The Xbox News Looks Really Bad - WAN Show June 19, 2026

Summary

The WAN Show – "The Xbox News Looks Really Bad"

Podcast: Linus Tech Tips (WAN Show)

Hosts: Linus Sebastian (“A”) & Luke Lafreniere (“B”), with Producer Dan (“C”)
Release Date: June 20, 2026
Summary Timeframe: [00:14] – [221:09]

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Episode Overview

This episode opens with troubling rumors out of Xbox and Microsoft, including possible studio closures and even talk of spinning off Xbox as a separate entity. Linus and Luke dig deep into the business, management, and future of Xbox and discuss the game industry's current struggles with acquisitions and shutdowns. The episode also explores the dopamine-driven world of “fake” online shopping sites, recent breakthroughs in home AI setups, and fun (and sometimes gross) moments like Linus’ infamous “blended Big Mac” punishment. In classic WAN style, the team covers a broad spectrum of technology and gaming news, with engaging detours and a conversational, slightly irreverent tone.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Xbox and Microsoft’s Gaming Division Turmoil

• Rumors of Major Changes:

  • Microsoft is rumored to be considering major shakeups for Xbox, including spin-offs, restructuring, or joint ventures as reported by The Information. ([01:20])
  • Multiple studios (Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games, Double Fine) are rumored to be closing or looking for buyers.
  • Focus may be shifting strictly to legacy franchises: “as far as they know, at Bethesda, if you’re not working on Fallout or Elder Scrolls, you might as well just forget about having a job right now.” ([03:32])

• Questioning Their Strategy:

  • Linus is critical: “Why did they spend all these billions and billions and billions of dollars to shut them down?” ([04:28])
  • The business practice of buying and then closing studios is compared across the industry, with the Embracer Group cited as another example. ([05:10])
  • Luke: “What is the competitive advantage of buying Double Fine and then shutting it down?” ([06:37])

• Economics of Game Development:

  • Conversation about how difficult it is for smaller, lesser-hyped games to succeed in today’s market.
  • Most games don’t make money, and the all-or-nothing nature of Game Pass and other subscription services may further hurt smaller titles’ visibility and profitability.
  • “From what I’ve heard, game development is very much like Twitch streaming, where the vast, vast, vast majority of the money is made by the handful of projects that just absolutely rocket ship.” (Linus, [18:02])

• On Subscription Models:

  • Game Pass is a double-edged sword—success for players, but potentially harmful for developers' long-term sales and emotional ownership by players. ([21:16]-[23:44])
  • “You lose traction on other platforms ... It's very emotional. They're not as emotionally invested [in Game Pass titles].” (Luke, [21:16])

• Leadership, Management, and Corporate Culture:

  • Satya Nadella and newly appointed gaming leadership are suspected to be under immense pressure to hit profit targets, putting creative studios at risk.
  • Mixed feelings about new leadership: “We were feeling good about the things Asha Sharma was saying ... And now I feel like we're kind of getting rug pulled on it.” (Linus, [20:23])

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2. Industry-Wide: Studio Buyouts and Closures

• Pattern Across Companies:
  • Not just Microsoft; the “buy and shut” pattern is repeated by groups like Embracer.
  • The supposed logic—buying to reduce competition—doesn’t seem to make sense in gaming due to the market’s size and the ongoing success of indie developers. ([05:48]-[07:18])
• Discussing Double Fine’s Recent Output:
  • Deep dive into the lackluster performance of recent Double Fine releases like Kiln. Peak concurrent player counts are very low, casting doubt on sustainability. ([15:55]-[18:13])
  • Psychonauts 2 still retains relevance, but it’s a single-player title from years ago.

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3. Notable Memorable Moments

• Blended Big Mac "Punishment" Segment ([31:32]-[39:36]):
  • Linus, fulfilling an on-air punishment, drinks a blended Big Mac, fries, and Coke combo, resulting in some truly visceral reactions and banter:
    • “That was possibly the worst thing that I have ever tasted.” (Linus, [36:50])
    • “The weirdest thing was ... you could taste individual ingredients.” (Linus, [37:41])

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4. Dopamine Shopping Sites & Digital Behaviors

• Rise of "Fake Online Shopping" Experiences: ([40:33]-[51:51])

  • “Dopamine shopping” sites simulate the buying process but never actually sell you anything.
  • Alternate take: sites are just data-harvesting attempts, but Linus doubts their value due to the artificial nature of the behavior.
  • Linus experiments live: tries out several fake shopping experiences, building a fantasy shopping cart, and discusses if it could actually scratch the itch for compulsive shoppers.
    • “If that was a concern for somebody, if it helps you not just blow all your money online, this actually (is) great.” (Linus, [48:54])

• Digital “Window Shopping”:

  • Both hosts agree that removing friction (like Amazon’s one-click checkout) is a huge part of consumer overspending.
  • Adding friction, as in these “demo” sites, may help curb overspending for some users.

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5. Home AI Labs, Open Source AI, and Hardware Experiments

• Linus’ AI Home Lab Saga

  • Shares a detailed story about setting up a home AI lab with old and new Nvidia GPUs (GV100, RTX 5090), driver headaches on Linux, wiring jank, and the realization that old pro hardware doesn’t necessarily support new AI workloads.
  • “Unless I want to run old ass ancient models, they’re basically EOL. They’re useless.” (Linus, [106:42])
  • Conversation on economics, e-waste, and the prospects for running powerful local models on aging or surplus hardware ([154:11]).
  • Discussion about the future potential of using ARM devices, AI accelerators and new types of hardware for local lab clusters.

• Nvidia's Open Source NPIRE Project

  • Nvidia’s new open source project where robot arms, guided by AI agents, learn physical skills autonomously, including “installing a GPU” ([91:12]-[95:12]).
  • “All we did was give Codex an API to the world of atoms and the rest is emergence.” (Nvidia’s Jim Fan, cited by Linus, [91:12])

• AI Cost, Model Hosting, and the Shift to Local Computing:

  • Ongoing trend: as SaaS LLMs become pricier, companies and power users are preparing to run models locally; economic realities are shifting the landscape, raising the appeal of "owned hardware.” ([159:31])

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6. Throwback, Nostalgia, and Crafty Tech Workarounds

• Shader Delivery/Compilation Fixes:

  • AMD and Microsoft rolling out “advanced shader delivery” to cut load times and stutter—a response to a longstanding headache in gaming. ([190:33])
  • Anecdotes about old games’ loading times and tricks (like Morrowind rebooting your Xbox during loads, Halo using one rock model everywhere).

• Discussion on “Iconic Box Art”:

  • GTA’s never-changing art style sets it apart; memorable, decade-spanning design matters. ([27:19])

• Unusual Speedrunning Tactics:

  • Spongebob Speedrunning via Disc Greasing:
    • Speedrunners discovered smudging their game discs with “eight grease strokes” created a game-breaking bug for faster times.
    • “Optimizing your grease patterns is so sick.” (Luke, [141:59])
    • “Grease-less” and “greasers” are now categories in the Spongebob speedrunning scene. ([143:02])

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7. Noteworthy Quotes, Reactions, & Side Stories

• On Emotional Investment in Games:
  • “I am way more invested in stuff that I paid a lot of money for.” (Linus, [22:17])
• On Game Pass and Reviews:
  • “I wouldn't be surprised if people were less likely to interact with things like reviews and comments if it's a game that came free in their Game Pass.” (Luke, [21:16])
• Linus on his AI home lab:
  • “It was probably the most fun that I’ve had building a stupid test bench in years.” ([108:18])
• On Greasing Discs for Speedrunning:
  • “A former champion ... revealed: I clean my discs via licking them, then using a pillowcase to wipe and clean ... which also allowed him to leg clip throughout the game.” ([142:17])
• On AI Labs & e-Waste:
  • “There will be a glut of basically discarded hardware ... Support for ARM and gaming and Linux especially will get way better.” ([152:05]–[156:02])

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8. Other Technology and Gaming News Highlights

• Illinois Moves to Ban Smart Glasses for Drivers:
  • Illinois may become first state to ban smart glasses while driving to curb distracted driving, with debate about enforceability as the lines blur between prescription and “smart” eyewear. ([201:51]–[202:50], [205:47])
• Microsoft Copilot+ AI Features:
  • Features exclusive to NPU-equipped laptops may finally be coming to regular GPUs, a change that undercuts the initial sales push for dedicated NPU hardware. ([144:01]–[147:30])
• New 3D Printing: Alloys On Demand:
  • US researchers develop software-controlled elliptical laser paths allowing for on-demand metal alloy creation, enabling rapid prototyping and custom part design. ([85:19])
• AMD Proposes Raptor Lake Next for DDR4:
  • AMD and Intel may support older DDR4 platforms into 2027 due to DDR5 cost pressures, acknowledging gamers often see limited benefit from DDR5 while DDR4 remains cheaper. ([146:46])

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9. Community Q&A and Housekeeping

• Q&As (“Comms”): Questions ranged from LTT product restocks to gym equipment, Linux tips, and nostalgia for MSN Messenger-era messaging.
• Floatplane Announcements & LTT Store:
  • Upcoming Lime Day sale, product pre-announcements, and a note on upcoming open sauce Colorway.
• Promoted Sponsors: OpManager Nexus, Kape, RedTiger, Motion Gray.

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Timestamps of Major Segments (approximate):

• Xbox/Microsoft News Deep Dive: [00:14]–[28:28]
• Double Fine & Studio Closures: [03:32]–[23:44]
• Blended Big Mac Segment: [31:32]–[39:36]
• Dopamine Shopping, Infinite Scrolling: [40:33]–[57:33]
• Sponsor/Floatplane/Product Updates: Scattered, mainly [61:13]–[65:32]
• Home AI Lab Setup Stories: [91:12]–[128:09]
• Spongebob Speedrunning via Greasy Discs: [141:00]–[143:36]
• Tech News Lightning Round (Smart Glasses, Shader Compilation, AR Glasses, Alloys): [190:29]–[201:51]
• Community Q&A/Housekeeping/After Dark Setup: [208:03]–[221:09]

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Episode Tone & Style

The conversation is a blend of technical, skeptical, and humorous, with segments alternating between detailed analysis (particularly around business decisions in gaming), friendly jokes, and tech-side storytelling. The hosts aren't shy about expressing frustration—whether at poor corporate strategy, the pains of integrating old hardware, or the taste of a blended Big Mac. There’s also genuine excitement for innovations (AI, 3D printing, shader delivery) and visible nostalgia for the LAN party and old-MSN era.

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In a Nutshell

If you missed this episode, here’s what you should know:

• Uncertainty clouds the future of Xbox as Microsoft rumors swirl about closures and restructures.
• The “buy to close” cycle in gaming is hurting developers, while Game Pass may undermine smaller games’ success.
• Compulsiveshopping sites now let users enjoy “retail therapy” risk-free (potentially).
• Home AI labs and open source models are bringing new life (and headaches) to old and new hardware.
• Critical, funny, and at times gross: few podcasts blend business analysis, tech geekery, and eating punishments quite like WAN Show.

If you care about where big tech, gaming, and enthusiast computing are headed—the good and the ugly—this WAN Show dives deep.

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Notable Quotes by Timestamp:

• “Why did they spend all these billions and billions and billions of dollars to shut them down?” (Linus, [04:28])
• “What is the competitive advantage of buying Double Fine and then shutting it down?” (Luke, [06:37])
• “That was possibly the worst thing that I have ever tasted.” (Linus, [36:50])
• “You lose traction on other platforms ... It's very emotional. They're not as emotionally invested [in Game Pass titles].” (Luke, [21:16])
• “Optimizing your grease patterns is so sick.” (Luke, [141:59])
• “All we did was give Codex an API to the world of atoms and the rest is emergence.” (Nvidia’s Jim Fan, cited by Linus, [91:12])
• “It was probably the most fun that I’ve had building a stupid test bench in years.” (Linus, [108:18])

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End of Summary

Transcript

[A]

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

[B]

Whoa, that's good.

[A]

This might be the drink of the summer.

[B]

Okay, I like this one too. I'm rocking with it.

[A]

Okay, try it for yourself.

[B]

Starbucks refreshers concentrates are coming home.

[A]

Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours. Welcome to the WAN show. We have a wonderful show lined up for you guys this week, but it does have to start with some bad news. Remember some of the trepidation that we had about Xbox's new leadership? Well, it looks like things were going pretty good for a bit and then boom, rug pull back to the bare floor trepidation we had before. Things are not looking good over there right now with rumors of potential studio closures or divestments or even spinning off Xbox entirely from Microsoft. There's some good news this week, though. Illinois may become the first US State to ban drivers from wearing smart glasses. Seems like a smart move. What else we got?

[B]

The Steam Workshop was used to spread malware and stop killing games. It was ruled against.

[A]

Okay, those are choices. The show is brought to you today by opmanager, Nexus Cape, Red Tiger and Motion Gray, alongside our rap part partner, dbrand and our chair partner, Razer, and also our laptop partner. Also Razer. Why don't we jump right into the Microsoft stuff? I wouldn't even normally necessarily be 100% on talking about this because I personally feel that rumor mill stuff is best addressed once the rumors go away and the actual stuff happens. But there's been a lot going on at Microsoft this week. The information reported on Friday that Microsoft is even weighing options regarding Xbox's future that could include a potential spinoff, restructuring it as a wholly owned subsidiary like LinkedIn and GitHub, or as some kind of a joint venture. The word on the street is things are not doing too good right now. Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games, Double Fine are just a few of the studios that are either closing or rumored to be closed. Or they could be searching for a buyer. Satya Nadella has approved Ashasharma's plan to focus on successful franchises like Halo, Fallout and the Elder Scrolls. Now, this was not even something that I read online, which of course, you know is credible when you read something online. This was something that someone internally said that they heard from people and was just chatting with me about. But what I heard from a person, some person, is that as far as they know, at Bethesda, if you're not working on Fallout or Elder Scrolls, you might as well just forget about, like, having a job right now. None of this has actually been announced. I don't think there's been any internal memos confirming any kind of, like, mass layoffs or anything like that. But I guess what I'm trying to figure out right now, Luke is king. Why

[B]

the. If you're not working on Fallout or Elder Scrolls thing is interesting because I can't imagine there's a huge team working on, like, continued DLC for Starfield. The why in regards to shutting down studios, I honestly have no idea. Especially if, like, if they're trying to push.

[A]

Hold on. I want to go back farther than that.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

Why did they spend all these billions and billions and billions of dollars to shut them down? Buying. Buying gaming companies that by all accounts were apparently doing well enough that they were worth billions and billions of dollars only to turn around and go, well, what's going on here? Why are we investing so many billions of dollars?

[C]

What's that?

[B]

Yeah, it's. It's. It's. This has never made sense to me. And the weirdest thing to me is they're not even the only ones doing it. I don't remember the name of the other company, but there's another company that just keeps buying up gaming studios and shutting them down. I don't get the point. Never understood the point. I bet you chat's going to point it out. Not 10 cent.

[C]

No.

[B]

Embracer group. Yeah, Embracer. Just.

[A]

What a name, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What's. What's that meme called. Is that. Is that the hug? Meme

[B]

Studios has Embrace. Embracer Group shut down. Let's see. That's an AI overview.

[A]

Nice. Solid.

[B]

Embracer Group quietly canceled 29 unannounced games and shut seven studios within six months last year. Like, this is. Here's an article from Games Radar.

[A]

What kind of a business model is that?

[B]

This is. This is my point. It's like, what. What are you doing? And there's. They're super known for buying studios and then. And then they just. Yeah, they shut down an incredible amount of said studios that they bought. And I just. It just. I don't understand the point. And it's not just Embracer and it's not just Microsoft. This is like a thing. And, you know, I saw some comment. It's already gone, so I can't see it. But it's like, oh, it's. It's competitive. Whatever. Whatever. Dude. There is so many games out there. And like, most of these massive studios are mostly getting destroyed by small. I guess some of the studios that are being bought are small studios, but you're not getting wrecked by the, like, Double A's, which is maybe where you could consider like, Larry.

[A]

Larry. And.

[B]

Yeah, you're not, you're not getting the. I don't know. I'm just trying to think of like, what, what, like, you think Double Fine is going to reduce the sales of Halo? Like, I don't understand the competitive advantage of buying Double Fine and then shutting it down. And I think they've had Double Fine for a while, so it's not a great example. But like, I. I don't see it in the games industry, buying, acquiring these companies and shutting them down as a way to actually make your games look more attractive because there's just so many games. You're not going to accomplish the goal of shutting down enough studios to actually reduce the volume of new games hitting, like, these various platforms.

[A]

I mean, in fairness, what has Double fine done lately? Psychonauts 2 was a while ago. Let's have a look. I. And that's a. It's just an actual legitimate question. So here's a few things.

[B]

They were always a.

[A]

Like some of this smaller, Quite old Psychonauts 2. Okay, is this, Is this in. Is this in order? What is kiln? Is kiln new? Oh, yeah. Okay, this is. This is apparently brand new. How many people are playing kiln right now?

[B]

Double Fine is a. They're a developer. I thought they were a publisher, actually.

[A]

Okay. Mostly positive. 136 people. That's. That's not a lot of reviews. How do I. How do I. Am I shoot? Oh, yeah. I guess I can't. I guess I can't find it. Oh, no, you can just see the 100 most played. Well, I doubt with a hundred reviews that it's anywhere on here. Oh, wait, is it? I hate it when it does this. One of one. Yeah, it found it.

[C]

Where?

[A]

Yeah, and I can't actually jump to. It doesn't actually jump to it and. Or it's not actually here. I can't. I can't tell what I'm. What I'm looking at here. The craziest part to me is that it's like I can understand probably your

[B]

search because it's in your. In your Steam search as well.

[A]

That makes sense. Yep. There it is. Nice.

[C]

Nice.

[A]

Nice spot. The thing that kills me too is like, I. I don't even. I don't even. I don't. I can understand why they might look at the current climate and go, yeah, sorry, why are we even bothering to develop new games at all? Most played games in the top 10 we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Free to plays. And of the paid games, one of them is like a new sort of viral meme game that is $5 taskbar

[B]

hero, I'm assuming is an idle game, which is why it's showing up on her most played. And it's probably. I'm. I've never even heard of this game before. I'm assuming you get like, rare card things and it's just like that banana game that we found.

[A]

Mixed reviews. Free to play. Desktop Companion. Idler. Yep, there you go.

[B]

So, like, whatever. I don't know if that counts.

[A]

So basically everyone's just playing Counter Strike, Dota 2 PUBG.

[B]

And 5M is GTA 5.

[A]

And Bongo Cat. Another idler.

[B]

Yeah. 5M is GTA 5.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

Yikes.

[B]

So it was apparently a hackathon project made by like eight people.

[A]

Oh, okay.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Online multiplayer brawler where teams of colorful sprites sculpt ceramic battle armor on a pottery wheel.

[C]

Mm.

[A]

Sup.

[B]

I'm getting some. Some mixed. Mixed information on. On kiln, but it sounds like it was a fairly small team.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, in the. In the context of it has a hundred reviews, though, does it probably even matter how small the team was?

[B]

Yeah, but, like, I wonder how big the team at Double Fine even is.

[A]

I don't know. I can't. I see. I see. I. I honestly, I think that's. Oh, man. How do you. How do you deal with that? So you've got a relatively small team in the grand scheme of how big this business is. This business unit is not hitting its targets overall. But, like, it feels like to go after these. These relatively small projects when, I mean, realistically, you know, one. One of the biggest failures at Microsoft from a gaming standpoint over the last 10 years has got to be Halo Infinite. Like, more like Halo Infinite Fail. Like, the amount of money that they put into that, it would eclipse whatever Double Fine has spent making every game that Double Fine has made probably ever. And I mean, in fairness, that that unit has been also not left intact. I don't know, man. Is. I think even as recently as last week, last WAN show, we were feeling good about the things that Asha Sharma was saying, the. The things that Xbox was doing in her defense.

[B]

I don't even know how much this is her idea. It's very clear that Satya Nadella is super down with this vision. And I suspect this may have been passed down to a certain degree because he's been fairly vocal about, like, yes, do this Please.

[A]

Yeah, and he's also been pretty vocal about that. Microsoft has profit margin targets, and either we hit them or they're overcut.

[C]

Yeah,

[B]

But that's a tough one when you're trying to win your way back into people's living rooms.

[A]

It makes you wonder about what political, like, Game of Thrones level stuff is happening at a company like Microsoft where Phil Spencer's out new CEO with an AI background rather than a gaming background is in. A bunch of public statements are made about like, rah, rah, rah, let's go, Microsoft.

[C]

We're gonna.

[A]

We're gonna rejuvenate this business unit. And then immediately after that, the rumors start swirling that they're basically gonna like, pull the plug on it. Essentially is what it kind of seems like they're doing. And then like, did she. Did she just get. Did she just get sacrificed? Was. Was it like. Was she not. And I don't know that. I don't know that was this. And it was. Are they trying to, like, get rid of her? I actually can't tell because how could you possibly hope to execute on the, like, the vision that they seem to have for the Xbox brand of exclusive content if your first party studios are on the. On the auction blog? Can somebody answer that for me?

[B]

Yeah,

[C]

it's.

[B]

It's tough because that's another thing is like, I've never heard of Kiln before. So I've been sitting here kind of trying to go down a journey of dodging the AI overview and learning things about it, and it feels like a very Xbox first title. Like, I know you looked up the Steam stats, but there might be more playing it, more people playing it for. In Game for Kiln right now. What does that even mean? What does that mean? Fish Lad said for In Game for Kiln. Are you like, looking for servers or something? It says it's a Pottery Brawler. So is it like a fighting game? Yeah, but apparently I'm finding some mixed information because I found like, okay, it means four people are playing. Yeah, but how do they know that? Yeah, but it's not. It originally only launched on Xbox. I don't think it originally even launched on Steam. So, like, the Steam information is not necessarily that interesting to me.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I don't know how accurate it is. Yeah. Steam to be. Yeah, so that doesn't matter. I'm not. I don't think the four people on Steam or whatever is like.

[A]

I mean, it tells us a little bit if it a little bit got kind of viral know on Xbox last

[B]

I be more players.

[A]

They're not selling a lot of Xboxes. So, you know, maybe people would have played it on PC since it is available there. But yeah, it seems. Yeah, it seems like not. Not many people are playing that, so that's unfortunate. And this. This came out. Oh, yikes. Yeah, this came out like less than 2. Chart on the left. Oh, whoops, whoops, whoops.

[D]

There we go.

[C]

So.

[A]

Oh boy. Maximum. So it peaked at 193 players.

