The Linux Challenge Is Going… - WAN Show February 27, 2026

Summary

The WAN Show — February 27, 2026

Episode: "The Linux Challenge Is Going…"

Hosts: Linus Sebastian & Luke Lafreniere
Podcast: Linus Tech Tips - The WAN Show
Summary prepared for: Listeners who missed the episode and want a thorough, content-rich update

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Episode Overview

This week’s WAN Show features Linus and Luke diving deep into Linus’ latest “Linux Challenge”—a candid, sometimes exasperated, account of the hurdles and surprises he’s hit switching to Linux for gaming in 2026. Along the way, they tackle tech headlines, including wild battery claims, Big Media mergers (Paramount/Warner Bros.), AI surveillance in fast food, and more. The tone ranges from witty complaint to insightful commentary, with plenty of tangents and tech culture riffs.

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Main Theme: The Linux Challenge – Trials in 2026

Linus’ Linux Gaming Experience

• Initial Motivation: Testing the latest Linux distros for gaming, with a focus on real-world “normie” experiences.
• Preparation: Linus chose Pop!_OS after consulting distros using both classic list articles and LLM recommendations.
  • “To the greatest degree that I can, my goal is to go into this kind of…something relatively fresh.” (03:19)
• Hardware Issues: Immediate setback—dead M.2 SSD due to improper storage.
  • Learned lesson: Always use ESD bags!
• First Impressions: Installing Pop!_OS went well. Steam and Discord were easy to set up—sometimes even simpler than on Windows.

Key Pain Points & Bugs

• Game Compatibility Frustrations:
  • Left 4 Dead 2 constantly crashes after 30 seconds in-game, despite being “native” and “perfect” according to ProtonDB.
  • Reviewing ProtonDB entries, Linus notes users’ “delusional” standards (“works out of the box!”... but only after multiple ‘tinker steps’).
    • "I almost feel like I’m being gaslit. Like I’m a complete idiot because, you know, it didn't work perfectly for me." (11:35)
  • Fix required: Manually force Vulkan via launch arguments—not beginner friendly.
• Helldivers 2 Issue: Mouse movement isn't registered, although button remapping works. Had to resort to using a controller.
  • Bonus bug: A weird border on the top and left of the display, source unresolved.
• Unique Steam Bug: Three simultaneous mirrored Steam windows—all responding to input, but not showing proper menus.
  • “I've never seen that before.” (20:54)

Broader Linux Adoption Reflections

• Fragmentation: Endless flavors/distros—beautiful but a challenge for mainstream adoption.
  • “It’s both the most beautiful, incredible thing about open source, and also the biggest problem it has to overcome.” (22:43)
• Expectation Management: The community’s “pendulum effect”—exaggerated optimism forces new users/critics into a combative stance.
• Verdict: For enthusiasts and tinkerers, Linux is an ongoing adventure. For everyone else, it’s still not “just works” enough, especially when gaming under peer pressure (see: waiting friends in the lobby).

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Timestamps & Key Quotes

[00:07] - Introduction & Linux Challenge Reveal

• Linus swears his issues with Linux are genuine, not user error or trolling.

[05:10] - Pop!_OS: Initial Setup & Game Store

• “I managed to find the store almost immediately. I managed to download Steam and Discord…”

[07:29] - Left 4 Dead 2 LAN Experience

• Steam/Discord download was smooth, but game crashed 30 seconds in.
• “Within about 30 seconds of being in the game, it would just hard break.” (09:12)

[11:25] - ProtonDB Comedy

• Explores the cognitive disconnect between “no tinkering required” reports and reality.
• “Works perfectly out of the box. Tinker steps: switch to experimental, set this launch option...” (11:33)

[13:31] - Linux vs Windows “Whataboutism”

• “Nobody brought up Windows, and I’m happy to criticize Windows. You want to do a Windows Criticism WAN Show?”

[16:01] - Vulkan Fix & Continued Success

• “I typed in a thing, switched over to Vulkan and then lo and behold, ...gaming for over five continuous minutes.”

[18:17] - Helldivers Mouse Bug

• “Mouse look is not working at all...my controller worked perfectly though.”

[20:27] - Steam GUI Madness

• Linus and Luke marvel at duplicated, mirrored Steam windows.

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Luke’s Angle: Distro Choices & Package Managers

• Chose CachyOS, a trendy, performance-focused Arch-based distro (built for gaming).
• Motivated by SteamOS’s Arch roots and personal comfort with Arch.
• Recognizes the package manager isn’t “comfy,” but that’s the beauty (and curse) of Linux—pick what fits you.

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The Linux Fragmentation Dilemma

• Too much choice (“a flavor for anything”), endless fragmentation, naming confusion (distinguishing kernel vs. OS/DE).
• Steam Deck: Highlighted as more beginner-friendly Linux experience, but replicating that polish on generic hardware is not simple.

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Broader Topics & Tech News

Paramount-Warner Bros. Mega-Merger [1:14:31, 195:00]

• Paramount is set to acquire Warner Bros Discovery, consolidating even more media power.
• Discussion turns to how streaming is now becoming more monopolistic than old cable models.
  • “More consolidation in the media we consume is bad.” (195:51)

Donut Labs’ Solid State Battery Hype [1:21:20]

• Finnish startup claims a breakthrough, but skepticism abounds. Linus points to lack of independent, destructive testing.
• Cautions against confusing third-party lab “tests” with endorsement of fundamental claims.
  • “It’s like...credibility washing.” (122:58)

Burger King’s Patty AI Surveillance [1:53:40]

• Burger King testing AI-powered ‘Patty’—monitors employee politeness in drive-thru.
• Hosts debate the balance between necessary supervision and invasive monitoring.
  • “This is the step before complete human replacement.” (166:58)
• Linus reflects: Both wage theft and time theft exist; technology is leading to a “death spiral” of mistrust between employers and employees.

Data Center Land Grab – Farmers Refuse to Sell [2:05:14]

• US farmers refuse multimillion dollar offers for their land from Big Tech seeking data center territory.
• Luke: Agricultural land protections are heavily abused by wealthy homeowners in BC—“playing farmer game” to dodge taxes.

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Side Quests & Memorable Moments

The Urinal Tangent [1:08:10]

• “Every man somehow knows which urinal to stand at.”
• Using non-verbal cues as a metaphor for social behaviors—culminating in a riff on evolutionary psychology.

YouTube/Google Rant [155:40]

• Luke laments YouTube’s algorithm shift toward “brain rot” content and away from educational or wholesome material.
  • “Bring back the wholesome stuff...the subscribe button should mean more.” (157:24)
• Both hosts agree: Despite flaws, YouTube is “the Library of Alexandria” of our era.

The Third Place as Social Fix [54:02]

• Linus and Luke dream up "Third Place Inc."—an affordable, default hangout spot to fill the social gap left by lost community spaces.

Tech Retail Nostalgia [101:20]

• Hosts reminisce about NCIX.com, comically explore its (now AI-generated) zombie website, and recall old RAM prices via Wayback Machine.

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Closing Thoughts On Linux, Tech & Community

• Linux Desktop for 2026: Still not frictionless, especially for gaming, unless tinkering is your hobby.
  • “If changing your operating system is not your hobby, this is not an attractive proposition.” (40:13)
• Luke’s status: No major problems with his Arch-based setup—yet—but expects anti-cheat/game compatibility will eventually drive him back to Windows.
• Social Tech: AI/automation is reshaping work, community, and play—be it in burger joints, media giants, or gaming spaces.
• “Third Place” problem: The digital age has eroded neutral, affordable hangouts, breeding both loneliness and social friction.

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Notable Quotes

• “I almost feel like I’m being gaslit...I’m the one who’s a complete idiot because...it didn't work perfectly for me.” (11:35, Linus)
• “If changing your operating system is not your hobby, this is not an attractive proposition...” (40:13, Linus)
• “It’s both the most beautiful, incredible thing about open source, and also the biggest problem that it has to overcome.” (22:43, Linus)
• “More consolidation in the media we consume is bad.” (195:51, Linus)
• “This is the step before complete human replacement.” (166:58, Linus)
• “Bring back the wholesome stuff. Bring back the stuff that someone’s going to look back at their usage of YouTube positively.” (160:08, Luke)

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Section Timestamps (Quick Index)

| Topic | Timestamp | |---------------------------------------------|----------------| | Linux Challenge Troubles Begin | 00:07–41:09 | | Game Compatibility Woes (L4D2, Helldivers2) | 07:29–18:47 | | Steam GUI Glitches/Bugs | 19:33–21:19 | | Linux Fragmentation Discussion | 22:43–25:03 | | Luke’s Arch Experience | 26:17–30:51 | | Team/Community Friction from Linux | 44:35–46:55 | | Pop!_OS Cosmic Store Confusion | 34:39–40:13 | | Paramount/Warner Media Merger | ~1:14:31, 195:00| | Donut Labs Solid-State Battery | ~1:21:20 | | Burger King AI Surveillance | 1:53:40 | | Farmer Refusal & Agricultural Land in BC | 2:05:14–2:14:44| | YouTube Algorithm Criticism | 1:55:03–1:59:59| | NCIX Nostalgia/Archiving | 101:20–104:49 |

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Final Verdict: Is 2026 the Year of the Linux Desktop?

Not yet—at least not for gamers trying to rely on widespread compatibility and stability with mainstream apps and games, or for “normie” users.
But for those willing to tinker and troubleshoot, it can be rewarding, and it’s improving—just not “Windows replacement” smooth.

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Feedback or Suggestions? Want episode summaries like this every week? Let us know!

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

What is up everybody and welcome to the WAN show. We have a terrific show for you guys today. The Linux challenge is not going well for me. I managed to run into. It's hard to even. It's hard to even quantify them at this point. But at least five things I've never seen before. And I swear. I swear on. What can I swear on? Tell me something to swear on the show. I swear on the WAN show, I guess. Do I put my right hand on it? I swear on the WAN show that I didn't do anything weird. I swear it. I swear it's true.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The one. The bug you showed me before the show was wild. I. That was fascinating.

[Linus Sebastian]

I swear I didn't do anything. In other news, Donut Labs claims to have made a solid state battery with the keyword being claims. This rabbit hole goes pretty deep. Solid rabbit hole that the state of it is uncertain and nebulous. What else we got this week, Paramount

[Luke Lafreniere]

is set to take over Warner Bros. In a continued series of media consol which like should probably concern everyone. Everybody. Also, Burger King is vying for the throne of politeness with AI and all of their employees ears all the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, it's more wired up to their mouths, which is weirder.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, wait, really? I might have misunderstood.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was thinking when you didn't freak out about that, that you probably misunderstood.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's a lot worse.

[Linus Sebastian]

The show is brought to you today by Vessi Ugreen, App Control and Ground News, alongside our rap partner dbrand and our laptop partner, Razer, and our chair partner, also Razer, which is not a different company. It's just. It's just Razer be funny if it was. It'd be funny if it was also

[Luke Lafreniere]

Razer, just sponsored by both of them. Okay, what's going on?

[Linus Sebastian]

What do you want to do first?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have we. Have you talked publicly? I don't think so. About what distro you're going to choose?

[Linus Sebastian]

I have not. Because I hadn't decided until Elijah and I shot the first episode of Linux Challenge 2026.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

And Elijah even did not know that I did not know which Linux distro I was going to be using. He was like, okay, we're at the point in the video where the script just says Linus decides on his distro. And I was like, well, yeah. Did you think. Did you. Did you think I was like faking reading these listicles just now and like talking to the AI about what I should use?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

And he's like, so that's the thing is, to the greatest degree that I can, my goal is to go into this kind of. I'm experiencing something relatively fresh. Like I've used Linux before, but it was years ago and not much and not that much. I used it for a little while and then I didn't really use it anymore. And so I'm doing what I do where I go in and I go, okay, how would I do this? So I started with like Boomer, best Linux distro for gaming. And so I got listicles again. And to their credit, I think they were a little better than last time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really? That's actually a little surprising to me. I'm surprised they're different at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

Except. Except hear me out. Wait for it. I followed up by being a non Boomer and typing it into an LLM. Which might explain why the listicles are better now. Oh yeah, and to be clear, I'm not saying. I'm not saying that any of the listicles that I read happened to be LLM written or, or aided. I'm just saying it's not impossible maybe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And at this point, in this current state of the Internet, you actually don't. You can never really know because even if they got that information by reading somewhere else, that other thing might have been assisted.

[Linus Sebastian]

The whole snake eating its tail situation that we've got going on here. So. So I started with googling Listicles like a Boomer and then followed up with asking an AI. And once again the overwhelming top recommendation was come online, give POP OS another shot. So I popped over to their website, downloaded the ISO and it was off to the stumbling block races.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, exactly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Off to the race. Now. Now, in fairness, the first issue I had was that the M2 SSD that I've had sitting in my tech sack for the better part of two years is dead. Oh, can't blame POP OS for that. No, no, that's on me not putting it in an ESD bag.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, just raw.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was just.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was in there. It was in there. I got it installed. Once I figured that out and I used a different ssd, then everything was totally fine. No, just kidding. Everything got pretty messed up. So I've got a few little clips that I would love for Luke to see while we're here on the WAN show. I actually, I cheated a little bit and I showed him one of these earlier. Things were going really great. I managed to find the store almost immediately. I managed to download Steam and Discord, basically, as if anything more easily than if I was on Windows or if I was on macOS, like Windows in particular, you can use the Microsoft Store. But like how is it Microsoft that after you force me to sign in with an account when I install Windows, how is it that I then have to sign into that account again when I open my browser and I go to my Microsoft email? Why do I have to do it again when I want to play Minecraft with my kids? Why do I have to do it again? Why do I have to do it over and over and over again?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think playing Minecraft takes three if I remember correctly, because the website and then the like Launcher. But then you also have to do the Store, the Xbox Store, Microsoft Store or whatever. Yeah, it's crazy wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, like system system wide, like user accounts have been a thing for how long? How long has it been since. Since you just have signed into Google account once?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like very long time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Very, very long time. Very long time. So that was really easy. That was awesome. And then I downloaded a game and it came down pretty fast

[Producer Dan]

and then

[Linus Sebastian]

things started to get a little weird and I ended up actually bailing on Linux on the first night because I had seven people waiting in a lobby for me to play left 4 dead 2. On top of all the people who wanted to spectate the game who were watching on Discord, which was like another 10, something like that, how many people were spectating probably around there?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That sounds about right.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I had all these people waiting for me and this is what would happen when I would try to play the game.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it is wild to start this challenge at a lan. But if it was Windows that he jumped in with this, this would have worked off rip. Yeah, well, yeah, so we have to be like, you know, fair about that.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's wild to start it out of lan. But also I tried to throw a softball.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've seen a few Windows installs at LANs. It's definitely happened.

[Linus Sebastian]

I tried to. Oh, do I actually have a clip of Left 4 Dead 2 crashing? So I tried to throw a softball by choosing a game that I assumed, and this is not a crazy assumption that I assumed would be well supported on Linux.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Honestly, I think that's not only a crazy assumption. I thought that by playing this game we were actually giving it an advantage.

[Linus Sebastian]

I thought I was basically hacking for Steam to choose a first party Valve game as my cause. The win condition for the first episode of Linux Challenge is always play a game. Right? Would you like to play a game?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I honestly forgot that. But I'm happy that I did launch A game technically, in the videos that I recorded. Since then, I have launched more games, so it's fine. But yeah, I did. I did launch a game.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I ran into a situation where it totally worked in lobby, but then within about 30 seconds of being in the game, it would just like hard break. Yeah, like hard. Hard lockup or. Or just hard. Hard crash the game.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And did it throw an error or anything? I don't. I don't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not the first time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then the second, I can't remember. There's a lot of footage in here because I was expecting this just be like a quick thing, like I quickly inst. And then I'm. And then I'm playing Left 4 Dead 2. I just. I didn't think it'd be that big of a deal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And for reference, just before you keep going.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone said that apparently I did a Windows install at LTX 2023.

[Linus Sebastian]

That doesn't surprise me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't remember that, but it doesn't surprise me either. Frosty Kyogre said some guy said he bought a fresh laptop for whale Land on the way there. So like, this is. People have fresh windows at Lens. It happens for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, here's me playing through around once I fixed it. Okay, hold on. I think I've got. I think I've got the. I think I've got the error. So. Yeah, this is wild. Here we go. I actually get into a game here. I move around my mouse a little bit. Everything's running. It's running at like 300 frames per second. And I'm give it like another. Give it like another. Probably 10 to 15 seconds. I think I get to the bottom of the stairwell on the first map of the. Which one? Which one is this again? What's the finale? The mall, Dead center.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. Yeah. I don't know any map names.

[Linus Sebastian]

And boof.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Gone. It just disappeared.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hard cut to desktop application.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Gone.

[Linus Sebastian]

And what's really frustrating is if you go on protondb, you find all these people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It says native.

[Linus Sebastian]

It says native. And the first, when I looked at it, like the first two or three were like perfect. And I even scrolled down and the first one on POP OS was like, perfect, excellent, perfect. Now when you start reading more of them, you go, oh, well, hold on a second. People have all kinds of problems with this here. There was a really funny one. Can you go down a little bit? Go down, go down, go down, go down. There's one that says. Hold on. Is this it? Oh, here it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Worked perfectly out of the box. Tinker steps, switch to experimental. Oh, no, this wasn't it. There's one that said no Tinker steps and then also said tinker steps.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. No, no, this is the one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is it.

[Linus Sebastian]

So literally what this person says is, works perfectly out of the box. And then the body here is tinker steps, switch to experimental. Set this launch option. Then. Then they say, the game ran perfectly for me without any major issues, no tinkering done whatsoever. This is where I end up feeling like I'm put in a really uncomfortable position. Because when you are engaging with this level of delusion, I feel like. I feel like I'm. I feel like I'm made to be the bad guy here. Like, you've got this. You've got this stance that's so far out of reality that you feel like a bad guy. You almost feel like it's. I almost feel like I'm being gaslit. Like, I feel like the, like, like I'm the one who's, Who's a complete idiot because, you know, it didn't work perfectly for me. And I didn't know that putting it in experimental mode and having a launch argument was no tinkering.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I don't know, like, where their line is, but in my opinion, if you want to. If you want a year of the Linux desktop, you know, like, if you want, if you want to go that hard and you want to call it a native game, you should be able to click Play in Steam and it should just work because that's the experience that people are going to have on Windows. Right?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, that's. I mean, except when they don't. And that's really, really important to acknowledge in all this because I'll come in and I'll say something critical about Linux or people will feel like I'm saying something critical about Linux because I'll say something like, I launched Left 4 Dead 2 and within about 30 to 60 seconds it would crash every single time I launched it. And they'll be like, that's a personal attack. It's like, that's a personal attack on them. They're like, well, what about all the issues on Windows? I'm like, whoa, bro, we're not talking about Windows.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, fair.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Nobody brought up Windows, and I'm happy to criticize Windows. You want to watch me criticize Windows? Do you want to do a Windows criticism wan show? I'm sure you're down. Yeah, look how down he is. Yeah, I'm going to chime into this one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We Got to include teams.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look how happy he is right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We got to include teams.

[Linus Sebastian]

But sometimes that's not what we're talking about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Microsoft.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I, man, was it on the. I can't remember. Yeah, it was on the forum. It was on LTT forum that Elijah did that video recently where he switched to iPhone. And someone's like, well, you're talking a lot about the issue, switching from Android to iOS, but you're not talking about all the issues going from iOS to Android. It's. It's so bad. Like, you're right, we're not talking about that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's not what's happening.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because guess what? Elijah didn't switch from an iPhone to Android. That's not what. That's not what he's fucking doing. Not every video can be about everything. So this isn't about, this isn't about attacks, but it's about me being put in this position where I feel like I have to, I have to. Like, Yvonne always uses like a pendulum analogy when we're talking about like, like positions in an argument or we're talking about some kind of conflict where, where she'll talk about how sometimes she feels like because someone else's position is so extreme, even though the truth lies here, with the pendulum at rest, she almost is forced to take this position to try to achieve that, to bring us back to space.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very common in politics. Yeah. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so when I'm up against this is perfect and you're crazy for not

[Luke Lafreniere]

recognizing it, it's like, whoa, it can have some flaws. Windows has a lot of flaws.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, so many.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So something that I find interesting about this is Steam Deck is used by a lot of normies.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And this is Steam Deck verified. Right. Would you need to make like, is it different? Would you need to make changes on Steam Deck or would have it. Would it have had the same problem?

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a good question.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I genuinely don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

And if Valve is implementing. So do you know what the fix was? So the fix ended up being that I had to force Vulkan, which is a pretty reasonable Linux gaming fix. Except that. And this is again one of those, like, how is this a thing? Right. This is a first party Valve game. They literally make a Linux distro is not even available in the in game menu. You have to use a launch argument for it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I, so I typed in a thing, I switched over to Vulkan and then lo and behold, I've got a clip here of me gaming For, I think, yeah, over five continuous minutes and it just completely working. Bang, bang, bang. Kill all the Zombies. Running at 300 FPS.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah,

[Linus Sebastian]

but that's not what Buddy said. Buddy said no tinkering. And also his fix was different from mine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone at Floatplane chat said, yes, Steam Deck is very beginner friendly, but Linus keeps picking non beginner friendly distros. As far as my understanding goes, POP OS is widely known as a fairly beginner friendly distro.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's literally why people keep recommending it. It's also friendly for people who are on Nvidia graphics, which. And I had someone ask this in the chat just now, which I wasn't. But what I wanted was to use the same distro across my multiple systems.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

My main desktop at home is Radeon. My laptop, which is what you have the lan. My daily driver is Radeon. Yeah, sorry. I had my main desktop, not the laptop. I kind of gestured over here and you kind of pointed this direction. It kind of seemed like it was. I had my desktop at the lan. I also had this. So my main desktop and my laptop are both Radeon, but my downstairs gaming machine is GeForce and so is the one in the theater room, which is where I've actually been doing more of my gaming. And so what I really wanted, and that's one of the special sauce things with Pop OS, is that it's out of the box, GeForce ready. And so yes, I did pick a distro because I wanted it to be more like non Linux hardware, optimized friendly. But that wasn't what I was using. I was using the Radeon build and I installed it onto a Ryzen Radeon all amd, all the time system. So there should have been no real challenge there, but the challenges just kept on coming. I showed Luke another clip earlier so I don't have to show it to him now. Where in Helldivers two. So that's the second game that I tried to play. He sees the character moving around on screen. It's running at. You know, I didn't install Windows on a separate partition and then benchmark them back and forth.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Felt pretty solid, though.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it was smooth.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it was smooth.

