no longer unsteel it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Tim says it's really funny. They call it an attack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The. The. The distillation attack. Because you're distilling information from the model, which is amazing because they distilled all of their information from everyone by pirating everything get wrecked.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is it like a scale over 150,000 exchanges?

[Luke Lafreniere]

You pirated way more than that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, shut up. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no cares for them at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it is this interesting thing. I've heard a counter argument that's like, yeah, okay, but now you're just gonna crush them.

[Linus Sebastian]

So what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

But some new company that is going to benefit off of their stuff is just gonna prop up and it's called

[Linus Sebastian]

Shoulders of Giants, boys.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, sounds good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's stand on them. Because I'm sure not reaching a reasonable height on my own.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that doesn't bother me at all. I just. I don't care for them in the slightest.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Last one I got for you. Hi, Le doing this? Currently sitting idle because of the 41 degree heat. Nearly quenched my MRI. Did you know that there's a shortage in titanium tools for working on MRI equipment? What caused this?

[Linus Sebastian]

I would have to imagine just like China. Us trade stuff.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

But I blame ram okay the truck brand though this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thank you, Dan. This is why he's the producer and not the on screen talent.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh my goodness.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh titanium is mined globally. Blah blah blah. Oh yes. Here we go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

War.

[Linus Sebastian]

Linus, laptop. China.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Never not be funny.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No one watches the show. It's fine.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But yeah, some. There's some theory of war.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Planes sure. Trains, automobiles, drones.

[Linus Sebastian]

Solid reference.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah

[David "Cave" Johnson]

yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who knows?

[Linus Sebastian]

Sweet reference you might say. Toilet suite. You can probably just. Thanks for tuning into the WAN show. We'll see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bye bye.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't eat toilet sweets.

[David "Cave" Johnson]

Now you tell me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't.