[B]

Not a ton.

[A]

So it pretty much doesn't matter how small the team was. That worked on this. If you hit a peak of 193 players, that was probably not a success.

[B]

Here's the other interesting part.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Is, you know, how long ago did he say it came out?

[A]

Less than two months ago.

[B]

So early development started in 2019. Yeah, that was my reaction to that. Apparently Kiln started as a project under Double Fines. Amnesia. Amnesia Fortnite, which is an internal game jam that was in 2017. But it was. Yeah. Why did it take so long? The answer is simple. His team was pulled into other projects while they were working on Kiln.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So Kiln was like a side project, B project type thing while they're working on other stuff. Wasn't until after Psychonauts 2 was done that the developers could really start working on other stuff. And then that's when Kiln came out.

[A]

All right, so here we go.

[B]

How did Psychonauts 2 do?

[A]

Here's. Here's Double Fine. Anything developed by Double Fine. So Gillen overall, positive reception, but 2800 follows and 4 online with a peak of 193. The previous year they had Keeper, which peaked at 191 and currently has 2 people online. Psychonauts too. Yeah, people are still playing that. This is an order of magnitude bigger game than Kiln in terms of follows has people still playing it today peaked at 7,000. So the last time that Double Fine released something somewhat relevant was five years ago.

[B]

Keeper is also a single player game. I think being able to be done with a game is okay.

[A]

Psychonauts 2 is also a single player game and it's still being played more.

[B]

Yeah. It's obviously a way bigger title.

[A]

Yeah. And. Well, no, that's what I'm trying to say though is these two are. Well, it peaked at 191 though. Like people were done with it before they were ever playing it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. Both of these two were just absolute flops as far as I can tell.

[B]

That's a good metric. Yeah. Especially when they're Xbox first So people with Game Pass are getting them for free. We don't know how much that impacts things and blah, blah, blah. Is there any way to look up metrics for Xbox stuff? I doubt it.

[A]

Not that I'm aware of.

[B]

But I think if your game isn't like a complete banger and it's Xbox first, it's going to be really hurt on other platforms.

[A]

Well, because the thing is like, if your game's not a complete banger, you're basically kind of boned these days. From what I've heard, game development is very much like Twitch streaming, where the vast, vast, vast majority of the money is made by the handful of projects that just absolutely rocket ship. And most titles that are released on Steam do not make any money essentially. And so, I mean, I'm. I'm looking at this going like, even if this was a hundred times as successful on Xbox, if you have a peak number of players of. Actually I know 20,000 would be pretty good. Except that if most of those were on Game Pass, which is your subscription service anyway, that's not incremental revenue. How many people work at Double Fine?

[B]

Hundred, Something like that, man. Not cheap rolls either.

[A]

Yeah, dude, I, I think it's. This is tough. This is tough because it's like, it's a. I love Psychonaus, you know, And I think that. I think this is one of those things that's like extremely emotional for people.

[B]

Oh yeah.

[A]

Like. When we don't have all the information. But I think what.

[B]

We're fairly severely lacking in information, I think.

[A]

But what I think we do know is that it's clearly been under managed for a really long time. And I think what's frustrating for me is that they finally made the changes at the top in what looked like an attempt to address this. And now I feel like we're kind of getting rug pulled on it there. I think that's the best way that I can summarize. What's frustrating about what we're hearing right now is it was like, hey, we're going to turn it around. And we're like, yeah, let's support that. And then it's like, oh, actually no, psych. We're going to do this turn around

[B]

by doing what we've done before.

[A]

We were doing before.

[B]

Burn everything down. Yeah, I just, I look at something like Psychonauts, which again, Xbox first. I see overwhelmingly positive reviews, 8,300 reviews though. And I've seen multiple people in floatplane chat point out, I played Psychonauts 2. I loved it. I played it on Game Pass. One of the problems that I have with that is you lose traction on other platforms.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So it does super well on Xbox. On Game Pass specifically, it's not gonna have the, the traction of the reviews and the amount of people playing and everything else to make it rise up on something like Steam. So it's like, it's. We've, we've talked a few other times about, you know, two ignorant dudes who've never made a game have talked about how in my opinion, it can be very bad for you to be a part of these game Pass type subscriptions. As if I know anything. But still, because it can really hurt you on these other platforms, you just don't get that interaction. I wouldn't even be surprised if someone had the stats on this. I'd be really interested. I wouldn't be surprised if people were less likely to interact with things like reviews and comments. If it's a game that came for free in their Game Pass. Because they're just filtering through stuff they have. They're not, as you, you mentioned, it's very emotional. They're not as emotionally invested. If they didn't spend the 80 Canadian or whatever it is, American or whatever it is, wherever you're from on the game, you're not as invested. Literally.

[A]

I am way more invested literally in stuff that I paid a lot of money for.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Way more. Or spent a lot of time on like in order to achieve it. In this case, time equals money. Right. So like, let's take something like my, my motorbike, which is finally done. I'm, I'm way more invested in that paint job. Even though, like, it didn't necessarily. It did cost money. But even if it didn't like the fact that I've invested my time, which is, you know, equal to like my value.

[C]

Right.

[A]

I've put, I've put that into it. I love it more for having put all of that energy into it. And so in the same way, when I, you know, when I was a kid and I saved up and I bought a game I like, I wanted to like it. And I, and I wanted other people to like it too, with me. And that was exciting and emotional. Whereas, no, I would not be. And again, I also am not, you know, I'm not a psychologist, I haven't studied this, but I would not be surprised if somebody just playing something that's there, it's in front of them, it's in their Game Pass subscription without investing that, that money in the acquisition of It. Or having that anticipation. Yeah. It wouldn't surprise me if they were not as evangelical about how great it is and didn't create as much word of mouth.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I think that can hurt it a lot. Like, I think that can hurt it in ways that I can't understand. I imagine it can hurt it in ways that basically nobody can understand. But like, this is just such a well reviewed game.

[A]

I mean, Psychonauts 2 was before Microsoft acquired them though. So when I was, the only reason I brought it up was because I had to go back that far to find a relevant double fine game.

[C]

Was it?

[A]

As far as I can tell, Microsoft

[B]

purchased the studio in 2019.

[A]

Yeah. So they developed that completely before Microsoft acquired them.

[B]

Oh, yeah, they published it afterwards. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they published it like two years later.

[A]

So they haven't. They haven't developed and released.

[B]

Well, they released it on Steam two years later. It might have been released earlier than that. Actually, that's another thing that, that's something I was thinking about with Kiln is like, when did it end up getting released on? Because like, man, man, I'm tangenting too much. But you know, GTA 6 is not coming out on PC right away.

[A]

Sure isn't.

[B]

GTA 6 will still be massively popular when it finally hits PC. I don't think every game gets that. I think a lot of games have their hype cycle.

[A]

Kiln was a simultaneous release.

[B]

Oh, it was okay. Damn, that's.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Nope, it just didn't resonate.

[B]

That's not good. But I do think, like, if something is released into Game Pass first and then you have that hype cycle, then you try to have two hype cycles by having it released on PC or wherever else, Sony, whatever it is later on.

[A]

Oh, we've seen that so many times.

[B]

It hurts it a lot.

[A]

We've seen that so many times. I mean, hardware companies try to do the same thing. Like you think back to. I forget what GPU it was, but Nvidia tried to have a, like an announcement embargo and then a, like a specs embargo and then an unboxing embargo and a review embargo or something like that. I think it was either three or four separate embargoes that were anywhere from like a week to two weeks apart where they were trying to like create this massive extended hype cycle. And I remember just telling them, like, no, we're not doing this. Like, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna just, oh, I'm not gonna just, like, open the box and not be able to. Because there were. There were things that I would have needed to be able to say in order to even give an informative unboxing of it that I. That I wasn't able to. And they seem to have mostly backed off that. Or at least it's hard to tell because when was the last time they launched a gpu? It doesn't happen very often.

[B]

Yeah. Like, I saw, you know, the Google News feed on your phone. I saw something came through that was like, the highly anticipated box art for GTA 6. And I remembered that, like, we. We finally have a first look at the highly anticipated box art for GTA 6. And I was like, man, I'm so sorry for whoever had to write this article, for one.

[A]

I think you mean the AI agent that generated the article. But sure, but.

[B]

But also, like, again, I'm coming back to, like, just not every game gets this. They are genuinely probably like, the one. I don't think there's any other one where anyone's ever going to write the highly anticipated box art. Maybe at certain stages, other games. I feel like right now it might just be that, I don't know, maybe Ballers Gate 3 was big enough that. That the upcoming Divinity game might get some type of attention. Not that much though.

[A]

No. Because, like, GTA's box art is iconic. I'm trying to think of another franchise's box art that that has. Cause it can't just be an anticipated game.

[B]

This is maybe the first negative thing I'll ever say about Baldur's Gate on this show, but I don't even think the Baldur's Gate box art was like that Amazing.

[A]

No. And it's not. And more importantly, though, for this comparison, it doesn't have a legacy. It doesn't have a history. Whereas the GTA box art.

[B]

Oh, I was gonna say Baldur's Gate sure had a Baldur's Gate.

[A]

I understand what you're saying, but box art doesn't. Like, a GTA poster is the kind of thing that literally, there are adults today that were children with that on their wall. You know what I mean?

[B]

Yeah, totally.

[A]

From GTA 5, who are now grown into adults and who are anticipating the release of GTA 6.

[B]

People are. People are like, whoa, I'm amazed you said that. I'll show you why. Where's Carlach, Bruh? Where's car? Like, why. Why is Missouri here and there's no car?

[A]

Like, I mean, this also just feels like, like, Star wars which was modeled after previous film movie posters. Like, it doesn't. This is. This is not. It's not iconic. And like a G. Like gta, it could. That could only be gta. That style I want to see. Like, I think. I think that something like a Diablo has a very iconic box art. I would say. I would say Elder Scrolls actually has a pretty iconic box art.

[B]

Honestly, the fact that this image exists at all is. Is a decent indicator of what you're saying.

[A]

Yeah, but nobody would be excited to see a new Elder Scrolls box art because this is cool. What I'm looking at over here is cool. And it's not just. It's not just cool because it spans such a long period of time that it's time capsules of cool spanning back like 20 years more. More 30 years. Almost like, give me something equivalent. Like even Nintendo with their. With their prime IPs, like, you know, Mario Kart or Mario Platformers or whatever they have, they have taken such a different approach over the years that you don't. You don't have that. Like, other than the first couple titles here. Let's go back to you. Other than the first couple of titles,

[B]

there's Style just one and two, which were. I believe they were both top.

[A]

They were top down.

[B]

So the second they really got the real identity of GTA, they went to GTA 3 and they got this boxer and they never looked back. Yeah, that's pretty. That's pretty strong.

[A]

Yeah, that's a statement. Yeah, it's like, we nailed it.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Now it's just that. But cooler every time. And I've never gotten into these games. That's cool.

[B]

Apparently Kotaku even has a whole thing. This was linked by Noki in chat. Hi, Noki.

[A]

Oh, it has to have a helicopter

[B]

in the top left.

[A]

Okay, that's interesting. Didn't know that.

[B]

Oh, and it's got like pontoons this time.

[A]

Sure. It's a cool helicopter.

[C]

Spoilers.

[A]

Everything about this is cool. Yeah.

[B]

Gives you some idea of where you're at. You got some palm trees. You got a little gator down there. Flamingo. So it does give you, like, information as well.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Got a pink bike. I was way ahead of the trend on that one. Let's go.

[B]

But yeah, I mean, that is a. That is a good point. But still. Oh, my God. If some other game did this, and I'm sure some other game has, where they stick with like a trend and it looks cool, it still doesn't really matter as much because it's not gta.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know what I'm saying?

[A]

All right. Oh, okay. I apparently am supposed to. Where is it? Oh, for crying out loud. Okay. Float plane announcement. Dan, play the video.

[D]

I think a quarter is like this, right?

[A]

What am I looking at here?

[B]

What.

[A]

What is happening?

[D]

Honestly isn't that much.

[A]

What is happening? What is Sammy doing? That's disgusting. It's not even blended. What is he doing? Why is he drinking? Smells like a burger, but kind of peanutty.

[B]

Peanutty.

[A]

Why is it.

[D]

But.

[A]

Well, it just tastes like you bit

[B]

all those things and chewed it already.

[C]

Ew.

[A]

And then you, like, spat that out,

[D]

let it get cold, and then put

[C]

it back in your mouth.

[B]

It's kind of what it's like.

[A]

Why is it here?

[D]

It's time.

[A]

It's time for what?

[D]

It's time for your wise, manly punishment.

[A]

Excuse me?

[D]

Yeah, so remember last season? You didn't do your punishment yet?

[A]

I don't think I agreed to any kind of blended McDonald's punishment. I don't eat McDonald's at the best of times.

[D]

Yeah, well, we're not eating. You're. Oh, you're effed. You effed. We f'd. You f'd.

[B]

We effed.

[D]

You effed up.

[A]

No, he says F5. The show is still up.

[D]

Do I keep speaking?

[C]

You can keep speaking.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

You don't eat McDonald's, but you can drink McDonald's today.

[A]

Did you at least make a fresh one?

[D]

Yeah, this is fresh. This is fresh. I. I re. I redid a second one just for you.

[B]

Yeah, so it looks like soil.

[D]

So you lost last. Last. Last season of WAN Show. Why is mine late? So as a punishment, you have to drink this delicious drink that I made you.

[A]

It's not even pouring, dude.

[B]

It's sludge.

[A]

That's the worst thing I've ever seen.

[B]

So he. He told me about this before the show because he asked if I wanted to do it as well. Because there's a decent amount of times where, like when you just ate the limes or whatever, where I've, like, joined you. Oh, it spilled onto the table. It's so gross. Oh, it's doing it more.

[A]

Why would you put the drink in it?

[D]

Why?

[C]

What?

[B]

Yeah, when you pour, like, the Coke or whatever you got.

[D]

Oh, yeah. Well, I need to blend.

[A]

What was that?

[D]

What?

[A]

The drink.

[D]

It's Coke. So this is the Big Mac.

[B]

Coke.

[D]

Big Mac with the fries and Coke. I'll drink it with you.

[B]

I'm not. Okay, you're doing it. Okay.

[A]

How many calories is this?

[B]

That's so funny. Because that's another comment that I made. These are all reasons why I didn't want to do it.

[A]

This has got to be, like, a thousand calories.

[D]

No, it's like a couple hundred.

[A]

There's no way. What is it? What.

[B]

What is all in that?

[A]

Yeah, what's in that?

[D]

It's a Big Mac.

[B]

An entire Big Mac.

[D]

Three quarters of a Big Mac.

[A]

Three quarters of a Big Mac.

[C]

Okay.

[D]

Fries. Three quarters of fries.

[A]

Three quarters of a house. What size of fries?

[B]

And why did you bother three quarter it?

[D]

Because. Yeah, we're testing it with the quarter first. You saw in the video.

[A]

Oh, wait. So when you say fresh, you mean you freshly blended it? But this burger is from, like, lunchtime today, so. Lunchtime today, late for when today?

[D]

I'm not gonna say who, but someone's late today. That's not. This is not my fault. I plan it perfectly.

[B]

How would you. How would you like to take your five and a. Five and a half hour old blended Big Mac solidarity.

[A]

Know what I mean? Yeah, but you eat garbage.

[D]

What?

[A]

What do you mean, garbage?

[D]

What do you. What. What do you mean, eat garbage?

[A]

All right, well,

[D]

cheers. Cheers. To good health.

[A]

I'm not cheersing nothing. And there's no good health that could possibly come from this.

[B]

No chance.

[D]

Prosperity in life and happiness.

[A]

It.

[D]

Cheers.

[B]

Oh, it's sludge. Oh, my God. Oh, no. Oh, I wish. I really wish you guys had my perspective because watching that. That Matrix slime go down was wild. Your hands covering it. Turn this way. He's still got more. It's okay. It was fine.

[A]

No, what kind of a thing to say is that?

[D]

I got. Wait a second. Seconds.

[A]

Get that out of here.

[C]

Slide up over here with it.

[D]

Oh, there's so much mess. I'm so sorry.

[C]

That's okay. I'll lick it up when everybody goes home. Just don't get it on the shag.

[B]

Let's actually wipe the table off, though, before it, like, encrusts into it. Oh, don't. Oh, my God. Don't pour it into the carpet, please.

[D]

Fired.

[A]

Oh, don't be late for. Man, I'm not going to lie.

[B]

That looked disgusting.

[A]

That. That was possibly the worst thing that I have ever tasted.

[D]

You want Sprite?

[A]

No, I'm good on the Sprite. I think I'll wash it down with some water.

[D]

I have a Big Mac here for you if you want.

[A]

Oh, get either. I. I do not. I don't eat McDonald's at the best of times.

[B]

More McDonald's is not the. Not the answer.

[A]

Oh, man. I don't remember the last time I had Coke. I don't remember the last time I ate a Big Mac. I have been known to enjoy some McDonald's fries from time to time. However, potato salt is. Is. Is not potato and salt the strongest flavor? I think the weirdest thing about consuming that Coke.

[B]

It's gotta be. No, no.

[A]

Was the way that from one moment to the next, you could taste individual ingredients. Like on that first bite, I got a wave of mustard. Oh, that was like overwhelming.

[B]

How did you blend it enough?

[A]

Just about made me throw up.

[D]

I blended for a minute straight.

[A]

Why would you blend it for a minute?

[D]

Because last time it was too chunky.

[A]

That's. Oh, man. Sammy, stop in late for when it wasn't my fault today. I can't explain why it wasn't my fault today, but it really wasn't my fault today. There's an NDA that prevents me from explaining why it wasn't my fault. Oh, I should not move around right now. I'm not talking about today.

[B]

I'm so happy. I feel like I'd take a bite out of a whole lime for multiple days in a row. Overdoing that easily. I would do that easily.

[D]

Okay, do the floor plan.

[B]

I think I would probably do it for like a month.

[A]

Overdo me that.

[B]

Make sure you not into that at all.

[C]

Make sure you leave that on the kitchen counter so it sits all weekend.

[A]

Anyway. For those of you who aren't in the know why When Late is a series over on floatplane that Sammy does

[B]

where just why When Late he.

[A]

He runs around the office in the lead up to the Wan show and documents what we're up to before we start the show and in some cases after we should have started the show. And for a particular season there was a punishment and that was it. And that was very unfortunate. If you want to check out why Wan Late LMG GG Floatplane. We've also got a lot of other really great stuff over there, including. This is a fun one. A Week in the life of Tatiana, AKA Material Girl. This is the first time I've heard that nickname for her. But what's that on the right? Sure, that makes sense.

[B]

Oh, what's that on the right?

[A]

That is the LTT Forever sock. Coming soon.

[B]

Copper infused.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What does that mean?

[A]

Antimicrobial qualities. Yeah, she does. She does

[B]

all the fancy metals. Antimicrobial. Like I know silver is too.

[A]

Yeah, silver is. Copper is. I don't think gold is. I don't think it has any kind of Antimicrobial properties,

[B]

but yeah, Copper, silver and zinc.

[A]

Yeah. Tatiana. Tatiana is our. I. I mean, obviously it's a reference to the Madonna song, but she's our. She's our materials specialist, not material girl. And so she kind of talks through some of. Some of what her job entails in that video. All right. Oh, man, I'm a little flustered. So. Yeah, that's it. That's a flow plane announcement. What else are we supposed to be doing?

[B]

Gnarly.

[A]

All right, you want to pick a topic, Luke?

[B]

Yeah. Dopamine sites are letting users shop without buying anything. And this actually.

[A]

Okay, I actually, like this shattered my

[B]

brain and then I had to put all the pieces together and then it exploded again while I was trying to understand what the heck somebody was talking about when this was first described to me.

[A]

You talk through it and then I actually have not tried it yet because I wanted to do it live on Wanchool. I want to do dopamine sites.

[D]

Sure.

[B]

Okay, so you set that up.

[A]

Okay, go for it.

[B]

A new wave of these dopamine sites lets people go through the entire online shopping or food ordering experience. Like the whole thing genuinely. I'm going to start browsing, adding items to cart and checking out without actually buying anything. The goal is to scratch the shopping itch without spending any money. And according to reporting from business magazine Fast Company, some users find it surprisingly satisfying, though others see it as strange or dystopian like I do, as a solution to over consumption window shopping for people who can't touch grass. Sammy says my prediction is I think this will be used to store customer data to sell to companies to see how customers shop. Yeah, for sure. I'm certain this is a crazy data harvesting.

[A]

I mean, why though? Because you have. You'd have no way of knowing that people will shop exactly the same on a fake site as they would on a real one. I don't see how this would be useful data at all.

[B]

I think it's what people are clicking on.

[A]

I mean, I guess, but these aren't real things anyway. Like, I guarantee you this is. Look, look. This is just the exact same background stuff was just like different AI plates. Yeah, I don't think. I don't think there's any useful data to be gained here.

[B]

Looking at the text, I think there could be. Or at least I think they could package it and sell it to someone as it being that even if it isn't, people do be. People do be buying data.

[A]

Anyway, carry on.

[B]

Apparently these aren't in the notes but apparently, as far as my understanding goes, it. It is, like I said, the whole process. So you can go to a store, you can put in your fake credit card info, you can watch the tracking information, you can see it show up all that jazz. Okay, so, like, seriously, put. Typing in this information is something people want to do. This is the worst. When mine doesn't autofill, I get pissed off.

[C]

Mm. Mm.

[B]

Leave it at the door. Don't knock. You might wake my tiny dog.

[A]

Okay, okay, I'm gonna pay. I'll pay on delivery. No, I'll pay with my wallet. I'm gonna place a demo order processing payment. 30 minutes. My turtle is on the way. I can call them. Oh, no. This is where it falls apart a little bit. Oh, okay, cool.

[B]

Was that. Was that cathartic for you?

[A]

Well, it's not. It's not supposed to be cathartic. Okay. I don't really. I don't. I don't use food apps. So maybe. Maybe I could find a demo shopping site that isn't a food app.

[B]

Yeah, they're supposed to have that as well.

[A]

Okay, where do I. Where do I find. Where do I find more of these? Rise of fake online shopping. Food never comes. Okay, so that's. That's the one. Are there any. Are there any.

[B]

How many people are actually doing this? That's another thing I'm wondering about. Like, is this just a news topic because it's so crazy so people are talking about it, or are people actually doing this?

[A]

I can't imagine many people are actually.

[B]

Go to Dopamine shopping dot com.