[Linus Sebastian]

It felt good. And then I scrolled down and you can see my mouse hand going like this and I go back up and you can see that the mouse look is not working at all. What I never showed Luke is some of the troubleshooting steps that I went through to try to resolve that. So I Tried rebinding mouse look. And if I bound look up to. Instead of mouse movement to like left click, I could totally look up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. So it was capturing the mouse.

[Linus Sebastian]

So it was perfectly capable of getting something from my mouse. My mouse was definitely working.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was perfectly capable of tilting the camera up, but the actual mouse movement was not being registered. My controller worked perfectly though. So this was for gaming with the VIPs, with the whales. Mm. And so I was like, well, I guess I'm gaming on a controller that at least.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I. Man, I hate shooters on a controller. But yeah, it is what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Also, did I. Did I point out to you the weird border on the top and the left? Did you see that? Oh, the weird, like two pixel wide white border?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I never figured that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just top and left.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, just top and left.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Strange.

[Linus Sebastian]

The most fun one, though, is the one that I'm going to show to you guys and that's this issue where my. Here, maybe I'll. Maybe I'll send this over to. Oh, producer Dan is gone. So we're going to do this the super janky way. Nice. Classic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you want me to switch cameras? Oh, no, you're just going to do the front one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no, It's. It's pretty wild. I still don't. I don't know how you would even make this happen because it's not only that there's three windows open, which I don't even know. Maybe you can do that in Steam, maybe you can't. But it's also that they're all do. They're all doing the inputs, but they're not showing the menus. So, like, only the one that he's actively selected on shows the menu, but when he scrolls, they all scroll down. It's so strange.

[Linus Sebastian]

Did you see that, though?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So this part, they're not gonna be able to hear you, but as he moves his mouse over to the other window, it's still navigating. In the previous one, it's a little hard to see, but like, man, it's. It's. It's strict. It's. It's very weird. We can still hear him. Oh, my bad. Sorry, I didn't think you'd be able.

[Linus Sebastian]

I yell loud enough, they kind of can, I guess.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dan's mic is there too, so I've

[Linus Sebastian]

never seen that before.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was weird. Never seen that before either. And like, you know, you can, you can in a lot of different things. You can make multiple versions of it come up but usually they don't all mirror the inputs and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

And Steam, it shouldn't be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I've never.

[Linus Sebastian]

Can you open multiple instances of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Never wanted to. I've never tried, never looked into it. But like you can with. No. Okay. You can with a decent amount of other things.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so I'm gonna have a lot of people, as often happens whenever I say anything critical of Linux, I'm gonna have a lot of people coming at me for this, assuming that I did something, something egregiously wrong.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So. And I'm not, I'm not saying anything. What led up to Go ahead, do it, do it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Pre show viewers will get it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do it, do it, you coward. What led up to.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm like, Shia, I'm gonna run away from the press and I'

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just. Just what? What? I know, I'm not saying anything. What steps led up to that? Like what happened? So you just launched the computer and it was just there? Or did you come out of a game or like.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, it's hard to say. So what would I have been doing at this point? I was playing Helldivers, so I would have been.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So you're in the game and then you, I assume you close the game and then it's doing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I. Oh shoot. Okay. Don't quote me on this, but I think it was when I like remaximize it or something like that I'd like get two somehow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I really don't want to remaximize the Steam window.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah because like if you minimize goes

[Luke Lafreniere]

people are saying you can have multiple windows of Steam open, but I'm not too surprised.

[Linus Sebastian]

Also wasn't multiple windows.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. And to do that I'm assuming you'd have to like launch. Launch argument. The like executable or whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'd probably have to do something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because Steam does not behave like that normally.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've never, I don't know if Steam's on here, but I' literally never had multiple windows of Steam open.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. This is one of those. Dude, this is one of those things where it's just like. Don't blame, don't blame blanket Linux, blame Pop OS or yourself. And it's like, unfortunately this is one of the challenges that Linux has with wide adoption is that. And oh man, it's. It's both the most beautiful, incredible thing about open source and it's also the biggest problem that it has to overcome is that you can find, you can find a flavor for, for anything. Like was it you that I was Talking to. When I said something like, you could have a. You could have a distro of Linux, that's for like gamers who hate My Little Pony or something like that, or. No, I think I was talking to someone else and they were like, really? And I was like. I was like, no. And they're like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. That would be stupid. But like, the fact that I believed

[Luke Lafreniere]

you, I think that might have been me, actually.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, maybe that was you. Is so emblematic of the problem.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's so much fragmentation and like, one of the. One of the things is you can

[Producer Dan]

say

[Luke Lafreniere]

people know it as Linux. Even that in itself is flawed.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, very.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So like, so like, even that statement alone has problems.

[Linus Sebastian]

It has huge problems. Linux is the kernel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, right. So to assume that people are gonna always. Exactly. Properly address the thing that might be causing the issue is like, obviously a fallacy. That is not going to happen. So people are gonna just blanket call it Linux because they've been blanket calling the whole thing Linux for a long time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Grellwing says SteamOS is not intended to be a wide release. It's an OS for boutique hardware. Not actually true, Val. Well, at least not originally true. When Valve announced SteamOS and the Steam deck, they announced their intention at some point to make SteamOS an OS that you could download and install on your own hardware. In fact, you can do it today. It just has to be on kind of specific hardware, which is the reason that I ultimately didn't use it, because I do have systems that are Nvidia

[Luke Lafreniere]

and you wanted the same thing across all of them.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I wanted to choose something that somebody with Nvidia hardware might choose for ease of use, especially because my plan is to install it across multiple systems, which I haven't actually done yet because it's been such a pain in the butt. Yeah. So let's see what else. I don't actually know if there's anything else in here. Here's the. Here's the weird Steam interface bug, but just two windows this time. This was the first time I encountered it, so I actually encountered this multiple times, which is pretty wild. I can interact with both of them, but if I mouse over one of them, it like is interacting with the other one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Because like, if it was just properly two instances of Steam that shouldn't be happening. So what he's showing is two completely different windows in two completely different areas. He moves his mouse on one.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm moving my mouse here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It interacts with the other one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So my mouse Cursor is over here and then you can see the menus on the window on the right actually moving. And in this one it was more bugged because the whole interface is just gone. It's just a black box.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that is weird. You can kind of see it like faintly in the background. Someone said, Did Luke go with Mint? No, I decided to mix it up. I still really like Mint. I actually genuinely thought like, you know, maybe I should go back to like ol faithful. I don't really actually use Linux all that much. But that tends to be the one that I go to when I, when I do use Linux. But I had been running this, it's not currently installed on my laptop because we're trying to figure out a hardware problem and they, they didn't believe in Linux. So we have Windows running on it right now. But I had been running just Arch on my laptop for a long time to try to prove like, look, if you're not doing much on your system, you can kind of run whatever. And my entire use case for my work laptop is basically in a browser. So I was like, it's not going to matter. And yeah, it didn't really matter. So. And my basically point there was like, I'm not interacting with the operating system basically ever. Like, I didn't do anything very interesting with Arch. I'm just running two browsers, Firefox and Chrome.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's it on Arch, by the way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So like, so that was, that was why I did that on my laptop. So I thought maybe I would try to extend that idea into the desktop space. But I didn't want to just use Arch again. So I went with Cashios. And that's not the only reason. So Casheos is built on Arch, but that's not the only reason. The other reason why I did it was because SteamOS is built on architecture.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I was like, okay, what's a like gamer version of Arch? Because I'm going to want this on my desktop. I'm going to play games here, I'm going to do other stuff here. I don't want to just run Arch like I did on my laptop because I'm actually going to do more with it. The point isn't the same now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The point with the laptop was it doesn't really matter if all you're doing is a browser.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that's the beauty of Linux. Horses for courses. You can choose a different distro depending on what exactly it is that you're trying to accomplish.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So now I'm Trying to accomplish more. I'm trying to do more gaming stuff. Cash us. Their tagline is a performance focus focused arch Linux distribution that rebuilds packages with modern CPU optimizations. I don't know. I heard it's good for gaming and it's arch and by the way, I did that on my laptop and SteamOS is built in it. So I was like hoping maybe some kind. I don't know, maybe things will work better through Steam there. I have no idea. I didn't do a lot of research. This is the more gamery version of the thing I've been using lately. I'll just.

[Linus Sebastian]

Super trendy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is very trendy right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

It Hyper trendy maybe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, maybe A third reason it's super trendy right now is actually one of the reasons why I chose it. So. So same core as SteamOS. It's super trendy right now and it's based on the thing that I'm using on my, on my laptop. Anyway, so there's some familiarity.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I'm going to jump in and go. The hyper trendiness of it is actually the. One of the reasons I didn't choose it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fair enough.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because this kind of like flavor of the week, hyper trendy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's weird. People have mostly forgotten about Bazite already. That's crazy, right? Wild to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not the kind of thing that I like to lock myself into. Like whenever we, whenever we do any kind of actual benchmarking or performance testing, anytime anyone talks to me, I'm like Ubuntu. Because it's just, it's just there. You know, it might not have the sex appeal, but it's there. It's been there. It's been there for us. It's, it's, it's the, it's the. If you want to look at, if you want to zoom way out over time, it's the consumer Linux distro.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's been there for everybody. Everybody knows about it. A bunch of people are saying like, oh, Bazzite's still cool. We're not trying to say Bazzite isn't cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

We're trying to say we don't have to be personally attacked here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Roughly six months ago, if you discussed Linux at all and didn't say Bazite every second word, you would get screamed at. And that is already no longer true. And now a lot of people are saying Kashi, Kashi Cashy. That's not. That's definitely the third out of the reasons that I had. But I did, I was interested in checking it out. And I will say for the more involved experience because again, I didn't get this on my laptop. There are things I miss about Mint Kashi's cool. It's been fine. I haven't really had any problems.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Good for you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Happy for you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There are things that I'm still planning on doing that I suspect might cause some problems. So we'll see how that goes. But I'm only. I started after you. I'm only a few days into this. Right. I'm pretty fresh and I haven't done a ton on it. So we'll see how it goes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Didn't take me doing a ton. All I had to do was launch a first party Valve game in Steam.

[Producer Dan]

Oh yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I didn't even talk about those audio issues I had in Discord.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Everyone's audio was so quiet I could barely hear them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you ever fix that?

[Linus Sebastian]

A reboot just sort of magically.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I did have some weird. There's a. There's one of the recordings that I sent in.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

After I played it back. I didn't know this while I was recording it, but after I played it back it's like a little laggy. That was happening in. When I was like watching videos and a couple other things as well. I noticed it when I was watching a YouTube video that the YouTube video would hitch every once in a blue moon.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I hadn't restarted the system literally once yet.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wonder if it's like a hardware acceleration issue or something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No idea. Restarted the system one time problem in a way. And I had done that recording before system restart. So I, you know, one restart after doing some updates and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not a big deal.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But that's. That's the only thing I've really ran into so far. But like, I don't love the like package manager. You mentioned how like, oh, I found the popos store pretty quick and then installed.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's just the bottom left icon. It was like right there. The name was like. It's like they were trying to not call it App Store. They were. They were so desperately trying to call it anything but App Store so that they wouldn't have to call it App Store. That they ended up with a name that just. I forget what it is. But it just like was not that obvious to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But yeah, it's so like I'm probably gonna go get an alternative store at some point because like, I don't love the default one. It works. There's been a decent amount of things I've I've looked for that. Weren't there.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it's called. Hold on, hold on. Jump in. It's called Pop Shop, which is a perfectly reasonable name. Okay. When it. When I mouse over, it seems pretty reasonable. It was called something. It was called. I swear it was called something else. It was not called Pop Shop.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Charge. Nucleus says it's not an app store. Yeah, I know, but sometimes we use words for things like ATM machine. It's not an ATM machine because the machine is the M and the. Yeah, but like, sometimes we just say things so that people understand what they are and what their function is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And by the way, there's a bunch of people spamming me right now. Use this thing. Use that thing. I'm sorry, I'm not going to listen. I'm just going to do stuff and we'll see how it works. If I run into a problem, I'll Google it. I'll look it up in some other way. I'll consult the sans. I'll do whatever. But I don't want to go based on, like, chat recommendations because that doesn't seem like a normal experience that someone would have. So I'm literally just gonna brain dump everything you guys tell me now. Like, yeah, if I read something on a form or whatever, I'll take information from there, but I don't want to use it on alternate route. And I'm also not having problems, really. I just don't love. Doesn't seem great like the package manager, but I can get a new one. Not a problem. I'm not too worried about it. Yeah, other than that, like, no major. No major issues. I felt Mint was very comfy for me, and I am now, I would say, slightly outside of the comfort zone desktop environment that I really didn't stretch for. I just went with Cinnamon, which is the one that I'm most used to. I did also install Hyper Land just in case I want to go have fun. But I'm very used to Cinnamon and I'm happy to be with it. Someone said go with Budgie. I saw that because the name. I thought it might be fun. But yeah, wait, you can use Cinnamon with Arch. Yeah, yeah, I have Cinnamon installed on. On both laptop and desktop, I think. Good luck. ReHyperland. Yeah, that's the reason why I didn't only install Hyperland. I don't know that I'll ever touch Hyperland. I. I might. I might just literally not get to it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Apparently it's called the Cosmic Cosmic Store, so it's I think. Is it, Is it this one? I think it's this one. When I moused over it, it wasn't, it wasn't super obvious, so I forget what comes up. Does it just say cosmic? I'm. I'm actually not sure. So don't quote. Don't quote me on any of that. Cosmic store. Another.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Another thing I'll say is like, and we have to basically address this every time. And I think there is a subset of Linux mega nerds that actually don't want the year of Linux desktop to be a thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know actively, because then it would be not like gatekeep enough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes, exactly. I think that is a subset. Probably not that big of a subset, but I do think that is a subset of people. But man, yeah, there's. And I don't know, maybe people should RTFM a little more and Google things themselves and stuff. But like, I'll come across a Reddit thread where somebody's like, oh, how do I do this thing? In like an Arch based distro. And instead of just like, oh, here's your actually like really simple answer because the question you asked is like, not that deep. There will be like a seven paragraph thing about how you're a freaking idiot and you should never touch Arch and you should probably go back to Windows, you tiny little insignificant baby. And it's like, dude, relax. Like, oh my God. I think it was like, I think the guy was like, how do I install C Steam? Yeah, it was how do I install Steam and Arch? And the reason why I looked that up, which seems really basic, was because I was just stunned it wasn't in the package manager. Yeah, I was like, what? Like, really? And like I ended, I ended up just installing it. Like, I just pac manned it. But like, I was a little bit surprised because like, yeah, I'm comfortable enough. I can use the command line and stuff, but I kind of. The gui's there. I kind of like it. It's fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's almost like basically everything for 98% of people has moved to GUI.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

For a reason.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's weird that Steam isn't in there. Like, Steam's pretty normal. No, Chrome also wasn't in there, but Chromium was. I thought that was just kind of a funny little thing. There might be some other reason for that. But I was like, okay, whatever, I'll just try Chromium and see how that goes. So I'm running Chromium instead of Chrome because I always, I do Firefox for personal stuff. Chrome for work. I've always done that. The separation, actually, at this point is, like, very fluent. Not doing that would be very weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, if I did personal stuff in Chrome or work stuff in Firefox, it would probably feel very odd. So, like, okay, I've got my two. Everything's fine. Teams is like, a problem. Have you done that? Have you installed teams?

[Linus Sebastian]

I haven't installed teams yet.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I like, man, it sucks. There's. There's no, like, official Microsoft yet.

[Linus Sebastian]

There used to be, though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There was a long time ago.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think maybe the first time we did the challenge, there was.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it was. I think we were right on the cusp. It was. It still existed, but the support for it was, like, bad or something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't. Don't quote me on that. But I remember us. I remember it being a thing. We definitely discussed it at the time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Teams is the reason Luke will go postal. It's already annoying. Like, I had a meeting. So how our meetings tend to work is you get a teams meeting that is attached to your calendar invite. So you click on that and then it brings you into the meeting. It's not. In my opinion, It's. It's really whack. Guys, stop telling me to try things. I'm not going to listen to you. I've already said that. You can stop. I'm legitimately not. I will probably avoid the things that you tell me.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is the most wrong thing you've ever said. You said you can stop. They can't. They actually can't stop. They're addicted to the shindig.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But, okay, so in Windows, you click on that link and it'll be like, oh, you have teams installed. Do you want to just open this with your desktop application? And, like, yeah, every time. I would prefer to do that, thank you. I don't think, because it's. Maybe because it's an unofficial app, maybe there's some way I can link the two. I'm sure there is. I haven't done the work to do that yet. Right now it really only wants to open in the browser. So the first call that I had to take, I ended up being like, I answered in the browser. And then it was like, a little whack. And I was like, hey, can I just call you through the app? And then we did, and I click call on the app, and then I think, it doesn't work. And like, 15 seconds later, the call goes and actually does something. And I'm like, oh, okay. So, like, the biggest Problem I've had so far is just teams, which is kind of funny because Discord actually worked flawlessly. Oh, right.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm glad yours was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Forgot about that. Sorry about that. Yeah, no problem. So Discord and Slack both worked immediately with no. No issues. But, yeah, teams was a problem. But it seems very centralized to. To. To teams. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Rest assured. Says in chat you were on Cosmic. Is that five question marks? That's in beta. Still borderline alpha. I don't know, brother. I just downloaded whatever was on System 76's website. I. Yeah, I don't know, dude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It just says now with Cosmic.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't. I don't make. I don't make the rules, man. Maybe. Maybe what I managed to do. Maybe what I managed to do was catch them at a bad time again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wouldn't that be just the way Cosmic is borked? Cosmic is not new. Cosmic is 1.0.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now, see, to me, 1.0 means new, and pre 1.0 means not even new yet. Like, to me. To me, 1.0 is the infant baby. Like, it's still, like, completely worthless. You ask that infant baby to shovel the snow in the driveway. Useless infant baby.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Toss it out there.

[Linus Sebastian]

It doesn't even move anything before that is in womb. So, yeah, if I'd known better, maybe I wouldn't have gone Papa West. But now I'm gonna. At least. I'm gonna at least give it a shot. I'm gonna. Well, I feel like I've given it a shot. Oh, I don't want to change it. It's such a. I feel if. If changing your operating system is not your hobby, then this is not an attractive proposition. And I think that's something a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their brain around.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Changing my OS is not my hobby. Redoing the plumbing in my computer. Yeah, that's my hobby.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You like the hardware?

[Linus Sebastian]

I could be. I could be convinced to do that. Clean out my blocks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah. I will say, like, it's been fine, but it has been like, oh, right, I have to install that thing. Okay. Oh, I'm not logged in on all of the different things. That's annoying. Huh? Slack's been quiet today. Oh, yeah. I don't have that installed yet. Crap. That's why it's been quiet today. Oh, no, Then install that and then. Oh, everything's fine. Okay, cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And I think it's. I think it's one of those things where, like, it all depends on, you know, what your baggage is. Right. I hate logging into things. I feel like half of my life is logging into things because I do so many disparate tasks in so many disparate platforms that like almost anytime I get interrupted and I have to do anything, I'm logging in again and fetching a two factor thing again and then going in remote desktopping into some other thing to retrieve some other token that I need to like there's always. I'm always logging into something. So if you tell me, hey, guess what Linus, there's this trendy new Linux distro. All you have to do is log into all your.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, I'm not interested.

[Linus Sebastian]

The conversation's actually over now. That went from fun and interesting to kill it with fire. Yeah, with that, with, with that fast.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I do. I will say I really appreciate actually the login methods for Discord and Steam these days. The QR coding from your phone.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is pretty fast for me. I didn't even open those specific apps. I just opened my camera. The camera used the link to open that app to the screen where it did the scan thing. And then I just was like, oh okay, that worked. And then it scanned it and it just logged me in instance. I didn't do anything. It was amazing.

[Linus Sebastian]

For me, I have my Steam password memorized so maybe it's just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh well that would.

[Linus Sebastian]

Friction of taking anything, taking anything out of my pocket is just sort of annoying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's an example of how many damn times you have to log into things. I dude, I like very rarely logged in my Steam.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have way too many of my passwords memorized now just because it's faster than typing in my master password and then going and getting my two factor and then doing my single sign on like they promised us that passkeys were going to remove the friction. Single sign on was supposed to make everything magically better.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, and then it got hyper paywalled. Single sign on getting hyper paywalled is like one of the worst things that have happened to modern computing in my opinion. Yeah, I don't know right now I haven't ran into anything that would make me run back to Windows. I have only been using it for a little bit and I suspect I'm going to hit a hard wall.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, Indiana Jones game hasn't come out, you know, exactly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm going to hit a hard wall where it's. It's an anti cheat thing or something like that and I just can't run it on this system and I'm going to go what the heck you'll hit. I'm going to end up back on.

[Linus Sebastian]

You'll hit the exact same one that I did at the lan. There's seven people waiting in a lobby for me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's going to drive me and

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm fucking around with my special snowflake Linux while everyone else is sitting here going, okay, so what? Because of your special dietary restriction, we need to make an entirely new meal for you and play the game that you can play. Actually we don't really need you in our friend group.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That bad. Sucks. Yeah. And that happens. You maybe you have a super happy fun time friend group that you've been with for forever and that doesn't happen to you and that's great. But that does actually happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

And even if it doesn't and they're nice about it, it doesn't mean that it doesn't cause friction.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. I mean and it might happen slow.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean there's a. There's someone and I. This is someone that I like very much and enjoy as a person. But there's someone who kind of stopped getting gaming invites from us because it was very high friction. And I love working for him.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which, it's a bit of a tell.

[Linus Sebastian]

Which narrows things down a little. But between audio problems and just general connection stability and you know, just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh man, that's pretty funny.

[Linus Sebastian]

Who'd you think I was talking about? I'm just kidding. I know who you thought I was talking about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was gonna say there's another one. Yeah, I guess. Wait, I guess we're those people.

[Linus Sebastian]

I haven't been playing with you guys lately.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yo, what the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It happens, man. It happens, man. Mr. Techtiff's got a lot of tech problems.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is this just cause I'm on Linux?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Mr. Techtif's got a lot of tech problems.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm labeling for a Left4Dead lobby one time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sometimes we got an hour to play and sometimes it takes you an hour to be set up.