[A]

Dopamine shopping dot com.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Of course, the thing at the front of it is a 4090.

[C]

Sorry.

[A]

What is nice. Okay. Buy everything, pay nothing. The only honest store on the Internet. Okay, here we go. So we're shopping.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay, so this is something I do. I shop online. I don't. Not usually for food. So that there wasn't really. Okay, so, yeah, I'll shop for something that I actually care about. Let's go for PC stuff. Obviously, I wouldn't buy a fully completed PC. I would. I would find some parts. So why don't I.

[B]

It's interesting that it goes. There's a 4090 at the top. You scroll. It's makeup.

[A]

This is a better deal.

[B]

It's computers.

[A]

Well, I mean, that would be interesting.

[B]

The. The target audience.

[A]

I think that would be pretty common sort of online aspirational purchases, right?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So, okay, I've got my 4090. Oh, I've. Okay. These are really cool.

[B]

I have sales.

[A]

I can add one of these to cart. They've actually got a fair amount of detail. 90 days of make believe condition new, sealed and fictional. I'd imagine this is like partly just like liability and whatnot. I mean, you haven't taken anyone's money, but if you convince someone enough that it's real, maybe, maybe they could, I don't know, get mad at you or something. Free shipping from the other side of the world. 12 payments with 0 imaginary interest. There's a lot of reviews, but I guess that's probably just fake and a random number generator. Okay, it's just GPUs. Like, can I something.

[B]

Dude, buy something. Get a ship.

[A]

No, I want to build a whole system, Luke. Okay, okay. Can I. Okay, well, here. Can I buy like. Can I buy like Ryzen cpu? No, I can't. I can't even. I can't even buy just a cpu.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

Where?

[A]

Oh, hey, there's one. All right. I found a 7800x3. I mean, there's got to be DDR5. Okay, so I'm shopping for DDR5. Oh, here we go. Here we go. Where are they pulling this pricing from?

[B]

Who knows?

[A]

I guess it doesn't really matter.

[B]

Nope.

[A]

AM5 motherboard. Oh, not a single. Okay, anything. Anything with a motherboard. Okay. I mean. Oh, AMD socket. AM5. Yeah, there we go.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

Add to cart.

[B]

It's kind of fun that the images do a little wiggle.

[A]

Yeah, that's a cute. It's a cute little wiggle. Oh, okay. Platform.

[C]

Sure.

[A]

That's something.

[C]

Sure.

[A]

Storage factory, default. Okay, hold on. What? All is in my cart right now? So here's everything in my cart. The pictures don't get retained. Yeah. So I got. I need a case. PC case. I want expensive one. Okay. Case.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Hey, there we go. Okay.

[C]

That's a whole good.

[A]

No, no, there's cases. There's cases. H9 Elite. That's a nice case. I'll take one of those.

[B]

Is it only $300?

[A]

What else do I need?

[B]

H9 Elite.

[A]

Should I buy a Windows license?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. Oh, I don't know. I can.

[B]

No.

[A]

Well, forget it. With cashios 2 terabyte.

[B]

That's a pretty accurate price for that case. Actually, I'm in Canadian.

[A]

I would imagine they would be pulling this from somewhere because it can't. It can't be too random or it would be. Just be kind of stupid.

[C]

Right?

[A]

Like these all seem. These all seem like they're. They're kind of close. To someone's pricing. But then there's just like a bit of rng to, you know, make things copy my homework, but make it different so no one knows I copied you so that they can't tell you know who.

[B]

Now you can shop for a budget or whatever.

[A]

Yeah. Okay, there we go. So I've got two terabyte ssd. All right. Oh, are there any deals so I can browse? Deals? You know what? It's dumb, but I think it's easy. As someone who doesn't suffer any kind of ill effects from, like, an online shopping dependency of any sort, for me to say, to be dismissive, but having used it a little bit already, I can see how if that was a concern for somebody, if it helps you

[B]

not just blow all your money online, this actually. Great.

[A]

I guess it scratches the itch a little bit.

[B]

Does it?

[A]

Yeah, a little bit. Because there's no. There's no risk that I will actually. Like, these look like cool cleats. I don't know. There's no. There's no risk that I will buy it. Except I could see. I could see this app exposing me still to a product that I otherwise wouldn't have found. And I would have thought that I was just harmlessly browsing and then that I would ultimately turn around and go buy somewhere else.

[B]

Oh, wow. This. This armor thing on this 4080 looks really cool. I could do a sweet, like, army green computer build. Let me go find this in the actual real world and then go buy it.

[A]

I could also see sites like this if their traffic actually got high enough, starting to sell placement on their site, if they aren't already.

[B]

Because you're kind of communicating to people in that way that this is an aspirational thing that people would want to purchase.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So, okay, my account. Orders placed, zero delivered, zero lost, total saved. That you did not spend. Okay, so I go on here. I feel like this is one of those things where if you have the discipline to only use it, then it could be part of. It could be part of sort of managing this issue for yourself. But if not, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, go to payment. But if you already had sort of a shopping compulsion, I don't see how this. I don't see how this fixes it. Okay, now hold on a second. Redirects to a PayPal that won't charge you a dime. Not a single cent leaves your account. The dopamine, though, that's real. Okay, pay. Logging into the PayPal account. You forgot the password. Okay, payment approved. Estimated arrival. And this just counts down. I can track my delivery. This one's actually pretty sophisticated. So it's gonna go to Hawaii first. Oh, no, it's just gonna go. Huh. That's kind of funny because how often do you feel like you order something and then it just goes to the middle of the Pacific Ocean for no reason and then comes back instead of taking the more direct path? Okay, that. If that's the actual joke, that's pretty funny. Order received. I don't know, man. I'd love to hear what you guys think of it. Dan, what do you think?

[C]

I don't know. It's interesting.

[A]

Store got your order. The company group chat blew up.

[C]

I've never really had an issue with, Like, I like the idea of shopping. Like, I like getting the thing right. I don't know. I don't think it's for me. I was trying to find a website, and I can't. And I think we talked about it last week. That was like a dopamine detox, but for infinite scrolling. And it was just a website that infinitely scrolled and showed you nothing.

[B]

So I've seen that. And I was like, I don't believe it. And then I loaded it up, and I still don't believe it. Because it gives you random messages as you scroll, and the dopamine is figuring out what the next message is. I think it's. I think it's.

[C]

Yeah, but the messages themselves, like, repeat constantly. I don't know. I felt better using that than I think I would get using this fake shopping thing.

[B]

Honestly, the. The thing. There's. There's been something that has finally actually been pushing me towards graphene os, and it's been that I realized that there is. There is one remaining infinite scrolling app on my phone that I can't defeat.

[A]

Hold on. Let me Google News. You can defeat.

[B]

Can you.

[A]

Oh, you mean like, remove it? Yeah, I think so. Can't you just remove the Google app? Because then when would you ever be exposed to. Oh, just by swiping from the. Okay, that's not how I access it. Oh, I. I have never formed that habit. I always access it from my search bar. I never do this, so I actually never really think about that.

[B]

Didn't even know that you could get it from there.

[A]

Oh, yeah, there's all this. It's like any good fix. There's a lot of ways to get it.

[B]

But yeah, I figured out recently that, like, I have killed infinite scrolling on my phone.

[C]

Mm.

[B]

Except I will if I'm sitting there with nothing to do, I'm trying to make it so that I'll do something better on my phone and I'm counting chess as an acceptable thing.

[A]

Okay, chess counts. I think chess counts.

[B]

But I have found myself. If I'm idling, I don't know what to do and I don't really want to turn my brain on. I'll flip over to the Google News and scroll through that quite a bit and I'm like, this is not. I don't like this. If I want to get news, I can go get it from places that I think are probably on the level instead of just this like random feed that I'm constantly being like, I don't want to receive anything from these people again. It's like the main thing I do when I'm interacting with Google News is like, please don't leak me this anymore

[A]

or running into the non granular. It is.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like there'll be something about the Detroit Red Wings and they're like some player that they're trading or not trading and I'll be like not interested in this. And it'll be like, do you want to sit in hockey? Not interested in hockey? Like no, I just, I don't care about the Red Wings. Nobody cares about the Red Wings right now. That's like the whole point of why this guy doesn't want to play there anymore. Like come on, man.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So it's annoying. So I want to get it off my phone and I have spent almost no time actually trying to. But I suspect what I'm going to run into is that I can't. So that might be the thing that drives me off of.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

Off of Android, I guess.

[A]

You know what, the more I think about this, the more I actually kind of like it. Not because I necessarily would use it.

[B]

If it helps someone, then great. Apparently it was only two people that it took to make it.

[A]

But if you're. But in the same like I was thinking about. So that thing I said where I was like, oh, the risk could be that if I see something that I, that I'm tempted by, this could make me go off site. But that's, that's the whole behavior that people are trying to avoid is when they aren't intentfully going somewhere and finding something to buy it. This is just giving them something to scroll and taking away that convenient one click shop. Like there's a reason that Amazon, I believe, invented and then like tried to patent or whatever one click purchases. It wasn't Amazon.

[B]

I have no idea it feels like it probably would have been.

[A]

One click. Yes. Amazon invented and patented the one click purchasing method. So if, if that reduction in friction wasn't important or effective, Amazon wouldn't have done it. You know what I'm saying?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So if there's anyone that this can help by just not having that one click available. Like if I have to do what you did, right, you had to click through to the page, you had to go here, you had to copy, you had to paste.

[B]

Well, I would right click Google Search.

[A]

But yeah, sure, okay, you had to do something. Then I have to go find it in stock. Yeah, blah blah. I have to click a thing. I have to do this. That didn't even.

[B]

Where did it go?

[A]

It disappeared. Because Nvidia doesn't care about selling gaming GPUs anymore. But you see what I mean, right? We're putting friction in a place where the other app on their phone that does this doesn't have that friction and just says, oh, you want it? Here you go. And it took actual money away from you. I. The more I look at it, the more I'm like, okay, if this helps anyone, then sure.

[B]

Also with the help of chat.

[A]

Oh, you turned it off already.

[B]

It's gone.

[A]

That was quick.

[B]

You long press on your, your home screen, you click home screen settings and you disable swipe to access Google app.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And I actually don't think I'll just start doing the thing that you do because the swipe to access Google. The whole reason why I'm trying to get rid of all the infinite scrolling apps is because it's like muscle memory almost, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I have a muscle memory of swiping to the side.

[A]

Let's see what's going on.

[B]

So as long as that doesn't work, I'm sure that that will happen and my brain will go, huh? And then I'll go play chess or do whatever.

[A]

I think I told you already that Reddit did me a huge favor when they semi deprecated our slash. All because I, you know, in the same way it's like, oh, let's see what's going on. Right. So it still exists, but the only way to access it, and this is actually kind of amazing for me, is pretty inconvenient on mobile. So you have to do you have to go to old dot Reddit.

[B]

Oh, right.

[A]

And on mobile, this is a terrible interface.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like I can't see thumbnails for crap.

[C]

No.

[A]

And it makes me, it makes me use it way less actually. It's Been something pretty great.

[B]

Something I like is every. I don't have Reddit installed infinite scrolling app, but every once in a while I do need to access it. So I'll access it through the browser.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And something that I love is that it will put up a thing.

[A]

It's so annoying.

[B]

You. You have to use the app now.

[D]

Yep.

[A]

I can't see it anymore.

[B]

And I'm like, oh, great. And I just close the browser.

[A]

I just.

[B]

I'm not installing your data.

[A]

I just didn't install the Reddit app. Oh yeah, I just didn't.

[B]

Yeah, I don't have it either.

[A]

And so. So I actually have muscle memory to dismiss that.

[B]

No, the one that I get is not dismissible.

[A]

What?

[B]

Which I'm completely okay with.

[C]

What? Are you sure?

[A]

No, it's got to be dismissible. I'm pretty sure.

[B]

Let me see if I can make it come up. I wonder if it's because I'm on Firefox.

[A]

Greenbrick says both have all. I don't think on the app might have it. That. I don't know. I don't use the app, but I know that for. Oh, well, I mean, maybe that's not true anymore. I know that for a while you had to do old. Let me see. No, it's not there. It just takes you to the homepage, which is an algorithmic page. Yeah. So I just get View and Reddit app and then I just have an X and open. Oh. So. Oh, I did put it on. Actually forgot about that. I put it on because I had to do something moderation related. You know what? I haven't touched that in so long. I'm just going to remove it. There, you're gone.

[C]

You're out.

[B]

No, close.

[C]

What?

[B]

Yeah, which again, I'm totally okay with because I just go boop. Goodbye. Because I'm not. I'm not.

[A]

Hold on. No, no, no, hold on, hold on. Let me refresh this. Yeah, I know. I have never seen that before. Is that new? I don't know because I've just been using old. No, see, look. Wait. View in Reddit app. I don't even have it. What are you talking about? It just prompts me to install it from the store.

[B]

I don't click View in Reddit app. It's like from scrolling and opening stuff and scrolling and opening stuff that will just show up.

[A]

Really? Yeah. I've never seen that.

[B]

I like run out of time almost.

[A]

What browser are you on?

[B]

Firefox. I've used Firefox on mobile without a pause. For like over a decade. I actually really like Firefox.

[A]

I wonder if that's like a Firefox user targeting thing. Do you. Does. Does Firefox block ads on Reddit? I don't know because maybe they go after you more aggressively.

[B]

I think so. I'm pretty sure I've seen the. The dbrand ads that are funny and ours. I basically just get us in deep breath.

[A]

Hey, speaking of us and talking about Creator Warehouse, I guess we should probably do that real quick and just put. Dan, just put the sign up there.

[C]

I was late. I forgot.

[A]

No, no, you're good. Okay. We do not have a big announcement for a new product or anything like that this week for LTT Store, but we want to give you guys a bit of advance notice that there is some pretty big stuff coming up.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

If you've had your eye on something you're not going to want to miss next week. Lime Day is kicking off. The Linus Inventory Management Experience is kicking off on June 23rd for floatplane members and on the 24th for everybody else. You'll find deals on select gear and apparel plus some amazing bundle offers that are going to be worth checking out. And a reminder that our Floatplane plus supporters get free shipping over certain thresholds. So this could be a perfect time to pick that up if you were planning to place an order that shipping that you would have paid for anyway could cover. Like depending on how much stuff you're getting, even a few months of being a Floatplane plus supporter over at LMG GG Floatplane. Just make sure that you sign up for our email list so that you'll get a reminder of when events like this go live. So you can do that [e-mail] also another announcement, but not something you can buy today is we're bringing a little bit of controlled radiation down to Open Sauce before our new nuclear Colorway lands on LTT Store. Open Sauce attendees will get an exclusive first look. I think they can. They can they buy it there. I can't remember. Anyway, you can join us July 17th to 19th at our open Sauce booth. And yeah, so you can get your hands on one before the rest of the Internet. Yeah, I believe we will have some for sale there. And if you want to know the exact moment that nuclear escapes containment and lands on the store again make sure you sign up for notifications so you'll be first to know. Plus you will receive a one time 10% discount code so you can check that out. Where is it entered? Somewhere here.

[C]

Wait, is It.

[A]

This one. Oh, now I don't know.

[B]

What are you trying to do?

[A]

Sorry, I'm trying to find the, the, the sign up for notifications and get coupon thing.

[B]

Normally it would be linked in here. I don't see it linked in here.

[A]

Yeah, okay, hold on.

[B]

Oh, on the nuclear escapes. So it's probably on the screwdriver question mark.

[A]

Well, I subscribed and I will check and see if I get anything. I think I was already subscribed to the newsletter though, so it probably won't. Where do they, where do they find it? Well, yeah, somewhere.

[B]

Nobody knows.

[A]

Someone does.

[B]

Not us.

[A]

Oh, Dan, there's more announcements, yes. Oh, yeah, sure.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

Yeah, we're hiring, looking for a full time writer to join the LTT team. If you're interested in applying, head over to linusmediagroup.comcareers to get some more information. And we've got dates for the next Whale Land. It's going to be August 29th and 30th. BYOC tickets will be available starting at $80 Canadian and there will be a limited number of whale VIP tickets for $5,000. Canadian whale VIPs will receive a high powered custom built gaming PC from Starforge Systems and a studio and labs tour plus a swag pack with the exact items curated closer to the event. Ticket sales start. Ticket sales start this Monday at [e-mail]. all right, good stuff. Oh yeah. Now it's time for us to do a couple of comms. If you guys aren't familiar, comms are the way to communicate with the show. We don't do twitch pits or super chats or anything like that. We figure if you guys are going to throw money at your screen, you should probably get quality merchandise in return. So all you got to do to send a comm communication message, checkout message, whatever we want to call it, I mean it changed the name recently. Don't worry about it. Is add something to your cart, head on over to your cart and ask to display your order as a checkout message. You can make them anonymous. You can show your name, you can type anything you want, literally anything. And then you place your order and it will go to producer Dan, who will, I don't know, he'll pop it up on screen or maybe he'll respond to it himself. Or maybe he'll curate it for me and Luke to respond to. Dan, do you have a couple for us?

[C]

I do. That's why I asked you to do them.

[A]

That makes sense.

[C]

It does. Listen, we're getting good at this. Hello, dll, long time viewer, first time messenger. I have to know if there's more stubby colorways coming. For now, I will steal this stubby I bought for my dad. Semicolon dash, right parentheses. Thanks in advance.

[A]

No, at this time, we have no plans for additional colorways of the stubby. It sells. Okay. The stubby is not going away. We're going to keep restocking it. But unlike the full size driver, it doesn't move in such volumes that we could have different colored plastics that would also sell in enough volume that they would be worth restocking. So sorry, but at this time, the stubby is in. I believe it's in black and black or black and orange. And that is about it. That was a huge order. It's like a $400 order. They picked up some true spec cables, a bunch of other stuff. Dan moved it before I could actually see it.

[C]

Oh, terribly sorry.

[A]

Now you're good.

[C]

It's only gonna be, like the one that's right there.

[A]

Oh, yeah, I see it now. There it is. Yeah. Picked up a. Picked up a stubby precision kit. Scribe driver, two scribe drivers. Map of Siberia, deskpad. That thing's really cool.

[B]

Is there more true spec cables coming? There's already some out of stock already. Yes, there's quite a few out of stock, actually.

[A]

Yes. Yes, more true spec cables are incoming. It's been. It's been painful trying to keep enough of them in stock.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Hit me, Dan.

[C]

Sure. Got another one here. What's up, boys? Like, I think that's supposed to say Luke.

[A]

No, that's his name. Oh, yeah.

[C]

Like. Do you pronounce it like, like, or.

[A]

I thought this was just valley girl talk. Like, what work of bench do you

[C]

order that took so long to arrive?

[A]

Looking to get a bench myself.

[C]

And I know you always want to pack a good man.

[B]

I love that. That was set in Valley Girl. We should. We should do.

[C]

All of comms are now Valley Girl.

[A]

All comms are now Valley Girl.

[B]

It was an Irwin fitness bench with fitness.

[A]

Like. Like the ones that make the clamps are different. Irwin.

[B]

I think probably different actually makes sense. But yeah, it was. I mean, it's very nice. It took astronomically too long to arrive.

[A]

Okay, well, which. Which one is it? I mean, it's you. It's got to be Alpha.

[B]

I don't think so.

[A]

Alpha.

[B]

This isn't even, like, the stuff.

[A]

Oh, okay. Equipment, benches at the top. Benches be crazy.

[B]

I think it's the AB1.

[A]

The AB1.

[B]

Very expensive bench. It's really nice.

[A]

Five stars.

[B]

I treated myself nine.

[A]

49. Luke doesn't spend money, but when he does, he spends it on his health.

[B]

And this is, like, I should genuinely be able to keep it basically forever. You can replace the pad bench.

[C]

The.

[B]

The frame itself is, like, not gonna go bad, so I can actually keep this all the time. I need. I need Linus to review the bench fully, like, in person.

[A]

I would. That's a fine bench.

[B]

I really like YouTuber face. Hey, that guy's video actually highly convinced me to get it.

[A]

Influencer.

[B]

I didn't know it was on there. He did. He influenced me.

[A]

Yeah. Hi. My name's Gluck.

[B]

Gluck. I want Linus to, like, actually do an unboxing review of a bench.

[A]

Now, there's no way. I wouldn't know anything to say about it.

[B]

Goes up and down circuit.

[A]

Now I'm flat.

[B]

I can be angled if you'd like.

[C]

Oh, man. Voice actor. Wan show Jebus.

[A]

All right. Yeah. Cool. Got a bench. So when you were mad that it didn't arrive on time, would you say that you were bench pressed?

[B]

Oh, my God.

[C]

I did it.

[B]

Is that I was. I was actually, like, fine. Pretty cheesed. I thought I read somewhere that it was. It was going to take, like, a month. And because it's like, Would you say

[A]

that you had to wait.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[A]

For it?

[C]

All right, that one counts.

[B]

That one was actually pretty good.

[A]

When there were no accessories, did you see that you had gotten everything unboxed, Bar none.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

I was really wondering where you're going with that. Bar none's pretty good. I think bar none's pretty good.

[A]

I'm just glad the whole thing.

[B]

It also especially works because there is no bar.

[A]

I'm. I. I'm. I'm just glad that after. After it all, you know, it worked out.

[C]

Oh, that one was a bit of a stretch, but, like, go off.

[B]

The funniest part to me is that I splurged on that. But dumbbells are really, really, really, really, really, really expensive.

[A]

Yeah, that's something I learned when I had to, like, buy a gym for Smash Jams. It's just metal. Metal's cheap, isn't it?

[B]

Turns out it. It's not. And it also costs a lot of ship it. But it's also in, like, your condo, you don't want a whole wall of dumbbells. So usually go for adjustable dumbbells. And adjustable dumbbells are very expensive.

[A]

So, like, it's just adjustable metal.

[B]

It's so expensive. And they Break pretty easily.

[A]

I feel like we could disrupt this market. Ltt. LTT Store adjustable dumbbell?

[B]

Yeah, I don't know. It's. It's like, it's like that dopamine site. It's just a digitally. It's a webpage where you just change the weight. Um, but yeah, so I decided to not buy fancy adjustable dumbbells. So I borrowed the old school plate loaded adjustable dun dumbbells my parents aren't using cuz they have like actual dumbbell wall. Um, and so I have these like old slightly rusted. I think Emma described them as. It looks like it came out of like a Russian gym.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

Uh, and then I have that paired and non matching plates.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So I can load them up with. I think it's like 65 pounds each. But one of them. Yeah, one of them has like three perfectly matching plates. Then there's the weight of the bar and the nuts on the end. And then the other one has. I think it's like genuinely like five or six different plates on it and it goes all the way to the end of what the bar can hold. So they're not even the same.