[Linus Sebastian]

Listen, listen.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, sorry, I have to update. I have to update the transversal auxiliary wave pump in my 14th computer in my seventh room. So I can play in the, in my theater room. But never mind, that's not going to work because little man wants to play there. So I'm going to play in this other place and then I'm going to play in the upstairs and then my thing isn't going to work and I'll see you guys in an hour. Nevermind, I can't play because Yvonne needs some help. I'll be back in 20 minutes. Actually, these other people. What if everyone just remoted in my computer and we play that way? Oh wait, that doesn't work. Nevermind, we'll do this other thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. You've kind of touched on a number of issues. I have a very troubleshooting oriented personality type. I get fixated on a goal and sometimes my goal is something like we need to play 5v5.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then you have issues with like Exit the game barely even supports it. Or like the remote software like Steam Remote Remote Play Together doesn't support that many controllers. But, but PARSEC does. And you, and you make your way down these. All these like troubleshooting steps. Okay, so that's, that's one of the personality issues that you've identified. Thank you very much. Another one is the multiple systems and some of them being in various states of setup. Yes. Okay. That's a reflection of my fragmented mind. Sure. Okay, let's go with that for personality flaw number two. The last one is actually this one comes up a lot and is the one that, I guess I don't really talk to you guys about as much, but comes up more often than the other ones. But sometimes I will go such a long period of time between gaming sessions that like everything's, everything's out of date, everything is demanding updates.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that is such an annoying thing about modern gaming that even with a fast Internet connection I need to be seated at my computer if I haven't played in a couple months. So there could be like a major patch on the game or there could be like a game ready driver or you know, whatever. Right. Or like just your crap all logs you out. Because you know how things spontaneously log you out now and so you have to be like seated at your computer 20 minutes ahead of time in order to make your game date. It's like at that point I might as well drive to someone's house and we can just plug in controllers and play Xbox One. Honestly. Yeah, not one. The first one where you just put the disc in it and you play Halo.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That'd be sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

You just needler each other until everyone's just angry, you know? Like it honestly just sounds more fun at that point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sword shotguns, Halo 2, the map where there's the, the ramps and the towers and the Blue boy thing. Solid. Heck yeah, dude. No, but in all actuality, we just haven't been playing very much. Life's been busy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I hear you people like every time I go to Smash Champs every time without fail, Someone says, hey, you're back. And like, I do go there once in a while, but I'm not attending. Like, I had been like, I played ladder last night and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, you mean for. For badminton? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. You said when I go to smash Dance, my brain's just like, wait a minute.

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So I'm just like. I'm not, like, I'm not seeing members of the community nearly as much as they're, like, used. They have gotten used to seeing me. Can you believe it's been open for a year?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's pretty wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

How crazy is that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was fun having all the LAN attendees look through the doors and just go like, whoa.

[Linus Sebastian]

It went the other way too.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Badminton.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People were like, what the heck is that? What is this?

[Linus Sebastian]

Because I was actually playing in the morning of the Saturday. So I was. I was playing badminton from 9 to 11 with a group that came up from Seattle. So it's not like we could just like, meet another time and play because they were up for. A couple of them had a birthday or something. So they came up. They did the new go kart place in Richmond. I haven't tried it yet. Have you been the like, two level one? It looks awesome.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't know we had a two level one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it just like, they. They were closed for renovations for, like, ever. And I want to go. Maybe we should. Oh, it's. Oh, man. We should do it for summer fun. Summer's coming up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, sweet. Speed.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's that one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Multi level tracks. Yeah. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I want to.

[Linus Sebastian]

I want to go there. Here, here, here. Luke, laptop. Endless ways to play.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, look. Yeah, there, there, go. This is clearly them going up. Whoa.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

30 minutes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Whoa. Yeah, I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They have laser tag and stuff too. Is this the new, like, Castle Fun Park?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it's in Richmond. Speeders has been there for a long

[Luke Lafreniere]

time, but they reno, like the. You know, they have laser tag, they have bowling, they have darts, they have mini golf.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, Castle Fun park is still my Castle Fun Park.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Too soon. I know. I heard they flooded again, bro. I feel so bad for them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's gotta be really. If you visit up here and, like, need a thing to do some night for some reason, maybe work or whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Castle Fun park is genuinely a really good time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Go to Castle Fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a bit out of the way and they've had, like, nature trying to tear them down. They've. They've. They had some Underground experiences. Like they had this really cool actually underground mini golf and stuff. And their place got flooded and those underground areas got.

[Linus Sebastian]

How could Abbotsford be subject to so many acts of God?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, really.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's right in the name. It's the fort of Abbotts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But yeah, check this out. Like. Oh, right. So yeah, so I was playing with the badminton people and like multiple of the. The group that came up was like, what is that? And I'm like, oh, well, it's like, it's a LAN for gaming. They're like, oh, like esports. I'm like, yeah, kind of if you

[Luke Lafreniere]

could only play with the people at the land. And pretty much everyone was bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah, kind of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No offense. I'm including myself in that to be clear.

[Linus Sebastian]

But yeah, like, dude, on the badminton side, we've been open for one year and this is what it looks like right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's really cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, this is, this is crazy. Like kind of. Yeah, you can kind of see it. But like we kind of accidentally like a whole like business. And it's. It's funny, right, because like you see so many. Like there's people waiting on the side right now. You could see everyone like waiting off court. You people who don't like understand the sport and the popularity of the sport. There were so many comments on the initial videos like announcing it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, those courts were like very active until like 3, 4 in the morning during whaling. Yeah, like I would go kind of poke my head over every once in a while and then I think there might have been a few even outside of those hours. But like I kind of stopped.

[Linus Sebastian]

The late night stuff I think was mostly LMG people. I was goofing around with them for a bit and like Yvonne was over there. I think like a bunch of the accounting people were over there and stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People are still using it.

[Linus Sebastian]

But yeah, like it's. I don't know. Yeah, there were a lot of just like, this is, this is so incredibly stupid. This will never be a viable business. It's like, guys, people need stuff to do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Third places, man. Yeah, give me some third places. And no offense to speeders, but give me some third places that aren't $100 every half hour.

[Linus Sebastian]

I had, I, I had never heard the term before until I was chatting with third place with Sherrod. Yeah, third place is always yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And he was just, he was just talking about like the lack of third places. And I'd actually like. I don't know, you know how I am. Like someone will Bring up anything and I start going like, oh, you like, like what would be the opportunity to like to fix this? And so I, I was, so I was, this was actually on our China trip and I was brainstorming with Sharad this idea for Third Place Inc. And it actually there's, there's some pretty cool ideas. I couldn't afford to do it here. Cause it's just like kind of crazy. But the idea, the basic idea behind it is you want it to remove, you want to remove the decision paralysis of deciding where you're going and what you want to do. Like it's kind of the physical equivalent of, you know, how it's impossible to decide what to watch because there's so many options.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or whether it's Plex or Netflix. Yeah, exactly, exactly that. So you go on like, we must have all been there. You, you're everyone's hungry. You fire up Google Maps and there's just a zillion options. So the idea is that with Third Place Inc. You remove that friction. You just go there. So it would like have programming or events, but none of them would be posted online. And maybe the bulletin board, literally. Like I had this idea of having like, like, like a door peephole style lens so you can like look and you can, you can like see what's going on today, but you can't like take a picture of it or anything. You know, obviously people would, people would post them. But you try to, you try to discourage it. And so the idea is just that you, you, you just have this kind of, this kind of like programming events. Whether it's like, okay, tonight we're doing poker night. You're not good at poker. Doesn't matter. Everyone's playing poker tonight. Flagship locations could be set up with all kinds of activities that encourage casual coexistence. So a music listening room with a jukebox. Crazy idea. Not a new idea. But the idea being that you don't. Everyone doesn't just have their headphones in. There's music playing and everyone can take their turn and for 50 cents or you know, whatever, for a dollar, you pick the next song. Karaoke, billiards, tabletop games. It'd be cool if it was membership based. So you don't pay, have to pay every time you go there. So you kind of remove that friction. You just go, you just go hang out. You'd want to be somewhere transit friendly. And then, you know, one of the things that came up with, okay, how do you deal with unsavory stuff? You Know, drug deals, hooking up in the bathrooms. Do you do it through a member's code of conduct? Do you. Do you count on people to self police? That's. That's kind of as far as we got. But like, man, how much would you. How much would you enjoy just having a pops chocolate shop? You know? And that's a. That's a bit of a dated.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a. That's a reference.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dated reference.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. No, I think it would be like a country club.

[Linus Sebastian]

Remember, Remember the part about it being affordable, though? That's where the country club thing doesn't really land for most people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Then the, the issue with it being affordable is how do you do that affordably these days? Like, how do you have that much space in. You can't anywhere in British Columbia.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, that's the one part.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anywhere that has population.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's the one part that most people didn't understand about smash champs. Like, that's the things that they thought were stupid were not stupid at all. And the things that almost nobody flagged were very stupid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The building.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, the building itself.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because that's been strange to me that people didn't put that together.

[Linus Sebastian]

The number of people mad about us acquiring the tech house, you know, another house, and like not recognizing that compared to our commercial real estate acquisitions, that's like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It shows up on the line.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a line item.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a line item.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's definitely a line item.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's for sure a line item.

[Linus Sebastian]

But like. Yeah, I don't. Yeah, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think part of the problem with this problem is just like magnetizing people away from these and, and these, These types of things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that was. Sorry, I didn't, I didn't mention that. You. You check your phone at the door.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, no, I meant to get there at all because, like, get them out of their house, get them out of their bedroom or whatever. There's a video I watched from. Hopefully I don't pronounce it wrong, but I think it's.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're gonna like this, though. You're gonna like this. No, sure, this is fine. Hold that thought. Yeah, but the idea was that you check your phones at the door, but that's okay because at the reception you can. So you can opt to leave it. So that. To. To leave it out or to put it in the box, and then if you get an emergency call, literally you can like call third place or. No, sorry, no, that wasn't the idea. That was one idea. And then I was like, no, there's too Many privacy issues. And then the new idea was that you have a landline at third place. And then you could. You could, like. You'd have to call, and then they'd, like, page you. Like, remember when you were trying to reach your parents at work when we were kids?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you'd have to call the office, and you'd be, like, scared to talk to the stranger and be like, um, is. Can I talk to Mrs. Sebastian? Like, yeah, can I. Can I tell her who's calling? Yeah, it's her son. Oh, okay. Okay, little Linus. Yeah, I'll. I'll go get her. And then it would be like, five minutes, and they'd go get them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You could potentially, like, if you had the phones badged by name, which wouldn't be very hard. I mean, be kind of automatic. I'm assuming you're bagging it somehow with a tag so you know who to give it to. You could just see the caller id. If there's no caller id, who cares? Just let it ring through anyways. But if there's a caller id, you could be like, so and so this caller ID is calling you, and then that person can decide if they want to come get their phone or not. But, yeah, that's pretty sweet. But, yeah. I watched this video from. I think it's Emil. Emil. Emil. Sorry. They say their name in the video, and I already forgot how to pronounce it, but you should install a cheap computer in your room. And I don't know why I clicked on this, but I was. I think my thought process was like, why? Why would I possibly want a cheap computer in my room? Their argument was actually pretty good. I don't want to play it because

[Linus Sebastian]

you should go watch for MSN Messenger.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I've heard there's still versions that work.

[Linus Sebastian]

No way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've shut up through the grapevine. But their argument was that for them, by doing this, they might choose a higher medium. And through doing that, not doom scroll, they might watch a movie, they might play a game, they might do something. I don't remember all the details. It's been a bit since I watched it. Go watch it if you're interested. But I like the thought process of just like. Just something to keep me from doom scrolling. And I think it's. These are such crazy magnets these days. And I think it's part of the equation, probably a small part. I think the biggest part is that just land and everything costs so much freaking money these days. But part of the reason why I think third places are disappearing is because people just aren't engaging as much because they're sucked into this. They're sucked into just vegetating on Netflix all day. They're sucked into something that keeps them at home alone. And it's, it's, it kind of sucks. I am a person that very, very much deeply values my alone time. But I also have to understand that there's kind of too much and something that would be kind of neat about a third place. You mentioned the like, music listening room. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

How cool would that be?

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's these ideas of being alone but amongst people. And it is a very different thing than being alone by yourself at home, rotting in bed. It is, it is very different. Even if you're not actively socializing, maybe you're just hanging out in the back of the, the music listening room, vibing out, listening to different tracks people put on. Maybe most of the time you're not all that interested in what it is, but maybe someone puts on a song that you really jive with for some reason and you ask them about it and figure out who the band is, whatever else, and you have these like, little interactions. It can be really healthy. Especially, I'm assuming a very high percentage of males are in the audience right now. Especially for us. There's a crazy, like we don't socialize with any one problem going on right now where we all just spend all of our time alone and fighting against that is like a, a valiant thing to do.

[Linus Sebastian]

So this, this stage in development occurs around two to four years and it's called parallel play. I love parallel play when a child plays alongside or near others but doesn't play with them. So different toys in the same sandbox or a group of kids drawing on their own papers while sitting side by side, focused on their own journeys, but still aware of one another. And it feels like we're not even getting there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. Sometimes a parallel play is great.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you were saying, like we end up alone in our homes, we also end up alone outside of our homes. I saw this really interesting. I see both sides exchange on Reddit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Eyes forward.

[Linus Sebastian]

So it was, it was kind of a. Kind of a women centric subreddit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Talking about how. How invasive and uncomfortable and almost like borderline aggressive it is if someone approaches them in public when they have their AirPods in. And you know, and, and I kind of went. And they were like, you know, oh, it's, you know, when you have your AirPods in, it makes you seem unapproachable and they're like, that's the point. And I'm like, oh, man. Definitely see both sides. Because it especially like, I'm not a woman. Big surprise. Shocker. Oh, I know, right? Not a woman.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I would have never known.

[Linus Sebastian]

But there are definitely aspects of the being a woman experience that I have witnessed as a third party, non woman that would make me really uncomfortable in public. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A little bit too much attention.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Little bit too much attention.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Might just want to be by yourself today.

[Linus Sebastian]

Might just want to listen to my music and jog.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Be left alone.

[Linus Sebastian]

And maybe I'm wearing short shorts because I don't want to wear sweaty leggings that are tied up against my legs. But that's not an invitation to, you know, want to touch them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, sure. That makes total sense. Perfectly reasonable. On the other hand, like, you go out in public and like, like everyone has their AirPods in. Not literally everyone. I'm obviously being a little hyperbolic right now, but many people do and you kind of wonder, okay, but like, what was it like before that? And were there things about that that were maybe better and healthy and maybe healthier?

[Luke Lafreniere]

But again, I have put the AirPods in and hoped no one would talk to me before. Totally get it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sometimes mid conversation, I'll even put my AirPod back in, hoping that somebody might recognize a nonverbal cue. But, you know, without, you know, categorizing our community, I will say there are social cues.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Might not be many members of the

[Linus Sebastian]

LTT community that don't really pick up non verbal body language cues. So it doesn't always work. But, you know, you try, you try. And you know what? Like, I. I get that. I'm not offended by it. I'm not upset by it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Doesn't really bother me.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm also not a woman.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Totally.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it really is very different experience. Very different. When I'm getting unwanted attention from a man, it's just kind of like, bro, go do something else.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's also fascinating. I don't know, we don't need to go down this chain really. But it's fascinating to me, like, if I am, like, attached to, to say, my partner right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If I. If I'm right next to them or my arms around them or holding hands, physically attached. If there is some strong indication that I am with this person. Yeah, it's fine. The second I, like, float out of the picture, it changes.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's like, so you're saying you're the jealous type?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Well, no. If. If I'm.

[Linus Sebastian]

If I'm so. If we're like this. It's fine to talk to me if he's not next to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is not my point. That is not my point.

[Linus Sebastian]

He might go full, like, papa bear mode. You watch out for that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My point is that it's surprising how palpable and fast the change in attention can be. We saw this in New York. I was like. I was floated off to the. Emma was getting something from a food cart. And you, Yvonne and I were all kind of more. Floated off to the side.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because we were reading the side of the thing, so she was kind of on her own, and some dude came up, like, pretty close, right behind her, and I repositioned, and then they left, and it was like. That was fast.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's almost like we're actually like animals.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And everything. Like, you know how every man somehow knows which urinal to stand at?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it's funny because women will talk about how they, like, don't get it. That's because you never needed to. That's because a hundred thousand years ago, a million years ago, you weren't marking your territory with this thing. You know you like it. But it's culturally universal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm serious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did. Did humans mark their territory with piss? I know dogs did. Did humans do that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Humans might not have, but something. At some point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did we definitely.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's clearly. There's clearly vestigial. Like, I don't like. I don't want to pee right next to another dude unless we're pretty close. Do you?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No. Yeah, sure, sure. All right, I'll follow. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, there's. There's occasional social situations.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it might just be, like, shyness because you have your dong out and in your hands. You don't want to be, like, literally shoulder to shoulder. But.

[Linus Sebastian]

But where's the origin of that? Why do we have that shyness? Would I be shy sitting next to another dude and ripping a fart?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Probably not. It's probably not.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think there's something coming out of my butt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This might mean. This might be a hot take, but I think fart smelling is different than dawn looking.

[Linus Sebastian]

But the thing. I mean, you could.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dawn gazing is a little different than fart smell.

[Linus Sebastian]

At the urinal, though. There's usually a barrier anyway. So it's not even about the look. It's not even rational anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hot take. If you're a tall dude, there effectively is not a barrier.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, that's fair. That's fair.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is. And, like, you know what? I'm not even trying to be like, I'm tall. You think there's a barrier for Lucas? There ain't no barrier for Lucas.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is true. This is very true. But what I'm basically saying is like there's things that are, that are, that are not. No, I hear you don't need to be communicated.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

That are non verbal. That we all just like kind of understand. Except the ones that don't. And coming way back around, some of them can make life a little uncomfortable to be a woman.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I don't have to experience that. Which is great. And unfortunately AirPods might be limiting our ability to socially interact. And third place would strive to be different somehow and probably would fail for that reason. Because people, people, like I said in the, in that subreddit, they. They liked it this way and wanted

[Luke Lafreniere]

it this way and the whole Third place.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that's valid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It might end up a pit of 300 dudes that are all single, everyone

[Linus Sebastian]

back in the pile and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And you know, it might. You might walk in that door

[Linus Sebastian]

and

[Luke Lafreniere]

feel a little targeted when 600 eyeballs turn at you all all at once.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not to mention the other balls.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, pretty much. So. Yeah. I don't know. There's. There's problems with these things. It is, it is a tragedy that a lot of these Third places are gone, but I don't have an answer for it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Have we done a topic yet?

[Luke Lafreniere]

One which I don't even know if we're actually done.

[Producer Dan]

You are not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We talked about the Linux stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I'm done.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't have a lot to add. Yeah. I think there are some cozy things from Mint that I miss.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I'm fine so far as of right now. Everything that I've had to do has me not looking back towards Windows at all. I fully expect my final conclusion is going to be wanting to go back to Windows because I'm going to run into game compatibility issues. And honestly, maybe because the team's experience is just so bad and I have to use teams. So it just is what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is why I never look at YouTube chat. I take the middle urinal. I love that awkward moment of silence when they have to decide whether or not to go next to you or go into a stall. Actual monster.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That feels like someone that we knew used to vary their walking speed to be a little bit faster than you or a little bit slower than you just to see how you'd react. Do you know who I'm talking about? I can type it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm Going to type it.

[Linus Sebastian]

That checks out. I didn't know that they did that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It feel. It feels like that type of thing. Just, they just, it's just the like social observation. They just want to see.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, okay. Yeah. Yvonne picked up on a tism thing from me that I hadn't realized that I was still doing. So like, like years into my relationship, she finally acknowledged it out loud. She's like, oh yeah, you're doing that thing where you don't step on cracks. So it makes your. It makes your gait really uneven, but it's fine. And I was like, oh God. Now I'm like hyper aware of this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I do stuff like that all the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

But that was. That's not me doing it on purpose to find out how other people will react to it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I don't think I even sort of hide that. I'll. I'll like really dramatically like I'll either on purpose step on all of them or not step on them or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have to force myself to not. I'm just think about it. Which makes me think about it a lot.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then I just walk with very even. I actually try to walk in my step with her.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Super robotic.

[Linus Sebastian]

She's 2 inches shorter than me. But women tend to have proportionally longer legs compared to their torsos. So our legs are almost exactly, exactly the same length.

[Luke Lafreniere]

M and I are exactly the same.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So we. So, so I can. So if I pay attention to it at all, then I. Then I can just like walk completely in lockstep with her. And then I. And then I don't have to think about it as much because if we're attached, then I don't have to look down and think about where I'm stepping.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm just a child. When I walk, I'll. I'll jump on all the lines or avoid all the lines. I'll. If there's like a little, you know, I don't know what you want to call it. A little flat bit like stopping the, you know, dirt on a slope or something. I'll. I'll try to walk on that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who knows?

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do whatever. Oh, a puddle. Yeah, totally. That's me for sure. I'm not walking. I'm gonna have fun. Whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

What are we supposed to be doing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Next topic.

[Producer Dan]

Some comms.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Comms.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Producer Dan]

And cw.

[Linus Sebastian]

Time for some checkout messages. So our end of season sale is accepted, extended. You want to fire up LMG GG? EndOfSeason. We are bumping the sale to 30% off. So if there's something you've been eyeing for a while, this is probably the moment to grab it. We are clearing space for what's coming next. Which means you can get current season gear at off season pricing and then wear it now or stash it for next year. Or you can, I mean, wait and get other stuff later. Either way, you win. I guess you can find the sale at LMG GG endofseason.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, there's only these ones left.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, that's the thing about a clearance sale. Yep. Yeah. So if you see something here that's in your size, you should probably order it now. Don't be. Don't be a Luke. Don't make that noise.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I guess you knew what I was gonna say. I. I kept mending meaning to request this and then I just kept forgetting to. And now it's out of stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now it's gone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I actually really wanted one.