[A]

It's. It's funny that we don't seem to ever be able to move beyond that.

[B]

Move beyond what?

[A]

I bought a Taycan Turbo S and I harvest the windshield wiper housings and just put new silicone in.

[C]

That is why I risked it.

[A]

You bought a $950 flat surface silicon so that you could use mismatched, custom rusted.

[B]

It's more expensive than my, than my computer chair. I spend a lot less time in it. I really like it though. But yeah, I splurge. We allow ourselves to splurge on one thing and only one thing, then it stops.

[A]

It's not even about the splurge, it's just. It's about the like I have one.

[B]

I was shopping a lot.

[A]

Why buy a new.

[B]

I spent genuinely months going on Facebook Marketplace trying to find like a used bench I could buy and it was just garbage, like rotting garbage the entire time. There was no options. I was really hoping to find like some gym that would close that would have a. An Atlantis bench. Cause I really like the Atlantis bench. That's at the community gym that I often go to. Never found any of those. Uh, when I bought this, this was like pretty close to peak, like elbows up by Canadian. So I was trying to look into buying Canadian. But almost all the you know, weightlifting equipment manufacturers are either American or overseas.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So like I kind of ran out of A lot of options. And then this one was apparently like some. Some welders in the east in Canada. So it's like Canadian people hand making things. And I was like, all right, well I'll. I'll be an elbows up bro and spend a bunch more money and buy this one. Instead of.

[A]

Frankly, it seems like, nah. Yeah, nah.

[B]

And this is like the type of stuff I was finding.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

On Facebook Marketplace. Like, this was.

[A]

Somebody died in this garage.

[B]

This. Yeah, Sorry. But. And like, and again, I spent months. So it just, it eventually came down to like, okay, well, if I want to buy Canadian.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I want it to like, actually, hopefully be actually Canadian and not, you know, rebadged somewhere else.

[C]

It.

[B]

And I don't want to buy some like, you know, something like that on Facebook Marketplace. I want an actually pretty solid bench. I kind of ran out of options. And then I watched Gluck's video, saw that Irwin one and was like, he mentioned in the video that it's Canadian. I was like, okay, well, that's like one of my only options at this point. I'll go that route. I tried to do the same thing for Dumbbells and it was like two grand. And I was like, nah, yeah, I'll borrow my parents.

[C]

I'm done.

[B]

I already, I already spent the like crazy amount of money on the flat surface. I'll wait on the other one.

[A]

Maybe one day you'll be strong enough to hold your elbows up. $2,000 worth. It's not this day.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I'm already like, overweight for the.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

Unfortunate phrasing. That's true. But I'm already over. Like, I can lift more than those dumbbells. But my, my argument is like, at least I can do something at home. And then if I want to lift heavier, I should just go to the gym. But it's nice to be able to like, if I have a burst of inspiration, I'm at home. I can actually just rip some stuff out. You can do a lot with a bench. Dumbbells. So, yeah, it's good.

[A]

Cool. Someone can. I can't, but you can. No, I would hurt myself for sure. 100%.

[B]

Are you still working out?

[A]

A little bit. I think I have some boobies now.

[D]

Creatine.

[A]

Small boobies.

[B]

Creatine.

[A]

Very small boobies. Yeah. But I honestly, ever since I started it, I've been like, really busy. I've been traveling for Computex, traveling for other stuff. There's been a lot of video projects lately. My. My wife brought home a bunch of chicks. And ducklings. So it's, it's a thing. It turns out that you can. Oh shoot. There was, there was something that I was going to talk about on wan show and then I totally forgot to write it down and now I guess I won't talk about it. It was just kind of an interesting topic anyway. Yeah, so, so it's a thing. There's like multiple services that you. It's, it's not that cheap. It's like a few hundred dollars or something like that. But they kind of do everything. They bring you some incubators and they have fertilized eggs in them and then they give you these like little shiny, lighty magnifying glassy things and you can like check on them every day and watch the, watch the chicks and the ducks like develop and grow inside the eggs. And they give you like all this documentation and stuff so the kids can like learn about bird development. And then they hatch and like it's really exciting. And then they, they bring you like a little habitat for them and like all the food and water. It turns out ducklings, you need a special water trough for them that they can't get their head into because they just have like an instinct to put their head in water and they'll just die if their mother's not there to stop them from doing that. They'll just kill themselves in like this much water.

[B]

These are stupid.

[A]

Yeah, I mean it's a miracle they survive in, in the wild. And then you just like keep them and you like take them out and play with them and they shit everywhere. And because they're birds and then when you're done with them you basically just like put them back in the enclosure and you say yep, we're done. And then they take them away and it's Yvonne and the kids especially have been having an absolute blast with it. So we have.

[B]

What do the cats think?

[A]

We have two ducklings right now and four. Four chicks. And the cats, Panda in particular is super into just watching them walk around and make their little peep, peep, peep sounds. Obviously they're the enclosure like latches and the chicks are not allowed out of the enclosure when the cats are around because that would end really poorly really quickly. But what are they for? I mean presumably for a farm somewhere that just runs this as like a side hustle, but it's, it's like very white glove, honestly, all things considered. Like they literally like come to you and like drop off the enclosure and stuff. My, my sister put us onto it. She's like, oh yeah, no, I've seen these before and they're a thing. And we, we looked into it. There's like at least a few companies locally that do it.

[B]

I hope Emma's not watching or else I'm going to have this like next week.

[A]

Oh yeah, they stink.

[C]

So.

[B]

Yeah, I know, I'm sure.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Because they're like, you know, farm animals.

[C]

Yeah, right.

[B]

So awesome.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Cool.

[A]

They're really cute though. I'm sure when the ducklings are first born, they're like the stupidest things they can like, they like, they like waddle like this. They're like, they're so clumsy. It's adorable.

[B]

Have you ever seen a like very fresh Great Dane puppy?

[A]

No.

[B]

God, they're so funny. Their feet are enormous. Their feet make no sense for some reason. Their feet are just so, such higher

[A]

scale than they like how humans, humans are born with a liver that's like almost full size or something. That's why babies tummies are so big. I read that somewhere. Let me double check that. Human babies, big liver. Hold on, I'm going to check that. Blah, blah, blah. It's normal for healthy human babies to have a disproportionately large liver compared to the rest of their body while in adults. Okay. It's not full size. While an adult's liver accounts for about 2% of body weight, a newborn baby's liver is up to 35%. So no, it's just, it's just big. It's not, it's not like full size when they're born. Apparently they have big eyes too. According to Ruker on in floatplane chat.

[B]

Human babies.

[A]

Yeah. Eyeballs, they don't grow. Is that true?

[C]

That's why their eyes are so big, because they're the same size.

[A]

Oh, that, that actually makes a lot of sense.

[B]

Funky. Anyways, oh, maybe I'm wrong.

[C]

According to Griswold. Talking about.

[B]

I don't know.

[A]

I, I don't know.

[C]

I'm just out here spreading misinformation.

[A]

I can pick one. Here's a funny thing.

[B]

They just grow a lot less, apparently.

[A]

This is amazing. This is mostly just funny. Tesla self driving safeguards apparently defeated by doll heads. So this is a product you can buy now that has a little suction cup that you stick to the top of your car and then you position it.

[B]

Oh my God, that's really funny. So you can sit on your phone and the car sees some head being very, very diligent about looking at the road. Oh, that's so funny. It's also funny because if you smashed into something your insurance would definitely get that footage.

[A]

Yeah, they definitely would. So, so there's a camera that tracks the driver's attention during autopilot and full self driving use and so the heads are positioned such as, like you see there. That fools the safety system into thinking you are a very attentive driver. And Chinese e commerce platforms are selling these tiny plastic heads as travel companions and dashboard decorations for as little as $10. Our discussion question is, oh, I don't know if we're going to discuss this again, but does marketing driver assist technologies as autopilot and full self driving, even with supervised tacked on, encourage drivers to assume they don't need to pay attention to what their car is doing? I mean I think we've talked about this extensively and there's, there's finally a class action in. What is it, Denmark or something? Somewhere, somewhere over in Europe there's a class action that has about 7,000 people on it now. That's basically like. Yeah, so that was false advertising, that whole thing. And not just for the people who bought the full self driving software package, but also for the, the people who bought all these Hardware 3 cars that will never have full self driving. Hardware 4 is apparently getting really good now that I'm done with that last comma video procurement is on getting our hands on a hardware 4 car. So I think what we're going to do is either we'll buy one or I'll make a little trade with somebody internally because I think there's a couple people that actually have hardware four cars here and so maybe they can take the Taycan for a month and I'll take their Tesla for a month and we'll call that a fair trade. I mean, yeah, I don't mind as long as they don't, as long as they don't crash it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Gas Racing says just rent one, my man. I mean why I can, if I, if I can do the trade then like that, that seems like a, that seems like a win. Win. I, I like wins. But yeah, I'm, I'm definitely, I'm definitely wanting to try it. Hardware 4 is apparently quite good. It's just like my only issue with it has been the false representation because what it wasn't and what it still isn't is completely autonomous. It's not. So when it isn't, I really believe strongly that they shouldn't have called it that. That's it. And I don't, it's kind of Wild to me that to some people, that's a bad take. That seems like objectively a good take. When something is not a thing you said it is, that's bad. That's a scam. That's fraud, that's false advertising. You can kind of use whatever word you want for it, but it falls under the umbrella of don't do that. Or it should anyway. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it makes you a trillionaire.

[B]

Maybe nothing makes any sense.

[A]

Here's a cool thing. There's a new 3D printing tech that's using elliptical laser beams to stir molten metal and create alloys on demand. The coolest part is that existing machinery can apparently implement this technique in software, meaning more convenient, stronger alloy printing. Researchers at NIST have figured out how to mix metal alloys mid print just by changing the path the laser takes. In standard metal 3D printing, the laser melts powder while tracing straight lines, and each melt pool only blends its ingredients a tiny bit. NIST researcher Ho Young instead programmed the laser to draw continuous elliptical loops as it moves, physically stirring the molten pool while it's still liquid, kind of like whisking the metal together. There is a bit of a catch. While some existing metal printers that are already in the field could in principle be reprogrammed to do this, commercial 3D printer software can't draw these patterns, so the team had to write their own from scratch. And they proved it by fusing Reha 19, a dense, high entropy alloy with a lightweight titanium alloy and watching them combine into a new alloy in real time. That is so cool. So, quick primer here. And I'm not an expert on this, so hopefully whoever prepped this topic knows about metallurgy. Most traditional alloys are one main metal, with small amounts of others mixed in. Like steel, which is mostly iron, a high entropy alloy instead blends five or more metals in roughly equal amounts, which can make them exceptionally strong or heat resistant. The problem is those metals have different densities and melting points, so they tend to separate into weak blotchy regions as they cool. So basically, exactly the problem that this stirring technique fixes. So the longer term vision though, is alloys on demand. So instead of stocking a different premixed powder for every alloy, a single printer loaded with basic elemental powders could blend custom alloys on the fly, which would cut material costs and even allow you to vary the composition across a single part to replace welding.

[C]

What the hell?

[B]

That's really cool.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Wow.

[A]

This is like man metal printing already. Absolutely blew my mind the first time I heard about it because I was like, okay, that's the coolest thing ever.

[B]

Alloys on demand is like, feels very space age. This is very Enterprise.

[A]

Yes. This is Star Trek.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Like, you just. This is like actually a food replicator, but metal.

[B]

Yeah, that's, that's actually, that's insane metal af.

[A]

You might even say.

[B]

That's, that's really crazy.

[A]

Yeah, I was like, I was reading about this this week and I was like,

[B]

really? Like, what are you talking about?

[A]

And you can even. And, and it can be like backported onto existing machines.

[B]

The fact that it's a software update, like, the whole thing is just kind of wild. That's, that's really cool.

[A]

Yeah. Like, I'm trying to imagine, like, what would I, what would I do with. This is one of those things where I feel like my imagination is the bottleneck. Like, what.

[B]

You almost need more limitations. So you can.

[A]

Like, what could, what could I create? Like, I could create. I could create a part that, you know, is like solid here, but then like has a sprung element here. Like, I could make, I could make like a hand squeezy thing. You know what I mean? Because I could have, I could have one metal here and then I could have like a, like a super bendable alloy here and I could make like a hand exercise. Okay. That. I don't know. I was thinking about your weight bench. Right. Like, I'm like, I'm just, I'm trying to think of like, what could I make with this freaking. Almost anything.

[B]

I think the most interesting part is just being able to rapidly experiment with different allies. If you're doing like, prototyping or whatever else to try to find, you know, what one looks the best, what one feels the best, what one is strongest or whatever. Yeah, I was gonna say strongest, but I don't like, is, is the resulting part as strong? I don't think it would be if you 3D printed a piece versus, like casted a piece.

[A]

From my understanding at this time. No.

[B]

Yeah. So I don't know if you could do strongest,

[A]

but you might do. You might be able to do strongest in this, in this geometry. Like, not everything is.

[B]

Oh, interesting. Relatively, Relatively strongest necessarily. Yeah, interesting. Sure.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I, I, for me, it really speaks to like, prototyping stuff really rapidly, I guess.

[A]

Here's some cool AI news. Relax, relax. It's actually cool. Nvidia research published a paper where basically they trained robot arms to perform some.

[B]

Is this actually really cool?

[A]

Yeah, it's really cool.

[B]

Where the, Is this where they install A gpu.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

So we're not even needed anymore.

[A]

It's so funny. That is exactly what my note said on the. On the topics spreadsheet. Hold on, let me see if. Here it is. Here's when topic checklist.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, you don't need. You don't need. How to basics. Installing a gpu. If you're a little robot, does it

[C]

like feel for you?

[A]

Anyway, what's cool about it is not just that a robot arm did a thing, because we already had that, but earlier this week, Nvidia director of AI Jim Fan revealed that researchers can now enable auto research in the physical world and presented a demo reel that introduces NPIRE. It gave eight coding agents a fleet of robots, an allocation of GPUs, and a whole bunch of tokens before giving the agents tasks to solve as quickly as possible without making mistakes. Fan said all we did was give Codex an API to the world of atoms and the rest is emergence. And that once. And he said that once instructed, the robot fleet starts to come alive. They look for visual cues, reset the scene, practice novel skills, tinker with control stack, read papers online, debate, reflect, get stuck and try again. Directly on the hardware, the agents were able to manipulate the robots to complete tasks like sorting precision screwdriver bits, tying and cutting zip ties, installing a GPU in a motherboard PCIe slot, and pushing a 3D printed T around on a table. Tests also included using different agents and different numbers of robots, and concluded that eight robots working in parallel solved the tasks significantly faster than fewer ones. NPIRE runs fully autonomously, testing the agent's hypotheses in the real world, automatically evaluating successes and failures, then resetting the experiment to its initial state for the next trial and deciding what to try next. Tom's hardware reports that the NPIRE project will be open source, so you could conceivably host your own automagical robot lab at home.

[B]

Man, it's kind of wild the amount of open source stuff that's happening in the AI space. It's. It's kind of surprising.

[A]

I mean, I can see Nvidia's motivation.

[B]

No, for sure. And from Nvidia standpoint, yeah, you sell more shovels, man.

[A]

I mean, the fact that that near frontier models like when Deep Seek first landed was just. Here you go, everybody. That was pretty surprising. Yeah, I'll give you that. I'm assuming that's kind of more what you were talking about.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, like, you know, that it's from Nvidia is not too surprising here. But just the sheer volume of stuff in this space that has been in the open source realm is kind of what I'm talking about. Like, this one in particular isn't all that surprising, but just another one. Being on the wall is. Is the surprising part, I guess.

[A]

Want to see the tying a zip tie one? Yeah, Here we go. It's pretty wild, dude.

[B]

So is it just this one or does it work with. Yep, there it is. Works with its buddy.

[A]

Here you go, buddy. Me.

[B]

I like that it adjusted.

[A]

Let it cook. Oh, no way. Okay. That was a pretty cool move.

[C]

Yeah, actually,

[A]

that was a pretty cool move. It's thinking. It's having a think.

[B]

Calculating.

[A]

Wait for it. Wait for it. Feel like I'm getting blue balls waiting for the big moment here. Wait for it. Still going. Wait, did that. Did it end?

[B]

No.

[A]

Oh, hold on.

[B]

Why would they do this to us?

[C]

What?

[A]

I can't believe you've done this.

[B]

That's so rude.

[A]

What just happened? Just. Did the video player just break? That's crazy. What just happened there? Okay. Hello. Can we.

[B]

This player sucks.

[A]

Yeah, they should use float plane. Yeah, we could help them with that. I'm so confused right now. Where's the.

[B]

Do they. Do they vibe code? This.

[A]

How does this work? It kind of seems like it, yeah. Does it? Yeah, this just. This just doesn't do anything. Yeah, nothing works.

[B]

Is. Is this. Is this slop? Have we. Have we found slop?

[A]

Oh, man. Okay, hold on. Maybe it'll go this time. Maybe it'll be different this time.

[B]

Just freeze on this frame instead.

[A]

Yeah, none of this is working. I can't click on any of the other things.

[C]

Fine.

[A]

How about the gpu? They all just. They all just tease you. This is crazy, man. Do I have to go to their only fans?

[B]

Go back to. Oh, my God. Go back to your screen, right? Click on it. Show controls. That's a. That's a good point. Someone pointed that out. Oh, really?

[A]

Nope.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Big fat pile of nope there.

[B]

Well, it's at the end. That shows that it's actually at the end.

[A]

Okay, so that's it. That's as far as that one goes. All right.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

Way to go, Nvidia.

[A]

Way to go, Nvidia. Either way sounds pretty cool. I've actually been finally tinkering around with some home lab AI stuff. I got Odysseus installed this week.

[B]

Oh, installed?

[A]

Yes. I got to have my first wonderful experience with Nvidia drivers on Linux. It turns out that depending on the GPU you're running and depending on the Distro you're using it is a giant big fat bag of dongs.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So my original plan was I found a couple of GV100 quadros, like old school quadros in the warehouse and some NV links. And I was like, oh, yeah, well, that seems like a thing that would be. Should pretty good for running bigger vram. Lot of vram. A lot of vram. High speed interconnect between the vram. So we have the 32 gig version of those cards. I have two of them. So that gives me 64 gigs of kind of mostly pooled vram. Yeah, well, yeah, it turns out they only have after. After fighting with this for probably a grand sum to. Okay, no, I should go back to the beginning.

[B]

Is this a video? Are you making this a video?

[A]

I don't know yet.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

There's no real payoff yet.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

And the last thing that I would have needed is to make a video with this much trial and error just yet. So I was poking around in the warehouse, I found those GV1 hundreds. And I was like, oh, that seems pretty cool. And then I also found that RTX 5090 that we did that power connector modification on. Yeah, you know the one with the super sketchy XT120 power cable going into it and then just like wires instead of the 12 volt 2x6. And I was like, hey, what? Nobody's using this thing. We have a freaking RTX 5090 that is just sitting in the warehouse not being used. I remember telling people explicitly. I was like, hey, after we do this mod, obviously we can't use it for comparative benchmarking anymore, but we could definitely use it for like if we have anything that we just need to run, because it still totally works. What the heck? Why is this just sitting on the shelf? Fine. Well, if I'm like doing some AI crap at home, then I'll use it. So I. So I. So I grabbed it, I put it in a bin, I took it home. No, no, don't worry. I figured out why nobody's using it. So anyway, I got home and I was like, okay, well, this could be a pretty cool little station. I grabbed a, like a Sapphire Rapids Xeon platform that nobody was using, because who would? But it has a lot of CPU cores and supports a lot of RAM. Corsair must have sent over this like, ECC DDR5 kit that probably was for Sapphire Rapids back then. So I dug that up. This is before the. Before the great shortage. So it's not the fastest stuff, but it's a lot of capacity. So I, I built everything up and I was like, okay, so I'll have the dual GV1 hundreds for when I need like a ton of memory capacity. And then I'll have the, the RTX 5090 for if I need actually like faster compute. And I was having a hell of a time getting it to work. And the conclusion that I drew is, oh, no, there must be something wrong with that stupid modified 5090. So I pull it off the bench and I go, this needs to be redone. Like we did. In fairness to us, we didn't have the best tools on hand at the time, and we didn't really know what we were doing. Modifying power connectors on GPUs. We did a terrible job. And the captain tape that we had because we forgot to put the sleeving on before we did the soldering. And we were afraid of killing it if we took the solder job off and put it back on again, which was a very legitimate concern because we put so much solder on it that I actually did end up spilling solder all over the board. And I had to wick it all off very, very carefully. Oh, wow. So that Kapton tape was like coming off and that positive and negative terminal were like, right there, like hairs away from each other. So what I ultimately did was I pulled everything apart, I desoldered everything, got all that solder all over the board. Had to, had to wick all of that up. Had to kind of bend it a little bit more at some point in storage. One of the sense pins for the 12 volt 2x6, that tells the GPU, hey, you're good to go. Draw 600 watts. One of those got torn off, just like sheared off. So I had to go deeper into that connector, cut away the connector bridge, the appropriate pins. It turns out we didn't need to run that cable at all, which is something we understand better now, but didn't at the time. You can just solder together two of the pins. I think it's pins three and four. I forget it's two of the edge ones. One and two or three and four, I can't remember. I grabbed some new wire. So we used this like eight gauge stranded and yet like thick, stiff copper or wire. Last time that was safe. In fairness to Lucas, it was safe to use that. But it was really rigid and inflexible. And it put a lot of strain on those connectors, especially with the weight of the XT120. So I grabbed some 10 gauge, which I was right by the way. Lucas is fine. It's good enough. He was also right though, because 8 gauge is rated for 50amps and 10 gauge is not. But when we looked it up, that was for like in wall. This is not in wall. This is next to an intake fan. It turns out it's. It's fine. So I got some 10 gauge wire which was a lot easier to solder. And it's like the silicone, like hobbyist grade stuff. So it's like quite a lot more flexible. What Lucas was right about though is XT 90s are not good enough. I tried it for lulz. I ended up disassembling the XT120, cleaning all the solder off of it, and then using that instead of. So hey, we can both be right. Luke is more than me, but that's fine. I was there with a flir. Like I was standing there with a flir and I was like, I'm not going to guess. I'm going to find out for sure what is too much resistance on this wire. So finally, after not being able to get the 59D working in the system, I put it back in and it's still not working. And I go, holy crap, I must have gotten some solder somewhere on the board. I must have done something. It's not working. I can't install the drivers. And I go, meanwhile, I've been trying to get the GV1 hundreds working and I like can't. It's way beyond my ability to do on my own. It has me like trying to block the nouveau driver from loading it boot and doing all this stuff. And I'm using chatgpt totally sucked. Gemini was actually quite a bit better in terms of like helping me get it working. I wasted it once again wasted a bunch of time with ChatGPT before just using Gemini and it working ultimately way better.

[B]

ChatGPT user share is plummeting.

[A]

I saw that. I think they're below 50% now, right? Yeah. So ultimately was like still struggling getting the, getting the GV1 hundreds working. And I'm like panicking about this 5090 that's broken now. So I actually like, I take out the Linux boot drive, I throw the 5090 on by itself and I'm like, oh no, sorry, I left the Linux boot drive on. I throw on the 5090 and it's not working by itself either. And I go, holy crap. Okay, I need to test this against something else. So I grab my, like, random old AM4 motherboards, like a second gen AM4 system. I put it on the bench, I throw the 59. Holy crap. I can't install drivers. I'm getting, like, code 29. This device, the device initialized by the BIOS, doesn't match the device Windows is trying to initialize or something. Oh, no, this has got to be a hardware problem. So I take the card off, I, like, take it all apart again. I find a little ball of solder somewhere. I go, holy crap, was that it? I put it back on, it's still not working. And I ultimately have no idea what I did, but I put it on again, and then it just worked. So then I was like, oh, my God. Okay, well, the last thing I'm gonna do is take this apart again. So now to, like, permanently do these power leads. I am gonna do this while it's all attached to the board. So I, I get the XT120 connector. I, I, I take out that monstrosity that Lucas bolted together with the, like, six individual leads going into the, like, the eye thing. And I just put those with ample solder straight into the back of the XT120. So I have the power connector done. It's working. I go back to Linux, I put it on, and holy crap, it doesn't show up. And I'm like, did I break it? So I go back to Windows, I put the card back on, it's working perfectly. I go back to Linux and I go, wait, I've got the Volta cards working now. This is great. The 5090 is not showing up. Oh, my God. You cannot. On Fedora at least, or maybe Linux at all. I don't know. You cannot have two different versions of the Nvidia drivers. You cannot. The GV1 hundreds need an older legacy driver path, and the 5090 doesn't support that. And the GV1 hundreds do not support the newer driver. And unlike Windows, where you can have two completely separate GPU drivers, you simply one simply cannot have multiple Nvidia drivers installed. Funky. Yeah, Demonster says I ran into that. Yeah,

[B]

but you thought the GV100's working, though.

[A]

But there's good news. I kind of went, okay, well, forget the 5090. Maybe I don't need it. I've got the GV1 hundreds working now. So I fired up Odyssey and I was like, oh, yeah, like, Quinn 3.6 is like, the hotness right now. There's all these different, like, various, like, quantizations and Whatever. And so I like download a few of them and every single one that I go to run, it won't. It won't like initialize, it won't. It won't work. And I was like, oh my God. It has first generation tensor cores that just straight up do not support anything anymore. Anything new, anything good. Doesn't matter how much VRAM I have. Unless I want to run like old ass ancient models. They're basically eol. They're useless. There was no point in me fighting with getting them working at all.

[B]

It doesn't support it at all. It doesn't just go slower. It just literally doesn't support it.

[A]

They literally do not support the right. I think it's like FP8. They do not support. They do not. I'd have to, I'd have to look at the exact terminology because it was like three in the morning by this point.

[B]

I guess I didn't understand it because I thought, I thought it would just run it a lot slower because it wasn't optimized for it. I didn't realize it just wouldn't run it at all.

[A]

Nope.

[B]

That has a lot of the fun ideas I had just cooked right off the top.

[A]

So at this point I go, well, time to rip those off the bench. The good news is I grabbed that RTX 5090 because. And I have now fixed it so

[B]

you at least have that on hand.

[A]

And I have now realized that, oh no, I've gotten further since then and I have now fixed it. I can put that on the bench. I had to scrub the old drivers which as part of getting the old drivers working, I had like explicitly blocked proper newer drivers from being from automatically loading because otherwise Fedora would try to do that.

[B]

Sure. Yeah.

[A]

So I had to go and unblock it.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Which is like I'm going straight back to Gemini for that because there's ain't no, no way I remember anything that I did for that. I finally get it working

[B]

and

[A]

that's where I left off.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Oh, actually no, that isn't quite where I left off because I also found a water cooled 5090 that nobody was using from the Murder Box build.

[B]

So you're going to have a water cooled 5090 and a Frankenstein one linked together. And I am like super to each other.

[A]

I'm like super, super close. I am very, very poorly rested this week. But yes, ultimately got them working. It was a total pain in the butt. But you know what, I'm glad it was, it was actually fun. It was probably the most fun that I've had building a stupid with hardware again. Test bench. Yeah, yeah. I haven't had a good reason. This is, this is going to blow some people's minds. Um, remember back when the 5090 launched and there was that whole like saga with me and Plouffe, who's going to pre order one, who's going to go through with it, you know, and, and ultimately he didn't end up taking his pre order and I bought it off of him. That was how, that was how it ended. So probably about a month ago he changed his mind and was like, I want a 50 90. And I was like, funny coincidence, I never installed it. I literally have been running a 7900 XTX in my main rig upstairs that I actually very rarely use for gaming these days. Mostly it's just like I do work at that one and I have a 3080 downstairs. I had a 5090 in my house for literally months. Installing GPUs in my computers, in fairness to me, is super inconvenient. The LAN machines are those one U like crazy ones. You need to find a compatible water block. You need to like get in there and get everything all drained out and like probably rearrange the internals in order to get a different shaped card in there. It's nightmare. And then in my main rig everything is, everything's water cooled and there's also some like, like gunk in it because I never actually cleaned that one out. So I would have to go like, like, like pipe cleaner every tube and take apart every block and clean every block before I would want to put a new stupid block in that system so that it doesn't get all gunked up. So in fairness to me, it is super inconvenient to install a GPU for, for me. But I was like, oh, sorry, yeah, do you want it back at the price you paid? He's like, yes, because they've gone, I think they've gone up like a thousand dollars US since then or something like that. So I was like, okay. Anyway, coming, coming back to that for my, for gaming, like I haven't been motivated to like the 3080 is still pretty good, 7900 XCX, still pretty good. As long as I don't want to turn on ray tracing. That's a fast card. And so this is like the first time in literally years that I've been like, oh, like the fastest hard. I just want the fastest hardware and

[B]

what do I have? How much of it can I shove in there. Like, you sent me that photo of. I think it was the two GV1 hundreds. And you had the. Oh, shoot. What is the name of the intel storage thing? Optane. You had the Optane drive in there. And, like, that photo is sick, dude. Like, I haven't seen a photo like that where I thought it made any sense at all in years, man. Like, so many years.

[A]

That that picture goes pretty hard.

[B]

Like, I remember, right? And it all matters.

[C]

This is getting me exciting again, right? Like, this is what modern computing is about.

[A]

And then you're going back in time.

[C]

You're like, are you ready? You guys got it? But it is.

[B]

It is fun. Anyway.

[C]

Look at that.

[B]

Isn't that.

[C]

It's 2007.

[B]

Look.

[C]

It's even got a VGA connector, like, PS2 keyboard, maybe. I don't know. This is awesome.

[B]

And you're. You're laying a fan down on top of the gpu.

[A]

You got to get some airflow. Got to get some airflow in there.

[C]

It's not enough zap straps.

[B]

It's just cool, man. Damn, I love stuff like this. That photo made me. Made me happy. I was kind of.

[C]

Man,

[B]

I'm sad about. I, I, I. Yeah, I guess I just. I didn't dive into it enough. But I was. I was thinking about. If you link 3.

[A]

Sorry. You can go ahead and show that. Hold on.

[B]

We'll let Luke go three 1080s together, you get 24 giggles gigs of VRAM. If you link two 1080 ti's, you get 22 gigs of VRAM. But they're. They're so.

[A]

But if you're. But if you're running older models, I think you can get away with it, but I would. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to make it so my back garage opens automatically when it sees my pink motorcycle. So I'm gonna need some pretty.

[B]

You're not gonna be able to let that keep running because you said that on the show now.

[A]

No, it'll be fine. Because I can also tie it to other triggers. I would never put that on its own.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Yeah. There's lots of other triggers that you can bake into it that people could know that and it wouldn't help them at all. Okay. Yeah. So my goal.

[B]

Yeah, for sure. Doing that.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't.

[C]

I can't.

[A]

Dude.

[B]

Someone just walks by your back garage with a picture.

[A]

The neighbor could ride their little. Their little train and open up my garage. Absolutely.

[B]

Cool.

[A]

So, yeah, what you can do is you can, you know what, I won't get into too much detail, but there's other gates that you can set it to have to pass in order for it to actually activate the automation. And not just that, but I want to do a whole bunch of like machine vision based automations because that was kind of the whole idea of, of wiring up my house with all these like cameras and stuff. Like, why am I ever manually opening the Sonos app? That's crazy. With all the tech that I piped into that.

[B]

I mean, I think it was like one of the super old school hacker movies. I think it was like the, the guy in the movie who is supposed to basically be Bill Gates, but wasn't actually Bill Gates, I think had this thing where whenever he individually was the one that walked into a room, it would play the music that he liked. And that was like from forever ago and that I know you can like kind of. Antitrust.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Anti trust movie.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Is it actually Bill Gates or is it just supposed to be someone who's like him? It's like obviously supposed to be him.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Stephen Bills. Yeah, sure. But yeah, he had a bunch of like cool home automation stuff.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I remember thinking about how awesome it would be. But those things have always been like, I don't know, pretty flawed. I find you could get Sonos playing everywhere. Maybe you could have it start playing if it detected somebody was in the room. But is it really going to know that it's you? Is it going to know that it's your music specifically because you're in the room? How does it deal when there's conflicts of multiple people in there? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[A]

I think I can, I think I can. I won't be fussy enough that it has to be, you know me necessarily.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

And I think, I think I can. It'll be enough for me if the system just even gets used. Because right now the friction of the Sonos app kind of sucking and not having that, that convenient casting like it used to have with Google Play music is enough that it gets used, but not nearly as much as I would like for it to. Like I could see something like the backyard. As simple as, hey, if you see people back here play 90s greatest hits.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

Just at all. Because usually that's what we'll put on if there's like a pool party or something.

[B]

And so. And someone can override it if they want, but it starts playing something, just

[A]

use the damn thing.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Just start playing something.

[A]

Yeah. Dan, you can go ahead and, and Throw up my. My amazing solder bodge jobs. Believe it or not, this is actually better than what we had. So there was no Kapton tape or there was just Kapton tape in between that red and black terminal before. Both wires were red and they were so heavy and so stiff that they put a ton of strain on. On these like flat connectors that were coming out. Also that little green wire, everything is now shrink wrapped, which is a massive improvement. And a lot of the just like burnination on here is from the first time around.

[C]

Yeah, look at that discoloration just above it.

[A]

Yep, yep. That's crunchy. Yep. So, okay, I'm not gonna lie. Some of that discoloration is from when I was melting off the old like, like freaking cooked pea worth of solder that was on that. That was just sitting on that connector. There's a. There's a shot of it like now cleaned up and finished. There you go. That's what it looks like. Now you compare that to what was in the video. This is a. I promise you, mondo improvement.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then there's a picture of the chickies.

[C]

Yeah, you got some helpers.

[B]

Wow, that's cute. That's probably gonna be my house soon.

[A]

Just hanging out in the. Hanging out with the drive sleds.

[C]

You can't get three. You gotta get like 15. You know that, Luke. Right.

[B]

Well, what might save us and Emma, if you're listening, what might save us is like, I mean, they could bring bird born things that could hurt our birds, you know, maybe.

[A]

Maybe they're babies. So, like.

[B]

Shush.

[D]

Stop it.

[A]

The only birds that will ever be born anywhere near is yours.

[B]

Stop.

[A]

I mean, that's just how infectious diseases work.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[D]

Oh.

[A]

Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah, that could be a big problem.

[B]

Yeah, thanks. Who did.

[A]

We're totally covered.

[C]

You.

[B]

Is it not you who saved first one?

[A]

The first one.

[B]

Okay, so for speaking of malware, for reference, it's kind of.

[A]

Yeah, that's what it looked like before, so.

[B]

Wow. Terrifying.

[A]

Yeah. So you can see how stiff the wires were.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Wow.

[A]

And they were super heavy. So they were putting all that strain on the world's sketchiest solder job. That was even worse than what I just did and showed you.

[C]

And this is supposed to be better than the 2 by 12 or whatever it is.

[A]

Well, it's. It doesn't. I mean, it won't melt the connector, I can tell you that much.

[C]

Yeah, but it's gonna. You're gonna look at it wrong, it's gonna snap off and it's gonna go into the fan and then there's sparks everywhere.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And then your house burns down.

[A]

And then if you hear, if you move your mouse up a little bit, you could see how we just had the four pin sense wire. See them? See them go across the fan there to the right? Oh yeah, yeah. So we just had them kind of running off of the stubs of the old connectors. So I did that little green wire instead to just bridge it, which is definitely better. And then under all that electrical tape that's between the, the power supply connector up there, you go under that was each six terminations going into one giant with eyes. Like with, with a whole like donuts on them. Like, I don't know what to call them other than like an eye. Like kind of like an eye hook, but flat for, you know.

[B]

Sure, yeah, yeah.

[A]

I don't know what those connectors are called. The point is six stacked like, like washers and then one giant washer on the other side. And then like them bolted together just like sandwiched together by a big bolt. It was scary. So my new one, the cable hits a max after a one hour Furmark session of about 48, 49 degrees, which apparently is. Is within range. Anywhere from like 45 to 60 is considered normal for the 12 volt 2 by 6 cable. So we good. So I still have the XT 120. That big yellow thing is still there, but it doesn't put nearly as much strain because it's not like hanging a foot over top of it, like out into the. Into the void.

[C]

Silicon wires are nice too. Love those.

[A]

Yeah, big difference.

[B]

Okay, so did you. You get it actually running?

[A]

Not yet.

[D]

I.

[A]

This was like, not last night because Hacksmith and Plasma Channel came over last night, but the night before. I. Dude, it's so. The world is so funny. I had never heard of the plasma channel until two weeks ago at Computex. I did a video on an ionic cooling fan thing and the comment section of that video was just flooded with plasma channel. You could collab with plasma. Plasma channel. Plasma channel. I'm like, what the fuck is plasma channel?

[B]

This one? Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. And so I'd like never heard of him until that moment. And then James messages me yesterday morning. He's like, hey, we happen to be in town and we got nothing going on. I'm here with like plasma channel. Like didn't really ring a bell yet. But they just show up. They show up in the evening after, after pool party for my daughter. And I kind of go like, finally Start putting it together. And he's like mentioning what he does on his channel and how he's like, super into that. I'm like, wait, no, you're really into ionic thrusters and ionic fans and stuff? He's like, oh, yeah, that's like my thing. And I'm like, wait, you're the guy that everyone was telling me that I needed to meet. Two weeks. Two weeks from me accidentally making a video about an ionic thruster and him sitting in my backyard trying Ukrainian borscht for the first time because my aunt dropped some off. And of course, he's just an adventurous guy, I guess because I showed it to him, I'm like, I don't know. Yeah, it's like beets and cabbage and. Yeah, that's unusual. He's like, oh, sure, yeah, this is great. So, yeah, we hung out, we rode go karts, we played some Ultimate Chicken.

[B]

I hope he sounds exactly like.

[A]

No, no, no, not. But yeah, well, no, basically that super nice guy. Yeah, super nice guy. Like Hacksmith I've met a lot of times. We've, we've hung out. Known him for years and years, but yeah, plasma channel. Never, never met him. They were in town for something and I forget where I was going with this, but. Oh, right. That's why I didn't work on it last night. So I didn't work on it last night, but I did work on it the night before. And I am at the point of. I've. I've got models downloaded and I can. I'm at the point where I can like, tell it. I want it to work across a couple of GPUs and I can click like, deploy, but it like, doesn't because I'm getting some errors. So I just need to work my way through those errors. So I'm getting close to actually being able to interact with my chat bot. And yes, to everyone talking about Frigate. Yes, I'm aware of Frigate and I will be using Frigate. It's like, it's actually pretty lightweight. You totally don't need anything. Super overpowered. But I'm kind of. I'm wanting to figure out the cutting edge software and I see no reason if, I mean, if the GPUs were just sitting there. Anyway, I'm seeing no reason not to. Not to use them. I wish I had a picture. I was looking for this earlier of how I. Of how I have the, the water cooled one set up. But the whole thing is pretty janky.

[B]

You know, I, I find it interesting that you stuck with Linux Because Odysseus works on Windows.

[A]

Yeah. But I don't feel like that's the right way to do it.

[B]

I agree and I respect that you stuck with Linux and I don't even think that's being like Linux pill. This is effectively a server.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And you should try to do it on Linux.

[A]

In my perfect world. Right. I am not running Odysseus on my desktop anyway.

[B]

No, this is. Yeah.

[A]

Everything that I said in Linux at the end of Linux challenge about for my job needing to daily Windows is still true. And so I here, actually I have a hair. This is for my security camera. Just send that to Dan. So all, everything that I said is still true. But in my perfect world, all of this stuff, like my local LLM stuff or like you know, Yvonne's helper for kids scheduling like, or whatever agent that I have chipping away on finally finishing that cat turret project or you know, whatever. Right. Like whatever's running would be in the server rack.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

It wouldn't be my daily driver machine anyway.

[B]

You could communicate with it through like discord.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So there's, there's no reason for it to be my daily driver desktop anyway. Okay. Yeah. So that's it. This is the current state of things right now. So you can see the squeeze bottle is still there from having just filled that radiator tower that's next to it. Yeah, that's actually.

[B]

The heck is.

[A]

That could be a problem. That's the Bixki external rad box that we did a video on a while back where Alex and I found that it had a fundamentally flawed design. You can actually see in the very top where there's. There's two fill ports. There's a black one at the back and then there's a silver one next to it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Alex and I found the fundamental flaw and so I took it home and I fixed it. You have to put a second fill port in it so that there's somewhere for the air to go when you fill it. Because otherwise it took me and Alex like quite literally hours to fill this thing because there was no way for the air and water to exchange. Now you can fill it from empty and like two minutes because you can just put it in and the air can escape fast.

[B]

Man.

[D]

Sorry.

[A]

I just found the video.

[B]

I don't even understand how he does that sometimes, but.

[A]

Oh. Pankratz pointed out we used it in the all transparent PC more recently if you want to see the. The modified version. So I fixed the fill port issue and then I Think Justin cut a new like transparent LTT panel for it. It actually looks really cool now. It's because there were RGB fans in it, but there was no transparent side panel. And we're like, they not only put the fans in, but they put the controller in like Bixki, what are you doing, brother? So, yeah, so that thing, I've had it at home so that I can put the one U machines on the bench because other all the water coming in from the pool that cools those machines is over by the rack and that's not a good place to work on them when there's, you know, an issue or whatever. So it allows me to take them off the bench and then, and then hook them up to something. So right now I won't be able to do that. So I'm probably going to have to come up with a more permanent solution for cooling that gpu. But I think I'll do that after I actually determine that I can do anything useful with this thing. But for now, yeah, I've got the two 5090s in there. Sapphire Rapids is PCIe Gen 5 really beast. So they can communicate over PCIe Gen 5. At least that's better than nothing. It's got 256 gigs of RAM, 56 core CPU or something like that. So it's like ridiculously powerful. And then, so what I want to do is without hardware bottlenecks, I want to just kind of figure this stuff out. Like I used to have fun with it, you know, like how it used to be fun.

[B]

I was messaging you about this too, but that's, that's why I'm so excited. And it sucks that everything costs so damn much, but that's why I'm so excited about locally hosted AIs. It's just kind of fun again.

[A]

Those ancient SGV1 hundreds are still going for like two grand on eBay.

[B]

Well, this is, this is why. And I, I wonder. I'm sure you can run something on them.

[A]

Oh, I'm sure you can.

[B]

No, I don't, I don't mean those, I mean what, what, what is interesting to me is that a 1080s of like a hundred bucks? Yeah, that's that. I, I, I, I figured that out because I was loaning one to a buddy and he gave it back and I was like, you don't have to give us back to me. And he's like, oh, it's worth something. And I, I looked into it and it was 100 bucks. And I was like, well that's Kind of interesting, really, because that's the cheapest way that I can think of that you can get. 24 gigs of vram is strapping three of those together, and there's a lot of 1080s floating around.

[A]

Okay, hear me out. I'm going to send. I'm going to send another picture to Dan if I can find it.

[C]

Shoot.

[A]

I took this picture. I took this picture at computex.

[C]

Already broken. 104 scenes. We're at records now.

[A]

104 scenes.

[C]

Yeah, I have 104.

[B]

Do you not clean them up?

[C]

No, I need all of them.

[B]

Oh, but.

[A]

Okay, that's a little unexpected. Shoot. I can't find it. But I found a company that may. Oh, I found it. Okay, so it sounds to me, Luke, like you need one of these.

[B]

Yeah, someone's also bringing up RTX Titan. I'm pretty sure I messaged Linus about specifically RTX Titans because they're. They're 2000 series cards that have 24 gigs of VRAM, which is like, insane.

[A]

How fun. How much. Okay, even if it's like, crappy, how much fun would it be to do a build? Dan, throw it up. Zoom in on the top right one. What is this?

[B]

Oh, my God.

[A]

How much would you love to fill that with, like 1080s? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.

[B]

Oh, that's fun.

[A]

It's about 20. So you could do about 20, 21,80s on that. Jeez. I mean, I. I don't know.

[B]

At that point in time, you're getting into the range where you have enough money that you should probably just have bought something else.

[A]

It would be. It would be bottlenecked to crap. Because I would imagine they would need to go all the way back.

[B]

Would be vicious.

[A]

Just to your system before they. And the uplink to that couldn't be faster than like 16x or at most 32x. Anyway,

[B]

that seems. Yeah. Someone else is saying crypto miner. Motherboard. Yeah, it feels like more like that.

[A]

That's not a motherboard.

[B]

Mining. Not.

[A]

Yeah, no, that's. No, no, that's like enterprise stuff. That's not for. That's not for crypto mining.

[B]

I wonder what they're using it for.

[A]

Lots of GPUs, apparently.

[B]

Yeah, but what. What application?

[A]

I'm not sure I meant to contact those guys after the show. Gotten around to it yet?