[Linus Sebastian]

The last chance sale is also still live. LMG gg last chance. There's some really solid deals in here. Once these ones hit zero, that's it. Shop the sale before it's gone. We got the polo shirt. We got the dropout hoodie. We've got docs. The not a hot dog V neck T shirt.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like that one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Some bundles. There's a lot of really good backpacks.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some of these bundles are wild right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. So go check that out. Finally, we're keeping the buy more, save more deal on all of our blank tees because we get it. When you find something that fits well and just works, it makes sense to grab a couple, maybe in a few different colors, and then call your wardrobe. Wardrobe optimized. You can check it out at LMG GG Blank tees. Buy more, save more. The more you buy, the more you save. It's girl math. You know you love it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, Here you go. Two shirts is 45, three is 60, four is 70, five is 80.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dang.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, That's a pretty good deal. Yeah. Yeah. High quality shirts. All right. And when you're placing your order, hey, you might want to send a checkout message. The way these work is you just add something to your cart on lttstore.com and it will go to producer Dan. If you guys are gonna throw money at your screen to check to check if you guys are gonna throw money at your screen to interact with us on the show, we figure you might as well get high quality merchandise in return. Like say, for example, the lawsuit hoodie that Luke had out just now. So in the cart. You can say whether you want your name to appear or not. You can choose a color scheme and oh my God, get that out of here. You go ahead and place your order and it'll go to Dan, who will reply to it or who will forward it internally, or who will just kind of pop it up, you know, somewhere, or who will curate it for me and Luke on the show. So want to show them a couple curated ones, Dan?

[Producer Dan]

Yeah, sure. We've got a bunch here already. Last week you talked about Apple headphones on Android with updates. What's your take on Samsung only supporting 3D spatial audio on its own headphones? I use Sony and it has no support for it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Generally, Samsung's fault.

[Linus Sebastian]

Generally speaking, vendor lock is not something that I'm a huge fan of. However, 3D spatial audio, are we talking the kind where it knows where it is relative to the position of your device? Do we know that this is Samsung's fault, or is this something that they specifically had to build for, like, on their hardware in order to make it work? I legitimately don't know.

[Producer Dan]

My new pair of headphones has 3D spatial audio like you've described, and it works with literally anything.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, but is that because they did a bunch of extra work or is it because Samsung specifically? I guess what I'm asking is, did Samsung specifically lock it out or did they just not put in the work?

[Producer Dan]

That I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

That I don't know. In general, though. No. I consider that to be a downer. If they are selling these headphones as having 3D spatial audio and it only works on a Samsung phone. It's. It's. It's a pretty crummy user experience. I want to be able to. I want to be able to mix and match. I don't want to have to buy my next phone from Samsung just because my headphones happen to be from Samsung and I really like 3D spatial audio. I don't happen to really like 3D spatial audio, so it's not a big issue for me. But your mileage may certainly vary on that. I know some people like it. Dan, do you like 3D spatial audio?

[Producer Dan]

I have never used the feature, so no, I don't.

[Linus Sebastian]

Neat. Okay, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, have you not used the feature because you don't like it, or do you.

[Producer Dan]

I don't use it because it's. I don't like it. Fine. With stereo. I did try one that was like 3D in a space that was kind of neat. Like, it was kind of more. Now it's kind of sounds like you're in a good room, which is a little different.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah, that's just like.

[Producer Dan]

That's a type of it, but not the.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like in your head.

[Producer Dan]

It's coming from speakers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but that's like a DSP thing. That's like the good old fashioned eax. Remember eax?

[Producer Dan]

Yeah, we're just regressing, I guess.

[Linus Sebastian]

You could play around with the EAX profiles in the. In the.

[Producer Dan]

I mean a train station and my music sounds worse.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, I remember.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, right. Like I'd always. I'd play around with it for 30 seconds just like that. And then I'd be like, well, this is stupid. I guess I'll just not use this anymore.

[Producer Dan]

I was like, pretty much, yeah. You know, Vaporwave played in a dead mall from another room and you're having an hallucinatory episode. That kind of genre before that was cool. Could have your MP3 player play that, your MP5 player or whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyone else? Anyone else? Yeah, chat's not all excited about 3D spatial audio, that's for sure.

[Producer Dan]

So if it's vendor locked for a feature that you think is dumb, does that matter?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it still matters because it's the principle of the thing, you know, it's still bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ah, yeah. Like if you have like, I don't know, you have a lollipop where if you press a button and it makes it taste like cum, then like, sure, most people probably don't want that, but if you arbitrarily lock it out to only iPhone users because you assume maybe they just, you know, like the taste of corporate dong, then, like, that's not your decision to make for them. They should. Android users should be allowed to love corporate dong too.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, some of them. Some of them for sure do. I suspect that product would have a very small but extremely dedicated audience.

[Linus Sebastian]

I bet it wouldn't be as small as you think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe, maybe not. Did you like upload a taste profile

[Producer Dan]

EQ your throat? Just leave a couple beats there. Would you want another one?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, give me another.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anything.

[Producer Dan]

No, Luke, please give us a mini networking infrastructure lesson. Why is running a VPN gold mine, but serving video is a money pit?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's actually a pretty good question.

[Producer Dan]

Are users watching videos on a VPN not just as bandwidth expensive?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just not as. I don't know, I can't remember the vpn, but there's a VPN that gives a lot of public data, which is how we figured a lot of this information out on the cost Benefit.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's the wind one? Windscribe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But. Oh, that sounds right.

[Linus Sebastian]

VPN based in Canada. They're based in Canada.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, that sounds right. It was a Canadian one, if I remember correctly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, Windscribe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Windscribe. Current status. Maybe this sounds, this looks like the right page. Maybe there's more information here, but you can, yeah, you can see the network utilization, the current users and the registered users and, and basically what the effective. Oh is this. I feel like there might have been more information on this in the past, or maybe I'm tripping, or maybe there was some other way we got it. But. But basically the, the vibe that we got is that it kind of seems like a lot of people turn the VPN on, put the hat on, do some pirate hat wearing things and then turn the VPN off. And often turn the VPN off pretty much all the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The average utilization of VPNs does not

[Linus Sebastian]

seem very high because the, the experience of browsing with a VPN sucks. It's just constant captures, slower browsing speeds.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And unless you are wearing your tricorn hat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

The vast majority of the things that you do online, unless you're really, really, like really trying to avoid anyone, you know, fingerprinting or creating an advertising profile for you, which I am not convinced that most people are willing to put in the work to actively avoid. Yeah, I just, I don't see the, I don't see the point of it if I'm not traveling or like where I need to get around like a great firewall of some sort or if I'm not downloading something sketchy, I don't have my VPN on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And that's, I think the vast majority of people and the huge gaps between that allow them to save a lot of money. There's also like, I think the quality of service is not expected to be super high, to be completely honest. Like if, if you're watching a video and the next chunk doesn't show up, you're immediately pissed off. You're immediately messaging support, you're mad there was a buffer. What are you talking about? Is 2026, which is fair enough, but if you're using a VPN and you're torrenting something, which is specifically what someone said in chat is like, oh, it's a lot of data through torrents though, because if people are mostly just pirating stuff, first of all, you're probably not really staring at it the whole time it's downloading anyways, and it's a torrent. You're going to expect a lot of ups and downs. So if a little bit of that comes from the vpn, it's probably fine. So there's like the quality of service expectation is in the dirt and the amount that people are just not actually even using the service is in the dirt. There's a ton of people that have subscriptions and aren't even using them.

[Linus Sebastian]

If you don't have a subscription, by the way, now seems like as good an opportunity as any to talk about the really good deal you can get on PIA VPN through the Linus Tech Tips link. Dan, do you want to throw the link in the various chats?

[Producer Dan]

Sure thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool. Good chat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, hey, it's you. I didn't know this was like our own thing. Yeah, look at him.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look at that. Minus tech tips. Fans save more. With PIA vpn, you don't even have to be a fan to save more. You can just click this link.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's true.

[Linus Sebastian]

You could hate me and still save more.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's true. But yeah, it seems to just be that people's usage of VPNs is really low. And we talked to a couple people in the industry. We poked around, I think it was Windscribe and a few other different sites that were like very transparent about things. And we were like, oh, wow, people really don't be using this too much compared to the amount of like actually, you know, currently registered users. Connected users. It was very interesting to see the connected users versus network utilization and the registered versus connected users. I don't remember, but I think we figured out someone got the GI Joe reference. Yeah. For some reason, pia in my head just always sound. Sounds like GI Joe, but it's pia. I don't know why I do that all the time.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm a computer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm a computer.

[Linus Sebastian]

Stop all the downloading.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, see that's, that's what people do with VPNs. They download something real quick and then they stop using it for a month. I don't know how. I wonder how many people understand what we're talking about right now.

[Producer Dan]

I only care about the people who get the reference. Everybody else could leave. I want to be alone with them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bought a massage machine. Go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thank you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyways. Yeah, so, but it. Basically what we learned was a lot of people pay for it. Yeah, A lot of people pay a decent amount for it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And a lot of people don't really use it that much.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whereas Floatplane, I think our usage is actually pretty high.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Usage is pretty high. Every subscription service you're going to have. I don't remember what they call it, but people who have subscribed and are basically dead accounts where they just like, they don't check their credit card that much and they've just been paying but they don't actually use the service. Every service has that. Ours seems to have a lot of active users. I'm not complaining about that at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's almost like, it's almost like we advocate for, you know, not wasting your money.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I would rather you did. I want you to use Flow Plane. I want you to enjoy it. But VPNs are kind of. It feels like the opposite end of the spectrum.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I had someone make a comment to me that the Smash Champs business model will probably struggle from the people who buy the annual premium membership and play like six, seven days a week. I'm like, bro, no, that's what we want. Yeah, we want people here every day. We want, we want this to be a community.

[Luke Lafreniere]

VPNs are also. And I mean like all of them as far as I know. So I'm not signaling any of them out. And I do think I'm actually talking about pia. It's way more expensive to subscribe for one month compared to subscribing for longer periods of time. Well, yeah, so if you. This totally makes sense. The business model totally makes sense. But it creates a situation where it's like if you didn't use a VPN at all that month, but you might next month, you don't really want to cancel it. So a lot of people would just have VPN subscriptions even if they don't use it for four or five months at a time. And then you might have a spike in usage where they're like, I'm going to download a ton of stuff and they connect it and do a ton of torrents and download things overnight or whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Every Linux ISO, like we're doing the Linux challenge right now, so we needed so many Linux ISO I had to

[Luke Lafreniere]

download every single Linux ISO and every

[Linus Sebastian]

version ever, every season of popos.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But. But yeah, Mulvad has flat billing. That's cool. I don't know like some of them are most VPNs.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't like Game of Mint has like so many seasons.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's cool that they have flat pricing. Archerton but very nice. But. But yeah, it's. It's very common that people don't want to cancel. They might need it. Or even if say the Mulvad thing where apparently they have flat pricing, which is neat Even then you might not want to cancel because, yeah, you're gonna have to go subscribe again if you need it, and you might need it next week or something, so I'll just leave it. It's only like five bucks. There's a lot of the. I'll just leave it. Going on with vpn.

[Linus Sebastian]

I've had an active subscription to pia, in spite of the fact that they're like an affiliate of ours for like 10 years or something like that, because it's just more convenient to just kind of have it. Yeah, Firecat. Speaking of convenience, decided it was more convenient to type this into chat instead of into a search engine. So I saved them the work. Yes, PIA works on Linux. That's. That's one that I have a real hard time wrapping my brain around. But there you go, you got your answer and you got noticed. So it's double accomplishment.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like it's beginning. He's slowly becoming a Linux pro.

[Linus Sebastian]

Me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on, hold on. Don't make me pull this out. Why? Did you read the back?

[Producer Dan]

Just sent him a link to the wiki.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't make me pull this out. Don't make me pull this out. What? Oh, is this bad now? What is this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is it just not HTTPs?

[Producer Dan]

I don't think it's HTTPs.

[Linus Sebastian]

Certificate DATE invalid Oof. Oh, it's probably fine. Won't let them see me do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's probably fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, no. Normally uses encryption. When Chrome tried to connect to it for you, the website sent back unusual and incorrect credentials. You cannot visit it right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, wait, really?

[Linus Sebastian]

Why? Is it dot app? What the heck just happened?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you get sponsor linked?

[Linus Sebastian]

Is it dot app? No, it's not sponsored. Has it always been dot app? Shut up,

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude. It's been years since I've tried to use this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, Is it. Just let me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let me Google that.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, this is also.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just let me Google that. Let me google that dot com. I'll share my screen.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let me Google that dot com. Interesting. Let me Google that for you. Dot com Here. Hold on, I'm coming back to me for a second here. Also goes to lmgtfy.com and also has the certificate invalid issue. Go figure.

[Producer Dan]

All right,

[Linus Sebastian]

anyway, yeah, so this is what it does if you're not familiar is it just puts up a little cursor and then types it for you. And then. Oh, interesting. Still shows the sponsored results though. In spite of being whatever G Private is. Have you used G Private?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've heard of G Private.

[Linus Sebastian]

What is G Private? Are we On a little side quest right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Simple, untracked, private search.

[Linus Sebastian]

Google search. But it's 100% private.

[Producer Dan]

Learn more.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Take our word for it. Or like, Like what, What. What is this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have no idea.

[Linus Sebastian]

Committed to protecting your privacy. Add an affiliate disclosure. James Lacey of the Shopwise Group is owner of gprivate.com okay. All right, cool. Here's this postal code. Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, boy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, no, it's right there. It's right on the site.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's in the privacy page right there.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. I didn't. I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's probably a P.O. box.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. All right. Should we maybe do some topics?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nope.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wikipedia has blocked Archive Today and started removing over 690,000 archive links from the pedia, citing security risks and reliability issues. The decision followed reports that Archive Today's operator. This is freaking wild. Like, I've used Archive Today to get past paywalls before because I just want to read that one article and I'm sorry, I'm not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think a lot of people use it for that. Yeah, that's a self decided totally. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I mean, look, I actually, I'm not going to argue that that one's okay because a huge part of the decay of the quality of our journalism has been people's unwillingness to pay for it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it is pretty tough. When I came across one article I wanted to read on a site in the last year, and this is the first one, and I'm just like, yeah, I don't know. I don't think that's going to happen today. So Archive Today, sometimes that's what happens today is something that I have used. And looking at this, I am now deeply uncomfortable ever using it again. Let's talk about that. The operator embedded malicious code into Captcha pages, allegedly using visitors web traffic to help generate a DDoS attack against a blog called Gyroveg, run by Jani Patocalio, who published research about the background of the operator behind the archive. Editors also reported that some archived snapshots. This is actually okay. We could probably have a really long conversation about which of these things are worse. And I don't think there's a wrong answer, but I feel on my initial reaction that this next part is actually worse. Editors also reported. And we're talking Wikipedia editors.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

That some of the archived snapshots on Archive Today were altered, including a case where the credited author of a blog post was reportedly changed within an archived capture. This combined with an absolutely bonkers set of threats made from the operator toward Jenny Patocalio including the threat of a Gyrovage branded gay dating app, made Wikipedia editors determine that the service posed reputational and security risks, which.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When I first read just the subject line of this happening. Not in the Wan Doc. I read this a bit ago, but when I read the subject line of this happening, I was like, what? That sucks. And then I read more into it. I was like, whoa, that makes a lot of sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is really important. Archive Today is not the Internet Archive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

They are two different things. So far, the Internet Archive has not, and that includes the Wayback Machine, has not done anything to make us question their integrity and credibility. That group.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Archive Today just completely obliterated whatever goodwill they might have had because your entire raison d' etre as an archival. Well, archive. Damn it. I painted myself into a bit of a corner there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it kind of sucks because a lot of these archive sites have been, like, amazing for so long. Like, Internet Archive is so based.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, I didn't finish that sentence. But your entire value is that we trust you to be an accurate record of what we otherwise might have lost.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're supposed to be built on a rock solid foundation of truth and accuracy. That's. That's the whole point is that things are not forgotten and lost and. And allowed to be obfuscated or gaslit in the future. So if you're gonna do that, you're cooked. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, Wayback Machine has been used as, like, hard fact for a long time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And like. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it has to be that. If it's anything other than that, then it's worthless now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. It's rough. Totally understand the decision and agree with. In my opinion, you can't. You can't do those things. You can't associate with those things. You can't associate with an archive that's editing data. Like, it just doesn't work.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Fundamentally doesn't work.

[Linus Sebastian]

Also, like, I have no idea if this is the case, but, like, I have noticed times when I go to archive a page and it seems like it's like doing a lot for a long time. I wonder if my connection was being used for a DDoS attack. It says it was in captchas, though. But then, like. Like, have you ever actually tried to submit a page for archival.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. It does, like, a whole bunch of stuff, which kind of. And I don't. I don't know the exact mechanism that it uses because I've just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just like, compressing things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Never looked it up. I've Never figured it out. But what I assume is that it's easier for them to grab the assets through you and have you upload to them rather than you just flag it to them and they try to download it. Because they would probably get, they probably get flagged for all the archive requests that they're doing. That's, that's my assumption, but I really kind of don't know that. But there's been times when it's taken a really long time for just like a text page and I haven't really fully understood why that would be. And I wonder if, if, you know, my, my upload was used for this in some way. I don't, I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't have a single clue.

[Linus Sebastian]

Me neither. Niplus Cage asks why would one archive a page? So reasons to archive include logging changes before they happen. So this has come up a lot recently with the DOJ in the US's publication of the Epstein files. There's been a lot. There's. There's a huge tech conversation that somehow we have not had around the, the Epstein files, around preservation of data and government censorship and government manipulation of data. There's been multiple documented cases where they have made changes to either the redactions or in some cases by removing data that was originally published in order to make it more difficult to find. Yeah, so yeah, that's a good reason.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have done some personal archiving, but I haven't submitted something for archiving. Like I know there was, there was a particular video not that long ago that said some particularly disgusting things and I didn't actually want that person to be able to get away with just like pulling it down or whatever. So I myself downloaded and I had multiple other people download it as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think I have that video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So like there are things like that that I've done.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it's always been a personal effort. I haven't submitted for archive anything.

[Linus Sebastian]

Another really good reason is it can just be kind of a fun time capsule.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, totally.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like going and browsing NCIX.com from 2005 is both fun and also educational.

[Luke Lafreniere]

NCI.com on the wayback Machine is wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's pretty fun. And so being able to see accurate, like definitely accurate, which is again why the trust is so important. Accurate pricing from back then, being able to call back specs, see how it was marketed. Right. That's something that's not going to be captured on an incredible resource like tech power ups, you know, gpu, what do they call it? They're like gpu, I don't know, but it's awesome index. But that won't be captured there. You won't see what the retail pricing was. You won't see what the product photos looked like. So an archived snapshot of the site from that time is irreplaceable in that way. Nothing else can do that. Another reason would be to circumvent paywalls. I mean I already kind of talked about that. Is they have their ways of downloading the entire page and then just making that available without any kind of like scroll to sign up to keep reading or whatever else. What are you up to over there?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm loading NCX from 2005.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah, baby. Get that Lexmark Z705 color inkjet printer.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Pentium 4.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is. Ma'. Am. Dude, this is what I'm talking about though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Where's some ram? Can I get some ram?

[Linus Sebastian]

People. People are so upset about how expensive tech is and I'm just like, bro. It's like, yeah, it was always. Was always expensive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

512 megs for 162 bucks. Let's go.

[Linus Sebastian]

HyperX, baby. Get that Corsair Value select, buddy. That's. That's the move. Corsair Value select.

[Luke Lafreniere]

These old Kingston HyperX like blue with the. With the silver like pincher things on it. Those are legendary.

[Linus Sebastian]

That ain't nothing compared to my. My OC Easy Platinum though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One gig.

[Linus Sebastian]

Get that platinum. Super super mirror Silver heat spreader. And that was. That was back before they were hunting to save on material. Mushkin still exists. Fun fact.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know they just because of ncx. They don't in my brain. Yeah, because NCX is gone. They were like. NCX was like my only portal to Mushkin products.

[Linus Sebastian]

How cool would it be if we could I bring back ncix dot com. I'd still love to do it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That'd be pretty sick. There was Wayback machine snapshots from 2026. What's going on?

[Linus Sebastian]

Of NCIX.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, let me, let me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh no. I think it's still a thing. Didn't someone try to. I think someone tried to bring it back.

[Luke Lafreniere]

January 23rd. There's a snapshot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ew.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let's see what it is. Is it just some AI junk?

[Linus Sebastian]

Ew. Oh my God. No, no, no. Don't look, don't look. Don't look. Look. Okay. This is crazy. This is. This is crazy. Check this out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, what's that first one? Wait, what the.

[Linus Sebastian]

It redirected to this. Oh, it was Worse before. Oh, the last one was a you. Oh, wait. Yeah, there it is. That's crazy. Oh, man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ah.

[Linus Sebastian]

What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've never heard of this thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it looks horrible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It kind of does.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, well, it looks absolutely horrible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you want Anime Bobs? What if we showed you Anime Bobs?

[Producer Dan]

Sure

[Linus Sebastian]

can have my junk. Throwaway email.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah,

[Linus Sebastian]

this looks like an. No, I was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm sorry. I'm having troubles responding right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Please try again later. Cost free. I mean, I didn't. I didn't. I didn't say anything. Bro. Ask me. Okay. What would Linus think about being on this site?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Any. Enter doesn't send.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Enter doesn't send.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ah, there's one login. It's keeper. Oh, dude. Keeper. On the. On the two factor. Enter doesn't confirm it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really.

[Linus Sebastian]

It drives me on desktop. It drives me nuts.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, hold on.

[Producer Dan]

I'll increment the counter.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, hold up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, gosh. Which Linus are we talking about here? We. Well, he definitely wouldn't use alarm or. Yeah, emergency light emoji. The Linux kernel. Daddy. Linus Torvalds would absolutely hate being on this site. If it's any social media cesspool. Dude, straight up called. Is this trying to. Like, is this the. Is this the way this site thinks I would talk? I guess a disease that encourages bad behavior spills energy drink. Wait, but if you mean me, Linus Sebastian from ltt, I'd be like sponsor block activated. But only if they send a 4090. Torvald tried Google once because it was less mindless, but bailed. So it goes back to talking about Torvalds again. Yvonne's take. Just use FaceTime. Boomers

[Luke Lafreniere]

verdict.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's brutal.

[Linus Sebastian]

So stupid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's actually just not good. Yikes.

[Linus Sebastian]

What the hell is Linus social opinion? I don't know. What is that? Is that. Is that on here? Linus? Yeah, this is. Dude, this is so bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. It was just redirecting to the YouTube channel for a bit there.

[Linus Sebastian]

That would definitely be a better thing for it to do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It did that, like in January.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I'm still poking around, like, this year.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, there was. There was one day. I think it was this one. Let's see. It's on the 23rd. Yeah, YouTube.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's definitely a better place for it to go than this hot garbage.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's back to. It's back to garbage. There's a bunch of snapshots in 2025. What was going on here? There. This one. Three snapshots in one day. What was happening?

[Linus Sebastian]

I really wish that. Oh, yeah, this is just the domain being available page, I think, or like being for sale or something. Oh, man. So does that mean that whoever this Chatify Life AI has acquired it now then?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who knows?

[Linus Sebastian]

That would be really disappointing because I would. I would have loved to buy it and resurrect it, but I just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, there's a buy this domain thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Okay, well, that's a shame.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The owner of NCX.com is offering it for sale for an asking price of $1 million.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I was aware of that, which is why I didn't buy it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, screw that.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was worth a fraction of that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The meme is not worth that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, there's. There's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm like, I'm sorry, but it's been way too long. No one really cares anymore.

[Linus Sebastian]

Except Crystal says, no, it's still for

[Luke Lafreniere]

sale for a million dollars. Well, which might as well mean it's not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are there services where you can, like, lease redirecting? Because that kind of makes probably. So you find like. Yeah, no, that's got to be a thing, right? You find parked domains and you just, like, park domains that get by the right traffic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, because NCX would for sure get a little bit of traffic.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. People are saying yes. Yes. People are saying yes. Yeah. Okay.

[Producer Dan]

Oh,

[Linus Sebastian]

okay. This. This message from Helen Keller for 2069 is a little confusing, but I think I understand what they're saying. I'm clawing back a charity website for a client that got turned into a naughty website. Oh, a clawing back a. So, yeah, a charity website that existed and was a thing, and the client who owned it had it turned into a naughty website so that they could just, like, steal traffic. That's. Yeah. Oof, that's rough. That's rough. Do y' all own the NCIX YouTube channel? No. So the ownership of all the NCIX intellectual property is complicated, which is one of the big reasons why we haven't made a real serious written offer for it, because the original owner of it has a version in his mind of who owns it, and the creditors after the bankruptcy have a version in their mind of who owns it, and they don't necessarily agree. And somehow the domain and trademark and YouTube channel were not resolved at the time of the bankruptcy. So we have in the past approached the. The group that handled the bankruptcy on behalf of the creditors and said, hey, so you guys didn't like, get this. So if we buy it, do you. Do you commit not to pretend that it's yours because you, like, never got it. And they're like, we're not even going to look into that. Which basically is a big problem for us.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's not interesting enough for us right now. Once you guys make it a very popular domain again, then it will become suddenly interesting for us again. Yeah. So it's. It's untouchable.

[Linus Sebastian]

So it kind of. It kind of is. Is doomed to rot forever unless the owner allowed it to lapse maybe, and we sniped it. But even then, the trademark could be. Could be a problem. I don't even know that for sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't know there was someone on the ICX channel that I didn't know. I don't recognize this guy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. Oh, shoot. I think he's. He's someone's brother.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Is that. Oh, wait. Well, I don't want to, like, dox him.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, no, no.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, he's someone's brother probably, like, statistically speaking,

[Luke Lafreniere]

if anyone, he's in a few of them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I want. Hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Their thumbnails were pretty good. I did stuff for a long time. I must have really not been paying attention at the end there. Makes sense. We kind of had a lot going on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, here we go. His name is Barrett.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool. Yeah. He's Luke's brother.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool. Let's go with that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Long lost. He actually did some work for us at one point, I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, really?

[Linus Sebastian]

Really nice guy. Yeah. Cool. Float plane announcement. Couldn't come to whale land. Well, guess what? We released a vlog featuring Sammy's very first LAN experiencing. Here's the vlog. It includes very normal things like a fire truck. That's for gaming. See? See all the gaming happening in the back of the fire truck.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There is a lot of gaming happening in the back.

[Linus Sebastian]

There's actually a lot of gaming happening elsewhere on the fire truck. I'm not going to spoil the entire fire truck video, but there's. There's a lot of, like pretty. Pretty wild fire truck things that happen that involve gaming and whatnot. That's not on the fire truck, but whale land. Whale was pretty cool. A lot of cool stuff. A whale land. You should check out the vlog. Oh, yeah. Float plane. Audience is loving this one so far with the 300 to 1 like, dislike ratio. Nice small cameos from Bringas Studios and dank pods and Linus doing the thing. What does that mean?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you drop something

[Linus Sebastian]

just happened.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was just at the end of the video already.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep, yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There it goes.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Thank you. Thank you for that Sammy. That's very helpful. Check it out at LMG GG fpwan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Oh, we're supposed to do sponsors now. Okay. The show is brought to you by Vessi James from the business team said he owes me an apology and also a thank you. Oh, a few weeks ago he correctly okay, referred to the Atma weapon by its translated name Ultima Weapon. But out of shame he has put down his playthrough of final fantasy quote unquote. 3 thanks to me and our sponsor Vessi, though he's finally seeing the outdoors for the first time, Vessi has empowered him to go enjoy even wet grass thanks to their storm burst low tops. As always, Vessi claims their shoes are completely waterproof so even Ultros can look stylish running errands. Oh my God. Vessi's Storm Bursts are practical, durable and solid for everyday use and work with so many outfits. Plus, all of Vessi's shoes come with a year warranty and a great 30 day return policy. So leave your old shoes in the world of ruin and get 15% off your own storm [e-mail] Wanshow what a what a stunningly current bunch of cultural references in this sponsor read. The show is also brought to you by Ugreen. Traditional storage just piles your files, often making things trickier to find. But our sponsor Ugreen's AI nas brings everything into one secure hub. They come with something called Universal Search that lets you use keywords or phrases to find photos, videos or docs. It can even transcribe audio while translating across languages and can generate albums and mind maps on your behalf. Ugreen even gives you an AI chatbot bot called Olia that can help answer questions and organize your files. The NAS also has built in Security Manager that supports real time virus scanning while letting you control and manage permissions. That's on top of, you know, of course like NAS things like multiple RAID modes to keep your data safe. You can learn more about the UGreen AI NAS IDX by clicking our link in the video description. Ugreen's been kind of killing it on

[Luke Lafreniere]

nas's Dude I independently and this is not part of the ad spot or anything and there are other products that do this but I was I needed something. I needed a wall wart. So I got one from Ugreen and while I was shopping on there I've been having a problem with my car which is where the Bluetooth will sometimes just take forever to connect. It's very annoying. So I bought a thing from them. Bluetooth 3.5 millimeter.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you sure you want to just type that in Floatplane chat and hope someone else will know what it is?

[Luke Lafreniere]

One of these jobbers. I got one of these and it. It's been great.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You just. The. The USB is just for power and then the Bluetooth thing is just in the like top of the USB plug.

[Linus Sebastian]

Makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then my car has a USB and an aux right next to each other in the like center console thing. And what I'll do is my phone can connect to two Bluetooths at the same time. So my phone will automatically connect to this, which is a worst experience because I can't take calls nicely over it. And I can't do all the controls that I would like to do through the car. But it will automatically connect to this and work immediately. And then I'll notice some audio oddities. And when that happens, I just go bunk, bunk, bunk on the. On the steering wheel and go to normal Bluetooth and then everything works great.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is a very kludgy fix. But I'm glad that you're happy. It's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is kludgy, but it like makes me happy in a weird way.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And I'm glad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

18 bucks. And there is no gaps in being able to connect my phone to my car now. Which is awesome. It's sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just go Aftermarket radio. Eventually. Sure. But this was $18 and it immediately solved it. It was great.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's terrific.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I liked it. This is an extremely not planned topic and it's not even really a topic. But I just decided to check out Steam charts for some reason. I was like, I wonder what people are really doing.

[Linus Sebastian]

So that's what you do on the show when you're not listening to me talk or talking.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're doing an ad spot. There's not much for me to do. And two things. Three things really stood out to me. One, Arc Raiders is still destroying. This is crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's actually wild. 170,000 people on ARC Raiders.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's almost like people wanted an extraction shooter that's slightly less of a giant piece of shit.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. 5M. I was like, what's that even? I've never heard of that. It's just like mod thing so people can play GTA online. So there's still that many people playing GTA online.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wild. And then I saw a bongo cat and I still can't fully tell what this Even is waku wakuk dunk, dunk, dunk. It seems like it just like sits on your taskbar and as you type, like things happen.

[Producer Dan]

It's a bonsai buddy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

How is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So they're typing a notepad and it just goes bunk, bunk, bunk, bunk.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then it like bonsai buddy still a thing all these years later.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. But look at this. Overwhelmingly positive reviews. 22,000 of them.

[Linus Sebastian]

How much does this cost?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, it's free.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's free.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, that makes a little bit more sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

That explains a lot. But are there.

[Producer Dan]

Oh, it's one of those.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's banana game. I should just scroll down. It's just banana game. Okay. All right. Sounds good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, that was a fun side quest.

[Producer Dan]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Donut Labs, based in Finland, claims to have made a solid state EV battery.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

They recently announced they've created this holy grail of battery tech after only being founded in 2024.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

For those wondering, solid state batteries, pretty cool. The idea is that they replace the flammable, highly combustible liquid electrolyte used in lithium ion batteries with a solid substance that is capable of higher energy density and faster charging. I think also they're supposed to be lighter, but I guess that's another way of saying higher energy density. Historically though, they have been very difficult to manufacture. This technology has been researched to pretty much no avail for decades, with EV manufacturers pumping money into it hand over fist. Toyota's Advanced Battery Research, for instance, has 13 and a half billion. That's with a B of funding with a focus on solid state. So that's exciting. Except that there are some skeptics. Donut Labs has responded to skepticism with the I Do Donut Believe series where the company is sharing third party test results with the independent VTT Technical Research center of Finland. However, following VTT's fast charge performance test, 0off. A YouTuber with a PhD in electric propulsion whose master's thesis was about solid state batteries, cast further doubts on the product in his video called Testing the World's First Solid State Battery. I'm not going to tell you everything that he says in his video because you should really just go watch it. It's a really good video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've heard it. Yeah, I haven't seen it. I've heard it's fantastic.

[Linus Sebastian]

But there are a few important things to point out. He says that VTT's test results. What? Oh, did he actually say this part? I'm not sure if he said this part, but I was reading about it. As well. So now I'm getting his video and my reading a little bit confused. So let's not say where I got what, but here's something that's really important. The. Yeah. Yes. So the Technical Research Center, VTT Technical Research center says we tested the provided solid state battery from Donut Labs. I forget if they like actually put it in quotes or like how they worded it, but basically they worded it in such a way the solid state

[Luke Lafreniere]

was a name instead of a thing

[Linus Sebastian]

that they're saying what Donut Labs says they sent them, but they are not, they have not actually been tasked with confirming, proving. Yeah. That it is in fact solid state and they have not done any destructive testing on it. So in a way it's, it's kind of wild. It's like if I, it's like if I made a. Okay, let's say that LTTS true spec cables, let's say they were crap, hypothetically, but I called them true spec cable and then I sent them to some third party validation lab and had them test something like kind of unrelated to the speed they run at, for instance. Sure. And I was like, yeah, you guys can test the bending radius or sort of voltage drop. And then if that test lab were to say we tested LTT true spec cables and found that the bend radius is this much, it's kind of like credibility washing, if that makes sense for sure in a way because VTT never actually says it's a solid state battery, but they like tested the Donut solid state battery. So I forget whether that came up in my reading or whether that was in the video, but that was, that was pretty important. He also found that the voltage curve and fast charging graphs looked very close to a lithium ion cell. Also found that while the energy density actually seemed like good, it wasn't what Donut initially claimed. And then there was something that he brought up that I'm not actually sure if is an actual issue, but that is that they reached during their testing. They reached a 90 degree Celsius safety limit and they had to apply another heat sink in order to do the charge test again. And I think it was like 11c charging rate. But from my understanding that might be a ZTT safety protocol based on other battery chemistries. So that might not actually mean that they were sure that this thing was going to combust.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

But if Xeroth is right, that this thing seems to just actually be like maybe a good one, but just a lithium cell of some sort, then VTT was very smart to have Their safety testing protocol. Because theoretically, Donut Labs claimed that with their solid state battery, and I'm using quotes here, had an operating temperature that was safe of up to 100 degrees Celsius. So. Or something like. Or maybe more. I can't remember. But more than 90 was what they claimed. No, not zip tie tuning. Different thing. Different thing. Oh, sorry, did I say ztt? Vtt. Vtt. Technical Research center of Finland.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Not zip tie tuning.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I mean, they're. They're cool, but yeah, unrelated to this, I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What would be super based. Yes, they should just bring zero off out.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think they would do it. I think they would rather continue to trickle out information so they get to enjoy. Because I wouldn't have talked about them if it wasn't for their back and forth with the community about the veracity of their claims. They first showed up on my radar when they were making fantastical claims. Claims about this cell.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Look at this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, they're clearly riding this. But. And I'm. And I'm taking the bait, Luke. I'm taking the bait because it is more important to me to say, hey, this thing that everyone's talking about. Hold on a second. There are people who are talking about how maybe we shouldn't be talking about it than it is to not talk about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I will.

[Linus Sebastian]

La la la la la.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Until people like Xeroth who are genuinely third party and have nothing to do with that company and are not compensated by that company in any way and we're able to freely get it on their own, are able to check it

[Linus Sebastian]

out, because what's the first.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'll be interested or not.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's the first product that it's supposed to go in? It's like a motorcycle or something, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Donut Labs. Donut Lab. Motors, Batteries. Oh, God. Okay, well, I can't find what it's supposed to. What it's supposed to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If it is real, that's fantastic. And if it's not, that's not surprising. And we'll see how it goes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. Apparently I am. Apparently I'm correct. Wiley Giraffe says yes. It's supposed to go on a motorcycle within a couple of months. That's their claim.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's apparently called the Verge Motorcycle. Here it is. Oh, my God. No, like. Oh, for crying out loud.

[Producer Dan]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

600 kilometer range in a. In an electric motorcycle would be wild. Yeah, all of this would be wild if this could ever actually happen. Like, what if I try to book a test drive? Whatever. You're not even I'm over it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I just don't think. I don't think I'm ever gonna do. I don't think I'm ever gonna do an electric motorcycle. I mean, ever is a big word, but I just. Yeah, I don't. I don't think I'm ever gonna do it. Hey, what do you want to talk about next?

[Luke Lafreniere]

What's in the dock? Short circuit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. Fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't get to see the video. I don't even know what happened.

[Linus Sebastian]

I never saw the video, which is part of the problem.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Earlier this week, one of our channels, Short Circuit, published a video on a water bottle that made some, let's call them, bold health claims.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. A type of product we talk about on.

[Linus Sebastian]

We'd like to, first and foremost, we'd like to first and foremost thank our community for flagging this and holding us accountable for the bold claims, I'm gonna call them, that this bottle was making to their target market. The first time I heard about this was when our former community manager, now he has a different role, but he still talks to the community, messaged me when I was on a ski slope on a class trip going, hey, did you know about this video? And I said, excuse me, what the. No. From what I'm told in our notes here, the intention of the video was meant to be a they claim piece, not agreeing or disagreeing with the product, but rather showing it. And that clearly didn't come across. And me coming into this after the fact, I am extremely frustrated at the various breakdowns that seem like they may have occurred. We are in the process of an investigation, so you won't hear me saying exactly what happened because at this time, I have not gotten a full postmortem,

[Luke Lafreniere]

not fully confirmed report.

[Linus Sebastian]

What I do know is that this outcome is not okay because it made, from my understanding, extremely silly claims like health related claims about performing hydrolysis on water in your water bottle and whatnot. So in response to this, you know, appropriate flagging of this video from our community, we posted the following statement on both Reddit and on the Short Circuit YouTube channel. Hey, everyone, we've removed this short. We agree that the product wasn't framed with the level of skepticism it warranted, and it was published without going through our normal technical review and leadership approval process. We do not support or endorse unsubstantiated claims made by this manufacturer, and we're taking steps internally to ensure our review process is consistently followed moving forward. Thanks for holding us accountable. One of the first responses I Saw to this on Reddit was. What does that even mean? It wasn't published without going through the normal technical review and leadership approval process. What do you think that means?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's. Wait, really? Was that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Actually, I think it's. I think it's pretty obvious what that means. It means this is real bad. And I found out about it long after the damage was done, unfortunately, which is, you know, it's something that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a fact of larger companies I'm

[Linus Sebastian]

just not willing to take the fall for anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

There was a time not that long ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyone ask you to. Oh, I mean, on this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Internally, of course not, but there was a time not that long ago that the assumption is just that when something goes wrong, you know, Linus is accountable. You know, like, even, like, you want to go way back to the statement that was made that triggered the whole 2023 drama that I didn't make. But the expectation was, I apologize for it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What's the. What.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, like on the tour.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And so, you know, that's something that I flatly reject at this point. I'm sorry, I'm not gonna be as. As. As a spokesperson for the company. I can speak on behalf of the company.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. I would still expect that.

[Linus Sebastian]

But I'm not gonna fall on. But I'm not going to fall on the sword and I'm not going to take. I'm not going to take accountability for stuff I didn't do anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I don't know if that's what people wanted.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it's a. Yeah, Stay the Path. So this is what I'm talking about. Stay the Path says, sorry, dude, this company has your name on it. You own the company. Everything under LTT is under you. This is a company you own. This is all you. And that's nice and that's your opinion, but I'm not willing to do that anymore. Anymore. I'm sorry. It's just not gonna happen. It's not compatible with me continuing to do this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Let me put it that way. I feel like I think there's a gap happening right now where, like, I think Stay the Path's comment is that, like, you have to address it. And you literally just did address it. You said there was a mistake. You said we're addressing it. You thanked the community for pointing it out. Those things happened. I don't think that they're asking for you to do. I don't. Have you seen this video of the, like, volleyball player? The Japanese volleyball player that, like spiked a ball and it hit this.

[Linus Sebastian]

I did see that. And he does the dive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I don't think they're asking for you to dive under the net and do the apology.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think you should keep reading Chat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Before you keep talking, I, I think

[Luke Lafreniere]

it's an understanding gap on both sides, but I, I will keep reading Chat. I'm also looking through. I realized that searching Linus on the Linus Tech Tips subreddit is a little tough, but if you do space Linus space, it does a little bit better. I got that trick from chat last week.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a good trick.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I got that trick from chat last week. It was pretty good. The comments, talking about you individually don't seem to be asking for that

[Linus Sebastian]

again. You have to. You have to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, I'll keep looking at the chat.

[Linus Sebastian]

But yeah, just the truth of the matter, and this is just one of those things where you don't have to like it, but it's just going to be how it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think there's different levels of apology. I think there's ownership of like, hey, this is my company and my company made a mistake and there's here's the

[Linus Sebastian]

action the company is taking.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, sure. And that's one thing that's no issue. I think that's. I would like to think I'm still watching Chat. That that is what most people are asking for. And I think what you're talking about is I personally am, personally, individually, I did this. I made this mistake. I'm taking ownership for this problem. I don't think people are generally asking for that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. You should read chat more carefully.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm looking for. Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it's one of those things where, like I said, the bottom line is I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm just, you know, because there are cases where it really was, you know, a problem that existed, you know, in our, in our, in our, in our process. Right. And there are cases where over the years, and it's happened many, many times, I have explicitly laid out how we need to do it, and it hasn't been followed. And we made catastrophic errors because of that. And I've fallen on the sword and I'm not gonna do it anymore.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. But. Okay, my point is that I think some. And I've talked to you about this before, my point is that sometimes I think you just do that, but, like, no one was looking for that or expecting that, like there will be a. Someone will point out something on Reddit that Is like a particular department. It's happened with me. There's been something with like labs, which is now my thing. And you've jumped on the thread and brought a lot of attention to you in association to the problem when you had nothing to do with, with it. And I've been like, bruh, like, let me respond. These are, these are, these are my people. These are my things. Yeah. So I don't know, they might have shut up because I said stuff, but I'm not, I'm also, I read kind of slow, so I'm trying to keep up with the chat, but it's moving kind of fast, but I haven't really seen a lot of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I can find some stuff if you need.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

I, yeah, it's. And whatever. Not doing it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. It's just, it's not, it's not, like I said, it's not compatible with me continuing to do this. And so, you know, if that means, you know, making changes here, then we're going to make those changes because it's not compatible with me continuing to do this in this form. All right. Giving every kid access to tech in the classroom. Turns out that might have been a mistake. This is rough, dude. Gen Z is the first generation in history, in recorded history, to score worse on standardized testing than the earlier generation. One leading factor and I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I'm reading the notes for now. One leading factor, as pointed out by neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath via TechSpot, seems to be the negative correlation that exists between the time students spend on digital devices in school and their academic performance. The more screen exposure, the poorer the results. For the last two decades, US schools have spent a total of more than than 30 billion with a B dollars on laptops and tablets for students. And here's a chart showing how higher in class computer use is correlated with significantly lower math and science performance across both high income and middle income countries. This is mind blowing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Those are pretty big jumps.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now it is very important to note and this is one of the reasons that I am so opposed and this comes up a lot between me and the labs team, for instance, that I'm so opposed to non0y axes. And I get it, the argument is always, hey, I'm trying to accentuate the difference to make the graph more readable. And my response is always, if you have to do that to accentuate the difference, then I guess the difference wasn't so big. I see both sides. We want to clearly indicate which one is the winner? Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And in this case, a difference in a total score of 550 and 500 is like, hugely problematic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's also weird because the top two, the bottom line is actually 480. And the bottom two, the bottom line is 470. Yeah, it's off by 10. And it's also like, what. What do these represent? Like, is what. I don't know, is this American school system or something? Like, what is a 490? Is a 490A C?

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, that's a completely. That's a completely separate issue, but basically that's a valid issue.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, it's effectively the same issue because we're talking about what is the severity of the dis. Difference between the things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's. I hate it when we mess with a Y axis. And so I will often get into it with labs, especially around things like FPS. FPS graphs where they're like, no, I really wanna. I really wanna do this. And I basically go and like, one of the most famous ones was me and Lucas around efficiency plotting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, really?

[Linus Sebastian]

Because he rightly, like, he kind of malicious compliance showed me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

What it would look like at zero, where the efficiency of basically every power supply is pretty much the same. And. And I was like, okay, well how about this compromise? We show the, like that they're all basically the same and then we show a zoom in. Because to me, that context of, hey, they're all basically the same is actually really, really important when you're understanding that when we're looking at the difference between 80 plus silver and 80 plus gold, we really are just kind of splitting hairs here. It's. It's not that big of a deal. But in the context of engineering a power supply, achieving that extra percent or 2% of efficiency can be a Herculean effort and cost a lot of money in the materials. And so I totally understand why you want to show, hey, they achieved something here. And you want to make your. You want to make your visuals readable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, I don't want to go on this side topic for too long, but the point is just that this is wild. I'm not going to say causation, but there is a pretty clear correlation that

[Luke Lafreniere]

tracks consistent as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Across fourth grade math, fourth grade science, eighth grade math, and eighth grade science. I don't know where they're finding these kids who almost never use a screen, but good on the parents.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's, I suspect, is there schools that just have not Adopted, I'm assuming, is this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, this must be in school use. That makes way more sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, this is in school use.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it says right on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It sure does.