[B]

Bat country. Five seconds per token. Ten sets of 1,080 ti's. Slybridge. Okay, relax. Yeah, relax. The whole idea is why I want to check out the RTX Titan and the 1080 is because they're. I actually don't know how much RT

[A]

Rod says this is like running RAID on floppy disks.

[B]

Oh man. I. I read something somewhere that I think it was like the 580 or something was the first card at Nvidia that Nvidia was like messing around with AI application stuff. It's like quite a while ago actually.

[A]

Oh, like the second Cuda card. Like that 580.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Which is. Which is interesting. Obviously none of the models that like matter are necessarily going to run on that, but it. But it's interesting. That's kind of what sparked my interest of like how far back could you go? It is. It is a little sad. How are they still worth anything? Anything?

[A]

Yeah, here's a water cooled one that someone wants $200 for.

[B]

It's not gonna happen.

[A]

Got some bad news for you, bro. These fittings are worth about as much as this card.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

The scrap copper is a significant amount

[C]

of saying that now you want to buy 20 of them. So like you're gonna just.

[A]

One, two. Here's two. Can we find more hydro copper? One and a half gigs of VRAM each.

[C]

How?

[B]

They're all going for a bunch.

[A]

Yeah, there's no one, no one's buying these for that though. New inbox. What even. What is this thing? This isn't 580. This is something else. RT. Oh, this is RTX something. Oh, this is just a water block.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

Hilarious. Hilarious.

[B]

Oh yeah. Someone found two GTX 5 80s in SLI are responsible for the AI we have today. Jensen Huang revealed that the invention of deep Learning began with two flagship Fermi GPUs in 2012.

[A]

That's crazy.

[B]

Yeah. So that, that made me think like how far back can we go while still pushing the VRAM limiter to models that can still be helpful. And you know what, maybe, maybe you don't get to the sick new models, but maybe you still can run something pretty helpful. Like I wouldn't be too surprised if some of your home automation stuff could be run on much more simple.

[A]

Oh, it could 100 of. Some of that stuff could run on like a 10 or. Sorry, a 10 could run on like probably a 30, 60, 30 70. So a big part of the reason that I wanted to run the newer stuff though is I want to be able to do a gentic stuff.

[B]

No, yeah, absolutely. I'm just. And, and like both. Honestly, the whole spectrum is really interesting to me.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like, you know, having some like really insane hardware at home and doing some really cool stuff or I've been talking about this forever. Mainframe style things. Obviously it's not mainframe. I just really like using that terminology and I think it gets the point across of what I'm trying to describe. Even though it's not the thing, but mainframe style. Big AI servers for local company use. Yeah, that's also very interesting to me. Wicked hardware at home. I'm planning on getting something. It won't be 250 90s, but I'm planning on getting something pretty beast. I don't have the hardware locked down yet, but working on it.

[A]

Stay the path says agents are crazy. I'm having a hard time focusing on schoolwork because I just keep wanting them to do more.

[B]

Yeah. Give it a. Give it. Give it access to some voice thing and then invite it to a Discord call and interact with it that way.

[C]

Very funzi buddy.

[B]

One of my buddies was talking to me about how he. He did that and he would just like, he could message it on Discord, but sometimes it would be easier because he's working on something to just have it join the Discord call. Then he could just ask it questions that way. And I was like, that's nuts, dude. That's crazy. That was honestly a while ago. But this guy Silas, you're out there. He's. He's been on the edge of things for a long time. But. But yeah, I'm also interested kind of down on the other end of the spectrum on like, what can I get done? Like if I. If I just finally. Or maybe I'm holding on to my 1080 and I'm planning to finally upgrade when the 6000 series comes out. What do I. What do I like, you know, like machine God, Warhammer, strap my 1080 into now to make it just keep doing work. Yeah.

[C]

What.

[B]

What can I. What can I still glean out of this thing? It's continue to play games this whole time somehow. What can I now make it do? And I. Without having done anything with it in full ignorance. I feel like you could probably do a decent amount with these with, you know, some smaller models. Maybe you find a couple of your buddies are also upgrading off 1080s or you find a couple on Facebook marketplace for 80, 90, 100 bucks and you strap a couple of them together. Like what can you do with 16 gigs of VRAM and two 1080s? It's interesting. We're going to try to mess around with some of that stuff with the lab and see what happens, but.

[A]

Cool.

[B]

We're Kind of taking our time a little bit, making sure we know what we're doing, but it should be good. Exciting.

[A]

Oh, Dan says I'm supposed to do the float plane announcement now.

[B]

I thought we did.

[A]

Oh my God, we have so many topics. Oh no, wait. What? No, we already did that. Dan. Oh. Sponsors 1 and 2 the show is brought to you by opmanager Nexus. It's a full stack observability platform that lets you and your IT team see everything happening to your IT system in one place. It's built to work with the manage engine ecosystem and the tools your team already uses, so there's no need to start from scratch. Whether your team works from the cloud or prefers an on premise setup, OpManager is designed to work the way your org prefers to operate. It's easy to deploy and has customizable dashboards so each member of your team gets the reports and information that's most pertinent to them. They know just how much reliability matters, so they have data centers all around the world to make sure that everything is backed up regionally. It's backed with strong data encryption, adhering to industry and regional compliance rules, so your data stays protected. Opmanager Nexus Stop guessing and start knowing. With full stack visibility we're going to have a link to them down below. The show is also brought to you by Kape. If you're using one of the major North American cellular carriers, you've probably seen at least one headline about them having a surveillance scandal or data breach reach. Well, Kape is a privacy first mobile carrier that puts you rather than your carrier in control of your phone number. And this is what the same reliable cell service that you'd expect from any other carrier. Now one way that they do this is by rotating your ismi number every 24 hours so you look like a different subscriber to the network, making it harder for you to be tracked. We got, we got his attention folks. These guys are legitimately seem pretty cool. While other carriers love to collect as much data and hoard it for as long as they possibly can, Kape does the opposite. Any metadata from calls and texts is deleted just after that same 24 hour period. And each plan comes with two additional phone numbers that are real and encrypted numbers that can be used for account verification, social media or services like banking, which leaves your primary number for just friendly friends and family. During onboarding, they don't ask for your name, your Social Security number or your address. They collect only what's necessary to provide you with service. If that sounds pretty good, it gets better. You can click the link below or check out this QR code to get 33% off your first six months with code WAN. The show is also brought to you by Red Tiger. They're gearing up for some big sales, including special sales for Prime Day right around the corner. Their F7NA dash cam captures everything on the road thanks to their true 4K technology with a Sony Starvis 2 IMX 678 sensor for their front recording and you can grab yours now. But like I said, keep an eye open for some Prime Day deals from the 23rd to the 26th. It's also great for capturing footage at night free of light disturbance, so even if someone's peeking in your windows at night, you will have them on camera. You can upload footage at 20 megabytes a second at high speed over the 5.8 GHz WI FI6 connection and it's easy to use and navigate any menus with the built in touchscreen software and English voice control. So don't wait. Protect every journey with Redtiger's true 4K dash cams. We'll have them linked in the video description I think a recent AMD upgrade actually. Who was that for? I think that was for Steve from the business team. Anyway, the show is also brought to you by Motion Gray. If you're looking to upgrade your home, office or gaming room, check out our sponsor Motion Gray and their Ergo Pro 2 sit stand desk. If you're working long hours or spending a few too many hours gaming, it can be nice to stretch your legs without having to stop what you're doing. Each Ergo Pro 2 comes with plenty of add ons to make your desk fit your personal needs. And no matter what size desk you go with, Motion Graze, Ergo 2 supports up to £176 and comes in both light and dark color options. Their desks are easy to clean, have smooth edges, and are built to handle most scuffs and scratches that a desk would face. And they use German Bosch motors. Everything arrives all at once, so you don't get the desktop one day and then wait a whole week for the legs to ship from somewhere else. And everything you need to assemble it, including the necessary tools, is packaged with the desk. So grab your motion gray Ergo 2 Pro at our link in the video description all right, it's done Dan, he says all the way to the end. Now can we talk about hardcore spongebob speedrunners? What Luke said at the beginning of the show, he was like, it's all bad news this week. No way. This is the coolest thing ever.

[B]

We have one.

[C]

We have one tomato anus. Parkour.

[B]

Spongebob Speedrun.

[A]

This is incredible. It's not after dark. Dan speedrunners of SpongeBob SquarePants. That's what's next battle for beginning bikini bottom on the original Xbox found that by deliberately smudging the game disc with grease and sweat, they were able to enable a time saving glitch. This glitch is called a leg clip and is done by rapidly pausing and unpausing, which makes the laser skip as it seeks the menu music, which opens up level skipping opportunities. Two speedrunners shift and Zim, after much effort and time found out the winning smudge pattern. It was eight grease strokes radiating from the disc's center like flower petals. Enough to cause a glitch without making the disc unreadable.

[B]

Optimizing your grease patterns is so sick.

[A]

The most gamer move of all gamer moves. A former champion.

[B]

Grease pattern sucks, bro.

[C]

There's gotta be a new greaseless category.

[B]

100% greaseless.

[C]

Greaseless. They play on greasy, pal.

[A]

Oh my God. A former champion handle. Swagmaster Doritos revealed. I clean my discs via licking them, then using a pillowcase to wipe and clean licking them. Which also allowed him to leg clip throughout the game.

[B]

The swag master Doritos licking his disc and then using a pillowcase to wipe it clean. What brand is so awesome?

[A]

The top speedrunning community has since abandoned the disc trick. Now everyone runs the game from the Xbox hard drive, citing leg clip inconsistencies and the ethics of damaging discs.

[B]

Oh, you can't leave Swagmaster Doritos out of it.

[C]

I told you there was a grease category right there.

[B]

There is literally a greaseless category. But I do, I feel like. I feel like you got to acknowledge the greasers, man. You got to acknowledge how can you

[A]

go fast and his work without grease, sir. Yeah, yeah, you got to grease it.

[B]

Wow, that's. I actually wasn't prepared for how cool that was.

[A]

All right, I got something else that's actually, you know, okay, maybe not cool, but definitely better than what we had before. Remember when Copilot Plus PCs launched and like the whole selling point was that you needed a fancy dedicated NPU on your laptop processor to get local AI, which if you're me, seemed pretty stupid when you already had a whole bunch of tensor cores or AI cores or frickin cuda cores. Some kind of. You already had A bunch of stuff in your computer already.

[B]

Practically nothing ever used the NPU anyways.

[A]

Well, Microsoft is quietly testing a way to run those same features on a regular old discrete gpu. This change? Yeah, right the way it probably should have been from the start. This change was spotted by Windows Latest in the GitHub repo for the experimental Windows app SDK 2.0, which now lets the language model APIs run on Nvidia RTX 30 series or newer cards that have at least 6 gigs of VRAM. It is strictly developer facing now. It only works if you're on the Windows Insider experimental channel with developer mode turned on and Microsoft warns the whole thing could change or disappear in a future release.

[B]

Of course,

[A]

When Microsoft launched Copilot Plus PCs in 2024, the whole pitch was you needed a special machine with at least 440 tops NPU to get these AI features. But the irony is that NPU's were never actually more powerful than GPU's for this stuff. They're just power efficient, which matters for laptop battery life, but not very much for a plugged in desktop with a gaming card. For now, this only covers the language model API layer things like text summarization, rewriting and editing the headline. Copilot plus features like Click to Do and Recall are still NPU only, but this lines up with Microsoft's Messaging at Build 2026 where it dropped the Copilot plus branding and talked about AI running across CPUs, GPUs and NPUs. Adoption of Copilot PCs reportedly lagged because people didn't want to buy new hardware for features they saw as gimmicks. And even a Dell exec admitted at CES that consumers just plain weren't buying laptops because of AI.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, especially when like I really think most people are interacting with LLMs through a chat window in a browser. The vast majority of people, and I'm the oh we should have more local stuff guy. And I'm saying that like it's, it's just, it's just reality, man.

[A]

Our discussion question is Microsoft spent two years telling people they needed a new NPU equipped processor for these AI features, and now graphics card people can just do it with their stupid GPU that they already freaking own. Was the NPU requirement ever really about capability? I mean, clearly not. As far as I can tell, a big part of it had to do with partnerships between Microsoft and the hardware guys.

[B]

The Labs team was going around to a bunch of events for a while and they were talking about how they could do these cool new AI things with their various chips. And I'm saying they because I'm talking about a variety of different companies and a very common question from us was like, does it run on the npu? Can it run in the npu? And it was always like, no. Okay. What is this thing for? Why do you keep telling me? But it's always better and faster now and then nothing runs on it anyways. And then like it's just recall. I don't want that. So like basically the only thing that I know of that can run on this hardware that I bought.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Is something that I don't want. It's just like. Just get rid of it. Go away. I. It's great. It's efficient. Cool. You already have the efficiency cores. Just do more of those. I guess.

[D]

Whatever.

[A]

More cash. Give me more cash.

[B]

That'd be great.

[A]

Give me anything.

[B]

Literally.

[A]

Literally anything.

[B]

Just not that. My God.

[A]

Oh, here's a Fun 1. DualSense PC gamers finally get haptic support.

[B]

That's cool though.

[A]

No thanks to Sony. Sony dualsense controllers haptics now work on PC over Bluetooth, ending the long standing requirement to plug the controller in via usb. This breakthrough comes from dsx whose new beta can expose a virtual dualsense to games, allowing supported titles to send native haptics effects wirelessly.

[D]

Cool.

[A]

The DSX beta doesn't just enable wireless haptics, it also adds Bluetooth controller audio support for the DualSense on PC. So audio features tied to the controller can also work without needing a wired connection. Still, it is worth noting that this is a third party solution and Sony has not delivered native wireless DualSense haptics for PC. So. All right. In classic PC fashion, the community ended up solving the problem on its own. Which actually leads me not to our discussion question for this one, but to something else entirely that I want to talk about. I was.

[B]

The reviews of DSX are pretty mixed.

[A]

Yeah, I've heard that David said that plugged in is still the more reliable way to do it, but it is in beta, so that's why I wasn't going to go at them too hard about that.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

So make of that what you will.

[B]

The DSX software looks like it's not in beta. Maybe that features in beta.

[A]

I think so. Hold on. The notes say DSX Beta doesn't just enable wireless haptics. It also adds Bluetooth controller audio support. That's. I'm going by so on the notes. But yeah, I think it was actually David, I was Chatting with about this and you know how we've talked about how there's going to be like a great E wasting coming because it used to be that enterprise hardware could be repurposed for consumers. Like you know, those old like Xeon motherboard chip combos that you could buy on like AliExpress and stuff. I had a bit of a, I had a bit of a brainstorm slash moment of hope that maybe these proprietary closed systems that exists now instead of that stuff that can be repurposed, maybe there's a path to it. Hear me out for a second. One of the challenges to repurposing like Xeons and EPYC processors that are going into servers these days for gaming rigs is that the motherboards use these proprietary form factors that are basically unusable, you know, for desktop purposes. Like a lot of them, they won't even have PCIe slots on the main motherboard because it goes out to like a riser that's like way over off on the other side of the chassis or they're using, or they're using you know, PCIe over cables to run to or they're using like mezzanine cards or you know, whatever, like completely not desktop stuff. But it got me kind of thinking where did the boards come from in the first place? For those, for those like old Xeon, you know, Frankenstein machines. It was, it was, it was from enterprising, usually Chinese companies with some help from Russian firmware writers, taking the motherboards, hacking chipsets out of them and then completely remanufacturing them. So hold on, let's keep going again. Another thing that is going to sort of cause this great E wasting is that many pieces of enterprise hardware are no longer even running x86. They're running like Amazon's Graviton ARM based CPUs or ARM's own. What do they call them? Like they're their AGI line of CPUs. But we're watching in real time Linux gain not just gaming compatibility, but also ARM compatibility at a rapid rate. We're watching Windows gain ARM compatibility, although I'm less hopeful about these weird CPUs working on Windows. What's the Linux project that's still working on Apple Silicon compatibility?

[B]

Oh yeah, I don't know the name off the top of my head, but there is one.

[A]

I'm trying to remember what it is. Asahi. Asahi Linux is still working on porting Apple Apple Silicon. I believe they've booted like they've made significant progress. It's not like fast or super usable yet.

[B]

But hear me out like that. I think it's Japanese, like beer brand.

[A]

Hear me out. At the point where this boom of purchasing that is going on right now is starting to reach end of life and is going to be making its way into the wild, into the disposal reseller ecosystem. Right. Its value will be very low because there won't be really anything to do with it. So the kinds of enterprising individuals in East Asia who did cool things before. I see you've actually. Oh wait, no, you've got something else entirely going on over there.

[B]

It's cool.

[A]

We'll get to that in a second. We'll have this glut of basically discarded hardware over that like five years from now, period. Support for ARM and gaming and Linux especially will get way better. Is there a possibility the GPUs are going to be mostly useless for gaming anyway, but might be usable for Home Lab? I guess. But we've got these like weird, you know, tower form factor.

[B]

Well, that's okay. So that's what this is about. Oh, this is NV link to PCIe madness, basically that I had. I had heard.

[A]

Wait, sorry. These are SSMX

[C]

or.

[A]

Sorry, SXM. Excuse me?

[B]

SXMV.

[A]

SXM to. To PCIe slot. Is that what I'm looking at here?

[B]

Through two cables. Something. I haven't exactly dove into this, but I heard about this.

[A]

So they don't have direct 3D at all from my understanding. So they won't. This won't be a solution for gaming.

[B]

No. But to be able to use them for Home Lab or you know, like

[A]

maybe it's not going to be that

[B]

bad running local models or whatever. I think we'll be able to do something with this stuff. Yeah, I'm pretty confident considering this is already happening. Yeah, I'm pretty confident that there's going to be.

[A]

Because I was feeling really doom and gloom about it. Like all these CPUs are basically going to be garbage. But like Epyc. Epyc's an SoC. I think a lot of people don't actually realize that EPIC doesn't have a motherboard chipset. You can add features to it. You can add IO functions that would normally be handled by like a motherboard chipset to it, but you don't have to. The memory controller is right on the chip. Everything you need to operate that chip is right on the chip. And so nothing would really prevent you. If EPYC chips were cheap enough, if they were worthless enough, nothing would really prevent an enterprising individual from creating a motherboard for it. Kind of like they have that I'm aware of. Anyway, 3D Pro says SXM2 is old. I don't see SXM5 to PC yet. No, you don't see it yet. But what we're talking about is this, this AI build out boom that's happening right now.

[B]

The money that will be involved in that will be enormous. And there hasn't exactly been a lot of SXM5 hardware that's just like.

[A]

Yeah, not yet.

[B]

Flooding the.

[A]

Not yet. Yeah, because nobody is, nobody is decommissioning those systems yet. There's no GPU supply yet. Yet though there will be a time. And that stuff from today will still be pretty useful. Like everything that you can do with an LLM today, like an Enterprise Grade 1. You'll be able to do on this now discarded grade hardware because the frontier models will have moved way past it. And if they want to have any hope of monetizing it, they're not going to be running 5, 6, 7 year old GPUs. So I don't know. I had a moment of maybe this isn't going to be great, but it's not going to be as bad as I thought. Yeah.

[B]

And I found, I found a couple boards that claim to be SXM5, blah blah blah. I don't know if any of this is legit even in the slightest. It's on ebay. Massive question marks everywhere. But when this would be more kind of viable, you know, I believe pretty strongly in the enterprising abilities of people staring down the barrel of an incredible amount of extremely valuable, currently unusable hardware that they can get their hands on for practically nothing. And if they could adapt it to something they could sell for tons. There's so much incentive there. I believe someone will figure it out.

[A]

Yeah, speaking of incentives, at that point,

[B]

just use the frontier models at 20amonth. I feel like you maybe haven't been paying attention to the news, sir.

[A]

Yeah, $100 a month, $20 for five minutes of tokens.

[B]

Maybe it's been.

[A]

Especially when your agents are off there spending tokens on your behalf.

[B]

Dude, it's been very interesting looking at the control panels of things like GitHub because the. Oh by the way, the tokens cost an incredible amount and also unlimited. Whatever all happened while I was away. It's okay. It's all right. Not only did we already have a cap on it on the org level so it was all right, but also all of the Full plane developers were like wow, that's scary. And just like didn't really use it till I came back. So every, everyone was cool. And also there was a safeguard in place so it was all right. So both things were true. But the. Yeah, the full plane crews got your back. They didn't spend $1 billion while you're gone.

[A]

Yeah, it's nice. It's nice to have team members who look, I've always said, I've always said it. I don't mind spending money. I will spend money. You guys have seen me spend money. I don't like wasting money. And it's nice to have people who are on board with that like hey, and if they need to use it, let's talk about that.

[B]

And. And they've used it a little bit. But it's mostly like I find the like inline IDE usage of this stuff to be very different than blah blah blah. Anyways, they have a different form of using it than. Than just like chat botting but they're man it is. There was a screenshot of someone who did like, I think it was like five different prompts and it costed over 50 bucks. Using some of the like nicer models. It's. We're getting into the find out range of things not, not completely everywhere but like. And oh man, the chatter. I feel like this has been like the first time the door really opened to like we're gonna start charging you for stuff, you know. But the chatter that's already happening about people starting to run models locally because you know, as much as AWS has gotten a lot of companies used to just like open bills basically. Like things can just. They'll just cost whatever they cost.

[A]

Yeah, invoice me daddy.

[B]

As much as, as much as AWS has gotten people used to that these AI models and the ability for individual employees to spend to just crush your wallet just so easily. And in a way that might be genuinely a mistake, in a way that might be malicious, but they can show in 10 trillion different ways that it

[A]

wasn't just stupid and useless or just

[B]

stupid and useless or just you know, just the, the huge range of things that could make it cost incredible amounts

[A]

of money or for things that they're actually ultimately doing personally.

[B]

And you might put a cap but you might put an org wide cap and then that person spends the whole orgs cap or you might do individual user caps but this user might on day one of the month spend their entire budget through a mistake and then do you give them more budget and blah Blah, blah, who knows? But there's been a lot of conversations about like, you know, what's a fairly fixed or at least measurable because of power?

[A]

Hardware that you own. Yeah, it's almost like hardware that you own was always the better deal if you could afford it up front. Because renting has always made sense in the context of I can't buy it.

[B]

And you might still want to become the default. You might still want to do that because every once in a while you might want the, the incredible potential of a frontier model. But a lot of the time, I don't know, not really all that necessary. You just run it on your own. Especially if you're just asking it to like, you know, oh, hey, I'm working with this new API. I've never worked with it before. How would I do this? Can you find the documentation for this for me? And then it's giving you the documentation. Like if you're learning, if you're using it as like a learning accelerator. One of the people on the team was talking about how they don't, they don't like using its output, they don't like using it that way, but they might use it to help get them to, you know, find that documentation for me. Then they can learn it themselves or whatever. You don't need some crazy frontier model for that.

[A]

No.

[B]

So whatever, just use the cheaper one that you have locally.

[A]

Hey, I've got another cool thing, Mr. There's no good news this week. With demand for DDR4 platforms rising, intel is rumored to be preparing Raptor Lake Next for release in early 2027. The Raptor Lake Next series would exist side by side with Nova Lake to help meet demand for both DDR4 and DDR5 platforms, respectively. This speculation comes as many vendors are increasing production of DDR4.4 motherboards due to the inflated costs of DDR5 that are making LGA 1151 and AM5 unaffordable. This comes on the heels of AMD announcing a re engineered Ryzen 7 5800x3D anniversary edition with Team Red expecting DDR5 prices to remain high for at least the next couple of years. The good news spin on this one is. I don't know if you guys remember this from back when DDR5 launched, but DDR5 ain't that much faster than DDR4 for gaming workloads. There are places where DDR5 is a big benefit and businesses may ultimately have to spring for expensive DDR5. But every gamer who doesn't need to buy DDR5 might help to balance the current situation and help keep things overall a little bit more affordable. David and I were working on a computer that was meant to compete with a different computer recently. Yeah, yeah. And we actually Talked through Hey, DDR4 or DDR5. And right now one of the challenges is that while DDR4 is about half the price of DDR5 at sort of a similar tier. So if we were looking at like a 6000 megatransfer DDR5 and like a, like a, like a 3200, you know, kind of lowish latency kit. So I'd say those are kind of our equivalents or. So it's about half the price. And motherboards on the DDR4 side are actually still substantially cheaper. But where you're running into trouble is there aren't great options for like gaming CPUs for DDR4. Even AMD's re released 5800x3D is pretty darn expensive.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

It doesn't match.

[B]

I was really surprised at how expensive it was.

[A]

The I'm buying an old platform so I could save money vibe.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

At all.

[B]

At all. It's a few hundred bucks, isn't it? Yeah, I think it's like 300.

[A]

I think it's 329us if I recall correctly. Don't quote me that.

[B]

The US on that. Really?

[A]

Yeah. So it's like 400, 400 and 450 bucks. Almost like that. Yeah. But throwing more supply onto the pile is always a good thing. More competition is always a good thing.

[B]

350 USD.

[A]

So seeing intel come back into the game could put pressure on amd. And again, the more people who are like, okay, I'm gonna buy some DDR4 stuff, the less pressure there is on DDR5. And DDR4 is not necessarily using the same cutting edge fabs that DDR5 would. You can get decent DDR4 out of Chinese vendors like Cxmt, who actually is also making DDR5. Now the more we can use the supply from the various sources that we have it, the better it will be for keeping pricing from spiraling completely even more out of control. So I'm bullish on this. I think it's pretty cool. But hey, what do I know? I was bullish on the new leadership at xbox, so. Well, actually, I don't know if I was bullish. I was cautiously optimist, willing to watch and see if things went well. And so far it's not looking that great. Sorry, what you're gonna say.

[B]

Speaking of watching and seeing if things went well, snap specs alive $2,200 augmented reality smart glasses announced along with the availability and specs, the highly wearable. I believe they said glasses look kind of the opposite of that.

[A]

Look at, look at his poor ear

[B]

bricks on your face.

[A]

Look at what happened to this man's poor ear.

[B]

Wow. Fascinating.

[A]

You know what though? I mean look, if you're going to wear doofy ass smart glasses, they might as well look like that. This is.

[D]

This.

[A]

This is like I embrace my freaking bottle. Bottle glass, thick freaking giant rimmed glasses. This is me. I apologize to no one for anything. I. I can respect it. I wouldn't want to wear them, but I can. I can respect it. Hilarious. Sorry, you were saying?

[B]

Is this Snap like the app?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, that's.

[B]

I forgot they were doing this. Yeah, I remember this was announced forever ago. But anyways. At the recent Augmented World Expo, Snap revealed SPECs of their first fully standalone. Why is this called Specs?

[A]

Their first fully standalone AR glasses aimed at regular consumers.

[B]

The specs will run you 2,200 USD and pre orders are open set to ship this fall in the us, UK and France. Notably, Snap is the first to actually sell standalone true AR glasses, beating Meta, Apple and Google. You can probably see why if you look at them as you can use these to place virtual objects and interfaces into the real world and are fully standalone. They are running Snap os Snaps proprietary platform. What a weird world that Snapchat is the company doing this. But whatever the specs have, as far as specs go. Two Qualcomm Snapdragon chips. One dedicated to computer vision and spatial awareness and the other one to run the user interface. An in house liquid crystal on silicon LCOS display with an FOV of 51amazing degrees. 132 grams for the smaller smaller ballers doing a lot of work in this sentence. 47 millimeter frame. 136 grams for the larger 52 millimeter version. Auto tinting lenses that change states in about 10 seconds. Compared to meta Ray Bans that can take around a minute. What?

[A]

That's pretty cool.

[B]

Why does it take so long?

[A]

I mean transitions take a little while. I don't know much about how they work to be perfectly honest with you.

[B]

Yeah, but if it's going through that like you know, when you apply a charge to it.

[A]

No, it's not that.

[B]

I wonder what it is, what you can actually do with them. Real time turn by turn Navigation A floating adjustable web browser. Live language Translation, gesture control, and spatial AI that answers contextual questions about what you're looking at. Snap's demos showed things like, car repair help. That's a really fast way to wreck your car. Cooking timers.

[A]

And that's an expensive cooking timer. Yeah, I think I have a microwave.

[B]

It's also a really expensive tape measure. It also might weigh about the same as a tape measure.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Fantastic. Thank you.

[A]

They declined to reveal the specific chipset, display resolution, brightness, refresh rate, or camera details. Huh. So maybe we'll find out more at some point. The UK has announced a countrywide ban for social media for people under the age of 16. This is expected to go into effect the spring of 2027 and will include apps such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. One of my kids finally asked me if they could install Snapchat.

[B]

Why is. Why is it okay? Is Snapchat like, popular with the kids again or something? Okay.

[A]

And I'm actually. I have not answered.

[B]

Still exist?

[A]

I haven't answered yet. Apparently everyone's using it to communicate and I'm leaning no. I. I feel like it's one of those things that's just like, but why, though? But also, you know, if all of my friends were on ICQ and my parents told me I couldn't install icq, I'd have been like, why are you destroying my social life?

[B]

Is Snapchat still trying to give you the air of it being, you know, temporal?

[A]

Yeah. Yep.

[B]

So, like, either of those things.

[A]

Yeah, neither of those things are super good things.

[B]

Yeah. The main reason why I don't like the temporal one is just because, you know, maybe your kids will know because it's been communicated, but not everyone involved in the various conversations would know.

[A]

Do you mean, like, impermanent? So, yeah, okay.

[B]

It's like, oh, man. And then, ah, kids are dumb. So, like, even if your kid knows that it would disappear. There you go. They might trust their friend to not take a screenshot, or they might trust the Snapchat software to tell them if a screenshot was taken, which is also not a thing.

[C]

Yeah,

[A]

I don't know. I'm kind of tempted to have a talk with them that basically goes, there's always going to be another fad. Like, just open up my. My social tab and basically go like, here's. Here's all of the apps that I have for people to message each other in. I want you to point at how many you think I have Any kind of valuable conversation.

[B]

I think I did mean temporal.

[A]

By the way, is I thought it

[B]

just means pertaining to time or lasting a limited period of time rather than being eternal.

[A]

Does that work?

[B]

Yeah, I think so.

[A]

Okay. I wasn't sure it worked in that context.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

I've usually used it as pertaining to time as opposed to temporary. Ephemeral is definitely one that works. Night of Never in Floatplane Chat says, I don't know.

[B]

Either way.

[A]

Yeah, either way. I think we all understood what we're talking about at this point.

[B]

Basically, if you haven't used Snapchat and I haven't used it in probably a decade or more, you can send like a picture, and that picture won't always exist. I don't know what the terms are. I don't know if you can open it and it goes away or.

[A]

Self destructing is another great term for that.

[B]

Sure. Or if it lasts for like a day or something like that. But there's in some way you. You won't be able to naturally access it through the app anymore. And it has a thing where if you take a screenshot of it, it tells the person that you received the message from that you took a screenshot of it. But there are other ways to capture your screen, including just like another phone or a webcam or something else, like take a picture.

[A]

So, yeah, part of the temptation I think here is going to be to like, basically go, yeah, how many of these do you think are.

[D]

Are.

[A]

Are used for meaningful connections? You know, like, there's always going to be another. Another thing. What is this offering that is not addressed by, you know, current, you know, current solutions? Do you feel this is very important? Why? You know, see if we can maybe just kind of talk through it.

[B]

It's tough too, though, because, like, if. If that is the way that all of their friends communicate, none of those arguments are gonna matter to their friends, which is tough.

[A]

No, but I mean, I don't know. And maybe this is a. Maybe this is a lot to ask of a youngling, but, you know, from my point of view, should have the conversation at least. If someone won't talk to me, if I'm not on their preferred messaging platform, then I don't really think that that was probably a very deep connection. But I can also see that the other way. Right. If they're sitting there going, well, if they won't talk to me on my preferred messaging platform, then maybe they don't care that much. I'm just. I'm having a hard time understanding the necessariness of something like a Snapchat or Something like Instagram. And maybe this is just me going full boomer here. And I see a lot of y'. All.

[B]

You also have to be the really annoying person that doesn't use. Use the thing that everyone else uses, though.

[A]

It's not a great place to be.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Socially. Yeah, I get that.

[B]

And it helps that they can blame you. Yeah, it does, genuinely.

[A]

Oh, definitely.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Sorry, my stupid dad. Don't let me have it.

[B]

Yeah. And whether or not they actually, like, believe that that is. That is a helpful, helpful line.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Sorry. It's.

[A]

I just flemmier.

[B]

Over time.

[A]

I just. I can't. And this is something that I. That I have honestly struggled with basically my entire time using computers to communicate. Why the actual. Do we need so many apps for this? Like, trillion seemed like magic. I was like, oh, well, this just solves it forever. Now I never have to think about it again. And then trillion died. Except I think it actually still exists or something. But it. It's not really useful anymore because you can't use it to communicate with people across, you know, Facebook messenger and WhatsApp and Instagram, DMS and Twitter. DMs and, like, oh, my God, YouTube's gonna have DMs now. Like, what are we even going? What is going on here?

[B]

I just googled trillion.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And it was like. Did you. Did you mean trillion the number? I was like, oh, boy.

[A]

It still exists.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

But is business. Is this for. Yeah, for people. Business and healthcare.

[B]

I wonder if you can link, like, teams into it or something.

[A]

Cerulean Studios, I think. I think this has come up on the show before.

[B]

I think it has.

[A]

Hilarious. I just. I can't.

[B]

Yeah. It sucks that. I don't know. Twitter became a platform of politics, because as much as I never liked it at any stage, it was the place that, like, all of the creator people were. So you could always find a link that way.

[A]

Yeah. And then Facebook was the place that all your, like, family members, high school and that cohort was at.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then between those two, you could kind of, like, you kind of plug your nose and just. Yeah, just have them on your phone.

[B]

You could find people. And one of the problems is Discord is where a lot of people seem to be migrating, at least, you know, at my age.

[A]

So they're moving. They're moving on from Discord, just so,

[B]

you know, like, the kids.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay. Boomer. Discord.

[B]

Not. I'm not too surprised. That was only gonna last so long.

[A]

That's the thing about trends.

[B]

There they come and go temporal.

[C]

Haha.

[A]

It's not a very deep cut, but.

[B]

But the problem with Discord was the discoverability was crap.

[A]

Oh yeah.

[B]

How do you find anybody?

[A]

I mean, it's like by design.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Streamer mode. Streamer mode. Lock it down.

[B]

Which in a way, was actually really great.

[D]

Really great.

[B]

But yeah, with. With Discord becoming so divisive. Sorry. With Twitter becoming so divisive, then it like, okay, I gotta find this person. They're not on Twitter anymore. I see. They said, I'm gone now.

[A]

Are they on Master?

[B]

Did they go to Blue Sky? That's where their thing said they went. But that account looks like it's abandoned too. And then. Are they on Threads? Are they on Macedon? Are they on whatever the heck? How do I find this person?

[A]

Are they on Snapchat? Can I send them my dick? They won't.

[B]

Screenshot. They told me they wouldn't. Nobody would lie. Nobody would use an external camera to take a photo of it because Snapchat can't detect that. No one would ever do that.

[A]

No one would have a rooted device.

[B]

Yeah, nobody. Nobody's ever tried to do something bad with information they received in the form of a photo or text message when they're in High School.

[A]

LMGChannel and Floatplane Chat says Threads is the new dating app.

[D]

Really?

[B]

That's weird.

[A]

Stop. Okay, I got.

[B]

That's strange. I don't even know what to think about that. That's just strange. So you shop for. For used stuff on Facebook Marketplace, and you shop for used people on threads.

[A]

With the relative dating threads, I'm starting to wonder what direction the app is going. I mean, Facebook figured out that by running Marketplace for absolutely for freaking free, they could figure out everything that you were interested in getting rid of or buying dating threads. I mean, what more could Meta possibly know about you?

[B]

What are dating threads?

[A]

I have no idea. I'm running into a ton of profiles that feel like classic dating app bios. Overly curated, no real post history. And here's the sketchy part. Most of them aren't linked to a real Instagram account. Yeah, that's sketchy. Some are connected to what looks like fake Instagram accounts that were clearly made to pass the verification check. Okay, that's sketchy. Also some.

[B]

Maybe they just don't have Instagram.

[A]

No, I think you have to have it. Also some very popular threads.

[B]

No, but maybe they didn't have it before, so they just made Instagram to be able to get threads.

[A]

Also some very popular threads. Accounts with thousands of Followers are linked to Instagram accounts that only have a few hundred followers. Like, isn't the whole point that it's tied to Instagram? Why are these profiles even existing? Is dating threads an unofficial trend? Okay. And garbage. Okay, well, at least one person noticed a thing.

[B]

Huh.

[C]

Weird.

[A]

Sure. All right.

[B]

I have no idea. I think we're not the right people to talk about this.

[A]

Yeah. Dude, I've been married for longer than I existed as an unmarried individual.

[B]

Yeah, I. This. I remembered a fun thing.

[A]

No, that's not right yet, actually. But I've been with the person I married for longer than I have existed as an unmarried individual.

[B]

That makes sense.

[C]

I think I've been playing Minecraft for longer than I have in. Been playing Minecraft.

[A]

Okay. One of those things. Oh, boy.

[B]

Oh, man. Oh, man.

[A]

Are there women in Minecraft? Like, is that.

[C]

No. No.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

I think it's just sad.

[A]

I see.

[C]

I was more supposed to be like a reality hit. Yeah.

[B]

Just how long Minecraft has been out?

[C]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

Do you still actively play Minecraft?

[D]

No.

[B]

Oh, okay.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

I'm not that single.

[A]

Well, it kind of seemed like that's where you were going.

[B]

I thought that was your point.

[C]

No, no, no, no. Okay. Linus was thinking about marriage versus not marriage.

[A]

Same sort of thing. Interesting. Still that you went there with it.

[C]

But I'm distracted when the WAN show is happening.

[A]

Yeah, that's fair. Anyway, we weren't actually done with this topic.

[B]

One of my favorite things because just to go back to, like, there is no security in. In communications when you're in high school thing, a fun one that was going around my school was that you would send. You would tell someone a secret on MSN messenger, but you would use like wingdings or whatever. And none of the dudes figured this out for a super long time. But the girls knew that you could paste the wingdings into like word and then just change the font. And it was. It would actually say what it said. So there was a bunch of dudes my school telling secrets to girls. And all the girls knew what all the secrets were. And it was. I just thought it was hilarious. I was like, that was very funny.

[A]

I don't actually remember that feature of msn. MSN had so many cool features. If they just. Seriously, I've said this before. I'll say it again. If they just brought back MSN messenger in its, like when they eoled it form today, people would use the out of it. They would. They would show up in droves. It was so cool. And the funny thing is like lo fi, like digital cameras and stuff like, that era is so hot right now. Like you could even. You could even have the low quality video calling of original msn. You could literally change nothing but update the security. I bet a handful of Microsoft engineers could vibe code the freaking upgrade. Like, seriously, just bring it back. It will be successful. You're welcome. I'd use it.

[B]

I would definitely be interested.

[A]

MSN messenger was goaded. It was so good. The nudge was peak. Okay, there are some features that, I mean, maybe that's how they monetize it. They monetize disabling people from nudging you. Oh, Jeremy says. What are you even talking about? Microsoft had a messaging app that was just plain better than anything that we have now. It was actually awesome. No distraction. Ah, so good.

[B]

I still to this day will screw up and want to send someone a thumbs up emoji and do bracket Y bracket and then send it. And then I sent someone. I don't know, maybe that converts into some emoji now. Or I just send them bracket Y bracket and it's just. It doesn't mean anything.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

This is amazing. I'm not going to show this, but my son wore the tie from my wedding for an event tonight and looks like an absolute baller.

[B]

Epic. He does.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

I'm actually looking for something here though. I'm in my chat with Yvonne

[B]

Bracket White bracket still works in his emoji and lots of stuff. A lot of the stuff I've used it in at it does not. But that is good to hear. Why? Oh, that's good. I like that. What's Bracket? Why Bragg? It's supposed to be this.

[A]

Hold on.

[C]

I'm gonna find.

[B]

Isn't that boobs? No, you put a space on each side of the Y for that. Come on now.

[D]

Jeez.

[A]

This is. This is really annoying. Why is this not working? Okay, do your thing for a little bit. Wait, we haven't finished that topic yet. This is so obnoxious. Well, whatever. Yvonne and I still use Bracket L Bracket, but it just doesn't convert to anything. We just.

[B]

You just understand.

[A]

We just use it. Yeah. And so I'm trying to find it, but what's funny is if you search for that in WhatsApp, it actually finds every instance of the word love.

[B]

Huh.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That's weird, actually.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, that's. That's what it meant.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. But it's fascinating that it's converting that. Why would it do that? I even put quote. You saw I put quotes around it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

It's also picking up words like left looking like. But mostly the word it's fine. Oh no. Is it finding any word that starts with an L?

[B]

Is it finding capital L anywhere that finds with capital.

[A]

No, no. I know. I think it's any word that starts with an L. Why is it doing that?

[B]

Interesting.

[A]

I'm trying to find something specific, you freaking stupid thing, man.

[B]

Everybody's posting like little ASCII emotes. It makes me happy.

[A]

Oh, that's awesome. Remember when you could make custom ones? I still have saved on. On my nas. The one of the. Of the little smiley face with the arms creeping up behind the other one and then like giving it a hug. It's like the cutest thing ever. Those were so cool.

[B]

Kirby Dance used to be one of my favorite ones. I'm posting in a full blown chat now. Oh my God, there's an among us. An among us.

[A]

Well, I am not going to be. I. It turns out that I actually text with my wife a lot.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

So go, go. So going through this is gonna. It's gonna take too long. All right. Anyway. Yeah, so we like definitely unironically still use that. We know what's up. Okay. Anyway, we weren't done that topic. They'll also. The UK government will also be looking in more detail at overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for under 18 year olds for social media.

[B]

That one's nice.

[A]

And they'll set out more details on this in July. They also want to address so called AI romantic companion chat bots.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

Nice. And will hopefully inform force a minimum age of 18 for those are a problem. According to a national survey with more than 116,000 responses earlier this year, more than 83% of parents said the risks of social media outweigh the benefits. And 90% expressed support for a minimum age of 16.

[B]

And the kids will get around it. But.

[A]

And they will. But also a lot of them won't. It'll be less convenient. Or maybe it won't. But at least we're. At least we're starting the conversation. At the very least, I think that is something that is worth doing at this point. This is so obnoxious.

[B]

I can't believe Snapchat's getting popular again. I can't believe Snapchat's still around.

[C]

I can't believe they're making AR glasses.

[B]

The whole.

[C]

Yeah, I thought that was like an unrelated company. And they're like. They're actually the Snapchat. It's like.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

What?

[A]

Okay, I found it as recently as in April.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah, there it is. Bracket. L bracket.

[B]

That's awesome. Freaking couple who used to talk on Amazon.

[A]

Yeah. Oh, dude, we Ms. And Hardcore was crazy. All right, why don't we. What else we got? Oh, this one's cool. You want to talk through this one?

[B]

AMD brings.

[A]

I collapsed it.

[B]

AMD brings advanced shader delivery across all RDNA GPUs. This is actually pretty exciting. Cutting game load times down by up to 95%. AMD and Microsoft are rolling out advanced shader delivery in the Xbox PC ecosystem designed to tackle shader compilation stutter and long first load times in games. I wouldn't even just say first load, to be honest.

[A]

It's all the freaking time. So often that that computer building video to compare to a different computer that David and I were doing was so frustrating. We ended up waiting around for shader compilation. I kid you not. Four times on set today.

[B]

It's very annoying. This is genuinely really cool, honestly. First load, I think you could just kick that out of there. But anyways, instead of compiling shaders on the user's PC during gameplay, shaders are pre built and delivered ahead of time. So game. So games can load faster and run smoother right from launch.

[A]

Yeah. You just download it?

[B]

Yeah. How big is it?

[C]

I didn't think that was possible.

[A]

I think it's not that bad. Weird, because intel was talking to me about this. They're doing it too on the new ARC handhelds. Huh. Yeah.

[B]

Interesting.

[C]

But how?

[B]

Yeah, I'd love to know more.

[C]

Me too.

[B]

Yeah. An AMD tweet said that the ASD reduces shader stutter and load times by up to 95%. The feature is expanding in preview and is now being supported more broadly across AMD rDNA GPUs via new drivers. However, the functionality currently only supports games played through the Xbox app. Techspot's article on the subject says support for Nvidia RTX hardware arrives later this year and intel has been also pledged to implement the feature. Hopefully they keep releasing graphics cards. Yeah. What's the worst load time you can remember experiencing?

[A]

Oh dude, Halo Infinite. Getting that game going with a group was brutal because I swear every time there was some stupid update, there would be a stupid like eternity of pre compiling shaders. It was brutal.