[Linus Sebastian]

I. Where's the source for this? People are asking for the source here. I think it's from Tech Spot.

[Producer Dan]

Here you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

So Tech Spot interviewed the. Interviewed the dude. And here's the. Yeah, here you go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The trends in International Mathematics and Science Study or tims

[Linus Sebastian]

Freaking wild. However. However. Lots and lots and lots of other factors.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

[Linus Sebastian]

At play.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I suspect, honestly, a bigger impact would be electronics use outside of the classroom.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I don't know how you'd control for that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can't, like at all. Parents, a learning institution.

[Linus Sebastian]

Parents would not self report correctly. And this dude, this one blew me away. I was. I was helping out with a class field trip the other day. They did a ski field trip.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was gonna say, was this the mountain?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And, you know, I like to. I like to be involved while I still get a chance.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, like, my kids are not gonna want me as a, you know, parent chaperone forever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It comes back around, I think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's what I hope. Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But there will be a gap in there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but, but, but basically I, I was. I was so. I was chaperoning this thing and one of the kind of side eyes and like, kind of, you know, undertone conversations that I had with one of the teachers was how impossible it is to get just like accurate height and weight of the kids on the intake form for the ski trip. Which is really important because when they're adjusting the bindings in the tech shop for your ski rentals, they need to know how strong of a skier you are, how old you are, and how much you weigh so that they can make sure that they will detach correctly in. In the event of. In the event of a crash. Right. And. And I, and I over and I overheard or what was part of. I wasn't eavesdropping, but I was part of a conversation where one of the other parents speculated that the reason that the teacher got like three different, like, clearly incorrect responses for one kid was that it's actually the kid doing all correspondence with the school because the parents are just like, not involved and didn't know how to like, measure themselves. And I was like, oh, my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Basically. But it pretty much. It highlighted why you could. You could never count on getting any kind of accurate, meaningful data about out of school.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, you could never do it. I just. I just suspect that's a very significant impact because. I mean because of tangential things. Right. Like if they're, if they're spending all their day, all their time doom scrolling because their parents don't care anyways. Like is their attention span so wrecked when they're in class that whether they have a screen in front of them or not, they're just not going to absorb anything? Like that type of stuff I think is relatively important.

[Linus Sebastian]

Daniel Tin says this isn't even a Y axis issue. There's not enough description about the study methodology and without actual controls there's a panoply of confounders. Okay, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about Y axis issues with the presentation of, of anything. And yeah, that's why I have carefully avoided saying that it is like a causation. I've said correlation. All we've seen is that Jared Couney Horvath says that there seems to be a negative correlation. That's what we've said. And I pointed out that the way that these are laid out makes it look like a bigger difference than it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's how we got into the conversation about the importance of drawing attention to. At the very least, if you are not using a zeroed axis, that's all it's okay. It's also clearly a multifaceted problem and is not just down to using computers in the classroom because like we had computers in the classroom and we had the computer lab as well. Like we used computers all the time when we were in school.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But you had computers in the classroom that wasn't the computer lab.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we had like when I was in elementary school we had often like one computer in the classroom. And so if you finished your work early, like you could play Oregon Trail sometimes if your teacher was a bro.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. Not at your desk though. No, but I, but, but sure, yeah, I don't think I had many of those examples. But. But maybe it was a thing. I do know that was like a thing at some schools and that was

[Linus Sebastian]

like before even teachers had a computer at their desk.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes there would just be like a station.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Little workstation, the computer in the, in the, in the corner.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or like if you had a student that had like a learning disability or something, then you'd often have a little computer for them to use.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Reddit has been fined by the UK for not verifying ages of users. The 14 and a half million pound fine. I love that money in UK is in. Is in weight units. Was issued after the UK Information Commissioner's office. It makes it sound so big.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it does.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's like, you know those giant checks, it's like, here's a million pound check.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, God,

[Linus Sebastian]

here's a. Here's a 14 million pound fine. Put it down on something solid because

[Luke Lafreniere]

I broke my hand. My hand actually got atomized from that.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, so. The ICO alleged that Reddit's failure to check ages resulted in their illegal handling of children's personal information and the potential exposure of children to inappropriate and harmful content. The ICO finding came before Reddit's July 2025 rollout of an age verification system in the UK. But the ICO says they still have concerns, noting that Reddit relies on users self declaring their ages when opening an account. This seems to ignore Reddit's use of Persona to further verify ages of users seeking to access restricted content. In the statement provided to Ars Technica, Reddit said that the ICO's insistence that we collect more private information on every UK user is counterintuitive and at odds with our strong belief in our users online privacy and safety. We intend to appeal the ICO's decision. All right, so there was, there was another part of Reddit's response that is not in my notes here that I thought was pretty hilarious. Let's see if I can find it now. It might have been in a different. Might have been in a different article. That's important. Yeah, no, here it is. We don't require you to give us your real name. We don't track your precise location. You can even browse anonymously. You can share as much or as little about yourself as you want when using Reddit. Love that. Because they're basically saying, hey, we don't require anybody to tell us everything about themselves and, and every, you know, am I the, you know, experience they've ever had and how old they almost certainly are and, and all of this stuff, you know, they can share that with us if they want to, but we, we don't require any of it. So, I mean, oh man, this is, this is a can of worms. Hey, because on the one hand, This drive from governments or, and plural, like around the world for these platforms to collect and verify more and more and more information seems crazy at a time when they're already collecting too much and if anything, we should be going the other way. Like, are we. Is it time to root for Reddit? But on the other hand, Reddit's only, the only reason Reddit's mad is because the government wants them to collect this data a different way that will give them some kind of responsibility for their stewardship of it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think where I've come to on this topic because we've been talking about this for a while is I do really like the idea of kind of take them away pushing, of pushing the kids to use less electronics and get off social media and stuff like that. Because it is highly malicious mind control. But collecting data in order to do so not only will not work, it's also just a massive trove of valuable information that will be broken into. So just stop collecting it. The kids will get around it. The kids have always gotten around it. The kids will always get around it. You, you're not actually going to stop people who are really trying to. So at that point, like I think the most at risk kids are going to be kids that would really try to get around it. So you're not actually saving the most at risk kids anyways and you're just making this like massive amount of data that they will get. Like let's be realistic about it. You're just putting it out there for, for, for bad actors to just grab. So like it's. You're doing a horrible job of just putting data out there that will be stolen that you really shouldn't have stolen and of kids information which like, come on. And you're doing it in a way that is not really even going to be effective anyways. I would love to see some stuff to try to dissuade everyone of every age from overusing like social media and doom scrolling apps and stuff like that. Especially kids who are more susceptible. But let's be real, so are adults.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, this, this whole idea that because you're an adult you're like magically grown up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, no, that doesn't, that doesn't happen.

[Linus Sebastian]

It just doesn't fly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, like let's. I don't know if this is a topic in the doc, But I mean YouTube pushed out and I appreciate that they did a like time management thing specifically for shorts within YouTube so that you can block how much you use. The thing that I don't like is there isn't a zero. They go down to 15. I appreciate that they have a limit that is not super long, but 15 is still not that short. 5. They're shorts. Five minutes would be fine. Zero would be the best. If you could granularly control it all the way up to zero, that would be the best. I would appreciate.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what, I'll be honest with you, I don't think, and I agree that it should be an option, but if I was configuring my kids account, I probably wouldn't set it to zero. True, that's fine because the goal, the limit would be to learn moderation.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, totally.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not to go cold turkey. I had a member of my family that developed a very unhealthy relationship with, with video media consumption because it was so restricted in our household and that was just their personality type. And I personally feel like if they had been, if they had not been cut off from it as, as often as they were and it had not been made such a, such a, like exciting thing, such a, such a huge dopamine hit when they were able to get access to it, maybe some of that possibly could have been at least dulled. Maybe they might have learned to manage that compulsion. Maybe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I still don't remember the name of it. But I have a browser add on. I guess it's on my Windows install so I'll have to figure this out on Linux. But I mean it's a browser so I just need to go find the add on again. But I have a browser add that blocks YouTube shorts solid. And for me, yeah, I just want it blocked. But your scenario completely makes sense. The options would be great and I'm not going to project onto you what option you should select. But I would love the option for zero. But I do, I do. I will say, having complained all of that bit, I really appreciate that they made this feature. I don't think that they had to. They had just an individual limiter for YouTube. I appreciate that they made one separate for shorts. They are different things. I understand they're in the same app. They are different things things. And I appreciate that they did that.

[Linus Sebastian]

YouTube does a lot of things pretty wrong. They do some things very wrong. They do a lot of things kind of right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is in the a little wrong but mostly right category, I think. I appreciate that it exists and I don't think there was going to be some law that there was going to make them do this. So like, I appreciate that it exists.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I, it's. I would, I would never describe myself as a fan, but I respect a lot of what YouTube does and I have said before and will continue to say I, I believe that YouTube is, alongside Wikipedia, the Library of Alexandria, one of the most important things the human race has ever built.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I was gonna say like I, I totally, I respect your stance and I'm not gonna call myself a fan. I love YouTube. I, I think it is fascinating that they haven't been so much worse than they are and like I. You know what, I'm very quick to point out things that they screw up. I think the whole members spam thing, which we'll talk about shortly was a mistake. I think not having zero on the shorts thing sucks. Removing the dislike button was just, just so dumb and I would really like for it to come back but at the end of the day, YouTube is amazing. What a platform. And like the fact, the fact that they haven't. Yeah, the fact that they haven't just gone full nuclear terrible is like kind of fascinating.

[Linus Sebastian]

Please keep it up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's legitimate close.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's really important to please keep it up.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's been sketchy lately but I

[Linus Sebastian]

believe in you if there's any major concerns. I'm going to have some face time with execs soon.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Topic type and kind of the funnel, the shorts. I think there is a problem right now with YouTube where YouTube was about people and it was organic and it was the place you could go to learn basically everything and it felt like an app made by. Yeah, you could just find everything and right now it feels like it's getting too hype focused. There isn't really the consistency. I'm sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

I give them that feedback basically every time I talk to them. But I'll try again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's more extreme than ever, I think and I think you're seeing it in this flow that we've talked about on WAN show a bunch of times where channel performance is much more individual video based and you have huge swings in viewership between videos. I have found more than ever that I'm losing creators. I think the subscribe button should mean more.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that's one of the things that should happen because like a search, the search is. Oh man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Mind blowingly bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's mind blowingly bad. But at the same time, again, to give them credit. Holy crap. Is that a lot of stuff to search through. But. But it does seem pretty rough. Honestly, I don't think this is a hot take. Search for Google in general has been kind of in the pits. Search and drive is terrible. Search and Gmail is terrible. Like all this stuff has been pretty rough. And this is someone who just said I love YouTube and I still love YouTube. I'm just being honest about some of the negatives. I think there is a lot of soulless, negative, genuine brain rot content stuff that does not enrich your life in any way. That is being forced to the front of YouTube and shoved in front of your face. And I think that will decrease people's appreciation and usage of YouTube long term. I think it is a short term strategy to combat things like TikTok and I think it will rot their overall market dominance in the long term. I think they need to understand and appreciate what they are, which is the video platform of the Internet. They stopped publishing user numbers because they basically just said, we have everyone.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Know that, understand that, own that and have a higher level that you hold yourself to compared to other platforms. And I don't mean that you have to like start banning this type of content. It's never going to happen. It's a bad form of moderation for YouTube.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're still going to have flat earth and landing conspiracy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Part of YouTube has been that, that has been there the whole time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And that's okay. But remember that you can float wholesome content. You can push wholesome content. You can, you can push out these smaller creators more. And I understand that you are. Again, I do love YouTube, but what I'm experiencing right now is that I'll see a video with. Oh my God. Yeah, this. I mean, I'll see a video with 19 million views, which is the first thing that showed up when I, when I opened YouTube. Yeah. But this might actually be a really cool video or a meme. I'm not. Yeah, Smash the rock. Yeah. Oh, no, no, no. Okay. He's getting to stuff that might actually just be a really cool video. My point was more Mr. Beastie type stuff. But I might get a video with. Perfect. I might get a video with millions of views right next to a video with seven views. Maybe somewhere in the middle a little bit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is everything I'm seeing is these like huge, dramatic. I'm not necessarily into it, but I will say that's pretty quintessentially YouTube.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it's, it's just. Yeah. I don't know. Bring, bring back the, the middle content. Bring back the wholesome stuff. Bring back the stuff that someone's going to look back at their usage of YouTube positively. I, I think I really appreciate that they're adding these limiters, these, the abilities to set your own limiters to things like shorts. I remember back in the day when no one would have wanted that for YouTube because YouTube is a space where you went to go learn things, grow, experience, you know, see behind walls, all that kind of stuff. And it's, it's going down the extreme brain rot funnel now where people are going to look back to their. Their childhood of using YouTube and only think of things that were just a waste of time for them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I think that's not necessary. And I think you can do that while keeping all of these different types of content on the platform, but just not hyper pushing these, like, objectively kind of things that aren't great for your brain. Okay, rant over.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's really good. Mind Paradox made a really good point. Scientifically speaking, the earth is flat. 75% of the earth is water. 95% plus of that water is not carbonated. Therefore, if we were to round the earth is flat, that isn't even the

[Luke Lafreniere]

direction I thought they're going in. That's pretty good. Acting like we didn't have things like smosh and other millennial brain rot. No, I didn't. I didn't act like that at all. I've said that's been on the platform the entire time. That is a. Literally not what I said in the slightest.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What I did say was how they promote different things. And I don't expect them to not promote that. I'm just hoping that they try to really balance things out and promote wholesome things as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, our. Our brain rot was. Was pretty bad, dude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We had some heavy brain rot. We had lots of it.

[Producer Dan]

Oh, my God. Shoes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, what is he going to show? Like this. This was massive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah. Oh, no. I always hated that. I never liked that. I was very confused why people were into that. I. Yeah, I was. Yeah, whatever. Again, I'm not expecting it to not happen. I'm expecting it to be a little bit more measured, and I feel like. And it's a. It's such a fine line. This is one of the reasons why I'm very happy to open say that I love YouTube because, my God, is that a difficult line. And they have straddled it so well for so long. I feel like we're just. We're just slipping a little too far one way. And I'm just asking to just try to bring it back a little bit. I don't want to swing too far this way. We talked about that whole pendulum thing earlier in the show. Just because it's swaying a little bit this way, I don't want to bring it all the way back. I just want it to try to be in the middle. I expect it to be full entertainment mode sometimes where you watch that slop and. And it's okay. It's fine. There's a place for that. I just want the other Stuff to also be brought up. That's it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm just trying to find another, like a horribly stupid video from back then, but I don't think I'm going to be able to. I don't think I'm going to be able to find it. Do you want to pick another topic?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. Sponsors.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, but, yeah, I suppose I could. I suppose I could do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can do a topic while you get reset. If you want to look for something.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm gonna try and find a really stupid video. Yeah. Okay. Here we go. Here we go. Here's. Here's some of our. Here's some of our old school brain rot. Hold on, I'm getting an ad. Thanks, YouTube.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, boy. Anthropic. In the DoD. There's. There's OpenAI in the DoW. There's. There's a lot of stuff happening in AI right now, but. Oh, my goodness. I would have never remembered this. This made me think of power thirst. Power thirst. Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway,

[Luke Lafreniere]

sometimes you want just like dumb, silly, fun things. It's okay. I'm not to never do it. Saying there's a balance, that's all. All right. Should we talk about Burger King?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we should do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Burger King is vying for the throne of politeness thanks to AI. What a title. Burger King is entering the AI chatbot race with Patty.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Unironically. Pretty funny, the name.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's a good name. The OpenAI powered Burger King assistant who will live in the headsets of employees with the purpose of assisting with meal preparation, notifying management of issues such as a downed point of sale or low stock, as well as evaluating employee interactions with customers for friendliness by tracking the use of phrases such as welcome to Burger King, please and thank you. Okay, see, I don't think it's in the mic. What says it's in the mic?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it would have to be if it's listening to what you're saying. As in the employee.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, I thought. Okay. I thought you meant, like, it would, like, override sometimes. Just start talking. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah, it's definitely listening.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So I thought this was peak dystopian.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just think they were already doing it. That's why I didn't realize.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you think they were already doing this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought they were already tracking phrases and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is that a thing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought they were. Because everything that goes through the mic is technically going through a computer system. Like McDonald's has, like, server racks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Are you sure?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, it's not. No, I'm not sure. To Be clear.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. I just thought that because I was, I was not aware of, of this at all. But, but basically like this pretty much as far as I can tell, is like a turbocharged version of the Coffee Shop AI thing that. Did we show on WAN show or was I just talking to one of the writers about that? I can't remember Coffee Shop AI, but it had like boxes around people and like said how many drinks that they had made in the last hour and like tracked how long customers had been sitting at particular.

[Luke Lafreniere]

These are the types of things that I thought kind of already existed, but

[Linus Sebastian]

this putting it right in the headset. So all of a sudden you could get like a counseling notice for forgetting to, to say please to a customer 10 times in one day or like whatever threshold they set. Like, this is, this is the step. This is it. This is the step before complete human replacement.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I feel like I was talking to Yvonne about this because this is going to be, this is going to be one of those times when I feel like people are some. There's going to be a group of people that are not going to like what I say as, as an employer who at this time in companies wholly owned and operated by himself has somewhere in the neighborhood of around 150 plus people. Because usually when we give the employee count, we're just talking like Linus Media Group and like closely affiliated companies. But you know, you start to bake in things like the Smash Champs badminton club, like they've got a lot of part timers. It's, it's, it's retail.

[Producer Dan]

Right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, it's a bit of a different situation. We've had major issues sometimes with people who in many cases, like we don't always get pay scales. Perfect. But yeah, with people who in many cases are very competitively compensated for what they're doing, doing things on the clock that I think it would be hard to argue are not unacceptable. So for instance, you know, are not acceptable hiding in a bathroom and having a nap when you are on shift.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So, so there's a, there's a certain corner of the Internet for whom wage theft exists, but time theft does not. Trying to have a balanced take here. I say they both exist. Sure. And to some people that will be, that will be very controversial. To them I say, hey, you run a business. See how well that works for you. All right, cool, good chat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, push it.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, so with that in mind, basically how my conversation with Yvonne went was there's, there's A huge problem. Because you have, and I think it's really important to point this out, a minority of employees who behave in such a way that supervision is necessary. You have, I hope, a minority of employers who behave in such an overbearing manner that we have exceeded supervision and we have made it to monitoring.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There are many such cases, however, where there's like, maybe there's one bad apple. Maybe one person fell asleep in one bad apple bathroom.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, that's not what I'm talking about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

But unfortunately.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But there's. There tends to be some really, like, oddly expensive to the point where you're never going to pay it back off, and overbearing reactions.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so that's kind of where I'm. That's kind of where I'm going with this. So you, so you, you exceed supervision, which in my mind should largely be traditionally human supervision. Right. So you exceed supervision. You make it into monitoring. You make it into. Yeah, I think monitor.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Attempting to just pop it. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I think, I think part of our problem right now is that we're in a death spiral because the more of this monitoring level of supervision, the more you make your way into, like, complete breach of autonomy and privacy at any, like, at any given moment, like, the more disenfranchised you might have a worker become. And the bottom line is, as a business, you're never going to be happy about giving money to someone who's not getting work done. And if they're not getting work done because of how hyper disenfranchised they are, that's not going to change. You're not going to want to pay them to do work they're not doing. And then you're going to try to monitor them more, they become more disenfranchised, they want to do less work. And I feel like while in any individual workplace you can break the cycle collectively as, like, as a people, as a society. Yeah, I feel like we're circling the drain here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I think, I mean, wages are not keeping up. It's hard to be motivated at work when you make work. Long hours, make little money, whatever that Lawzerth says.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think the word you're looking for is micromanagement, but I'm not, because there's a big difference between micromanagement, which might be necessary in some cases, or that person should just be let go. But sometimes that's not what you want to do. Sometimes you'd rather kind of go, okay, no, we really need to, to carefully set expectations here. You know, whatever it is, right. But that's really different from. I have a camera trained on you at all times that has an AI monitoring it that is compiling data and stats that I can go back retroactively and dig through anytime you were ever on shift, in any little thing you ever did. That's not micromanagement. That's like. That's spying, if that makes sense. And to be clear, like, we have cameras in our places of work. We're on camera right now. And I'm not talking about that one or this one or this one. Where is it? Whatever. It's in here. There's a. There's a security camera in here. Thanks, Dan. Dan pointed out I still can't see it. Whatever. I assume. I assume Dan knows what's going on. Look at him. That's. That's the face of a man.

[Producer Dan]

It's over there in the corner.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thanks, Dan. Perfect. And. And. Oh, man. See, this is where. This is where, like, the realities of running a business kind of coincide or collide with some of my philosophical, I wish it was this way beliefs. Like at Smash Champs, for instance, the extensive security system that we have has resulted in reduced shrink for our retail operation. It has resulted in multiple cases where we have been able to ban members who have stolen from our other members.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. I mean, dude, people are f ked up, man. It's like we're trying to have a community here. We're trying to just, like, play sports together. And you've got people that will be caught. Caught in 4k taking something that's not theirs. And we have literally heard the oh, I didn't know that belonged to them line. I hate that line.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did it belong to you?