[B]

I mean we had. We had Net Nanny and dial up combined. Bit terrible combination. And I would try to load Runescape and I've told this story on Wednesday before but it was literally so long. I would load RuneScape, go downstairs, make a sandwich and like some peach juice because you still have peach juice, consume all of it, go upstairs and it still usually wasn't done loading and it was actually loading and would eventually actually load. So I'm talking double digit minutes. My favorite one though is, is Morrowind of course, because Morrowind would completely reboot your Xbox during some of the load screens. It was honestly there was a lot of tech for Morrowind that was fascinating, like place placing data on different parts of the disk for load time optimizations and stuff. And yeah, apparently it would like sneakily restart your Xbox. Crazy. Some of this, Howard explained, had to do with the folks at Xbox tipping Bethesda off about a few quirks of the hardware. Great tricks they taught us. Favorite one is if you're running low on memory, you can reboot the original Xbox and the user can't tell you can throw a screen up. Like when Morrowind's loading, you get a super long load. That's us rebooting the Xbox. That was the Hail Mary. And yeah, it was kind of a known thing for Morrowind players of. Every once in a while you just get smashed with this like insane load screen. And the thing was like, you know, don't turn the Xbox off or whatever it is working. But nobody like I didn't know this was it rebooting until many years after I played that.

[A]

I mean I've seen it many times where the last frame that was sitting in like the output buffer or whatever is just like still there even when it's not updating to new frames. But I get. I guess that was, that was a feature, not a bug.

[B]

Crazy eh huh. So that's, that's my favorite one. That isn't the longest one but it. Man some of those load times were really long and it makes sense now that the whole freaking system is rebooting and then it's loading what you needed.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Crazy. I loved man. I really, really used to enjoy watching some like Making of things. I don't remember if it was Morrowind or Oblivion or something, but I remember there was a making of of one of those that was just really awesome to watch. Some of the making of of. I think it was probably Halo 2, but the, the making of extras of either Halo 1 or Halo 2 was just incredible. That's where I learned how they would just. They would like intentionally make the. The like geography of the map that you're on in a way that it would block what you're about to see next because it Would load the enemies, like, right before you got there, and it would unload stuff behind you. And like, all this how they managed. Again, just dealing with the memory of these consoles really. Isn't that what I'm describing?

[C]

I think it was like two rocks. No, like all of the geometry and everything was just two models that they rotated around and scaled.

[A]

Oh, is that. I thought that was Mario.

[B]

Mario did that with clouds.

[A]

Clouds. Yeah, clouds and grass.

[C]

I know. Halo. It might have been the first one did something very similar.

[B]

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Oh, yeah. No, what you're saying, it's not all the geometry. It's all of the rocks are basically

[C]

two mountains and stuff, and they're slushing

[B]

together the ground so you can't see most of it. And they'll rotate it around and stuff. Yeah, I think Pebble.

[C]

It's just a teeny tiny one.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's Halo 1. It's just scaled differently.

[C]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Halo 1. I'm pretty sure that was Halo 1. Halo 1 rocks.

[C]

Let's see. Might even be one. I don't. I don't remember those A while ago.

[B]

I don't remember.

[C]

There's some really good ones about. There's a good, like, mini doc on YouTube about racing the beam. If you're talking about Mario. Because all of the game logic has to happen before the beam starts because, like, you only have so much time to manipulate it as it's going down the screen every 50 or 50 or 60 seconds. Seconds, right.

[B]

That's kind of funny. Oh, it's Halo 3.

[C]

No way. Not Halo 3.

[B]

I thought it was.

[C]

Oh, racing the beam. God, Noki's fast. What the hell?

[B]

The Nokia is wicked fast.

[C]

That's insane. No, that. That's a great video. If you want to. If you have any interest in, like.

[A]

All right, we've got a couple of quick ones.

[C]

Halo 3.

[B]

Sorry. One last Halo 3 player discovers every single rock in one of the game's most memorable levels is the same rock. It's just rotated, scaled, and moved around. Like, that kind of stuff is instant wicked man.

[C]

Instance entities, baby.

[B]

I. I love that stuff. Anyways, are there.

[A]

Are there pictures of this

[B]

pretty boring pictures all the same rock?

[A]

Well, yeah, but I want to see, like, how they use them and stuff.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just being a joke. Let me see if I can.

[A]

Okay, so here it is. So every one of these rocks is the same rock.

[B]

It's just rotated and scaled and turned around.

[A]

That's hilarious. I would never. I would Never know that.

[B]

Yep. And you know that maybe a different amount of it is jutting out of the ground.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

And you only have to load one rock.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Pretty awesome.

[C]

You just instance it with size and rotation and you're done.

[B]

So cool.

[A]

Amazing.

[B]

Love stuff like that. Like when I. When I learned that thing with Super Mario Bros. And the clouds and the grass are the same. It's just recolored. Fantastic.

[C]

There's also a really good mini doc about the Sega logo, I think on the original Sonic, because the console couldn't produce that type of like screen update resolution. So what it's actually is it's like four videos playing simultaneously. And then what they do is they break it into different scan lines and different colors and then they swap the color buffer because it can only display so many colors, which gives you like quadruple the frame rate, so your animations can be even smoother. Because it couldn't physically process that amount of information that fast. It's nuts. It's so cool.

[B]

I love stuff like that.

[A]

All right, I got a couple quick ones here. Researchers at UC San Diego, backed by Google, have figured out how to turn retired smartphones into low cost data center hardware. The pitch rests on a surprising fact. A phone from three years ago still delivers higher single core performance in spec benchmarks than server CPUs. Like dual AMD EPYCs that are found in real data centers, the servers crush the phones on total throughput. But in terms of per core, the mobile chips actually hold their own. The process strips each phone down to just the motherboard, so your display, batteries, cameras, chassis all come off. And Android gets replaced with a standard data center Linux distro. The boards get networked into self managing clusters of 25 to 50 units running Kubernetes. Of course, roughly 25 to 50 phones match the compute of a single dual socket server cpu. And a 20 phone cluster can already serve an app for our class of 75 plus students. Google frames this around embodied carbon. The motherboard alone accounts for about 50% of a phone's manufacturing emissions. And people replace phones roughly every four years. With Google's support, UCSD plans to scale up to 2,000 phones in a data center launching fall 2026 that could support a hundred classes at once, all on hardware that would otherwise be e waste.

[B]

Dude, that's awesome.

[A]

It's super cool. I don't know how scalable it is, but it's really cool. 2000 phones, it's not even that many phones actually in terms of like the. The sheer volume of phones that exist that people are just not using and don't care about anymore.

[B]

Like, look at the Neo. Like, you can do incredible things with processors.

[A]

100%.

[B]

I was doing, I was doing. So I was talking to Wendell about space stuff and we were talking about the Mercury era.

[A]

Were you talking about data centers in space?

[B]

No, we were talking about the Mercury era missions and he was mentioning offhand. I haven't like verified this or anything, but it's Wendell, so. But he's mentioning offhand about the transistors in your phone now is amounts to a higher number than all of the transistors in the world at that time. And I was like, damn,

[A]

that's pretty cool.

[B]

That's pretty cool. Yeah. Brain too small. Think too much further than that, but that's pretty cool.

[A]

Illinois looks like they might become the first state to ban drivers from wearing smart glasses. This is just pending Governor J.B. pritzker's signature, meaning it could become law in the coming weeks if he signs it. The bill's supporters say the glasses can display information, messages, or other content directly in a driver's field of view, making them a new form of distracted driving as these devices become more popular. Critics argue that the bill is a blunt instrument and that not all smart glasses are equally distracting. And enforcement could give police broad discretion to stop or question drivers based on their eyewear. That's about all I have to say about that. Probably seems like a good thing to avoid video screens in people's eyeball holes while they're driving. It's always something that blows me away when I visit Taiwan or other countries where you appear to be simply allowed to watch video on your dashboard while you are driving. Pretty much. I'd say a solid half of the Uber drivers that I get in Taipei are just like watching dramas or like music videos.

[B]

Dude, I was getting an Uber because I need, I need to get somewhere. I tend to really try to take transit when I'm in Taipei for a variety of reasons. To be honest.

[D]

It's.

[B]

It's also super cheap, but I get carsick really easily. And I was getting an Uber and we were, we were counting the amount of like, I don't know what you want to call them, false starts. And this is, this is not unique to Taiwan, I would say, but this was a particularly rough situation where they would like step on the gas fairly seriously and then break before going. Once a, once a light went green, there was, at one light, it was 26. It was a, it was like a 15 minute ride or something like that. I was. I could taste both a mixture of stomach acid and metal in my mouth by the time we got.

[A]

I guarantee you that's not as bad as what I tasted earlier in the show, but it's not a competition.

[B]

But like, oh my God. Yeah. If I can not, I'll usually not. I'll walk or take transit or something.

[A]

I actually tweeted earlier this week and I got a surprising number of just like brain dead responses on this. I was like, hey, there's already an accelerometer in both of the phones in the car. How about you just use it Uber. And then you can just like tell drivers to chill the out with their whole like lead foot break, lead foot break, lead foot break.

[B]

It's just.

[A]

And the funny thing is like, you can, you can report issues. Like when you leave a three star review, I think anything three star and below it automatically prompts you for like, why? And for whatever reason. Like, excessive acceleration and braking is not one of them. Like you can flag, if I recall correctly, it's like dangerously. It's like dangerous driving, but it's not always dangerous. Sometimes you're just cruising down the freeway, there's nobody around and they're just like, Oh my God. The gas pedal is not a toggle switch. You could just make a fine adjustment and it's like, oh, you should just talk to the driver. It's like, I shouldn't, I shouldn't have to. It literally shouldn't be necessary. With what is supposed to be a replacement for, you know, professional drivers in taxis or whatever, it just seems like a very obvious thing for them to just address because it's such a meme. Like everybody knows. Yeah, yeah. Uber drivers like, yeah, especially like Teslas when they have the regen braking on maximum. So they're like one pedal driving and they have no idea how to have that pedal be anything other than all the way down or all the way up.

[B]

Yeah, it's rough. Okay. Did we finish that topic?

[A]

Oh, yeah. I mean, I guess so.

[B]

Did we?

[A]

Yeah. I want to talk about E. Oh, wait, no.

[B]

Well, I mean, I think it's worth mentioning that. I think this is going to be completely insane. You, you were doing that. It was like Illinois or whatever with the. You can't wear smart glasses.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

I, I mean, I support the idea that you can't wear smart glasses while driving, but like, what the hell? You can barely even tell the current generation. Ray bans versus normal Ray bans. How the heck are they supposed to figure that out?

[A]

I mean, I don't know. And they're only gonna get stealthier as time goes on.

[B]

Yeah. And I think there was like one of the discussion questions on or something. I don't know where the topic is right now, but I think one of the discussion questions was like, is this gonna just give them an excuse to pull anyone over at any time if they're wearing glasses? It's kind of like yeah, probably to be honest.

[A]

And like cops simply already cannot be expected to recognize every thing that someone's not allowed to have or every stupid law.

[C]

Totally.

[B]

So I mean I support the idea that you shouldn't be able to wear them while driving, but like, man, I don't know how the heck you enforce that unless it's just one of the. An additional thing to throw at you when they're trying to throw the book at you.

[A]

And Agent Renzo reminds us we talked about the last week but prescription smart glasses, like what are you going to tell them, dude?

[B]

It's such a tough.

[A]

Take off your prescription glasses and get back behind the wheel. That's crazy.

[B]

That is crazy.

[A]

We briefly touched on this for the first time. ChatGPT has less than half of the AI assistant market. I don't think we have to get into a ton of depth on this. But Claude is growing like bananas. Gemini is growing pretty good, but Claude is. Claude is looking.

[B]

Of the development minded people I know are using Claude right now.

[A]

Claude very strong. Yeah, yeah. There's a bunch of stuff in here. I'm so sorry to the writer who prepared all these notes but I think we have to move on to after dark. Dan, Mr. Besser hit us.

[C]

Oh, I got buttons to push first.

[A]

Okay, okay. You push the buttons. I. I hear him pushing buttons. I don't see it doing anything.

[C]

I push at the buttons. That one.

[A]

Nice.

[C]

Tada. Okay, cool. We have to do the Valley Girl. Hello. LLD for Linus. Are there any plans to bring back.

[A]

That's a really bad Valley Girl. You're going to have to do better than that.

[B]

Give it up, Dan.

[C]

Can't even remember what it is. Linus, can you give me a hand here?

[A]

Yeah, sure. He's pretty good at like hello llc. Thank you. Thank you for like Linus, are there any plans to like bring back Waffle long sleeve?

[C]

It's my favorite long sleeve. But I only got one before they were gone.

[A]

Okay. Yeah. You did that whole second sentence without a single like.

[C]

Yeah. Oh, I keep forgetting to add the like.

[A]

It's like my favorite long sleeve. But like

[C]

thank you Director Linus, I'm

[A]

not answering the question until you do the second line properly.

[C]

It's like my favorite long sleeve. But, like, I only got, like, one before they were gone.

[A]

I would have had a, I would have had a fifth leg and before they were, like, gone. Yeah, but that's really good.

[C]

That's pretty good. I'm working on, I'm working on it.

[A]

I don't think we have a ton of plans for Waffle long Sleeve. My uncle really likes it too. I don't think that we're going to be bringing it back anytime soon. Soon. I am so sorry. Do I Valley girl Less. I can't tell.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

I think so.

[A]

I wonder why I stopped. Because I, I, I talking about this reminded me that I used to get a lot of comments on WAN show about why the does he talk like that. He sounds like a freaking Valley girl. And I just noticed as I was talking to Dan, I didn't, I didn't drop any likes. I don't think. Do, do I, do I still do it a bunch? I. Mr. Oh, Mutt says it's been much less.

[C]

I haven't really noticed.

[A]

Interesting. I didn't think about it at all.

[B]

I never thought about it till this conversation. But my answer was immediately. And I think it's, I think it's less.

[A]

Agent Renzo says, I think you realized the uselessness of the word. Like, I don't think I did. I mean, I, I do pick up on the speech patterns of people around me and I, you know, like anyone, I'm always changing, you know, like, I don't know. I just didn't think about it.

[B]

You thought about that?

[A]

Now that I think about it, I, like, immediately, immediately want to do this.

[B]

Watch it, Watch it be fully fledged.

[A]

Is it back now? Have I relapsed? Am I off the wagon?

[B]

No, because you didn't say, is it like, back now? So I think you're.

[A]

We're like, so back. That's crazy.

[B]

That's like, crazy.

[A]

I'm going to have to not think about it. Look at her butt. She must be like one of those rap guys. Girlfriends.

[C]

I brought those apple boxes out and I was singing. Apple boxes.

[A]

Jeans, nice. They're here.

[C]

Boots.

[A]

That's what he's talking about.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Boxes with the fur. Everybody was resting on her. Did you answer the question about.

[A]

Yeah, I did.

[C]

Okay. Do I, do I have to? Yeah.

[A]

I mean, we're not answering any.

[C]

Hello D question for Luke. Have you, like, heard of the lantern of the laughless Saint stated as the, like, spiritual successor to, like, Morrowind and junk. The trailer's amazing and starts by saying, beep you, Todd Howard. Whatever that could mean. Like, come on.

[B]

That was pretty good. That's pretty good.

[C]

He's improving.

[B]

Yes, I have heard of it. I think the whole Internet came together in its algorithmic excellency and was like, this guy. Because I don't think I've received ads for almost anything else as much as I've received ads for this. And I'm following it on Steam.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

What is that?

[A]

How many times you said like, like a Valley Girl? Oh, I was gonna see if you did it more. I was just gonna keep trying.

[B]

I do it a little bit.

[C]

Yeah, I know. Yeah.

[A]

Oh, you've always been a little Valley Girl.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Howdy.

[C]

Lldl finally remember to use my, like, coin. Lol. Switched to cashy during the Linux challenge and it's been fun.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[C]

Any, like, workarounds or discoveries or, like, happy little accidents, you know? Like, you, like, you found that you didn't make it into the, you know, videos.

[B]

What is it? It's not Valley Girl.

[A]

No, it's.

[C]

It's.

[A]

It's evolving.

[B]

Yeah, it's like. It's like Valley Girl mixed with, like, 90s dork.

[C]

Yeah. Well, this one felt dorky. I'm trying to embody the character.

[A]

You've got to remember, Dan. You gotta remember everything is a question.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

How do LDL finally, like, remember to use my coin lol? No, that. That was wrong. But how do you ldl? Like, you gotta. You have to have the up. Uptone at the end.

[C]

Yeah, it's been fun.

[B]

And then you're also the, like.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Any workarounds or discoveries or happy accidents you found that didn't make it in videos? Yeah, okay, okay, we'll get there.

[A]

Any happy accidents?

[C]

We'll get there.

[A]

I haven't tried catching during the Linux

[B]

challenge, and it's been fun. Any workarounds, discoveries have happy accidents you found that didn't make it in videos.

[A]

He did read that to you. It was just impossible to understand with all the extra filler words.

[B]

I'm also. I'm just thinking. I feel like

[A]

that doesn't count.

[B]

I feel like it was mostly mentioned because WAN show counts as a video

[A]

and I count it.

[B]

I talked about a lot of it on WAN as we were going along.

[A]

That would be an interesting WAN show. Hooking up electrodes to us so that every time we say like or just any bull spit, I might appreciate that

[B]

I want to use them less.

[A]

Would we end up saying nothing?

[B]

We're both just paralyzed. That's rough.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

No, no, hear me out. Serves a purpose. W. Calderini.

[B]

I don't think so.

[A]

Hear me out.

[B]

No, I, I, I don't think. I didn't mention anything. I think I mentioned a lot of stuff on WAN that didn't necessarily end up in the, in the primary videos. Damn it. Workarounds and stuff, though. Yeah, I don't really think so. I haven't dabbled much with playing games that aren't on steam yet. I suspect that's going to be a hurdle. It's about time. I do my, like every three months. Check in with Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Damn it. Yeah, just say it and there's no value.

[C]

It takes practice to fill it with silence.

[B]

I really, I really want to do that.

[C]

I don't want to practice. Does it does take practice.

[B]

I was thinking about this months ago. Not that recently, but just that I think it would be better if I didn't.

[A]

It's also, believe it or not, counterintuitively part of communication to use filler words

[B]

though, because you are communicating that you're still talking.

[C]

I do find that people tend to interrupt me when I'm working on that presentations and stuff, though. It's really good to have it as a practice.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

If I could be able to flip a switch, turn it off and on. Yeah, yeah. It's. It's kind of similar to what I was able to do when I was in high school. So the second I joined the, the shop class, so I think that was in grade 11, I went from being the guy who people would go if I said ass or, or damn to just cussing like a sailor.

[B]

Wow, that makes a lot of sense.

[A]

But I still had, I still had young siblings at home. And at that time, dude, I, I could turn it on and off like fully. I don't think my parents ever realized that I said a swear word. And in shop class, I don't think people knew that I knew other words. Yeah, like it was, yeah, I, I, but I, but I. It's harder now.

[B]

I seem to be able to do that quite effectively on like a location basis sort of.

[A]

You slip up a fair bit on when. Oh, not on when.

[B]

No, that's what I'm saying.

[A]

No, but like, no, I, I can't.

[B]

I suck outside of this context. Yeah, I screwed up all the time.

[C]

I know.

[B]

And it's like really frustrating and kind of embarrassing, but for some reason on wan, it's like perfect actually.

[A]

Come to Think of it. I'm pretty good at it. I. I don't think my kids have almost ever heard me swear.

[B]

Like, why? Why can't I? Like what? What?

[A]

I don't know. But you're kind of embarrassing in public sometimes because I've been working on. You're very loud.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

If you weren't so loud loud, then the potty mouth wouldn't be so much of a problem. I've been working, but I'll be like, luke, there's like a lot of kids here.

[B]

Yeah, there was.

[A]

Sometimes I don't actually, I usually don't say anything because there's not much point, but. But there have been times that I'm just sitting there going, okay, yeah, I.

[B]

I often forget how far away I can be heard from.

[A]

Uhhuh.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Very far away.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I had someone point out the other day that like we were talking about something that wasn't super public and they were like, we got to talk quieter and I was already whispering and we had to talk quieter because someone was across the building and I was like, oh damn. I have wondered before, like if our sound booths even contain it.

[A]

I'm not sure they don't contain it. Part of the problem is the frequency.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because lower frequencies are tougher to block. So it's easier for me to have a private conversation than it is for you.

[B]

Very fun, Very cool.

[C]

Last one there. Sorry, I was responding to.

[A]

Now you're good.

[C]

Appreciating you guys being late. Allow me to second screen watch from like Australia. With everything you've learned during Linux recently, would you consider like a Linux Tips or like a Nix Tips series?

[A]

No, I think it's already covered really well. I don't really see what additional value we'd bring at this point in time.

[B]

I think the, one of the biggest benefits we could bring is just making

[A]

it more normal, covering it more on the main channels. Absolutely.

[B]

And if it just happens to be in videos, like you were talking about how your choice for Odysseus was Fedora. I think you said using Fedora workstation. Yeah. So that makes sense. And if we did end up making a video about that, if Fedora was just the thing that you used, it's not like this huge deal, it's just the thing that you used. I think honestly that's the most that we could bring. That is a lot. I'm not trying to diminish it, but like trying to help normalize it is I think something that the line of sick Tiffs channel could accomplish.

[A]

That's what we do. For the longest time, that's been our whole thing. We don't go the deepest into anything. But what we do is we strive to put at least a few things in every video that someone can learn. And then we try to light fires like Luke said. We try to just, like, go around throwing matches on the. Be like, man, like. It was your channel that inspired me to get into this, and that's always my favorite thing to hear is that one of those matches ended up turning into a forest fire. Okay. Not a great. Not a great metaphor, but I think you guys get the point. We don't want forest fires in a literal sense. We want them in a. In an imagination and inspiration sense. Yeah, maybe we should go now. I will see you again next week.

[B]

Hold on. Somebody pointed out. Did you guys figure out the YouTube channel thing yet? Did we not?

[A]

Which one?

[B]

Oh, what channel are we streaming to right now?

[A]

We haven't figured it out. I asked Dan before we started. He says next week. Some people were off this week, so they couldn't deal with it.

[B]

Okay, just.

[A]

We gotta actually do that just mid sized company things. I know.

[B]

That makes sense, though.

[A]

I know. See again next week, same bad time. Hopefully we'll have the channel thing sorted out.

[C]

Bye. All right.

[B]

Oh, I'm up.