[Linus Sebastian]

Did it belong to you? Then why would you take it? I hate that. I get. I get triggered like rackets by that line. Yeah, we've had rackets. Shuttles. Shuttles are becoming a big one because they're so expensive. Because they've become so expensive, even. Even used like. Like rat bag shuttles are actually going for money. Not much. It's like by the pound. Cause people will use them for training. They'll use them for just, like, feeding drills and stuff. Stuff. And it used to be that those were considered like, oh, here you go. Worthless. Now they're, like, worth money now because new shuttles have gotten so expensive. And so because people, like, need to carry a tube around with them and because all the tubes kind of look the same. Like with rackets, people have it, like, in their bag. You'd have to be pretty conspicuous to, like, Open someone's bag and take a racket out. Right. But shuttles, they'll have them on the bench, you know, and so we. Yeah, we've had, we've had cases with rackets. We've had cases with phones.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, right. A phone is so, like, personal.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that one was really unfortunate because it was an acquaintance of. Of an acquaintance. It was. Oh, it was a known person. So that was a really unfortunate conversation to have to have.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Don't like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, we've had like, we've had all kinds of things. We had an allegation from a neighborhood that a member performed a bio act in public near our facility.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And we had to, you know, we had to track that down.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

And so. And look, we've only been.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We've only. That was like a GTA moment, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

We've been operating for a year and already this is just, this is just the stuff that's flowing off the, off the top of my head, man. Right. And so I'm sitting here going like, yeah, on the one hand, and you know, yeah, we shouldn't like, we shouldn't like, have cameras everywhere, man, and like all the cameras, man. But on the other hand, I'm sitting here going, how on earth would we have resolved some of this stuff if we didn't have a record that we could track back to?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it depends on the usage

[Linus Sebastian]

of it was the bio moment solo? Yeah, it was a solo bio moment for sure. For sure, bud.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I think, like, like, are you sitting there in, in an office upstairs with the like, stockbroker style monitors just staring at all your employees all day? If so, I mean.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, no, no. I was gonna say, you know, I don't have that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So if you're doing something like that, like, that's clearly like, oh my God, go away. If you're reviewing footage in case of incidents, that no longer really bothers me, I think, I'm pretty sure in Canada you can't record audio in a work in like an office style workplace.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that's a thing. Yeah, we're trying to figure out because I think we wanted the audio for the badminton footage or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, yeah. For like.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then we were like, games, can we? And then there was like something. Because it's a public venue and it's like a service that's being offered and therefore talked about and there's like signs and stuff, then it like becomes more fine. But if I remember correctly, regardless of the Signs situation. If it's just like an office, you just can't do it. Like, it's a. I think it was

[Producer Dan]

more okay for the public, but it wasn't okay for the employees.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

SF Wong, this is a good one. As a business. What about using AI to monitor things like a manufacturing floor to do time studies and improve inefficiencies rather than to judge people?

[Luke Lafreniere]

So that's. Oh, my. What the.

[Linus Sebastian]

Boy, are you ever. Boy, are you ever treading a fine line there?

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're treading the fine line. They're just.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's already a product. No, that. I mean, the world's most ethical manufacturing foreman sure could be looking purely for ways that they could improve their own performance by laying. What I'm saying is not untrue. By laying out the stations more efficiently or whatever. But literally any human being in existence would also be looking at that other. The other meatbags out there and figuring out, you know, which ones of them are, you know, scrolling on their phone instead of popping widgets together or whatever else it is they're supposed to. To be doing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's very, like, inhuman to expect people to be 100% on task for four hours and then 30 minutes later, four more hours. It's like, not really how humans work, but there's, There's. Yeah. So things get a little bit weird because you give people too much data and then they're like, wait, I don't like that I paid for that minute. I need you working for that minute. And again, it's just not really how people work. But then, like, how do you. How do you find the acceptable bar because you actually do need output from them or else your business closes. So, like, it's. Yeah, that's where, like, ideally you find. In my perfect, happy, fun time world, ideally you find a measurable.

[Linus Sebastian]

Can I work there?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ideally, you find a measurable amount of output that you want from this person that is worth the amount of money you're paying for them. And if they're hitting that output, it doesn't really matter too much on the other end. But that's. Certain positions.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's really hard to measure relative.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that too. But it can be like, okay, what if this isn't a widget maker? Right? Like, what if this is something completely different? How do you. How do you measure the output of every single possible role at Linus Media Group, for example? No, that's potentially impossible.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have a. We have a really.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We have a weird business and we have a lot of people that wear A lot of funky hats.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not even normal hats. We have a lot of people that wear some really weird hats and potentially a lot of them at once. So it's like, how do you measure the output of that person?

[Linus Sebastian]

Almost impossible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very difficult. So. Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it's something that we, we often come up against as we're sort of figuring out, you know, how you, how you measure output, how you, how you track that against, against costs, how you, how you try to optimize, you know. It's a good thing though. I think it's one of the things that keeps the content always changing, keeps working here. Dynamic. Like, it's been interesting watching people comment recently that, you know, the reason LTT is going downhill is because they've had a lot of turnover in their on screen personalities. And I'm kind of sitting here going, okay, a. All you have to do is go as far as Social Blade to find out that no, in fact viewership has not gone down since those events. In fact, it's a little bit up since then, which I'm not attributing to that either. I'm just saying the, the causation relationship that you have conjured out of your, out of your brain hole is not actually a thing that happened. And one of the things that's cool about LMG is that as we have changes, we just kind of adapt. We just make new styles of content. We're always looking for what is exciting to whoever the team that's here is. We're always, we're always changing. We've been around for 17 years, guys. 17 years. In that time, you know, my interests, believe it or not, have changed pretty dramatically. A fair bit. Your interests have altered?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

In the. What are you up to? You got to be up to like 13, 15. That can't be right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Pretty sure it is. From NCX days, 1513 would be since working for Linus Media Group.

[Linus Sebastian]

Linus Media Group hasn't existed for 13 years. Not till end of this year.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, so then 14.

[Linus Sebastian]

14. Yeah. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh no. Is LTT at 18 now? I hope not. Oh man, I'm getting so old. 2020. Wait, what? Oh, got confused. Six years ago, the first LTT video was posted on Reddit. So it. So 2020 is the post date of this Reddit post. Not the. Okay, 17 years. November 2008. So we'll be at 18 this year. Good Lordy. Anyway, one of the. So. So where I was going with this is that you're going to see the content continue to change. And I think that's part of what has given us our staying power. I'm actually really excited to see some of the stuff that David Pankratz made his, his solo on camera debut recently over on Short Circuit checking out a Der Bauer branded like Test Bench. We actually had one of our, one of our editors did a short circuit recently that I thought was really good did. It didn't get a ton of views. But when I was. I don't always feel compelled to message the, the production or crew or the host when I, when I review one of our videos. But this was one that I reviewed just because he was new and I, I thought Peter just did like an outstanding job of this video. The feedback on it is, is quite, quite positive. But yeah, just needs. This needs a few more views. Guys, go check it out. It's a really, really good video. And a fight deck is not something that we would have had the internal interest to cover in the past. Like super high level unboxing. I think you might find Razer did one like a thousand years ago that we did an unboxing of.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I remember that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I think we still have those.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Really?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, but those would be like, those would be like garbage by today's standards. Oh my God. Remember when our thumbnails looked like that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because I did them just text on the entire thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why was I feeling so aggressive that day?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who knows? That's funny. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, it was a different time. It was a different time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I, I think stuff like this and part of that I think is kind of the beauty of Short Circuit is you're gonna have some weird stuff on there sometimes. And I think Junk Food Swirl might not, you know, get a bunch of clicks just because of what it is. But that doesn't necessarily mean the video is bad.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is great. Tyler R. Says I miss the old text thumbnails.

[Producer Dan]

I meticulously copied it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Good for you.

[Producer Dan]

The WAN show. If you want a Photoshop template, we post that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think anybody needs that. What they do need is to hear about Drop, no longer operating as a standalone business by March 31. Drop, founded in 2012 as Massdrop, is closing its standalone E commerce store at the end of next month as part of the Corsair integration following the 2023 acquisition, the last day to place orders is March 25, and drop rewards will also expire that day. So use them or lose them. Drop.com will become a landing page for brand collabs under the Corsair umbrella. Community reaction is generally negative, so Far for the people who still manage to care, which seems like not many. I saw some. I did actually read through some of this and I saw a few people comment that the newsletter, which is apparently a big part of Drop's deal, has just been kind of full of the same stuff over and over again lately.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And Drop in general has kind of been like that. I remember back in the day, I used to go to massdrop when it was Mass Drop, like all the time. I was genuinely on there, like, a lot. But it was because they'd have a lot of really weird stuff come through that was interesting. However, they used to be really into like, knives.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. Like everyday carry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, they were huge in the everyday carry scene. There are tons of other stuff and for a long time now it's been mechanical keyboards, headphones. That's it. It's like, okay, after a while, I have a keyboard I like. I have some headphones that I like. There's no real reason for me to come back to the website if that's all they're ever really doing now. And yeah, they used to get into some funky stuff. And they were really around the original idea of massdrop, which was just like using collectivism to get cheaper prices on things. And that was really neat. And then they stopped doing that, I guess.

[Linus Sebastian]

Corsair was a really weird company to take public like this. Seems like it has not gone particularly well.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, the timing was a little rough, wasn't it? Didn't they go public over Covid?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, Max. I think so. Maybe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe their goal. Yeah, maybe their goal was just go public during COVID Well, it was at a high.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right? Everyone was like hyper into gaming and streaming.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, the owner is out, I think. Don't quote me on that though. Does Andy Paul still own any of the. Oh, does he not have a Wikipedia page? Well, that's something that he won't have in common with you if we get our way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't never forget, guys, Luke left Rainier needs a Wikipedia page.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Hobbes is saying, like, they. They used to have actual group buys too that were exclusives of Mass Drop.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, seriously, how important is this guy compared to Luke left Rainier? Is this your relative, by the way?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Very, very disconnected. But technically along the line somewhere. Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's super.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I poked through a couple family relatives to figure out, like, is there a change?

[Linus Sebastian]

He's good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dang.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was thinking about get my. My dad has one of his jerseys I was thinking about one of getting one of his jerseys.

[Linus Sebastian]

14 points in 16 games in the 23244 playoffs. Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bit of a gamer. They're not doing so great though, the Rangers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So they're. His jersey was on sale recently and I might actually grab one because it would be kind of cool to have a jersey with your name on the back that is not a custom jersey. You know, that's pretty sick. That's pretty cool. What was I gonna say? Yeah. Insomniac and Philippine Chat also said it's kind of like what happened to Humble Bundle over the last 5ish years.

[Linus Sebastian]

Humble bundle still a thing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Humble Bundle is still a thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait, no, I think I knew that. No, no, I knew that. Humble Bundle. What. What do they have? What do they do? Get great games every month with Humble Choice for only $18. Oh, it's a subscription. Is it a subscription?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think it's a variety of things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Bundles. Okay. Games. Well, books.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yeah, you can.

[Linus Sebastian]

Humble Bundle books.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They had some Linux administration thing recently and I was like, oh, interesting. And then I was like, I'm not diving that far in.

[Producer Dan]

I think you get to keep them, though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Producer Dan]

So it's not like I think Game Pass works.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's. It's. I don't know if there is a subscription or not, but either way, Humble Bundle has always been, you keep it. So if they did have one, I'm sure it would be. It'd be like a loot box kind of thing, not a pay to access.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so these are just

[Luke Lafreniere]

overwhelmingly positive games Bundle.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, that sounds pretty good. I like overwhelmingly positive things. Oh, here we go. All right. But then I have to pay at least 20.46. Oh, you will get. You will get all eight items. Oh, yeah. All of these are all items. So what if I put in a dollar? Oh, okay. Now you have to pay at least $20. $46.46. Okay, that's interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's not that bad for that many games. I don't know how much they cost outside of Humble Bundle.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, me neither. But apparently they're all like super, super positive, highly rated, so that's something. What the. What is Bug Fables.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Monster Train is good. I played Monster. Monster Train.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah.

[Producer Dan]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I found a bug in that game that made me like, I could beat anything no matter what. They have this. I've played both Monster Trains. Now, I think That's Monster Train 1. In Monster Train 2, there, there's like different floors and you put your units on the floors and then enemies come on and they attack once. Then they go up a floor and I I found this mechanic where there's a card where you you can play the card and then it will move one of your characters on the floor and then there's an affix that you can put on the character that makes so that they gain a permanent stat when they move. But the it would try to figure out where the character would move before you played the card, when you would hover the card over. But that would mean that the character would move as far as the game was concerned. So you could just highlight the card over and then unhighlight the card rapidly and you just gain permanent stats. Just completely broke the game. I did it for one run because I thought it was funny and then I was like I'm never doing that again. I have to like, you know, it removes the entire fun of the game if you do that. But yeah, I just made it. You could just One shot. Anything. It was. It's pretty good. It's pretty good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool. Let's. One shot this message from our sponsor App Control Are applications on your controller getting out of control? Well, check out our sponsor App Control. It's a task manager, but with more features. AppControl has things like historical resource monitoring, so you can keep up to three days worth of information on cpu, gpu, ram, temps and usage, as well as seeing which apps have access to things like your mic, webcam or location, including when your location is hidden. If something new or unusual starts running in the background on your computer, App Control will notify you so you can take any necessary security measures. You can sort apps by publisher, disable individual apps, and see what an app is used for with a single click and the cherry on top. It's free, so get App Control, the feature rich task manager [e-mail] finally, the show is brought to you by Ground News. Obviously, the WAN show is a trustworthy place to get all your favorite tech news, But how much do you trust any other outlets? Our sponsor, Ground News, is here to help you break free from media bias and better understand where your news comes from. They bring together articles from several sources and let you see things like political bias, ownership, and how reliable the reporting tends to be. Let's talk about Nvidia for a second. When it comes to covering Nvidia and specifically talking about AI, it doesn't look like the right wing side of the media landscape reports as much as the left. And we see this Mirrored in another story regarding Google rolling out NanoBanana 2, an update to Gemini's AI image generation model based on the information on Ground News. It seems that right leaning sources only report on AI news when it involves Wall street earnings. Things like the blind spot feature or these bias breakdowns can help you out ask important questions when engaging with the news. So get the transparency you deserve from your News and save 40% on Ground News's Vantage plan with our QR code on Steam. That actually leads very well into another topic which is that Paramount is set to take over Warner Brothers. Netflix has officially dropped out of the bidding war to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which leaves Paramount Skydance in the lead to acquire Warner Bros. Pictures, CNN and hbo. Max. Paramount already owns cbs. Paramount plus Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. They agreed to pay a massive 7 billion dollar termination fee if the deal fails to get regulatory approval. Netflix's co CEO stated that they declined to match Paramount's revised $31 a share offer. So approximately $111 billion because it is no longer financially attractive. Yeah, I should think not. There's a significant amount of political drama surrounding this deal. Yeah, because Paramount's bid is not enabled by Paramount doing so good that they have so much money that they can run around scooping up former competitors. It's because instead Paramount's bid is backed by a major right wing donor, Larry Ellison. Meanwhile, Netflix's co CEO Ted Sarandos reportedly visited the White House hours before dropping out of the bidding war. Interesting. The merger isn't finalized yet, but is expected to face heavy scrutiny. Well, will it though? From both the U.S. department of justice and this is more likely from European regulators. The California Attorney General has already confirmed that there's an open investigation with the California doj. Discussion Question, Is streaming trending towards a giant monopoly worse than we ever had with cable tv? Yes, yes it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's why the pirate hats are coming out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, so this is more consolidation in the media we consume is bad. Yeah, I will say that. And hopefully that is simple enough that everyone on every side of the political spectrum can kind of go, oh yeah, that makes sense. And recognize that this is bad. Cool. Good chat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

By the way, Paramount owns cnn.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I said that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

So this is going to be very interesting in terms of pretty obvious reason

[Luke Lafreniere]

why there's so much pressure to actually do this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes, that's as far as I can tell, the only reason that certain people involved in facilitating this deal have any interest in it whatsoever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Speaking of weird stuff, HP is selling one 1.2 terabyte laptops on Amazon. Kinda. The HP store on Amazon is selling low end entry laptops and advertising is advertising them as 1 terabyte plus devices. The catch 1 terabyte of the storage is OneDrive cloud storage.

[Linus Sebastian]

Also in the case of this 1.6 terabyte 1, 512 gigs of it seems to be. Oh wait, 512 gigs of it seems to be a portable hard drive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, what?

[Linus Sebastian]

Let me see if I can find it. What is this picture? Is this AI? Yep. Could be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That water bottle is like on her knee.

[Linus Sebastian]

This. Is this just bad Photoshop or is this AI? I can't tell because like clearly this shadow under here would also. She would have shadows under her fingers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but like where's the water bottle?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah, yeah, it's AI. You think it's AI? I'm pretty sure it could be a bad Photoshop. What's the graph? Yeah, let's have a look at these.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's AI. This is AI.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Okay. Oh my God. Nice. Okay, well that answers it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Oh, very cool. Very good. Yes. That's all ridiculous. Is this deceptive marketing? Yes. I do specify in the title that it's OneDrive. They first say it's 1.6 terabyte of storage. Like. Ah, man. Yeah, I think it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

This one's better. This one's better where they don't combine it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's totally fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

However, this is still. This is still yucky.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a problem.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is still super yucky.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The title on this one is fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The category is not, but the title on this one is totally fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

However, how long is this included for? Because if it's less than forever, it's less than years.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Then they could fix it if it was a fixed period of time. I don't even care if it's less than years if it's not forever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It would, I think in my opinion would need to be in brackets at the end. Plus one terabyte of cloud storage for three years.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or if the price for the product said the upfront price and the subscription to maintain that storage. Sure, I'd be fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That would also be fine. I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Also fully acceptable. Yeah. Yuck.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We got a no notes. The king of plasma TVs is done making TVs. Panasonic is pulling a Sony and giving Skyworth control of their television business with the aim for the Chinese firm to take over manufacturing, marketing and selling Panasonic TVs across the US and Europe. Earlier this month, Panasonic Announced plans to eliminate 12,000 jobs globally, which is a surprisingly only 4 to 5% of their workforce. That's a giant company. Holy crap.

[Linus Sebastian]

Panasonic makes like a lot of stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just apparently not a lot of TVs these days. To be clear, they're pulling a Sony in the sense that they are

[Luke Lafreniere]

offloading their TV business. At least. At least to a certain degree.

[Linus Sebastian]

They seem to be doing a Chinese company. Yeah, yeah. But they're doing it a lot more into a different company. It's Skyworth rather than tcl, which is who Sony more like. It seems like more of a partnership on the Sony side because they like own part of the joint venture. Whereas it seems like Panasonic is just like. Well, okay, you go ahead. This feels kind of like, like when you'd see like an old brand that used to be cool, like you'd see an RCA like flat panel, you'd be like, did RCA ever make flat panels? And then you look into it and it's just made by like some random, some random Chinese brand.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sad. Another no notes, but I suspect we'll talk about it for a little bit. YouTube. Whoop. YouTube rep has confirmed the ability to filter member only videos. As of right now, our LTT memberships are back online.

[Linus Sebastian]

They sure are.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You should still go to lmg, gg, FPWAN for better pricing, but. But it's there. If you'd rather stay on YouTube, which we know some of you would. We're slowly uploading new exclusives. New as in they weren't uploaded as of when this membership thing was turned off in the past, so some of it'll be a couple months back. We're still in the process of uploading new exclusives. It's taking a while as apparently there's a limit on videos uploading.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that makes sense.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That does make sense. But I'm surprised it applies to all channels.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I could see that there's a

[Luke Lafreniere]

lot of hacks and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Yeah, I could see that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

So the, the feed is going to be kind of a mess, but Luke is going to show you guys real quick a super awesome hack for not seeing any of the members videos if you don't really want to. For one thing you can say, don't show me these anymore. And for another. Excuse me, you can click on public. There you go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Boop. They're all gone.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then you won't see any of them. Which is why. Which is why we. Yeah, that's why we agreed to turn them back on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You can also Click on just Members only.

[Linus Sebastian]

You could do that or you can. Oh, why is that a thing?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I saw that and tried to click away from it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I did not. I did not.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't even know what that's in reference to.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't either. Freaking Sammy. Can't trust that guy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right. Hey, this is fun. Remember how I said that I had faith that Apple was going to add end to end encryption for RCS to iPhone to Android communications? They almost immediately did as part of the. As part of the beta. So they are. They are now testing that the second beta of 2026.4 has support for it. So that's pretty cool. Our discussion question is, now that Apple's original lack of encryption argument no longer applies, what do you think was the real reason they waited so long to adopt rcs?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Shame.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's just because they just plain didn't want to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, they wanted to shame Android stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah,

[Luke Lafreniere]

there's a new app that lets us track Sammy. Specifically. No, it's people with smart glasses. But realistically, it's just. Just Bluetooth devices. But in this case, it's probably coded for specific IDs that show you smart glasses. Anyways, with millions of pairs of smart glasses now in the. In the wild, you never know who might be secretly filming. And you still won't. But a new app called Nearby Glasses scans for Bluetooth signals and warns users when smart glasses may be in use. The app is currently available on the Google play store with iOS in the works.

[Linus Sebastian]

Neat. Leaked charger for a new iPhone. Apparently they're going magnetic only.

[Producer Dan]

Blah, blah, blah, portless iPhone on the way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We've all known this was going to happen for a while.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, this. This seems very, very rumor, Millie. Okay, I'm not. I'm not engaging with that. What else we got here? Discord is delaying its global age verification rollout. Discord is now pushing back their rule changes to the second half of 2026. Before they introduce the new rules, the company will be adding more options for users to verify their age and add the ability to make spoiler channels, which are essentially age gated chats for NSFW topics. They also plan to publish a blog post explaining exactly how their age estimation systems work. Well, that'll be an easy way to get around them then. Quote from Discord CEO says the way this landed, many of you walked away thinking we're requiring face scans and ID uploads from everyone just to use Discord. That's not what's happening. But the fact that so many people believe it tells us we failed at our most basic job, clearly explaining what we're doing and why. Okay, well, we'll see how it goes in another six months or so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, the problem is the way this landed was you were working with like the, the Palantir guy. I don't remember his name right now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, like not a great look.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's, I think the main reason. That's the main reason why I was pissed.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, do you want to be not upset?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is pretty cool. Ars Technica posted this article.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

In spite of big offers from tech companies, many farmers are being supremely based and refusing to sell their land for data center use. So based 82 year old. This is so cool. 82 year old Ida Huddleston told representatives of a Fortune 500 company when she rejected their offer of $33 million for 650 acres of Kentucky farmland. There's a quote, you don't have enough to buy me out. I'm not for sale. Leave me alone. I'm satisfied. Based another farmer in the same county or country. It says country, but I'm sure they mean county because obviously they'd be in the same country. 75 year old Timothy Grocer declined a proposal to name your price when a tech company sought to buy his 250 acre farm. This was reported by the Guardian. The money's not worth giving up your lifestyle. Grosser said. Based based and agricultural land being based again, agricultural land is. Has been a target because it has access to water. It has traditionally been relatively inexpensive for the amount of area you can get per dollar. Which if you're trying to build a sprawling data center, might be an advantage. I think access to power has also been an advantage traditionally.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah, farm power.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's like way cheaper. Yeah. There's a discussion question here. It says here in B.C. we have the agricultural land reserve to theoretically at least protect farmland. Do you think other regions could follow that example? I think they could. I think think the agricultural land reserve is extremely documentedly and I mean you could just take a drive in some of those areas horrifically abused by the ultra rich in B.C. to just have insanely massive mansions, pay way less in power, pay way less in taxes, pay way less in lots of different things by just kind of basically pretending that they're farmers, by having a tiny little bit of their land dedicated to farming something. It's very, very common that it's wine, grapes and then they'll have somebody because very little maintenance and then you have somebody Come gather your grapes and sell them or whatever. And you don't do any of the. The labor and you make no money off of it, but you are allowed to classify yourself as a farm. This is like just one of the many, many ways that PC is extremely well known for just, just excessive amounts of scams. Just tons and tons of scams.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, that's a farmhouse, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That sure do be a farmhouse, brother. Let's go. There are tons of these.

[Linus Sebastian]

That is like, we are here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Tons of them.

[Linus Sebastian]

We are here. That is like, here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hell, yeah. Those crops, those. All those crops behind there. That. That's making so much money.

[Linus Sebastian]

They have solar panels.

[Producer Dan]

Panels, though, so it's fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's making so much money, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on. This is not that easy to do with a touchpad, but let's see. Let's see what else we can find. Let's. Let's play.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's wild because you'll see, like, a very legitimate operation. Yeah, here's a farm and everything looks pretty normal. And then you see a mega mansion

[Linus Sebastian]

and you're like, oh, what are we looking at here? What about second house? Or is that a garage?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That looks like it actually

[Linus Sebastian]

normal.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't want to point out, like, there are. There are a lot of. A lot of very legitimate farmers in B.C, but it's extremely expensive land, so it's very, very difficult to get into. And you're. You're bidding against people, like potentially this. That are just building mega mansions and then, you know, chilling, playing farmer game by paying someone else to take care of their.

[Producer Dan]

I've also heard that if you are like, like, oh, the land's really bad. I haven't been able to make any money off of it because it's crap. Can we rezone it for not farmland?

[Linus Sebastian]

That is pretty hard from my understanding.

[Producer Dan]

Legitimately, people try.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm sure they try, but my understanding is it's pretty hard.

[Producer Dan]

I'm glad.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah. How many garages is that? Six.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's a lot of garage. Is there more garages on the right there?

[Linus Sebastian]

Shebus.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Absolutely wild.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They look like they do some legitimate farming.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. But there's also the thing where you can hire people to come in and legitimately.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, for sure. The one that I'm talking about is, like, way more egregious. There's a. There's a lot of ones a little further away from here, like more in the kind of alder grove area.

[Linus Sebastian]

Look at that. Wow. And meanwhile, this one. Ooh, damn. Oh, My damn, that's a big house. Oh my God. This one couldn't even all be in a straight line. They're not even pretending that they ever go any farther out of the house than this wall. Yeah, sure. Though we go, you know, do crop things. Oh my God, look at this one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The main thing, the main thing that stands out to me, like if they actually, if they actually end up producing like good crops, I don't really care that much. If they happen to be super rich and they're like, whatever, I'll farm this land and I'm gonna just pay someone else to do it and I'll slap a house here. Like that doesn't bother me that much. The main them a little bit, but not that much. The main ones that bother me is when they just have like a tiny amount of the property dedicated to that, like minimum requirements, which is often not that high. And then they do it. It's like, yikes, look how many cars

[Linus Sebastian]

are in front of this place. You know you can only drive one at a time, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some of these might be multifamily.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, I'm sure they are. Yeah.

[Producer Dan]

That was just a guy and his dog. Need 12 bedrooms.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's an extremely. If you want to have fun one day, if you go around Google Maps,

[Linus Sebastian]

there's way more than I thought there was.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Look into how much people make in this province and then just have fun looking down some of the roads. Look at, look into some of the costing of certain areas and go, wait a, wait a minute.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, you mean all the illegitimate money? Yeah. Oh yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That doesn't make any sense. The, the top end of people's earning in this province is, is, you know, this much. That means there's that many people, a huge percentage of them live in venture Vancouver. Okay, cool. What are all these places? How is there so many places worth like double digit millions of dollars and there's just so many of them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Our across the street neighbors when I was in my teens were just known to be gangsters.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think I've told you the story probably a few times. One of the in home Geek Squad guys when I worked in at Geek Squad worked at like a very obvious Hell's Angels place. And the guy just like was laughing about it. He offered him a beer and stuff and he said no, obviously. And then as he was leaving, he was like, guess what I do for work? And he was like, what? He's like, I don't remember what he said. I repair. I work for like a refrigerator repair company or something. And Then just huge belly laugh. Like, it's like clearly. Clearly he had like a crazy Harley. He had some. He had some leathers and stuff. Like, it was. It was very obviously a Hell's Angels, bro. Just. Just messing around. I'm in waste management. That's a pretty. That's a. That's a pretty big tell. Yeah. Bc. Bc. Ah, man. I don't remember what it was. I'm pretty sure it was New York Times. It was a long time ago, but they did like a most corrupt place in North America. And it ended up being Vancouver. This was. This was quite a while ago. Things have probably shifted a little bit, but probably not that much. There is a lot of money moving around in B.C. in illegitimate ways.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, Sean Caldera was actually talking to me about what's going on in Fort Langley right now, where real estate developer bro couldn't get permits to build just like whatever he wanted. So he ran and became the mayor so that he could just green light whatever he wanted to do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then his influence is spreading and like the whole vibe of Fort Langley has changed very significantly because there was all these rules about historical buildings and how high they could build and all this kind of stuff. And he's blown that out. And now it's just like another suburb. Well, the. The one Main Street. It just. It doesn't feel historic so much anymore. There's a couple. There's a couple buildings here and there, but it just feels like, I don't know, I'm in like a trendy street in Vancouver now and it's just in the middle of nowhere. It's kind of sad.

[Producer Dan]

I should put in a Whole Foods.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a pretty small place, maybe a half.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my goodness.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man.

[Linus Sebastian]

What were we even talking about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Who knows?

[Producer Dan]

Farmers refusing to sell the data centers.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. Cool. Based Sam Altman defends AI at the India AI Impact Summit. Okay, are you ready for your eyes to just about roll out of your head?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know anything about this topic. Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued that it's unfair to only look at the energy consumption it takes to train an AI because it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. Human.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, I wasn't ready for that at all. That's wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

We would need to factor. This is a quote, 20 years of life and all the food you eat during that time before you get smart.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Ah, so humans are just. It's just the matrix.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now, Altman further claims that if you compare a GPT inference query to a Human answering a question probably AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Holy crap. Whoa, dude. He completely dismissed concerns over ChatGPT's water usage as totally fake, arguing that modern data centers don't use evaporative cooling.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, some of them do, but that. I mean that. I'm not even gonna pick apart that much when the whole like. Okay. Oh, man. Good Lord. So here's. Here's the. Okay. I could wax philosophical on the value of a human life and therefore just obviously being more valuable than, you know, an AI agent or whatever. Right? Like, I could do that. But instead I'm gonna go all the way to the hyper capitalist side and I'm gonna meet you on your own turf. And I'm gonna say why? That was such a stupid thing to say. Okay? In a way that is undeniable. That AI will never pay taxes.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh. All right. All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

You're done, bud. False equivalency. And I don't even have to get into whether humans have a soul or, you know, or just the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you look at all the ways that OpenAI started, he was talking about how it was going to save humanity and a universal basic income and all this kind of stuff. And now he's saying, like, ah, you don't need the plebs.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I've got chills.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's. He's getting a little bit more real here. Boom. Which might be good.

[Linus Sebastian]

Boom.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Scam Altman.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. You can't tax pop more cars, Sam.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'll never forget.

[Linus Sebastian]

So that's why we should. That's why we should, even from a hyper capitalist. Don't care about anything but more mum standpoint. That's why we should invest in humans and. And training humans and we should not invest in training. What am I looking at?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why can't I scroll up? There we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

What is this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, he sure does call her Sam. We didn't forget about looped Sam. Little scammy company. You lied about your users. We didn't forget Sam. Little evil boy. I don't like you.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what's funny is we had like that. That concept of a line of. Of clothing products. So we had the. The Steve. That turtleneck, that mock neck that was

[Luke Lafreniere]

based on Steve Jobs, like a stupid

[Linus Sebastian]

double collar on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That would be amazing.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think we won't do that. That.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

The Italian government has declared all cloud storage users guilty in advance. A levy of up to €30 per year will be applied to cloud storage accounts based on the reasoning that that storage space could be used for copyright infringement. The Italian Minister of Culture signed a decree extending the levy that previously applied only to physical media and at the same time increased the fees for physical media. The Italian Society of Authors and Publishers welcomed the move, while Italian consumer and technology advocacy groups are calling the move anachronistic. These sorts of levies are not new. Germany introduced similar levies in the 1960s after legislators were convinced that cassette recorders would destroy record sales. Fun fact. Did you know that the Canadian private copying levy is still set to $0.29 per blank CD and has been extended to 2027? That's one of the reasons that blank media was more expensive here than it was in the States. However, I am going to say something once again. I know, huge surprise to everyone that might come across controversial. The levy on blank CDs was actually a lot simpler for me than the Canadian government actually enforcing copyright. I paid a little bit of levy on every blank cd and I never worried about, like the music industry busting down my door.

[Luke Lafreniere]

True.

[Linus Sebastian]

I, I, and, and as long as our. And as long as this levy kind of sits there as a, as a, as an invisible shield against me ever actually like being punished in any way for the songs I downloaded on Napster. I was actually pretty chill with it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Italian friends, I encourage you to explore self hosting.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you could do that too.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You have your own cloud blackjack and they don't have to know about it. Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Solid. Oh, hey. Whoa. Is that it for topics? Oh, did we talk about openclaw? Yeah, I didn't catch that much about it. The lady had her emails deleted.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's. We don't have notes on it. I don't know enough about it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool, let's not do that then.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it is. You want to. Let's. Here, let's just do this bit. Let's just look at their website real quick. The AI that actually does.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it does do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Clears your inbox a little bit too much, maybe sends emails, manages your calendar, checks your invite flights, all that kind of stuff. Look at this. What it does. What it does. What it does. It runs on your machine. It uses any chat app that it has. It has persistent memory, it controls your browser. It has full system access, including reading and writing files, running shell commands, executing scripts. Full access or potentially sandboxed. Woo. And people are letting this rip. Apparently Facebook researcher person. It deleted their entire inbox.

[Linus Sebastian]

Not entire, but a lot of it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, emails are slowing them down. Delete the whole thing maybe. That's good. Sweet. I don't Think we have a tonnel to say none of us have used this. It's super dangerous. It uses an old OS with a ton of vulnerabilities. Yeah, not too surprised is what it is. Neat.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, Dan, do you want to switch us over to After Dark?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, are you.

[Producer Dan]

Hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't have Twitter installed. That's one of my problems. When there's somebody that I can only communicate with on Twitter, I just constantly uninstall it. I'll install it again because I have to go message somebody, and then I'm like, ah, crap. I ghosted this person for a while. Hate that. It's like, sometimes the only way to contact people.

[Linus Sebastian]

You want to know what's already started.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What? After Dark. Oh,

[Linus Sebastian]

and you can tell how controversial it is.

[Producer Dan]

Like, press ratio.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, man. I am surprised you went back to it. Not. I don't know anything about popos. I've never used it. I know nothing about it. I have no opinion. Opinions on it. I just. I'm surprised. Once scorned, he returned.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, the narrative. The narrative last time should be the narrative last time was. That was a fluke that should never have happened. Yeah, they patched the bug. That's not normal. And I was like, I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Was that the only thing I don't remember?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, because I. Well, I just never got as far as even, like, having tried to do almost.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Almost the first thing, and then it nuked, and then he went somewhere else,

[Linus Sebastian]

and then I went elsewhere. Yeah, okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. All right, Dan, hit us.

[Producer Dan]

Sure thing. Hey, Linus, a while ago, you teased us with a sling bag for handhelds and tablets. Any updates on that sling bag?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, oh, shoot, probably. But I can't actually remember right now. Matthew's working on it. I saw a newer version of it a little while ago. I. I think we. I think we put it on pause. Waiting around for Switch 2 is what I want to say. So the latest version of it has. It's bigger, so it could accommodate a Steam Deck, but it has an insert so that you can put, like, a Switch 2 securely in it or a Switch 1. But it's tough, man, when the form factors of these handhelds are so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They vary so much.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. They're so, so different in terms of their thickness and girthiness and the same thing, but, like, whether they have, like, handles on them or whether they're, like, super skinny with joy cons, it might be one of those things where when we finally release it, it's ultimately not really what you want because we have to target something or we end up targeting nothing and then nobody wants it.

[Producer Dan]

What chipset are you using for the Linux challenge? I've used Linux since Slackware 1.0 and I can't get anything to work properly on Strix Halo.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I constantly forget the hardware in my system because I didn't build it myself.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting. I am using a variety of chipsets, one of which is Strix Halo. I'm actually. I think this is launched now so I can show it, but I've been using this PX13 from ASUS for a little bit. It's a Strix Halo system with. Yeah, convertible thing. It's. It's basically the old Flow X13, but without the XG mobile, without a dedicated GPU with 40 gigabit per second USB C and with beefy cooling and Strix Halo.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is a side note. I think it's not worth uploading our back catalog. I'm just gonna. Side note real quick. This is. I know we can press the thing and I think that's really cool, but when people don't. I guess just. I don't know how to uncheck it. So this is what the page looks like.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it's a temporary issue though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But there is literally no videos on my entire page that are not members only.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I don't know if people are gonna know to click this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. It's so little of how people find our videos anyway. Like really, like negligible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm just Boomer boy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I do that to find videos.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. Yeah, that's fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, Luke. And it's temporary. I fully acknowledge it's a problem. You're right.

[Producer Dan]

I think some people were upset about it being on the homepage.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Homepage. I think you can just click. I'm not interested in this on the homepage. You can't do that on the actual channel page. But you can just click Public on the channel page. There is solutions everywhere. As far as Mario Sanity goes, it

[Producer Dan]

does seem to remember. It will forget after a little while, but it will remember.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Producer Dan]

More merge messages. Hey, Luke, do you still play the new Mario Kart?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I quit the first day. I bought. I bought a Switch. This is probably the most disappointing purchase in a while. I bought a. I went blind into the new Mario Kart. Just expecting. You know, I've enjoyed like every Mario Kart someone screaming. No, wrong. It's correct for me. I. Yeah, I bought a Switch 2 almost exclusively for Mario Kart. I played Mario Kart 8 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe both a lot. I played Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U a bunch. And then I played Mario Kart 8 Deluxe or whatever it's called on the, on the Switch quite a bit as well. I played mostly on the Wii U, I think, but I also played on the Switch. Very excited about new Mario Kart. Was excited. Just didn't look into things. I didn't want it spoiled. Played a fair bit in one day. And the whole time I was just like, I don't like certain things about this. I really, I always really loved drifting in Mario Kart. Loved it. And then now it's like the drifting was weird. It didn't feel good for a variety of reasons. And I don't think I'm the only one that thinks that. And then they have this new like rail grind thing that I really did not like. They had a few other things that just made it really whack. It felt even more encouraging of exploits than previous Mario Karts. Usually in previous Mario Karts the exploits were cool but kind of hard to do. So you wouldn't see them in like online competitive play much. And literally day one, people were doing like under map exploits and crazy stuff in, in the new one because of all the different systems that they support. That is just kind of whack. Yeah, I, I did not have a good time and I have not played it Since. Honestly, my Switch 2 is not getting a lot of play time. Yeah, like probably sell it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think my son made the wrong call. Yeah, I think he should have gone with PC.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Disappointing, man. I was talking about that when it launched.

[Linus Sebastian]

He uses it when we travel. And in fairness to Nintendo, it'll probably have like a seven year lifespan.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, probably.

[Linus Sebastian]

So there will be plenty of time for banger games to come out for it.

[Producer Dan]

I'm gonna interject here with another merch message.

[Linus Sebastian]

What you're referring to as switch 2 is in fact switch plus 2. Or as I've taken to referring. Sorry,

[Producer Dan]

Linus. Wondering if your son is still liking the Switch 2. My daughter is now asking for one as a high school graduation gift.

[Linus Sebastian]

He's not using it that much. Bottom line. He likes it when he uses it. He uses it when we travel. But like we don't travel that much. And usually when we travel we're like doing stuff. Like two of our recent trips were ski trips.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Trips.

[Linus Sebastian]

So we're up early, we eat, we ski, we come home, we maybe play like some card games or hang out. We Let them bring their friends on one of the trips. So the kids brought some friends. So they, they hung out for a little bit and Yvonne and I hit the hot tub and then we all collapse in our beds. And I mean the way we travel is pretty type A. Yeah. So like I'm talking, we leave here Friday night, we ski Saturday morning, we sleep in the hotel for one night, we ski Sunday and fly home Sunday. Like 48 hours, doorstep to doorstep, from home to home.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So there's not a lot of room for like playing Mario Kart on your switch in all that. Oh, by the way, totally unrelated, I tried skiing for the first time in over 25 years. It was fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Back to boarding.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I think I'm gonna go back to snowboarding. Yeah. But not because like skiing is like a problem, but just because I've only boarded for over 25 years. I'm, I am more comfortable and therefore having more fun on a board. I talk to my kids about this all the time. How you have to kind of, of when you're an adult especially, you kind of have to invest in getting good at something to have fun with it. And I hate that video games have become that now because that like I find I used to think, wow, I'm really like jumping between topics here. But I used to hear people say, yeah, I only really play single player stuff now because like multiplayer is not fun because I'm not sweaty enough. And I didn't feel like things were that sweaty then, but now I'm totally there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I, I don't think this is age. I think things have changed.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm not, I'm not sweaty and sweaty enough of a skier to have fun skiing the way that I have fun boarding though.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So if you look at like counter strike lobbies back in the day, even the tryhards back then, in not all cases, definitely, but in a lot of cases would be seen as like very casual players these days in, in regards to the effort put into the game.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like the fact that it is genuinely common for people like warm up in AIM trainers, like no, dude, that's crazy.

[Producer Dan]

The sweaty guys play every day after work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow. Yeah.

[Producer Dan]

And now what do you have? Yeah, 60 hours a week of practice.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's crazy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And like, it's like I remember I played on some, some pretty good teams and I remember like the idea of practicing if it wasn't just a scrim

[Linus Sebastian]

was like funny, insane, like, like you would.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What are you talking about?

[Linus Sebastian]

Like when I was in high school, if someone said they were Practicing a video. Video game, like, you would have gotten an involuntary chortle, like, just like that one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But, like, even on the team.

[Producer Dan]

Hilarious to think about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I remember our. Our, like, our best player was talking about how he wanted to do, like, effectively aim training and, like, teaching people some, like, movement things and stuff like that. And everyone other than me was like, no, I'll scrim. I'll, like, play and just get better through playing some Huggies. What are you talking about? I'm not gonna. Like, like, no, not a. Not a chance. And now. And now people, like, very voluntarily on their own just to queue up like normals. They're not on a team. None of this matters. They're going nowhere. We'll, like, practice in aim trainers for a long time before they jump online. Like, the. The. The. The playing field has legitimately shifted. We have not just gotten older. It's probably both.

[Linus Sebastian]

Both, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it's not just getting older.

[Producer Dan]

Last one I've got for you tonight. Whale VIP here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh.

[Producer Dan]

Sup, GG on the Helldivers game?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it was my first time playing. It was fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a good game.

[Producer Dan]

What game, slash activity, slash, etc, do you wish you could have done at the land?

[Linus Sebastian]

I wanted to chair curl, and I missed it. I was busy. Chair curling is so fun. I still can't believe your dad didn't win.

[Luke Lafreniere]

He got. Yeah, he got.

[Linus Sebastian]

Didn't he win at one of our things once? Mm. Thought so, yeah. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Somebody. He had a great shot, apparently, and somebody just, like, whipped their chair and took his chair out.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, that's curling right there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, There's. There's offensive measures to this game, but you only have one shot. You can't like, in a curling game. It goes back and forth constantly. You. You throw your chair once, right? So, like, you had a good shot and it got taken out. It just is what it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some of it's like, the order that you just happened to be in. I don't know. Was I gonna say, yeah, I wish the. I wish the 8V8. We gotta kind of figure that out because that. I really. I already agreed with the vision, but now I saw the vision, and it was bright, and there was just issues with it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I hope we can get there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

It will take a long time. There were a lot of technical issues with the 8v8 this year when we were using it. It was great. The whole idea of everyone just sits down and you just play and there's no, like, oh, sorry. No, I don't have you on Steam. So can someone lobby up so that we have like. Like Only maximum person 2 degrees of separation between whoever's running the lobby and. Okay, sorry. Are we using the official servers? Oh, well, I only have a pirated version of the game, so I'm not going to be able to join an official server. Oh, God. Well, now I have the official game. I have to go get a pirated version of it now. Good Lord. Like, that whole. That whole foreplay is just so not sexy for me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It was also just the defaultness of it. People gathered near the entrance of the 8v8 and everyone was like, we're playing Halo. There is a blue side and a red side. Yeah, there is the blue team and the red team. I wonder what team I should join.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nope.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, you just join. I'm Blue 7. Well, I joined blue. Like, cool. Like there's. There's no. You just get into the game pretty quick. You just start playing. It was. It was. It was pretty sweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we had some issues with the net booting and we'll. We'll.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There were some problems.

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We need someone who's gonna own it and then. And then they'll own it.

[Producer Dan]

Huge props to the Whale Land team. Shout out Evan and Pancraft.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think they might mean Yvonne. Or do they mean Evan, like our new social guy. Cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Evan the volunteer. Yeah, I thought so. I thought that might have been the volunteer. Oh, that guy Evan's pretty base.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, Evan's cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

And archive.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm really bad with names, so I. I thought his name was Evan, but I didn't want to say it, but yeah, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. Is that it for the WAN show? All right, we'll see you again next week. Oh, well, same bad time, same bad channel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like that snuck up on me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Four hours flies by when you're having fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bye. Bye.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, Lifelock. How can I help? The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't. One in four tax paying Americans has paid the price of identity fraud. Why don't do my refund though.

[Producer Dan]

I'm freaking out.

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't worry, I can fix this. Lifelock fixes identity theft, guaranteed, and gets your money back with up to $3 million in coverage. I'm so relieved. No problem. I'll be with you every step of the way. One in four was a fraud. Paying American. Not anymore. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply.