What's up, y'all?
Happy Friday. I hope you had a wonderful week.
No, I take that back.
I hope you had a spectacular full week.
Spectacular and wonderful. Yeah. Wonderful.
I hope you had a wonderful week. Thunderful.
Thunderful. Yeah. Are you saying wonderful or thunderful?
I don't know. Well, a little bit of both. You bring the thunder to the fun.
Bring the thunder.
I'd love to resurrect, what's it called, kick sharded or kick farted?
Kick farted.
The brilliant Labs frame glasses that I checked out on ShortCircuit this week had a kick farted
vibe. I was going to say, you don't even need Kickstarter anymore, you just make AI products.
Yeah, I guess that's true. Because a lot of this stuff isn't Kickstarter.
I feel like it would get kind of redundant though because they're all just going to be
bad in kind of the same ways. You can only review so many things that say they do a bunch of stuff and don't actually
do any of it before it's just like. It's boring.
Yeah. It was fun when Kickstarter was new.
Oh, shoot.
I'm not logged in. I knew there was something I wasn't logged into. I'm not logged into Flowplain.
There's the world's first wallet with built-in Find My, Apple Find My.
That's kind of useful, actually.
Sort of neat. If they ever actually make it.
Big question mark. That's the thing, right?
I love this picture of Andrew on the Flowplain site. I don't know why it's here and I don't know why I love it so much, but it's amazing.
Here's another question for you. He just looks so cool. Why isn't it here?
Why isn't it here? Why would it not be there? What are you even talking about?
What else would you put there? Well, I don't know.
Exactly. It's not my problem. Yeah.
Look, I said I like it. Calm down. What is your biggest problem with it?
What's your problem? What? Why are you so aggressive?
What's your biggest problem with it?
My biggest problem? It's such a huge issue. My biggest problem right now is your attitude.
Yeah, see, Chris Uthi, Luke is agitated.
Yeah. He needs to take his calm down celery sticks.
Yeah. Mel, Bill, did your battle, sorry, Mel, Bill, did your dad ever get his present from Kickstarter?
No. Fox in the Box, he doesn't even want to play Super Chex because he's too bad at it.
What just happened? Are we good?
Oh. Dan? Did we die?
That was exciting.
Yeah, it's back now, so that's cool.
I'll just pop my live chat back out.
Okay. Not a good sign.
Only Luke was better at building a live streaming platform than playing Super Chex.
Sheesh. That one's rough, actually.
Damn, he's really bad at Super Chex, then, I guess.
Wow, Dan. Wow. Luke's had a hard week, so we're...
Yeah, how's the business side of footballing going? So we're making it harder.
How's the business side of footballing going? Business side's going great.
We actually gained a ton of subscribers in the last couple of months. Yeah, who did that?
I think it was Sammy.
Same Sammy's, actually, both of the Sammy's. We had Sammy one working on all the exclusives, and then we had Sammy Alpha working on all
of the being in Scrapyard Wars. Sammy Alpha?
Well, yeah. I mean, look, I can't come out here and be like, oh, yeah, one and two, like you have
tears. What do you do with your third? If I put Sammy's in tears, I'm going to be dealing with Sammy tears.
Oh, man.
Yeah, what do you do with more, though? What if you have like four Sammy's?
Four Sammy's. It'll be a problem. It'll be a problem.
We'll just start adding Alpha one, one, and...
Well, we could... There's lots of alphabets.
You just need to...
Oh, man.
Sammy Prime. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So that's three of them. Gamma and Omega and stuff, you still can't do that.
Yeah, no, you can't do that. You can't do that. No.
Because Omega would be above the other ones. So we've got one A and Prime.
But then you've got one A and Prime in other languages. One of them we could just call.
You could scale it. Yeah, Sammy. Oh.
Sammy, Ein. Ein's not too bad. What's wrong with Ang?
It's French. Have some culture, you swine.
That's the language of your people. Mr. LaFrenier.
I don't know any other ones other than Un and Ein.
What's like Spanish one? Just like Sammy.
What's the sign language for S?
Really? Yeah. Okay.
Sammy. Yeah, I mean, usually name signs are not just like the first letter of someone's name
and then a number. Do you have to individually spell the whole thing out?
No. What they generally are is they're like some combination of the letter that their name
starts with and some like action.
Okay. So my sister was given her name sign when she was like a very happy little kid.
This is my younger sister. And so this is the sign for happy.
And her name is Bella. So you make a B.
You're like that. So that's her name sign. So it's not going to be exactly the same.
But it's a repeatable...
When I was given mine, I was really into hockey.
And this is the sign for hockey. So you're L-hockey?
So I'm like that. Yeah. Exactly.
L-hockey. Yeah, thanks. It's a good name.
My mom loved me a lot.
I could tell, by the way, as I went to go take a drink there, he was going for me.
He was trying to cook something up, so I took a really little one so I could get out quickly.
There's tactics to this.
All right. What are we doing today?
Right. I was going to sign into a thing. Oh yeah, yeah.
I'm signing into the thing. Okay, cool. So that's muted.
So that's good. Everything seems good. Oh, I guess...
Do I even need to sign into Twitch? Am I just over Twitch at this point?
Maybe I'm just over Twitch. Does Twitch matter?
No. Got him.
Maybe I should sign into kick. No.
Okay, tell me this. Should we stream to kick?
Sure, why not? All right. We can stream to as many sources as we want.
I really thought that was going to be a longer conversation than that.
I mean, we streamed to Twitter, so like, whatever.
That's fair. Oh, we're not.
Oh, why? Oh, how come? I don't think I can get into the account.
Oh. But I can go to Twitter if you want.
I just don't care. I mean, we got 40,000 viewers currently per video.
The views are such lies anyway. And two comments.
It's just complete nonsense.
Stream to MySpace, is that possible? Are they doing these days?
I'd be down. It's like a music social media platform, right?
Really? I think so.
I keep reading about like a new, like, it's like MySpace, but like for Zoomers and like,
I haven't seen any actual momentum on any of them.
Is that a thing? MySpace isn't loading very well.
But yeah, I think it's a music social media thing.
I'm going to log in.
Date, network and connect with people. So it's a music social media dating platform.
No way. No way. For like people that still know what MySpace is, I'm assuming.
Hear me out. Habbo Hotel.
Yeah, dawg. Let's stream on Habbo Hotel.
Sick.
Like basically, if the platform is free to stream to, we can just go cost the money,
I guess. It doesn't like, if they're going to pay us something for using their streaming services,
sick. Hug Boy says steam. We would have to make a game.
It's like a hundred bucks. But then we could, we could stream to steam.
That would be, I think, a first in the market.
Kind of.
Like you never have to release the game.
Oh. Although I don't know if streaming is enabled before it goes live.
Has this moved?
Moved. It shouldn't have moved.
Shouldn't have moved. Is that for the right account? Do we have more than one account?
No.
I mean, I did get an email from someone asking me to reset the password for it.
I'm kidding. Relax. I actually cannot get into the account though, so you don't need to relax about that.
Oh. Do you need it?
I mean, I need to know that, like, we have it.
Yeah. If that makes sense.
Dan, I'm going to be sending you messages.
Look at my phone.
Efficient.
Or, I mean, do you want me to come and, like, pick them up from you?
That'd be so sick. I could get, like, a little string and connect it together and just hand over hand.
That'd be kind of fun.
New infrastructure. Yeah.
Okay, but I just told you I'm sending you messages and you're not reading them.
My phone didn't vibrate.
But the air did. Modern notifications are so ridiculous.
It's so frustrating.
Imagine having notifications on for anything other than when going live.
Exactly. Beast. Exactly.
That's based like a turkey.
And why do you leave on vibrate when you type fringe?
What is your thing? Oh, is it Dan?
Oh, I thought it was you.
No.
It's funny because I was sitting here silently judging you and then you sat there and audibly
and it was neither of us.
Oh, okay.
Oh, wow.
Why do you like this?
It didn't work.
Okay, that didn't work. I mean, it's not that I couldn't access that.
It just isn't working.
Speaking in code. Yeah.
No, that really wasn't what I needed help with. Oh, that's why that's why the thing is moving.
Yeah. See, no, no, no. We were both doing this.
Yeah. No, no, no. I know how to log into account Dan.
Okay, so then. Sorry, then this is Luke's fault.
Nice.
Dude, we have the funniest moment.
There's this YouTuber that I'd never heard of. He reviews rations.
He eats old military rations and stuff. No way.
What? What? I know who it is within seconds.
Yeah. Anyway, so he does this thing.
Blah, blah, blah. We'll get it on the tray. Nice.
Yeah. So, Ploof apparently watches him.
So, we have a video that's coming up this weekend.
And normally, you know, we would build a computer or whatever.
Wait, you're filming a video with Steve?
No. 1989, whatever? No.
Oh, okay. You have a video with Ploof coming out this weekend. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The video is, we built a five-star gaming PC.
We did a sequel to Herd Mentality. Got it.
So, everything has to be five stars with at least 100 reviews wherever possible.
So, we just buy the top rated components. And anyway, the point of it is to kind of talk through the rationale and to talk about what's
good and what people found was bad about them, the few people that didn't like these components.
So, when we bring out the case, we're just like, we just like bring out the case.
And then we're just like, let's get all the parts in it.
And they're like, I walked through the frame and they just ping me up here.
Nice. It's nice. Oh, dude, it's so funny.
I'd never heard of him. He's great. Yeah.
Yeah, it's great. Crazy dude. Good video.
Absolutely crazy dude. There's no way I would eat that stuff.
Oh, some of the ones that he's gone for is just like.
Yeah. I wouldn't do that. What a gastrointestinal champion.
Yeah. Well, I tried that, but I don't see one that came through.
So, apparently he only got sick ones for meeting them.
That meat from World War One. Dude, yeah.
He's gone. He's gone into some stuff that's like.
You can get that. That's like museum stuff at this point.
Yeah. He does a lot of. How would you, how do you buy that?
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I've never tried.
But I know sometimes he's gotten access to stuff that he's like really not supposed to
be able to get access to. Dude, a hard tack from the Civil War.
Yeah.
Yeah. Because there's no way he should have some of that stuff.
Not from like the Civil War, like maybe someone found it in some basement or something, but
there's things from like foreign militaries that are not for sale right now.
Like if it's modern or whatever, they probably wouldn't even want like, you know, people
to know what's in it and stuff, you know, like it could be a proprietary blend of spices,
Luke. Yeah. I think it's mostly like they just, they don't want soldiers and whatnot trying to sell them
for profit because they won't be able to know how much stores they have if that's happening.
But, yeah.
What is hard tack?
Change it? I think we might have to, but that's...
Okay, am I just not logging in today?
Well, no, no, don't log out if you're logged in.
Just open a private browser and do it that way.
Okay. Maybe I'm over it.
I think we should be over it. I'm over it now.
Okay. Okay. I've closed the tab and it is no longer in my mind.
Cool. This is such a clickbait title in this video.
Look at this.
Wow. Yeah, I know, right?
Wait, is that ours? Yeah, it's LMG clips.
Oh, the heck? What is that about?
Well, there's only one way to find out.
Reading the comments. Hey, Wansho.
Hey, Wansho audience. There's this idea that's been going around.
I know, I think it's David has asked if you guys would be interested in an entire season
of the most recent Scrapyard Wars being uploaded as one video.
So with the intros and outros removed of the middle ones and the intro left on the first one
and the outro left on the last one. They just have one long video.
Okay. I know you guys are already interested in that. That's not my actual question.
My actual question is what about previous seasons of Scrapyard Wars being uploaded as one long
video on LMG clips? Because we can't do that on line of tech tips.
It would get murdered. I'm assuming.
But what about LMG clips? What if just in one day we just like obliterated our like notification limit and just like did
all of them? Why?
Maybe on LTT where they should probably be.
It's not a clip.
Wouldn't you just kill your channel performance?
For a bit. Very short period. If we had like a banger, no, if we had like a banger video to upload the day after it
would probably be fine. That is a really clip fate thing.
Luke has a dark past and I'm in like kiss makeup.
What the heck is, what is this? I don't know who's in charge of the titles and thumbnails on LMG clips right now, but
they're doing some work. What is this?
The problem with Linus is about you not being very good at super checks.
I don't believe you. It actually is.
No way. It's about me like studying the tape and getting good.
That's the problem with Linus. Yeah, right. And then we talk about that game that neither of us is going to pick up, the Valve one,
the hero shooter. Oh. Yeah.
So it's like. I haven't played it since. Yeah, I haven't even been remotely tempted.
Yeah.
I'm just completely over it.
It's crap. You're at worst channel. Yeah.
I would get an upload once every several years.
I mean, it's funny though. There's like, there's channels that are just like the American, the office compilations
and like, dude, that shows been off the air for like 10 years.
Like how are you still uploading things? Yeah.
Look at this.
Just the whole freaking movie.
That's crazy. How's this been up for a year?
1.7 million views. I didn't. There's a bunch of these.
I didn't get that movie. I don't like love that movie.
I was like, I don't get it. How did you not get it?
Seems pretty straightforward. Wait.
Is there like a different...
Hmm. Oh, well here's the problem.
Hold on. No, that wasn't it. Oh, that's a different movie.
How many... Okay.
I don't know. I'm just confused right now.
So I'm not going to say anymore. All right.
Cool. Yeah. Anyway, movies uploaded to YouTube.
Should we start the show? Are you sure it's actually the movie?
Someone at Full Point Chat asked, the one that I looked up.
Yes, I'm 100% sure it's the movie.
Well, apparently the like new Deadpool was up.
Had 1 million views. A million views.
Wow. Wow. And then Disney pulled it down.
I guess if certain things aren't in content ID.
Looking at how long it took the Twitter thing to get responded to,
big companies move slow. Yeah.
When Bingo had a great idea, Scrapyard Wars Seattle,
traveling Scrapyard Wars is super annoying.
Yeah. And really expensive.
Just saying. Also, why would Seattle be better?
Seattle's like the closest possible thing in the world to Vancouver.
Wow. People super hate form Labs.
Really? Yeah. Why?
Apparently they're like awful. At what?
At being nice.
They charge a license fee to use third party resins, apparently.
And they apparently bought someone else in order to cancel their product
just for the sake of them not existing.
Yeah, it's too bad.
Because it seemed like Tynan did a pretty good job on the video,
on their resin printer. But people, people hate it.
And the product seems like really good.
Like I was looking at some of the stuff you printed with it.
It's like, wow. Like he printed a clear item that was like.
Really good. Clear. It looked like high quality injection molding.
I was blown away. Wow.
All right. Oh, wow.
What's up? All them comments, eh? Oh, yeah.
I know people are like super bad. I'm reading Chewy's Community Report for the week.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Should we do this thing?
I'm good to go if you guys are.
Are you good to go if us guys are?
Yeah. Then we're good.
Then we're good to go. Just keep going in the circle.
I could be like that. I could be a jerk.
I could be a jerk in my circle. I could tell how he said it.
I was like, someone's coming. Get it?
No, don't do it. Don't set that up.
Luke, you moron.
Man, this shows such a mess sometimes. Did you see your, oh, you put it under your laptop.
You have a new leather coaster thing.
Is that? I didn't put it. Someone visited for a tour and they gave us.
Oh, cool. You have one too, Dan. I do?
Yours is bread. It is. No way.
Dan's is bread. Yours is supposed to be Lambo colors. Oh, man.
And mine is light mode Floatplane colors.
Why are you disrespectful like that? What do you mean? What do you mean?
What do you mean it's supposed to be Lambo colors? It's Lambo colors. Oh, my God.
Wow. Bread. Bread.
Wow. Backhanded. This guy.
Absolute mean girl.
Dan's is pretty cool.
I noticed you didn't say mine was pretty cool.
Is that because it's supposed to be Lambo colors?
Whatever that means.
Well, it's not actually Lambo colors.
Do you want me to go in on it?
This is a gift.
I think it looks great. The utter disrespect. I think it looks more watermelony than the actual Lambo colors.
The utter disrespect. Which is like better.
But maybe the disrespect is to the original paint job of the Lambo.
Yeah, there could be a Lambo somewhere that color. You don't know.
Have you seen them all?
Someone probably has. All right, I'm assuming the selected.
Yeah, how's the mouth of that gift horse?
What's up, everybody? And welcome to the WAN Show.
We've got a great show lined up for you this week, and it is a sad day.
Yeah. Today we found out that Anantek has been shut down.
And I don't know, I think it'd be kind of fun to...
Well, we'll do a quick rundown of exactly, you know, what went down.
There's been some commentary from Dr. Ian Kutris,
who formerly worked there. And I think it'd be kind of cool for us to, you know,
all kind of talk together about what that site meant to us
and how it's impacted our journey in tech.
Because it really, for those of you who are relatively new to the scene,
it really was a big deal back in the day.
Not so much these days, and I guess that's why it's dead.
In other news, the Telegram CEO was arrested in France.
This blew my mind.
Absolutely blew my mind. We'll be talking about that. What else we got?
We've got a fake person, a well-known activist
that might apparently not even be real.
Might seems like some pretty hedged wording here.
It's almost certainly not real. It looks bad. And speaking of hedged wording,
a new version of Windows unlocks crazy Ryzen performance boost.
Nice. Yeah, maybe they should have... Oh, wait, there's a blurb.
Oh, I guess I do it after the intro.
The show is brought to you by MSI and Lion Audio Pulseway,
our chair partner secret lab, and our new laptop partner, LG.
Always loved me some LGs, and now Luke and I each have one.
They sent over these new Gram Pros for us to use,
and we finally have matching laptops. They're thin, they're super light, especially for being 17 inch,
and they're packed with some pretty darn good specs too.
You can learn more about them at the link in the video description.
Yep, we got some Mexican Gs right here.
LGs.
Oh, by the way, I guess this is the part where I should probably do a framework sponsor disclosure.
Hey, look, look. LG, the amount of conversations people have had about the laptops
that we've used over the years, when they weren't sponsoring the placement,
they can deal with this one being a little awkward to start.
Don't worry, I'll do a really professional job the next time.
Why don't we jump right into our headline topic today?
A non-tech has shut down.
They've announced that the company will seize publication after 27 years.
27 years? Pretty crazy.
I'm feeling old. That's a good reason to feel old.
I didn't even think about it. I would not have thought it was 27 years old.
I started reading a non-tech when it was pretty established,
and it was 2003 or something, 2002.
I don't know, yeah, like 2002 was probably when I started avidly reading a non-tech.
The good news, there is a small silver lining here.
The website will remain publicly available,
and the non-tech forums will remain active, or at least as active as they are.
For now. As far as I can tell, I saw a comment that there's no way to register on the site right now.
I don't know if that applies to the forum, but comments under the articles,
you apparently can't register, but people who have accounts can still comment.
So we'll see how long that keeps going.
We'll see how long the forum lasts. Forums are tough.
It's a tough time to be a forum. Anyway, the site was founded by Anand Shimpi in 1997 when he was just 15 years old.
It was purchased by Perch in late 2014 when Shimpi retired from journalism to join Apple.
Then in 2018, it was sold alongside other Perch owned properties like Tom's Hardware
to British publisher Future PLC.
Former on non-tech senior editor Dr. Ian Cuttrust has released a video on the closure
in which he expressed that a non-tech had been in decline for some time.
It's an astute observation. We did need Dr. Cuttrust to come in and pull out his monoscope and have a look at it or whatever.
I mean, that's absolutely the truth.
Okay, we're going off script now.
A non-tech was seriously like one of my half a dozen bookmarks in my browser.
For me, it would have been... Oh, dude, Linus, when I first met Linus, if he wasn't working on a video for some reason
or working at NCIX or whatever, and sometimes even when he was, he usually had a non-tech open.
Yeah, like literally all the time. It was like my home away from home.
I had my email, I had NCIX and the forum.
I had separate bookmarks for each just in case I needed to shop really, really fast
or go to the forum really, really fast. I had extreme systems.
I had a non-tech. I had red flag deals.
At some point when I was doing a lot of trading, I probably had my heat wear in there.
That was it. That was my entire internet world.
There were other sites that I read. I read hard OCP.
I would pop into Tom's hardware every once in a while.
There's an extreme something. This is an interesting one.
Guru3D. I liked Guru3D. This is an interesting one that I've been seeing a lot of.
Phil H. in chat said, I'm amazed that Tom's hardware will have outlasted a non-tech
as that place has been an ad-infested monstrosity for about a decade, but it somehow keeps going.
That is how. Yeah.
One of the things that Ryan Smith, who was the current editor-in-chief at a non-tech
said was that they were given the latitude to run the site the way that they wanted.
I mean, I'm not sure that I entirely buy that because the non-tech that I used to read 10
years ago did not have nearly as much click bait garbage on it as the current version
of the site. Yeah, but they might have been trying to.
At least editorially, I think is what he was trying to say.
Editorially, they were able to run the site the way that they wanted.
I guess that should give you guys some idea of how difficult it is to run a site that
is not just churning out AI-generated or even just AI-assisted lists of products that the
editor has never actually ever set their hands on.
Let's see what else. In Dr. Kutcher's opinion, this was the result of the gradual attrition of key staff members
who left as a non-tech's corporate owners pushed towards more commercial topics that
they weren't interested in writing about. I suspect it's a little more complicated than that as well, but I mean, I'm sure that he
keeps in touch with folks there from time to time.
What few new people were coming into the company weren't sufficient to replace those who left
leading to a negative feedback loop of declining capacity and scope.
This then led to declining reinvestment on the part of a non-tech's owners and lower pay
for freelancers. Kutcher's also said that additional layers of management made communicating these issues
upwards increasingly difficult. I can tell you as an outsider, the main issue for me was that I just wasn't really interested
in what they were covering. I don't know how much of this is topic choice and how much of this is how challenging the
space has become. There's not as much kitschy, interesting stuff these days.
I could see if I was shopping for an AIO cooler.
This is fine, I guess, but clearly almost no one cared.
What is this thing? The number of random small form factor computers from brands that I've never heard of?
They said that got the most comments outside of the AMD Ryzen launch of anything that I'm
seeing on the front page so far. No, you got to scroll down a bit though.
What are all these coolers? Was that the only thing that they still had a test bench for?
It's not just recent. It's been for a very, very long time that I just haven't been able to get into the stuff
that they've been reviewing. You could see when there's something interesting to write about, they're still getting engagement.
I'd be a little more interested in this than I think 16 comments merits.
It's kind of cool, but it also doesn't really matter.
It's a power supply and the things are on the edge.
It's going to probably be kind of okay-ish.
It's probably not going to be the best one. I guess there's just so many known quantities these days.
This was another thing that I had noticed with an Nantec over the years was like,
EnterMax, who cares?
It's not 2003 anymore. EnterMax is such a small player in the enthusiast space these days
in terms of how the average gamer might perceive them.
They just haven't kept up. To be clear, I'm not saying EnterMax is not a valid brand or that EnterMax makes a bad product.
That absolutely is not what I'm saying. The brand doesn't carry a lot of clicks by its own.
Compared to 2002, 2003, when it was Ntec,
EnterMax and irrelevant.
Before OCC stormed onto the scene,
before power supplies were twinkled and burned out, fizzled out.
Before power supplies were a twinkle in Corsair's eye,
EnterMax was hugely important.
It's like, why are you guys reviewing two EnterMax power supplies in a span of a month?
There were times when I wouldn't accuse a Nantec of pay for play,
especially because I read Ryan's article and he said that they were left to their own devices editorially.
But I would see stuff like this. What is the Geekom A7 mini PC and how could I possibly care about this?
How is that out of all the bazillion things that you could cover, the thing that you want to cover?
I guess it's a pretty easy category to cover. Is it also who they have?
Someone likes doing those and specializes in those, so it's freelance writing?
I don't know, man. This is a tough one because...
On the one hand, I hear something like that and I go,
well, management needs to manage that person.
They need to work with them to develop an interest in something else,
something that is commercially viable.
In the case of a Nantec, I'm not even saying, hey, they should just do the most mainstream stuff.
That's never what the site was. Commercially viable doesn't mean that it has to be what...
Think Geek, or think Geek, what was that lifehacker back in the day?
It doesn't have to be what lifehacker is doing. It doesn't have to be the most mainstream thing or the verge or whatever else.
It could be a deeper dive, but it needs to be a deeper dive into not the...
I'm still scrolling here, so I'm going to go back to that last one that I was picking on.
Whatever that weird thing was. When I look at that writer, Ganesh Ts, when I look at that writer, it's a lot of these types of things.
I feel like this might be a freelancer who's just interested in these types of things.
I don't know if it's a management situation.
But then the other side of it is, as someone who works out a place,
is it not worth considering if the work that you're doing is commercially viable
and will continue to keep you gainfully employed?
Maybe this is old fashioned or something, but when I was at NCIX,
I worried a lot about the value of the work that I was doing.
I know you're the same way. If it didn't feel valuable, not only did I not feel personally fulfilled by it,
but I was stressed by it. Well, yeah, because you start to wonder if the walls start to crumble,
are you the easiest thing to drop? Yeah.
You question the value that you're bringing.
You don't have to be the most valuable member of a team, but you never want to be an obvious place to cut.
Yeah. I don't know.
I look at a lot of the editorial decisions that were made in terms of what to cover
and what was taking up space on the homepage.
It doesn't surprise me that readership fell.
Pete Kinetic says, if you're a freelancer, do you care?
Yeah. Yeah. Don't you like your freelance checks?
Do you still have a job? Where do they come from?
Yeah. Yeah. It still matters.
It's like your portfolio, right? If my portfolio, and to be clear, I've never met Ryan.
I haven't met, I don't think...
Certainly, I haven't had a long conversation with anyone else on the non-tech team right now.
To be super clear, I'm not saying it's this person's fault.
Yeah. It's absolutely nothing personal.
But as a freelancer, wouldn't I want my portfolio to be something,
someone that I send it to wants to read? And it's possible this person did and might have wanted to do something else,
and they had them on the team as a mini PC person or something,
and that's just what they wanted me to do. Yeah, but then that's a management issue.
I do agree. So that's what I'm saying. I'm not blaming anybody.
I'm just saying, as a team, you got to kind of at some point look at what you're doing
and go, hey, is this valuable?
Is this moving the needle?
Yeah. And there's a lot to be said for the integrity of being interesting and passionate about something
and single-mindedly pursuing that, regardless of whether you're a particular art,
because I don't see writing a review as a purely scientific endeavor.
I think that there's an art to making it engaging and making it accessible and making it interesting.
I think as well. Like, looking at this, not going to lie.
I think it's just there isn't interesting things. Like, they're releasing so many articles.
Yeah. The stuff's just not there. Yeah.
And like, I was, okay, like there was some stuff that I was looking at.
I hate to pick on Ganesh again, because it's like SSD reviews, like portable SSD reviews.
And I'm like, really? But then SSD reviews were one of the things that Anant and Tech really set themselves apart from.
When I was learning how to test SSDs, I read a lot of Anant and Tech articles.
Anant's original review of the X25 series was what ultimately drove me to get super into them
and pay a bunch of money to get them for myself, which is why I made videos.
Like this, that I got called out for SSD versus hard drives and like SSD buyers guides and stuff like this.
You got called out for it? Yeah. Because back then, people didn't get it because they thought that it was all about boot times.
So that was why I came up with this idea of putting together like a bunch of practical tests to show people that it wasn't just boot time.
So I would do like application launches and game loading and stuff like that.
And I did like a side-by-side drag race because a lot of the marketing from the SSD makers and from the system makers was just boot times.
And I was like, well, that's stupid. You don't boot up your computer very often.
No wonder people think these things are stupid because you got to understand back then the price was so high for an SSD.
And we were so used to waiting around for our hard drives that it felt like people called me shill.
They called me ignorant. They called me whatever.
They called me all kinds of things for saying, hey, no SSDs, but it was actually like a nonce coverage that got me really interested in them and got me really excited about them.
I really think, though, that there's content on here that they're doing just because they need something to fill the pipeline.
Like power supplies, there's a lot of them.
They're not super interesting to all the viewers, but there's a ton of them so they can fill the pipeline.
Coolers, I don't think their cooler reviews are getting a ton of traffic, but there's a ton of coolers so you can make a lot of topics.
Part of the issue, I haven't actually thought about a non-tech in so long because I just stopped reading because it got really boring.
But part of the issue is that they're still doing a really old school style of article.
They're reviewing a cooler. You don't review a cooler anymore.
You round up a bunch of price comparables.
And they did roundups back in the day, but maybe the issue is that they just don't have the budget and time for it, right?
We don't know all the constraints. An interesting one. Let's just have a business meeting on the show.
Oh. Why are we doing that then?
So the idea is that...
So power supplies. Like, are you talking about power supplies specifically?
Everything. So the idea...
Right now, just for... Not a lot of people go to the website.
Right now, we have mice, keyboards, graphics cards, power supplies.
So I think that we definitely need to figure out what our focus needs to be.
But I can tell you that the reason that we started with power supplies was it's supposed to be something that we can automate to a significant degree.
I don't know how deep you want to get into this business meeting.
Oh, that. But...
Sure. I don't know. The representations to me about the degree to which they could be automated have been very different from how the situation actually is.
Yeah. So, I mean, we haven't really talked about this much, but Luke is the interim head of the Labs right now and has been doing a deep dive into how things are going over there.
And why are we doing power supplies?
Public service. I want to need something that starts with the U.
Undertaking. Oh, nice. Okay.
That's the reason. I want to know which ones are bad, Luke.
When we do a budget build guide, I want to know if it's going to blow up.
Okay, here's something you can't put a price tag on.
We did a video recently where... Okay, so the reason...
No, no, no, sorry. Let me finish. Let me finish.
We did a video recently where we bought systems from people on Facebook Marketplace.
We bought three systems for $900.
And in one of them, they used a GameMax power supply.
Now, in the old days, I would have said, I've never really heard of these guys.
They don't seem particularly reputable, but I have nothing to say positive or negative from my own personal experience about the quality of this unit.
Thanks to LTT Labs, I was able to say the GameMax products that we've tested have failed our testing.
This is not a reputable brand.
That knowledge has been now passed to the million and a half or so people, or 1.1 or 1.2 million people who watched that video.
And we wouldn't have known unless Lucas did his fine work that he's doing.
To be clear, not me. Yeah. Yeah, Luke.
Oh, yeah. Sorry. Lucas.
You win. The tall one. Really?
Yeah. Yeah. Very tall, very smart.
Yeah. Lucas hadn't done his work, and I believe Oni did the write-up for that one.
Yep. And if Sammy hadn't worked on how the visualizations for these things work, if those people hadn't done that work, we wouldn't know.
Because who is out there testing this stuff? Because it's not profitable.
Oh, a non-tech. Well, they weren't.
They didn't test any GameMax anything. They just test Thermaltake and Enormax for some reason.
But here's a conflict of interest problem, though.
Conflict of interest? We're continuing the business meeting.
What about Linus's framework, power supply investment?
That's not what I meant. PSU linked.
No, that's not what it's called. PSU circuit.
All right, run your laptop.
Run your laptop. You're not in charge of Labs now, are you?
There's been conversations around this, because this is PSU circuit, right?
And some of these don't get very many views.
And now it has been discussed that this is supposed to be just, like, again, a community service thing.
So, okay. But it has also been stressed. Not community service?
Neither of us has been convicted of a crime as yet.
Oh, no, you can do... Can you do that without...?
Well, I think that... It would be called volunteering, I guess. Yeah.
Okay, fair enough. Yeah, I think the connotation of community service is that you had it coming.
Probably, yeah, fair enough, okay. So, people have been pointing at things like the CSONIC Focus GX750, and going, like, okay, this is not the launch.
So, the launch one got 10K, and then they got 2K after that for a little bit, and then they started faltering.
Yeah. Sama, no one cared. That CSONIC did pretty good.
But this one, this one did pretty good. And then after that...
Yup. So, it's going to have to be a mix.
It's going to have to be a mix of, basically, it needs to be a mix of the things people are buying.
But then, like, this... And the things people shouldn't be buying. But this Sama one has gotten some flak.
This is, again, this is internal business meeting. You guys are here as an accessory.
Yeah. We thank you for being an audience.
Thanks for attending. Yeah, this is actually really efficient, because we're able to host a video while also having a conversation that we would have had to have anyway.
Yeah. So, this one, there's a lot of reasons to test this one.
The logo and stuff makes it really feel like it's a CSONIC power supply.
So, it's tricking some people. So, by getting the information out there and making it very searchable, all that type of stuff, we're still fitting that category.
But then, this is getting negative flak, because it didn't perform very well.
So, it's like, we have to try to... Wait, are we getting flak because we covered it?
No, no, no, no, no. Oh, like, internally, people are questioning why we're bothering.
Well, with the whole channel, but also specifically with that.
It's going to have to be a mix. It's going to have to be a mix.
We're going... But then we can't... Yeah.
If it has to be a mix, then we can't stress the performance of the individual videos and the performance of the individual pages.
No. No what?
No, we can't. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. All right. I mean, did I?
I don't remember. Maybe. Probably not.
I don't know. I think that the mix that we've had so far has been a little weird, like the fact that almost every power supply has been a 750 watt.
Yeah, that's changing. Yeah. So, like...
I will also credit that. Yeah. I mean, it started changing before I came in.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fine. That's not a mean...
I just mean, there's definitely some stuff that we've got to do to optimize the mix here.
There should definitely be more, you know, your Corsair, your C-Sonic, your reputable brands.
I would like to really focus on the stuff that people are buying.
Like, the fact that we don't have like a Thermaltake Smart 430 watt in there is in my opinion.
And look, I haven't been hand-holding this, so I haven't necessarily given this feedback before.
So, my apologies if this is a surprise to anybody, but the fact that we don't have like a 430 watt Thermaltake in there is a huge miss to me.
Because the number of people that are buying these things is enormous.
And we can see that in the reviews on sites like New Egg and Amazon.
And what I want to know as someone who is, you know, in charge of recommending products to people is, okay, but how bad is it?
Yeah. Is it that bad?
Like, is it bad like it's going to fail?
Is it break your system in a year? Is it bad like when it fails, it could light on fire?
I need to know this stuff. And so power supplies, I'd say, is probably the vertical that we are closest to in terms of the vision for how the lab is supposed to function.
And I have actually repeatedly talked about PSU Circuit as something that I consider to be a win.
Yes, I know that. I've been trying to explain to people why that's true.
Because this is what we are trying to do.
And it's going to take a long time for people to...
This is something that's really important to slam home for people because of a conversation that we had during this topic a little bit earlier.
We were talking about how people don't necessarily want to work on things that don't, like, do well.
So it's really important to communicate to a team that, like, you know, the web articles are getting tons of views.
But GameMax, we impacted literally, even if we account for it, that people don't watch the entire video.
We impacted hundreds of thousands of people and made them aware that this brand is sketchy.
They wouldn't have known otherwise. Because no one's covering this stuff.
So that was included in an LTT video? Yeah. Okay, yeah, yeah.
Because the GameMax Circuit video got 1,500 views.
Sure. I was one of them.
And now I know. Right?
Like, that's what we're doing. That's what we're trying to do.
And it's going to take time to build out the verticals that we want to build out.
It's going to take time to automate what we need to automate.
There's a lot of that to be done. There's a lot more to do.
There's also, like, I know there's been some criticism put towards the lab in regards to automation,
because some people have pointed out, like, the more you automate stuff, the more you remove the human touch,
and you're less likely to catch things and stuff.
We're not trying to automate a lot of those types of things to be clear.
And I'm not trying to increase automation in the Labs, actually, necessarily,
to increase the amount that they can even do, necessarily.
I'm trying to make it so they can spend more time verifying results
and retesting things and doing things like that.
So, yeah, it's okay.
Okay. I don't think we ever actually ended up finishing the...
I do think it's an interesting thing to consider, though,
that pretty much all of the things that you just pointed out for a non-tech,
we are diving into headfirst attempting to do the same thing.
But what percentage of our headcount is working on PSU circuit?
It's going to be three people, which is a pretty considerable amount.
It takes a very noticeable amount of time.
But is there a benefit to the projects that the other people are working on
that do make money to having this resource and to having this knowledge?
Yes. All right. But it's just, you know, I'm just saying.
I'm just saying, I have a vision. I have a vision right now.
I'm having a vision. And to be clear, just because I think some people might be getting squiggly legs right now,
I support the Labs project.
I'm just trying to push him a little bit.
Look, I'll defend it all day.
Yeah. I'll defend it all day. Because I'm just saying all the criticisms that you lobbied towards a non-tech
are the exact same things that we are doing or planning to do.
What a non-tech doesn't have is it doesn't have LTT.
Yeah. LTT is basically this like evolution machine.
It is taking the feedback from the community.
It is processing it through the writing team, through me.
And it is constantly shifting and changing.
And sometimes it changes forward. Sometimes it changes backward.
But it's constantly trying new things in order to increase engagement,
to make sure that this business stays sustainable in order to feed resources back into the
machine that is supposed to build these resources that will in turn make LTT more
authoritative, which will in turn bring more viewership and more resources,
which will allow us to continue to build it. The way that I've been seeing it is that some people have said that the LTT Labs team is
supposed to be a support department for writing.
And I don't necessarily see it that way. We are supposed to support, yes, but we're supposed to support the content creation of
the company. That doesn't necessarily just mean writing. That doesn't necessarily mean a singular part of writing.
That just means content creation within the company at all.
That also includes the Labs website, which is technically a separate thing from Labs,
but we're supporting the content of the Labs website.
And a lot of the ways that we do that is like this constant generation of articles and reviews
that we're doing, say, on the website.
In reality, do we really expect those articles to make enough money to be like this awesome
business within Linus Media Group?
Cop-Coff, look at what's happening to Anand. No, not really.
But by doing that, we're going to keep up to speed.
We're going to be in the dirt of what's happening with these components all the time.
So we ideally know what's going on or have at least a good idea of what's going on,
because we'll be trying things out of the time. Will we be able to catch everything?
No, but it should keep our level of educatedness on all of these topics up quite high.
That's the goal. And you know what? It's been slow, and we're not going to rush anything at this point.
So it's going to take... In some situations, we are slowing down.
Yeah. We're going to take as long as we need to take, and Godspeed.
Heck yeah.
All right. Topic two says our paper over there.
The Telegram CEO was arrested in France.
Pavel Dorov, the CEO of Telegram, arrested this week on suspicion of failing to act against
illicit actions on the service such as drug trafficking, fraud, and the exchange of child
sexual assault material. His arrest has caused a debate about free speech and government censorship with figures
such as...
Is this like your personal Voldemort now? No, but it's just so stupid.
With figures such as Elon Musk and Edward Snowden publicly defending Dorov as if Twitter
doesn't follow all of the rules with respect to backdoors and whatever else.
It's only some irrelevant market in South America that they'll go to bat against and
give it a rest. Anyway, Edward Snowden has at least some street cred here.
Dorov certainly seems to have a history of resisting government influence.
Now, he seems to actually have a history of it, not just a history of being a blowhard.
In 2006, he created the Facebook-like social media site now called VK in his native country
of Russia. It quickly became adopted by Russia's political opposition.
The Kremlin allegedly began pressuring Dorov to sell the site to more state sympathetic
parties in 2011. And when the Kremlin pressures you to do something, you either do it or you end up dead.
It's actually very different from the kind of bleeding about political censorship or
whatever else that happens from some people.
Dorov left Russia in 2014 claiming it was to avoid requests from the Kremlin to hand
over the data of Ukrainian protesters, though he did succumb to pressure and sell his VK
shares. To be clear, government censorship does happen here.
Yes. The bleeding or not. Yes.
It's just, yeah. It's very different from, hey, you should sell your shares, and then if you don't, then
you jump out of a window.
And shoot yourself in the back of the head at the same time.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Very crafty. All right.
While Telegram has a reputation for lax moderation, Dorov gave an interview to Financial
Times this March where he claimed Telegram planned to improve moderation within the year
using AI related mechanisms, though he stated he didn't think the app should police people
unless they cross red lines. It's not clear what those lines are to him.
This arrest has reignited the conversation on end to end encryption since Dorov was also
charged with providing encryption without the required declaration.
But Telegram's encryption is actually pretty bad, says our notes.
It's not on by default. The setting is not the easiest thing to find.
It only works for one-on-one conversations and can only be enabled when your conversation
partner is also online. Interesting.
Which I had to confess, I actually didn't know that.
I knew Signal was like the better one, but I actually didn't know these details.
So is it actually bad or are the settings just bad?
As I said, the encryption is bad, but is that true?
If it only works while your partner's online, it leaves a lot of room for error.
It can only be enabled when the partner is online. It's also online, yeah.
I'm assuming you turn it on and then it's on for that conversation. Yeah, that's, to me, that's a really poor mechanism for encryption.
If I am using an app that I think is encrypted, I... Yeah, but that doesn't mean that the encryption itself is bad.
No, no, no, I'm not saying AES whatever, like the actual encryption.
I'm saying the implementation of the encryption in the app leaves a lot of room for user error.
Is that a better way of phrasing it? Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just think saying the encryption is bad is rough.
I'm trying to see, is this the one that I use? I always get them mixed up.
The Wiley in Floatplane chat says, I've also seen some academic analyses
that their crypto design is questionable at best. Okay, yeah.
I'm not even saying it's not legit. I just, I don't know.
Because it's hand-rolled implementation instead of using a standard, well-tested one.
Yeah, there's a number of people that are talking in Floatplane chat
about how it's got issues, apparently.
Not where at least could have issues.
So, Luke. Yes.
I'm trying to figure out, okay, whatever. An interesting take that I read on this.
I believe this was an article somewhere I was reading.
I forget. The point is, they basically were like, okay, here's a devil's advocate sort of take on
this. You know, I signed up for Telegram. I joined some groups and within minutes, I had offers for everything from drugs to human
trafficking to government, state-sponsored, subterfuge.
It was absolutely wild how Telegram was essentially, should you choose to unlock that capability,
which is very simple to do, was basically a black market, essentially.
That's one perspective where if you were to go, okay, he's in trouble for, you know,
what, providing people with encrypted communication. That sounds pretty bad.
Or he is in trouble for essentially running a black market social network.
I have a complicated position on this, but I thought maybe I'd let you go first.
What are your thoughts? I don't know.
Government-enforced platform moderation is always kind of a weird thing. State-sponsored subterfuge, not centrifuge.
Did you say centrifuge? No. Oh.
Who said centrifuge? Someone in the chat. That's a Stuxnet, right?
That's pretty good.
Or uranium, what?
Sorry. I liked Dan's comment. Yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, state-required moderation of platforms is weird.
It goes both ways, right? It's the same thing as the opposite.
State-required non-moderation of platforms is also weird, in my opinion.
When people say, rah-rah, but my free speech, it's like, sure, but this isn't government
property, or public property, or anything of the sort.
This is my random website. We also have to be super careful with free speech, because free speech means free of
government oppression. It doesn't mean anything to do with a private entity that owns a platform.
So that's kind of weird in one side, but then the government forcing it is also weird.
Because again, it's my platform, isn't it? So that's odd.
If they make certain things, I don't know.
But there has to be some oversight, right? Because you can't say, because you can't harbor whatever, being an accessory to a crime,
or whatever. If I'm a government, and I tell you, look, you're not allowed to log anything from minors,
or even suspected minors. So I do support that.
I would support that. It's a nuanced conversation, but I don't think there's any avoiding that, for me, I support
the existence of a platform like this, even if I wouldn't run it.
It's scary when there are no tools to not be observed by the government, because we
have seen so many times throughout history that just not go well.
But the thing is that they're also... But then you also don't want to harbor all this bad stuff.
There should be an expectation of privacy. I mean, when you sent a letter in the year 1823, or whatever, the expectation was that
it is illegal to read it. I don't care who you are, you are not allowed to open it.
That's not how that works. And that's basically all that Telegram is, that's all it is, is it's an implicitly telegrammed
message to someone that is intended for their eyes and their eyes only.
And so, you know, I look at this and I go... So if a platform wants to do that, it's hard for me to say that they shouldn't be able
to... If they're chat enough to stand up to the regimes that would oppress people for communicating
about things that aren't human trafficking, that are just living their lives and existing
and that aren't bothering anybody, like freedom of expression, freedom of religion, whatever
the case may be, then that's great.
Like you go, girl. That's the weird thing. Like tools, screwdriver here, you could stab someone with it.
You can use a hammer for bad things. This is an argument that works for so many things.
Something that can absolutely be used for good, can very often also be used for bad
things, but I don't know.
You put yourself in a really bad spot if you remove these things that can be used for good
because they can also be used for bad. You lose out on incredibly important things.
I mean, we talked about this in our recent hacking tools, where it's like, what?
If you get rid of the hammers? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Good point. It's the hammer argument. Yeah, but with the hacking tools, if you ban all the hacking tools, then people aren't
going to know how secure their things are as easily and also the people that have the
ability to just make them anyways because some of them aren't inherently that complicated
or now that the plans for making them are online, if you're crafty, you can make maybe
a not quite as good version, but you can make your own version anyways.
They're still going to exist, and now it's just harder for good people to get their hands
on it. But with all of that said, I couldn't look in the eye of a trafficking victim who had
escaped and tell them... Which is why we didn't make our own VPN.
...and tell them, I'm going to keep running this platform.
I don't have it in me.
Which is why we... We don't do that. Honestly, for me, it's the same logic.
Forget her name. She's super private. Hold on.
What's her name? No, no, no, no, no.
I can't remember. There's someone who works on another privacy platform and she's super cool.
She did an interview recently. She doesn't do that many of them, but basically, she was like, yeah, this is really important.
Dang it. Anyway, well, whatever, her whole being private thing worked then.
Anyway, yeah, the point is, yeah, for me, it's really important.
I support end-to-end encryption.
Me too.
I think there's room for conversations around what that implementation looks like.
Should we be allowed to have an end-to-end encrypted, very large group chat, for example,
where you could organize an attack or something like that.
It's like, oh, yeah, maybe that would be bad. But then the flip side of that is, okay, the government has...
Oh, okay, this is great. The government has declared that what's his nuts won the election, even though there's
pretty significant evidence that he actually didn't and people need to organize so that
they can gather so they can resist.
That's why these platforms need to exist. The only problem... What if a place is under attack and you're trying to evacuate as many people as you possibly
can and communications are being monitored so they can create choke points and you want
to avoid that. There's lots of super legitimate reasons as to why you would want these tools.
The problem is that they don't move at the speed of a telegram anymore.
They move so fast that they're hard for enforcement to stay on top of.
They're hard to deal with and there's really bad stuff happening.
It's not like this stuff isn't going to happen, even if you take telegram away.
These tools are so powerful now. They can happen so fast.
No, I know. Money moves around in shadows just so much more easily than it used to.
I don't even want to name them because I don't want to... I'm going to anyway, so get rekt.
I feel like they actually... They don't cater to this stuff a ton, but it still happens on their platform anyways,
but Discord, practically everyone has it these days and you can set up a server and invite
2,000 people to it instantly and it all works instantly.
And there's no like personally identifying information to create an account.
You can create a complete throwaway account knowing it's going to be banned in two days
and not care and then just... Yeah, whether it's encrypted or not, people are just going to be...
And I, oh man, again, I was reading some article about this or other.
And apparently there's just all kinds of like shorthands for discussing illicit material.
I'm sure there is. As a person who doesn't get into that, I could read a conversation and I could have no idea
that it's even about that. Well, that was a whole thing.
I did not follow this enough, okay? And this is probably...
I'm going to... This is going to open a can of worms. I just remember a lot of the whole keyword thing that you're talking about being a part
of this conversation, but the whole pizza gate thing.
Yeah. You've done hot dogs and do you want lunch and all this other type of stuff where it
all means something else. It's like, okay, these sound like completely normal conversations, but like, yeah, I don't
know.
Russell Mania says, yeah, uh, crimeers use code words.
I love that he called them crimeers. I read it too. Me too.
Me too. That's great. Thank you for that.
Okay, we're not talking about the pizza gate conspiracy theory around the like one pizza restaurant.
No. Just the terminology. Didn't even want to bring it up.
I just remember there was a lot of conversations at that time about code words.
That's all. Someone said, Discord needs to moderate their platform better.
Do you have any concept at all of how genuinely insane that would be?
It'd be impossible. Like what a crazy task.
If we want moderated Discord on the level that you're talking about, I hope you're ready
to pay 15 bucks a month like or more.
Yeah. That's the thing. Like these services are only viable as long as they're financially viable, right?
Like you can't just say, oh, well they need to, okay, with what army, right?
Like it, it can't even just be, it can't even just be randoms.
Like these people would need training. They'd need criminal record checks.
You know, they would need, the whole thing would have to be monitored and overseen.
Who does it, right? Comments said, or pay per server, lol, yeah, except Discord killed all of those.
Yeah. Ventrilo and TeamSpeak and all those services are gone, basically.
I know I technically still use TeamSpeak. Some of them, like the TeamSpeak technically exists, but like, come on, it is not the same
thing. Like they killed them all was, was Discord because the servers are free.
So. But you know what you do know?
How to send a merch message. But if you don't know, don't send a Twitch bit, don't send a Super Chat.
If you want to interact with the show like this, like Tara O down here, all you had to
do is send a merch message. Go to LTTstore.com, throw something in your cart, we'll have a couple of suggestions for
you in a minute. We've got some stuff to talk about. Throw something in your cart and you'll be prompted to send a merch message.
You'll get a reply from Dan, okay, which may or may not be useful, depending on what
kind of a mood he's having. It was warranted, they're always warranted.
Or he'll forward it internally, or he will curate it for me and Luke.
So we'll show you guys how some curated merch messages might look.
And then we'll give you guys kind of the update for what's going on on the store.
Hit me, Dan. Sure thing.
Let's see what we've got here. Hello, Dan, Luke, and random beardless blonde dude.
Linus, if when you retire from YouTube would you still do the WAN Show?
You guys are a big part of my weekly routine, I would hate to see you go.
Don't freak out. But Luke and I have had this conversation very recently.
And I think we more or less agreed on, yeah, the show must go on, the WAN Show specifically.
I mean, it's one of those things where it's kind of a no-brainer because there's no
way that Luke and I are going to stop reading tech news.
It's not really that much work for us to take the Discord chats that we might have throughout
the week and just not do that.
And then point a camera at, you know, when we get together and chat.
It's in a time slot that doesn't really interfere with people who don't have a life.
As lame as that is, yeah. It has very rarely been a problem for me.
Yeah. There's that Katy Perry song. No idea what she's talking about.
Yeah, we sat at a table top. Yeah, we talked about some tech.
Oh, my goodness.
And to be clear, we still got a mission, right?
Having Luke taking a close look at what's going on with the Labs has been really refreshing.
It's really exciting because we've got a lot of work to do.
Looking at the path forward for the channels, the various channels here, it's been really
nice to see LTT on the upswing again.
And this is in spite of how difficult it is to make tech interesting.
But damn it, that's what we do. That's what we do. You guys are figuring it out.
There's been some real bangers. That's what we do really, really well.
We've got a great team. The sentiment around scrapyard wars is insane.
Yeah, that was a lot of fun. Things are getting to the point where you can kind of get into things affordably again,
maybe a little bit, as long as you've got a little bit of, you know, scrapyard war spirit
and you're willing to get in there and learn some stuff, which is, dang it, that's our
wheelhouse, right? So, man, I'm excited.
I'm actually optimistic more so than I've been in a while to be perfectly honest with
you guys, right? Like, if you look at how the last 365 days have gone for the channel, you know, we were
in a pretty rough state last September.
It wasn't good. And you know, we'd have a banger or two here.
We'd have a couple good uploads. And then it's been this kind of this pattern of like, yeah, we like recover for a bit.
And then it's like, it's like we've been swimming against the current for a long, long time.
But then you look at what happens here in July, and I mean, even this low point here
is not nearly what we were looking at back there, right? So you look at this low point in July and you go kind of like, oh, things are on the
up and up, you know, finally, we're pulling it together.
We're figuring out, you know, what is the new meta?
What are people looking for?
What is the mix that we need of reviews of things that people need to know about?
Like, you know, Snapdragon X or like, okay, yeah, here's one that didn't perform particularly
well, AMD's new mobile chips versus, you know, what are the what are the content styles that
are going to appeal more broadly? Like this one, this one's a really good example where it didn't necessarily start out doing
too great. Honestly, like if you look, it's at the low end of what are of what are typical ranges
for video performance. And it just keeps going up, but we figured out how to do this more often, how to find
stuff that achieves, I call this like escape velocity, right, where where we're finding
ways to make content that appeals algorithmically to the YouTube audience in a way that we were
struggling with for a while. So I'm, I'm actually, I'm really optimistic because we're going to be able to do that
better with more foundational testing, and we're going to be able to afford to build
foundational testing as long as we can continue to do that better as we go.
And you know, sometimes the content that we're uploading these days has been a little controversial.
I mean, that stock Android one definitely ruffled some feathers, but I don't think my
thing has ever been having the same opinion as everybody else.
No, and I'm, I've been tired of that for, I feel like it's been like two or maybe even
three years where for some reason, people in the tech space have been obsessed with
all the reviewers saying the same thing. And if they don't, it's like a huge problem.
That's just rough. I'm not going to do it.
No, good. Like, yeah, that's not good.
And you know what the funny thing is in time, a lot of the time the discourse kind of comes
around to my position. Do you remember what a firestorm it set off when I said that ad block was piracy?
Is that coming around? Yeah. Really? Oh, yeah.
It's dude, watching the, when I said that, it was like, it was like I had dropped a nuclear
bomb on my career, essentially. Like you wouldn't believe how, and some people are still super mad about it.
It's weird when I see the community wholeheartedly embrace piracy and then you say this one thing
is piracy and they're like, no, it isn't. It's like, wait, what?
I never said don't do it. I never said don't be able to sleep at night.
Are you all trading Linux ISOs on your Plex servers? What are you even talking about?
Like we meme on this stuff all the time. Yeah. Relax, bro.
Yeah. And it's the same thing. It's the same thing with warranty gate.
Yeah. All I said was it's only worth the paper it's printed on.
The value of a warranty is solely the value of the company's willingness to fulfill it.
I will say, I still think, OK. So I messaged it terribly.
Yeah. I messaged it terribly.
It was wrapped in like the worst packaging you could ever imagine.
But the underlying, I don't disagree with the underlying statement.
Well, you know what it was, Luke? Well, I was thinking back to a conversation that I'd actually had with another content
creator who knows who they are.
I'm not going to name this content creator. Sure. But it was a conversation that I had with another content creator where I was talking
about what the contingency plan was in the event of mine and Yvonne's passing
and how the company could continue to operate. And they basically said to me, well, my company is specifically set up with a poison pill clause.
So the second I drop dead, everything's gone. Everyone loses their jobs.
The brand can't continue because it could reflect on me post-humously.
And no one has any warranty. And I was like, that's pretty f***ed up with sort of my response to that.
And this is a content creator again. They know who they are.
And I was like, nobody has any. OK, because they sell products.
You're an actual f***ing a**hole, essentially, right?
Because the level of narcissism on display was sort of mind-boggling to me.
Because of the just the whole thing or the warranties not understanding.
OK, all of it. The fact that everyone is just like instantly out of a job because
because this thing couldn't possibly be good without you.
Like, do you have do you have any concerns?
Does it smell bad living inside your own rectum? Like, honestly, though, do you have is that a concern for you at all?
Like, and I know you're mad at this thing. Hold on, hold on.
So that was where I was coming from when I said that super weird thing
about how whatever we put together should be something that can outlast
because I remember whatever it should be something that is structured
correctly, such that it could be maintained in the event that it wasn't
just down to me saying, trust me, bro, and making sure that
whether it makes financial sense or not, we just take care of it.
That was what I said. But it was super weird the way that I explained it.
And it got twisted by people who know who they are.
And I think you probably should have just wrote down a warranty anyways.
But well, probably. But we also hadn't not written one down. The product wasn't launched yet.
The product wasn't launched. That was the craziest thing for me.
I said it's like one. I think it was it was it was kind of weird, like refusing to write one.
Look, but then it was also really weird how much feedback there was
when the thing wasn't even out. We had the integrity to not take people's money to what?
OK, here's a counter. No, we could have pre sold the crap out of those products.
OK, we wouldn't take people's money because we didn't want them to have
uncertainty about it because we wanted them to have third party feedback
on it before we were willing to take their money. Luke, did we do the pop up before the warranty?
No, I don't remember. No, we didn't. OK.
I thought we did. I don't remember. No. OK.
The whole thing was absolutely unhinged.
And it's really funny now because in every conversation around people
like talking about our customer service, you see people that are like,
like Linus said, like, yeah, I saw one recently. It was some of the zipper, like peeled off a backpack or something.
Yeah. Oh, my goodness.
And like, I definitely have thoughts about that. Like, from a sustainability standpoint, I would rather see people
like go get that patch and I'd rather give people like a small,
you know, credit for that or something than send a whole new backpack.
But we stand behind the product and I believe that person was offered a new backpack.
Would that be a cool option? There's a there's a lot of work some way.
There's a lot of work involved because. Yeah, really difficult.
Yeah, like, it's not like we're it's not like we're a huge multinational brand
and we can have like a backpack service center in every major city or whatever.
But yeah, I mean, there's definitely.
There's definitely, you know, things about that that I personally I personally
I wouldn't submit a warranty request for that.
But. Personally, I I would stand behind our product.
Right. So sorry, I was looking at.
Yeah, give me one second. Sorry.
Yeah, this is clean. I was looking at the subreddit.
Someone posted that during the show.
Oh, man, sometimes going through the reddit is a terrifying experience
and sometimes it's just hilarious that people got some screenshot.
I think it was from Scrappyard Wars or something. And they they remade the like Drake meme where it's like, no.
We're like, yeah, that's so funny. I've been enjoying those.
I don't know. It's great. Ski of ghosts asks, what about those who were unable to claim back
the twenty five dollars you promised only on buying a single new product?
We offered them a full refund. At the end of the day, my liability to you is absolutely
not more than the cost you spent on the product. If you weren't happy with the twenty five dollar credit.
We offered a refund. That's it. At that point, we have done all that we can do.
I'm not going to give you a back massage. Like I said, I said, I said, trust me, bro, not take advantage of me, bro.
Yeah. Oh, that's only said to me.
I'm not on the show.
We've talked about this.
Anyways, what about front massage says that's a nice hat?
Oh, man. Should we go through our announcements? We've got. Yeah, yeah, we've got.
Wait, well, no, we're supposed to do a couple of merch messages. We did we did one message.
I want to kind of change up the format a bit. If we do one message, you read all your announcements,
and then we'll do another one and then we'll move on. Oh, nice. Look at this guy being a producer.
You know, he's had the title for a long time, but that that was some
does produce that was some no, that was some next level producing.
That was he just produced the out of us. That's I feel produced.
We need like a logo in the corner of his webcam.
It's like S.S.S. Plus. I'm going to produce a resignation.
No, I don't accept it. He just said we're doing Wancho forever.
Yes, so like you're stuck. Yeah, well, we wouldn't be working together.
Technically, we would still be doing Wancho the street.
Dude, this street is going to be longer than my underwear. OK, the street can never.
You still wear underwear. It smells better, too.
My goodness. Wow, man.
Now it's my right, right, right. So we've got some announcements speaking of pop ups.
Yeah, we're hosting a pop up event speaking of not being willing to take
people's money for unproven products, although honestly, our engineering team
and our fashion team are getting good enough that I I might be willing to start
relaxing that now. Probably fine. I think it's time for us to just treat our our product design capabilities
as like we're actually like pretty good at this at this point.
Anyway, I do agree. But the pop ups are also kind of fun.
Pop ups are kind of fun. So so we're doing another pop up makes sense sometimes on Saturday, September
7th, we are going to be doing a pop up where we will be launching
slash making available our brand new LTT precision multi bit screwdriver
and bit kit. And if you come to the pop up, you'll be able to purchase one of 500 numbered
precision screwdrivers as well.
Are they numbered on them or where's the number? It's a lasered onto them.
Well, not these ones, because these aren't part of it. It can't be numbered if you have extra ones to show on the WAN Show.
Totally. When we number something, we number it.
Actually, oh man. OK, sorry. I'm in this derailment.
Luke and I, Luke and I, Nick and I had a conversation recently.
We found a bunch of those Lambo beanies.
Do you remember the 69 only Lambo beanies?
And I didn't know what to do. We found apparently for minimum order quantity purposes, we ordered more than
69 of them also to have warranty and et cetera, et cetera, because we said
we would only sell 69 of them, but I hate waste.
So the conversation, what Nick wanted to do was do like a promo on WAN Show
or something like that. And I basically was like, if we say there's only this many, there can only
be this many, but our options are either to what?
Sell them, hold on to them forever.
They don't want to do that. Or throw them away. And you don't want to burn them.
Which I don't want to do. Like the fashion company.
Is it OK to give them away? The chat says it's OK to give them away.
I think giving them away is OK. So the numbered ones can be the ones we sold, but we could still give them away.
Is that OK? Gauntlet Wizard said give them away in a promo.
That I don't necessarily know. It would have to be a genuine giveaway.
So we can we can profit from more than just money.
Like that's something that you guys got to consider. Just because I turn off the AdSense on my video, for example,
that doesn't mean that I didn't benefit. That I didn't profit.
That there isn't that there isn't a net benefit to me of uploading that video.
Let's say if it's something that's going to get a lot of views. It's it's not that black and white.
The world is about more than just money, right? So if I use it for a promo, I am absolutely profiting,
even if it's not directly financially.
Most people seem to think it's pretty cool to give them away.
So how many are there? It's like 40 or something.
Like I like maybe we had to order a couple hundred or I don't know,
or like 150, I don't know exactly them. Don't don't quote me on the number.
It's less. It's way less than a thousand. It's more than 10. Let me ask the audience this because I feel like they're the most likely
to lean in one direction, but I feel one thing that I suspect
will be opposite to the audience. So I want to check with them just to counter my bias.
Is it better to give it away internally or externally?
Because if you give it away externally, then you're not selling it. You're there's actually a lot less benefit.
I think we should give it away externally then, but it's not always easy.
Giving stuff away is not always easy. Like people don't need the whole fast fashion movement.
Chats mostly saying internally.
It's kind of both sides. Yeah, that's a company benefit. That's a perk now that we've provided.
So in terms of like, are we getting something out of it? We actually kind of are.
Yeah, whereas if we give it away externally and do it quietly
so that nobody knows about it, then it's the least benefit to the company.
Interesting. It's a zero benefit. So this is this is really important.
Gauntlet Wizard says you're also profiting on any charity events by that logic.
Yeah, yeah. That's like the whole billionaire playbook.
Why do you think any of them charity anything? I made a billion dollars and suddenly I am now philanthropist.
That there's also like it's a whole it's a whole it's a whole rabbit hole.
It's not even just the reputational management of charity stuff.
There's a whole it's a whole thing. But that's that's that's one of the reasons we don't really talk about stuff much.
Although there is something that we get to talk about this week because the thing that precipitated the donation was a very public event.
We ended up raising twenty thousand dollars
on to be clear for the people for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Oh, nice. Twenty thousand dollars with that got fish shirt.
So thank you guys very much. That was the full profits from that shirt.
Very exciting. What what is what am I looking at here?
Is this like a oh, OK, whatever. So here's a here's a thing about the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
There you go. You can learn about them there. Cool. I'll pause the video or whatever.
So that that's pretty exciting. But yeah, that's that's the only way to do it is to donate something
and not talk about it at all.
And to be clear, that doesn't mean that creators doing charity streams
and stuff like that are like bad or like specifically doing it for profit.
But there is a benefit to it. It's not it's not benefitless.
It's it's less beneficial than them just doing like a a subathon
or a donate to me drive in of some form.
They are still giving that money to charity. Charity is still benefiting from it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But it's not benefitless. Navy MT says, can you donate it to to a developing country?
Actually, that whole thing is a big problem. So back to what I was saying about fast fashion,
there is now an excess of secondhand clothing
because people just buy stuff, wear it a couple of times, and it's so cheap.
They just, oh, yeah, well, I'll donate it. And then like, I don't have to feel bad about the massive
amount of raw materials and labor that goes into these products
that I'm consuming and then using a couple of times.
Like we I feel like there's been a huge mentality shift.
Like when people would talk about people would talk about
never wearing the same pair of underwear as like a completely unhinged
out of touch, you know, behavior, we would laugh about it and joke about it.
But but now it really does seem like people will will wear a shirt
a few times and be like out of style now.
I'll just pick up something new on Team U or it's so cheap
and manufactured so poorly that it might be like somewhat destroyed by the third wear.
The logo is all racked or not logo,
but the thing on it is all racked or whatever else. And so back to donating to other countries.
It's actually not necessarily a net benefit,
because what it can do is it can destroy the local market for those products,
destroying the companies that produce them, making them forever dependent, creating this cycle of dependency
on like Team U garbage that gets shipped across one ocean,
worn a couple of times and then handled a bunch of times
and then shipped across another freaking ocean. Like the whole thing is so so inefficient.
I'm not saying we won't donate them. If anything, I think that's clearly the position I'm advocating for here
is that we we give them away externally.
But what I am saying is that it's not that black and white. It ain't that simple.
Yeah. Yep.
Yeah, four com five says, go feed your local ducks, then stop.
The thing that happens next isn't nice.
OK, let's go back to talking about our pop up shop, shall we?
Linus Cam, here it is. How did we?
Don't worry about it. OK. So we'll have some other popular items from LTT Store.com,
including our recently launched offsite laptop bag and
should we talk about the product a little bit? Are we are we going to talk about this at all? So there's a few things that make the new precision driver really exciting.
You guys can sign up for a notification. We're going to have that link down below right down.
People can get a notification. Yeah, I believe it's down there. I will double check them.
So there's a few things that I really love about this kit. Number one is the driver itself.
Super, super high quality machined aluminum. Nice, strong magnet in the end.
That's just kind of going to be if we're going to have a staple for our screwdriver products, that's going to be it.
We've got in handle bit storage. I can hold three of our precision bits, which use the standard shank size
and are actually the standard length. But with a twist, I'll talk about that in a minute.
Speaking of twisting, it's got a high quality bearing on the top
that will spin for anywhere from, let's say, you know what?
I don't want to promise too much. Let's say anywhere from 20 seconds to we've had them spinning
for darn near a minute, depending on how you get them going.
It's going to be. Yeah, there's a lot of there's a bit of finesse to it. There's there's some variants in the bearings.
There's a lot of stuff going on. We're going to have accessories, including different tops.
So you can have a concave top if you like the finger hold. We're going to have a convex top if you like to palm it.
And then by default, it's going to ship with the flat top, but you'll be able to get top kits.
And who knows what kinds of tops we might have available
for it in the future. That's the driver itself. Then there's the kit.
Super high quality case comes with a detachable top that you can use as a parts
tray includes a sheet magnet inside, along with little organizer spaces
for the stuff that you're taking out of it. There you go. There's one of our bits in there.
And OK, that is probably the worst bit you could have possibly put
on to there for my next point. Our bits are also pretty exciting, even though they are the same length
that you would find from, well, let's say, you know, other bit
other bit manufacturers that we respect a lot. One of the things that we changed was the depth of the
the the hex portion. So you can see it drops into our driver there.
And she's a little she's a little longer in the skinny part.
One of the issues that I've had with many of the precision drivers
that I've used in the past is that they aren't deep enough to reach
into, in some cases, like almost anything, depending on the bits.
So we're really excited for these to be not super deep.
I mean, they're still not a fixed shaft screwdriver. You know, you're going to need a fixed shaft screwdriver sometimes
and we're working on solutions for that. But they are a little bit deeper, making the multi bit a little bit more usable.
And I guess that's all I have to say about that.
Is there any other like major points that I missed here? Anodized aluminum end cap is interchangeable hybrid
sinette ceramic hybrid bearing incredibly strong magnet.
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, oh, yeah. Right. The driver will be available by itself.
If you already have an iFixit kit, we love iFixit.
They're a great partner. We love their mission. We're not we're not trying to replace iFixit.
We certainly never will. I was just going to say, no, like all the replacement parts, all the guides.
But we were real passionate about screwdrivers.
Really high end tools. And we really love this thing. Comes with 61 different bits, standard Phillips, specialized
bits for game consoles, all kinds of different ones. And I think that's pretty much all I have to say about that for right now.
So I said, what time is the pop up? Oh, right. OK, so it'll be next Saturday, September 7th from 10 a.m.
to 2 p.m. at the Linus Media Group Studio in Surrey.
Wait, is that the studio or the lab? Yeah, I was told studio. Studio. OK, so it'll be at the studio.
Now, this might be kind of exciting or whatever.
But do not travel far for this event.
Why we didn't give you very much notice. This will not be like LTX or Whalen.
We will have some testing stations for you to like try out the product.
You'll have you'll have an opportunity to talk to some of our design
and engineering folks about how we develop our tools and products.
There might be a few other things, but don't don't travel.
We literally don't have enough capacity for a ton of people to be here.
And everyone's just going to have a bad time if people are trekking
out here from like wherever a stand, so please don't.
Yeah. OK. Cool.
Oh, right. There's a couple of other things for the store. Scribe drivers, the pen are now available to order again.
If you missed out on the last two drops or you're looking to buy more,
you can secure yours on backorder at LMG.GG slash pen.
So that's a good candidate if you guys want to send a merge message today. I still haven't even been able to get one.
You don't have one yet? No. Oh, get wrecked, scrub. I tried to buy them in the last wave and I couldn't get it fast enough.
I want to like. Do you want me to put a request in for you? No, it's fine. It's fine.
Well, OK, this is not a rule, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I don't like putting in merge requests when customers can't get them.
So if the thing is perpetually sold out, it's very noble of you. Plouffe literally took a small break
from the shoot that we were doing together, sat on his laptop, ordered one
and then came back and I was like, what were you doing? He's like ordering a scribe driver. I was like, really?
Yeah, so I want it to like
be able to exist on the store for more than, you know, a couple days.
And then I'll try to get one. I mean, you got keys in your head of Instructure.
You could just turn off the cameras in 107 and just go go grab a handful.
That's really smart. You can't joke about that. That's really smart. You can't even joke about that.
It's just he's a smart guy. Yeah, it's not like there's like massive amounts of logs
and all of us get emails all the time. If anybody would try to do something like that.
Yeah, it would be pretty obvious. Yeah.
OK, last couple things. People in full-blank channel, like, grab me one.
I mean, you could just do it without. I got you, fam.
Oh, man. Last announcement is we are resuming our sponsor partnership with ASUS.
We stopped working with them on January 5th of this year due to issues
that we were seeing through our community feedback team or through
our community feedback mechanisms on the forum.
I got, oh, oh, look at this ASUS timeline. What is this?
Oh, wow. Colton put together a little document for me.
So in 2022, late 2022, we saw the first ASUS complaints on the forum
and second quarter of 2023.
We saw a detailed post about someone having issues with ASUS support
followed shortly by some more issues and an influx of complaints regarding ASUS
like GPU mobos with display issues in early May of that year.
We told ASUS that if we didn't see improvements or if they didn't do anything to address complaints, we'd have to consider pausing partnership.
So that was within a month of this sort of influx of complaints.
In May of 2020, what year are we in 2023 on the WAN Show, I said that ASUS was in the doghouse
and that we were in talks about shoring up customer support with them.
There's also a call to action in the segment, encouraging people to go to the forum
with their complaints. In August, we, let's see, hold on.
We reiterate, we're showing the complaints, the process takes time. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. In August, we posted regarding the large amount of complaints
that we'd been receiving since early May. We reiterate we're sharing the complaints in September.
We were told that ASUS had an action plan coming for how they wanted to change their processes.
We share with the forum that this is coming. In December, we went through the entire forum history and compiled a list of all
sponsor complaints from 34 different users and sent this to ASUS.
We flagged the ones that were valid complaints that needed resolutions ASAP
in also in December, we had a call with ASUS to go over each issue one by one and share
what we thought the resolutions should look like. In mid-December, we posted our weekly forum update.
In January, we announced that ASUS would no longer be a sponsor of LTT.
In March, we made a threat on the forum to assist with people needing RMAs.
It's still pinned. In April, we worked with ASUS to audit people's issues.
We realized a few were still outstanding. So this is in 2024 now.
In June, Colton and I actually met with ASUS's CEO.
I don't think we've ever addressed this publicly,
but we sat down directly face-to-face with their CEO.
I laid out what I needed to see happening with the ongoing issue with the SD card
in the ROG Ally. I laid out what I needed to see happen because this was around the launch of the Ally X.
I laid out what, philosophically, I felt was an underlying problem at ASUS.
I spoke to some of the issues that I could see, that I could have empathy with.
What I saw from speaking with him was someone who was told,
yes, sir, yes, sir, when things weren't getting done.
And I told him I can empathize with that.
I felt that what they needed was an improvement in upward communication,
an ability for people to raise these issues in a way that would make it,
so that he wasn't blindsided by it. Because it's one of those things where you can bash someone for what went wrong,
but I don't feel that that's actually the most effective way to enact change.
I think it's far more important to empathize with them and to try to figure out
what went wrong, because it was clear to me from speaking with him
that he didn't want ASUS to suck at all.
He wanted it to be great. And so I was like, okay, well, here's an issue.
One of the other things that I outlined as being very important was I felt that ASUS
still had a very 2000s mentality sometimes.
Fix it with a revision was something that I told him that I felt ASUS had
embraced for a lot of its history. And that was a big part of ASUS's success for a long time, was to move fast and break things.
And I was like, look, you guys are a grown-up company now.
And I think that's something that needs to change. He seemed extremely receptive to everything that we talked about.
So far, we have actually seen very little in the way of overall activity around ASUS support issues.
One of the ones that I saw, the person was outraged because there was a credit card hold
for an Advanced RMA. That's standard practice.
There's a credit card hold when you get an Advanced RMA. So Advanced RMA is when they send you the new product.
They're waiting to receive it. And then they're waiting to receive the old broken one back,
and then they take the hold off the credit card. That is completely normal and you need to chill.
In fact, offering Advanced RMA at all is really good. I love Advanced RMA because then I don't have to have downtime if something's kind of working.
So we felt really good about that.
Things seem to be going OK. And if anyone needs help finding the correct channels of support from ASUS,
we still do have a topic here. So you guys can check this out.
I'm going to post this in the Floatplane chat. Maybe Dan, if you can chuck that in some of the other chats.
But we think we've seen enough that we're ready to work with them again.
But nothing's permanent, right?
We have begun and ended relationships with industry giants time and time and time again.
I mean, NVIDIA is a hilarious one, right?
Because they went from working together to not working together for a long time
to working together extremely closely to not working together for two years.
Because we called them out to working together with them again.
We're working with them now. We don't agree with everything they do, but you're not going to get a lot done from the outside.
People leave, mentalities change, mentalities shift.
I mean, I do think that NVIDIA has a bit of a chip on their shoulder from the top down.
I mean, I would not criticize Jensen's business acumen.
When you have to ask that nice of an oven, you've got to be a shark to some degree.
Or as knowledge, everyone I've ever spoken to from NVIDIA is like the scariest thing about Jensen
is that he thinks he can do your job better than you can. And he probably can.
And he's right. He'll walk in in like two seconds and solve something that you've been spending a week on.
And it's like, that'd be terrifying.
You know that kind of pressure. But it's very clear that NVIDIA is out for NVIDIA first.
That's all we'll say about that.
So anyway. I've got some questions about the screwdriver really quick.
That is, what is the cost of things?
What is the cost of the screwdriver itself? What is the cost of the case with the bits and all that kind of stuff?
And what is the cost of the combo kit? Do we know any of that? Look at this face.
You don't know any of that? Does this look like a face that knows? No.
Okay. All right. I actually don't know. Can we figure that out?
Because I think it there, it's public info, isn't it? At least for the screwdriver itself?
It is 8.13. Everybody's gone. I'm not messaging anybody right now.
All right. Yeah. I could call Nick, but I don't need to call Nick for that.
I'm sure you will figure it out. You'll figure it out. I mean, when it's out, you'll know.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'm not going to bother someone if it just doesn't matter that much.
Okay. Nick's going to call in three.
No, my phone might be dead actually. No, no, no. It's still got 2%. Got a lot of Teams messages.
Oh, no, I'm kidding. Do you want to do another merge message before we move on?
I think we're supposed to, right? Additional topics 10 minutes ago? Was that all the announcements?
There was a lot of them this week. I got to make sure that you get through them all,
or we get hit. We get assaulted.
We did the pop-up event? Yeah, yeah, we're good. We're good.
Okay. We got to be sure. Calm down, boys.
They'll beat us with sticks. They will not beat us with sticks.
They come out of the quarterly budget as they break us on us.
Oh, my God. They're going to find you, bro.
You didn't use up your stick budget this quarter?
We're going to take it out of the fiscal report. You know, if we bought higher quality sticks,
then they wouldn't break as much. No, you know the prices of sticks?
Okay, let's see. They don't grow on trees.
Yep, that was my entire contribution to that bit, and I ruined it.
I 100% ruined it. You did, too. Avon Fox branch manager.
Okay, let's see.
I can't even pick now.
Hello, Wancho. How did the video game auctions go? David had an impressive collection.
Oh, I didn't ask him. Yeah, I don't know. I meant to ask him.
Hopefully good. Probably good.
Can we see? Okay, that I'm not too bothered about just like asking someone.
Okay, I'll ask him. I'll ask him. I'll see if I hear back. Okay.
Should I do another topic? Are you just calling him? Yeah, give us one more, Dan.
Sure, sure, sure. Let's see.
What piece of tech has the best value? We've seen all the unique builds in your house,
but what do you value the most?
You value the most? Value is tough because like, okay, I was actually just talking to Avon today.
We were at the waterslides and she was like,
are you going to leave your phone at the little tent site slash blanket area?
I was like, yeah, I don't know. She's like, are you going to cover it up? I'm like, sure, I'll kick it under a blanket.
And I was telling her, I actually love having a piece of crap phone
that I don't have to care about. Yeah. This thing doesn't matter to me at all.
I value that. Oh yeah, absolutely. So like, what does value mean?
Because you clearly said it's not money. This is a mildly controversial part of the reason why I don't want a new car.
Because it's broken in. It's got the first scratch, the 10th scratch, 100th scratch.
If something is more scratch than car. I'll be sad if it like stops working,
but I'm not going to say that. It stops working, but I'll just take it to a mechanic.
If someone like bumps it, I don't know, I'll probably get it fixed.
Like, I'm not super where it's a Honda effectively. There's, I'm sure there's parts and they're probably not that expensive.
Yeah. Like whatever. It'll be fine. Yeah. That's a very comfortable.
Luke's a bad driver. I've never once been an accident in my life. Shut up.
No, no, that's not the point. Like a scratch from like, okay, hold on.
I'm going to try and think of some of the hilarious. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Yeah, lean on it. No, I'm trying to think of some of the hilarious stuff. You've had taking up the entire backseat of your car when I've gone to put my backpack in it.
Okay. No, no, he had a good reason. No, no, he had this computer tower that had this like machined part that Jake made him
in like high school or something. It was back there for weeks.
Months. Months.
There was a water leak in my storage unit in my apartment. So I effectively didn't have storage.
So my car just like became storage right. It's solved now. So it's gone now.
My car is empty now. Really? Yeah. I need a ride tonight.
So I'm going to find out just how empty it is. Yeah.
It's actually like empty. And that, my friends, is how you secure a ride home.
I noticed that because you had previously said you're going to Uber, but I mean, I don't mind.
Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not home. I meant from Coltus.
From Coltus Lake. When? To get back here.
When are you going to Coltus? I went today. Did you not notice me say I was at the water slides?
Oh, is that, no. I was very focused. He doesn't even listen to me.
And so it's worked for you, for you.
Anyways. But yeah, the car is actually legitimately pretty clean at this point.
I'll be the judge of that. Sure. All right.
What are we talking about? How it gets scratched. But there's tons of ways.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Because like if you're wearing jeans. Yeah, like putting random, yeah, so much stuff in it.
That too. Scratching things on the way in and out. It has leather seats. So for a while there.
He's a friction-y boy. I was for a while there.
I was worried about like, you know, putting something on the seats or whatever. I would put like a blanket or a towel down or something
to try to predict the seat. And now it's like, whatever dude. Yeah. I don't know.
It was liberating spilling muriatic acid in my car.
Right. Like it kind of sucks. But at the same time, you're like,
first one's out of the way. Yeah, nothing's going to be worse than that. Yeah.
Yeah. I don't know. Like I've, I've stored snowboards in my car now.
Like whatever. At a certain point it's like, I want to use it for what it's for.
Yeah. And not worry too much about all the little details.
Yeah. The first one is jeans part. God, I have never even gotten to the point.
There's the little like studs on your jeans that hold them together.
And if you lean against a car, it could scratch the car. I realized.
I thought you were going somewhere else. I said that. And I'm tired of me with that. Immediately after I said the word.
They've never popped off from the sheer size of my.
Luke, you don't hold your jeans together.
Sorry. Motion anyway.
We should probably move on. Oh my goodness. We have got more. Rivets, yeah, rivets. Sorry.
I thought they're called studs and rivets. We never answered their questions. What was going on?
What do you value? How did we get to that?
I don't know. This is going so bad. Because you always bring it there.
I'll take that. Always start talking about your pants.
Oh my goodness. Where did it go? He takes it. I can't.
Oh no. I don't know where the limit is. So I'm going to keep my mouth shut.
What piece of tech has the best? Well, then you really won't be able to.
Whoa. Whoa.
My face is starting to hurt. My goodness. Mine too.
Okay. Wow. Your face hurts.
Is that like a weird nerve thing? Like where you kind of pinch here, but you feel it over here?
Okay. Okay. Oh man. Oh man.
A valley. It says. There's a homoerotic vibes on the big guy.
I think that's the middle square. It should be the free one.
What is this stupid show?
Most valuable piece of tech. Oh right, right, right. Okay. So what do I value?
I value my NAS. The NAS is the one I would save in a fire.
I try. Yeah, good luck. Yeah.
Oh man. I have cloud backup of things I really care about.
Now that you said the save in a fire thing, like I wouldn't save any of my tech in a fire.
You wouldn't even take your phone? If it's not already in my pocket,
there's probably other things. That's fair. I have the birds. And I mean that figuratively,
you do not save anything in a fire unless it has a beating heart.
Yeah, yeah. But like, I mean even just like,
I don't know my phone. I don't even like it.
I'm not going to replace it because I'm too cheap, but I'm not a fan of it.
So like whatever. If I can grab it on the way out, sure.
It's just that I'm a little hurt right now.
Why? Because that Bulbasaur computer was handcrafted
by my children. I would love to say that. And you would not choose that as your most valuable tech.
Charizard's going to win in this fight.
It's so big and heavy and it's like, I'd have to, if I don't unplug it,
it's going to be stuck. I'm just waiting for him to bring up his squirtle again.
Got him. Casey Bain said, what about your birds?
Yeah, that's essentially the problem, right? Like. Yeah, but how do you like save a bird in fire?
Like they don't have clipped wings. They'll be dead. So literally. I'd have to grab the cage and just run.
Okay, the cage. As long as you have the cage, then they have a chance. If they're out of the cage, it's probably just over.
If there's smoke and they're out of the cage. There are tricks to be able to catch them.
Really? They have oddly enough, I always thought the opposite
for the longest time, but birds have at least budgies.
Maybe this isn't true, but all that. Oh, interesting. Terrible night vision. Oh, I thought you were going to say they're territorial.
No. Okay, go ahead. Owls have fantastic night vision as far as I know,
but budgies have terrible night vision. So if you just turn the lights low, they can't see anything
and I can just catch them. Oh, I thought you meant like catch them outside.
No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, they're just gone. If they get outside, they're pretty gone.
There is ways to catch them in that case, but that's like a process.
It's not. Yeah, it's. Trank dart. No, they would definitely die.
They're the size of the budgie. A really small one, obviously.
I'm not an idiot. I think I've told this story on Wancho, but I've told you the story about how we were trying
to catch that person's buddy that got out. Yeah. I was walking around a park with a bird cage
and a speaker playing bird noises, looking absolutely insane.
Yeah, that's how you catch them, because they hear other birds and they're like,
okay, that's good. And then they see a cage and they're like, well, that's where food often is.
So I'll go there and then you just close the door. Nice. But then you have to figure out where the heck they are.
Right. So that can be rough. Put an air tag on it.
Then it wouldn't fly away. Yeah, that's true. That's true.
Hey, oh, speaking of pets, we got two new cats. Yeah.
Yep. Your ARM is what I was pointing at. Oh, yeah, right.
I told the story last week. Yeah. So how's that going? Great.
They are super, super well socialized.
They are. Yeah. On day one, they were like scampering around
climbing everything, sitting in our laps. Couldn't believe it, couldn't believe it.
The sitting in your last part is pretty crazy. Yeah. So are they integrating with the other cats at all?
Here's Yvonne, day one. Wow. Yeah.
Just they are, they be practically any animal.
They be chilling. We put a little, I've found a cheap cat tree on Craigslist
and our Facebook marketplace and just like put it in the
bathroom where they're staying while we keep them isolated from the other cats.
Yeah. How long do you have to do that? Oh, they want to see, show the class. Okay.
Yeah. Here, I'll send it. I'll message it to Dan, Dan.
Yep. How long do you have to do the isolation for? We don't have to anything, but they have fleas
and we can't treat them for another three weeks. And that also gives the other cats a little bit of time
to kind of smell that something's going on.
And it also gives these guys a little bit of time
to get a little bigger and stuff and stuff.
Are they, you said they have fleas
and there was a picture of Avon sitting with them. Yeah. So we're just,
You just take your clothes off, wash them after you. Yeah, that makes sense.
And realistically, we're just going to have to like treat everything after anyway.
So yeah, that is what it is. Yeah. More over it.
Yeah. That's fair enough. Yeah. Birds you usually do like a month,
even if there's no known issues, just quarantine for a month.
Yep. Oh, they're at the top of the dock.
Oh, okay. I thought you were just going to put them up. Okay, so here's my wife.
I've managed to catch her not yelling. Is that cute or what?
That's pretty cute. Oh, shoot.
Leaked my wife's pussy.
That's the best one yet. Anyway, here's them.
Ridiculous. Are they cute or what?
Yes.
They seem to be getting along quite well as well. Yeah. That's good.
Yep. We'll see what the other cats think.
There's so many now. Yeah, we're up to five.
Sheesh. That's like...
We're getting pretty close to Crazy Cat Lady territory here. Yeah, what is the line there?
Oh, I think we're at... Is it five or are you past it?
If you got one more, are you now officially Crazy Cat Lady? We see it as a ratio.
We are a household of five people. We only actually have a one cat to one person ratio.
That doesn't seem that crazy.
If we had 15 cats, well,
there'd need to be an intervention of some sort.
I don't know. A lot of people have two cats. Yeah, but they have two people usually.
Yeah, you got five people there. Yeah, exactly. That's 10 cats. Yeah, totally reasonable.
I think 10 would be fine. Yeah.
Pretty reasonable. Yeah, it's about the ratio, Luke. No, I don't think it's...
Okay, I think it can be at least partially about the ratio, but it also has to be...
If you and I had two wives, then it would be fine as long as there's two of us.
Right? So it's fine.
As long as between the two of us, we don't have, say, six wives.
Here in Canada, anyway. Yes. Always doing the cult? Other than in Bountiful.
Yeah. Yeah, there's like a cult town in BC.
We're not really sure how that works. No, we want to do the cult town.
Linus Tectown. That's only you two. That's not me. LTT, Linus Tectown.
Yeah. It's already named. It's already named.
What about Shayne's husband? And then where we do the bizarre experimentation on people
could be LTT Labs.
Perfect. It writes itself. Yeah.
That's amazing. Yeah, I love it.
We'll all eat blue oysters.
That was pretty good. You don't recall? I don't recall. Blue oyster cult. Blue oyster cult.
It's not good. That's pretty good. It was pretty good. That's stupid. It took me a second.
I was like, oh, yeah, that is a thing.
Speaking of things that are, oh, yeah, a thing, sponsors. The show is brought to you today by MSI.
School season is starting soon. Oh, look at you.
Time to drop that. That's not a real picture. Yeah, it is.
Well, not the face. No, the face has been altered. Pretty notably.
The hair, not so much. The hair is legit. The clothes are legit.
Yeah, I was actually wearing overalls like that. What is the shirt saying?
Walking, restraining order, waiting to happen.
Don't worry about it. I liked funny shirts from warehouse one.
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I redid that for you. The show is also brought to you by Antlion Audio.
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Did you have to finish the thing? I want to see the thing land on the thing. Ah, it's all right. We're waiting.
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We've included a link in the video description. These guys have been doing great stuff for a long, long time.
I remember seeing their first product, and I was like, oh, that's really smart.
Oh, yeah, I agree. I just, I didn't know they had wireless solutions. And then they took the whole thing
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Are we really encouraging this behavior? Oh, my God.
Sorry, that blindsided me. Coffee or...?
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We actually did a sponsored video with Pulseway earlier this week that I'm very excited about.
We added some automations to the water-cooled rack
that will hopefully prevent disaster again. Oh, that seems good.
So with Pulseway, we can shut down all the systems in the event of our leak detectors sensing liquid.
We can shut off our... There's a relay for the pumps.
Jake created a bunch of automations and stuff. So basically, everything will be fine.
That's awesome. Go, Jake. Yep. That'll be good.
What else we got going on here today? What do you want to talk about?
I think we have another title topic. Which one was it?
Oh, yeah. A new version of Windows unlocks crazy Ryzen performance boost. Yeah.
Early tests of AMD's branch prediction improvements
in the upcoming 23H2 version of Windows 11
show significant performance jumps in most games. Hardware Lux found improvements between 13 and 41% for Starfield.
Wow, for all the dozens of people playing that game still.
Great job. This one's maybe a little better. 4 to 61% for Cyberpunk.
This is a huge delta. And roughly 10 to roughly 20% improvements for F1 2024,
depending on CPU. Hardware Unbox found a 2 to 4% improvement in Halo Infinite,
but a 30% plus improvement for Gears 5
and 13% improvement for Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege.
Hardware Unbox also found similar numbers to Hardware Lux for F1 2024.
Go check those videos out for more information. Microsoft has also backported these improvements
into an optional update for the current version of Windows.
Oh, that's exciting as well. Excellent. So yeah, great work.
Keep it up. Maybe next time at launch would be better.
Yeah, wait for that update or something. Letting everybody know you're using an Admit account
and stuff like that would be really good. That'd be nice.
What else we got this week? There were a lot of people calling on me to...
How do I put this? To kind of do a takedown of...
Hold on, let me just... I want to actually bring up the topics doc
because I actually wrote some of my own thoughts in there and they didn't necessarily make their way into the doc itself.
So there were people, particularly on Reddit,
calling on me to do a takedown of Austin Evans' video
on the Framework 13. He published a review yesterday talking about a lot of the downsides
of the hyper-repairable modular laptop investment disclosure.
I'm invested in Framework. Some of the downsides he identified
were the relatively high price for the performance,
construction compromises for the sake of modularity, the genericness of the keyboard.
There's actually some stuff he talked about that isn't necessarily in my notes here.
He talked about the lag for Framework to have the latest processors.
But I guess what I'm sort of trying to ask is
why would I be doing a takedown of his video?
His conclusion was that essentially it wasn't for him.
He didn't see the value of it. And this ties directly back into the same thing
that I've been complaining about, which is not all reviewer people need to agree with each other
and that's okay. Like Austin doesn't need to agree with your take.
If it's even different than your take. But that's the thing is I don't even think he did.
If you watch the whole video and if you listen, it's 20 minutes long, like it's long.
And if you listen to everything he says, he talks a lot about the positive things as well.
It's actually pretty balanced.
And I think actually a lot of the negative, he's getting roasted for it.
Seems like it. And I think a lot of the negativity toward the video
actually demonstrates what a good job he did
of outlining the compelling things about the framework and particularly the framework 13.
Because everyone who watched his video disagrees with his conclusion because he actually did
a really great job of outlining everything that's super good about it.
There are a couple of things that,
if I was to have a private conversation with him, I might say, yeah, here's something,
here's an alternate perspective or whatever else. But I don't know, it was kind of disheartening for me
to see the people who were looking for some kind of drama
or showdown between me and Austin. There won't be, there shouldn't be.
He didn't make it personal. Nothing he said was personal.
Everything he said was his opinion based on his time,
his experience with the product. And he has different priorities.
I saw a couple of people criticizing the laptop
that he compared it to saying that it wasn't a like for like,
the one that he found for half the price that had the same processor in it or whatever else.
And you know what, that's fair. But Austin's priorities might not be those things
that are better about the framework 13. And I think you'd have to be a complete fanboy.
You'd have to be deluded to look at the framework 13 and say, it's the best value laptop.
We don't even use them internally here. And there's a variety of reasons for that.
A lot of our folks prefer touchscreen. Framework still doesn't have a touchscreen option.
That's feedback. I've been giving them on an ongoing basis.
The cost is not necessarily the most competitive
for what the spec is. There are departments where we have at least considered
rolling them out and the ability to upgrade them over time
is a key part of that. The ease with which you can get replacement parts
is a key part of that. But it's not going to be perfect for every environment.
And guys, investment or no to investment,
I would never tell you that it's the perfect thing for every environment.
Look, the second that I turn into a framework salesman,
you should stop buying frameworks and you should stop watching LTT.
That hasn't happened and it never will. It's ridiculous.
Yeah, like what's, hold on. I saw a comment from someone that was like,
it felt like, I think it was Crystal. It felt like he missed the point, but he didn't.
He outlined the point really well. He actually talked in detail about the point
and about the benefits. And I don't agree with his conclusion.
Which is fine. Yeah. Which is totally fine. But what I do respect is the way that he outlined
both sides before he presented his conclusion,
giving you an opportunity to be armed with the facts and decide if you agree with him or not.
I don't know. I'm just so, I'm so done with everybody having to agree.
And if we disagree, not being able to do it in a manner that is respectful.
Yeah. You should get multiple perspectives. I have always said that and the only perspective
that I won't accept is the perspective that you don't need multiple perspectives.
There is no one truth. There is no one answer.
It is never that simple. You could look at the best benchmarks
taken in the most scientific manner, but if the most
important thing to you is turning on all of the eye candy with a bunch of mods, those benchmarks
are never going to be the most relevant thing to you because in the interest of repeatability,
they can never use those mods.
It's never black and white. Literally, never.
Just, I'm tired of it, man, tired of it.
It's really frustrating. Speaking of frustrating, Ubisoft Patch resets
player progress for Star Wars Outlaws. Several hours after the launch of the paid
three-day early access for Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft sent PS5 players an email
telling them to install a day one patch. That's a weird way of communicating that.
But sure, the patch fixes some potentially game-breaking bugs, such as one that could lead to
the player being forever stranded in space, but it also requires players to restart from a new save.
Oof. According to Ubisoft, pre-patch save files
will face issues and progression blockers.
As compensation, Ubisoft is giving these players an in-game cosmetic called a trailblazer trinket
and 100 Ubisoft connect units.
Is that a belly button ring or what?
What kind of trail will be blazing? No idea. It says a.k.a. loyalty points.
Get some treasure.
Oh my goodness. It says a.k.a. loyalty points.
I don't know what connect units are or whatever. I have no idea.
The deluxe editions that include this three-day early access period cost $40 to $60
on top of the price of the base game.
Some players lost 15 hours of playtime.
Okay, so here's my thing.
Save data
should be compensated at like...
Dude. Yeah. Dude. The first time I did it, it wasn't work.
It was play. It's definitely gonna feel like work the second time.
It's definitely work the second time. For a lot of... Probably this game.
This is one of the things that makes me so angry about Nintendo. Just they do a lot of things that are really great
that make great games. I'm gonna keep giving them my money.
But the way that they hold your save data hostage
if you don't buy their online subscription is actually...
I can't make an argument for why it should be criminal,
but I wish it was. Yeah, it's already... The fact that you can't back up that save data in any other way.
Just so angry. And so looking at this, the fact that people had to pay extra
to have to do work essentially doing QA for Ubisoft,
a multi-billion dollar company, I just...
I can't abide it. Speaking of... This is a little off topic, but in the realm of how you were like,
yeah, Nintendo's make some great stuff. They make really frustrating other things,
but I'll just keep giving them my money because they make great games.
Mr. Dankpods over there has a video, his most recent video.
It's called It's Time to Change, It's Time for Linux.
And he basically talks in this video. What year is it? You should go watch it yourself.
What year is it? The year of Linux desktop. Is it the year of Linux desktop?
It's a really great video. Go ahead, go ahead.
It's a great video. It has half a million views already.
We're not gonna watch it, although it is this type of stuff.
But you should go watch it yourself. Even if you're not going to switch to Linux,
honestly, I think it's just a really...
I mean, he's been doing this for a long time. He's really good at it. It's a very good video.
But he talks about a lot of good stuff.
And he talks about how people have flamed him for switching to Linux,
but then he talks about how those same people are the people that say you should vote with your wallet on things.
And he's unhappy with what's happening with macOS, and he's unhappy with what's happening with Windows.
He talked about how you buy this operating system, then you get ads in it, which yeah, that's ridiculous.
I tried to install an unsigned driver on macOS that was for like...
I had to clear like four or five different prompts, dig into the settings in order to...
Yeah, it was wild. Yeah. I was trying to get an old printer working.
And actually, this was where I was gonna get into year of Linux.
One of the things that is still just very difficult with Linux
was we needed a Linux desktop quick, because we were just trying to see
if this old printer would work with it. And I was like, a Steam Deck.
I'll just grab a Steam Deck. That's like the closest at hand machine.
And you just reboot it in desktop mode. It doesn't even reboot.
I don't think it just switches, fires up the desktop environment.
And Valve didn't include any of the printer stuff,
because why would they, I guess, on a game console, except that it's supposedly a desktop computer.
And it's just completely not there. And it's like... You could get it, but it's gonna be annoying.
He talks in the video about how there's... Every time I touch it, it's just...
Okay. Yeah. It's side quest. He talks about that though. It's like if Frodo had to put the Ring in Mount Doom.
Okay, but first, he had to go play World of Warcraft,
harvest a bunch of pigs, and then he had to go get the in-game gold
and get it on a USB, and personally deliver it to freaking like...
You could argue there's some side-questing in Lord of the Rings. Okay, you could argue that.
There's a fair amount. Okay, it's like he had to put the Ring in the Mount Doom,
but first he had to go and fight the Ring Wraiths.
I don't know, I never read the book. And he had to talk to Tom Bombadil, which is where I stop reading Fellowship of the Ring every single time.
Yeah, that's it. He had to talk to Tom Bombadil.
The actually scariest character in the whole book. Dude, the guy's deranged.
But yeah, anyways. Every time I tried to read that book, like three or four times, can't get past it.
And I'm not the kind of person who can just skip. Yeah. And I don't think there'll ever be an abridged Lord of the Rings.
Has someone done it? Have they actually published? And I'm going to look it up.
I feel like probably. A bridged Fellowship of the Ring. Before we get completely off the topic. They've done like kids' version.
I'm not counting that. Whether you're interested in Linux or not, honestly, I would go watch the video.
I think it's really good. I think it's extremely based for consumers to just
not buy into things that they actually really hate. So I strongly support what he's doing.
This is so pompous.
It is not possible, even at great length, to pot the Lord of the Rings in a paragraph or two.
It was begun in 1936. And every part has been written many times.
Hardly a word in its 600,000 or more has been unconsidered.
And the pacing, style, size, and contribution
to the whole of all the features, incidents, and chapters has been laboriously pondered.
You could have bridged the Lord of the Rings.
Yeah, Drac, Ryu, and Fulplink said a bridged L-O-T-R,
or yeah, L-O-T-R is the movies. Yeah, I guess.
Just kind of true. But the books are still alive.
Didn't they just take the birds? That's the abridged one.
Oh, it's just going the big crow and then just drop it in from the sky.
And then woo, we saved the hobbles.
There you go. Lord of the 30-minute short.
Zab Rosdauer says those are Tolkien's words.
I know. That doesn't make them not pompous.
Yeah.
I carefully, hold on, hold on, what's the line?
My use of that word was laboriously pondered.
Oh, man.
Anyway. I kind of respect it, though. I don't think you should abridge it.
If you can't stomach Tom Bombadil, just whatever, just move on.
It's part of the damage. Yeah, but I don't... I want someone else to do the work for me.
I don't want to have to skim. I don't want to skim to see when the boring part is over.
I want the important parts. I don't want to have to wade through the slop
in order to get like an interesting conversation that takes place or something.
I think if you're really trying to understand the actual...
And he was actually very into this, and someone who has read
The Simerillian, and what is it called, the Sons of Hurin,
or whatever it's called, all the other books, I think he's trying to help you understand the world.
And understanding Tom Bombadil does help with understanding the world.
Oh my god, I'm so bored listening to you right now. Even though he feels out of place.
You're so tedious right now. It's funny because you actually look more tired.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah, 100%.
Yeah. Anyways.
You could read the book's comments, yeah.
You probably can. Like, does Goodreads have a comment section?
Goodreads. It has votes.
Does it have comments?
There are reviews. There are reviews, not comments.
There's comments on the reviews. There we go. Cliff's notes.
Oh no. Let's go. No. Let's go.
Oh, easy peasy. Next, The Two Towers.
Let's go. Band of orcs, capture Marion Pippin, kills Boromir, yeah,
Marigorne, spoiler alert. Although treated roughly by the orcs,
Marion Pippin remain unharmed and they're here. I'm attacked. The Hobbits run to safety.
The Forest. Yep. Yeah, this seems pretty good. Okay. You know what? I'm just going to go with this. I don't need to read the books now.
To be clear, I'm a reader. I actually am a reader. I have read, you know, thick books and stuff.
It's not that I'm incapable of- I've read thick books. I've read thick books and stuff.
I just can't get through Tom Bombadil. It's insufferable. I've read thick books and I can't be fictitious.
I can't be fictitious. Yeah. Wait, no cap?
What are you even saying? Yeah, yeah, that basically. All right.
Yeah, I read the thickest books.
Yes, I've considered skipping him. That's what Luke tells me to do every time.
No, someone should help. Someone should have to- Look, that's not my point.
My point is just that it's not that I am- I don't have the attention span to read.
Tom Bombadil is a difficult section of the book.
It's really stupid. Between that and the unending descriptions of mountains.
I'm just like, if I want to know what a mountain looks like,
I will literally just open my door and walk outside
and touch grass. I have mountains right there.
Some people don't. But I do.
I don't need that book for them. Oh, so now we're hating on mountains.
No, I love hot dogs and hamburgers.
I like hamburger patties that are made of hot dog meat.
I'm going to go- Wait, no, I don't think anyone would like that. Would that be-
Would that be good? That's not a hamburger patty.
Sausage patty? Sausage patty? A sausage patty? And also hot dog meat is not sausage.
Sausage is awful. Hot dog is a whole other level. Pork patties?
Pork patties. Hot dogs made of ground beef.
Okay, hold on. What are we even- Breakfast sausage patties.
Did we just invent food? I think we might have just invented food.
I think we invented a food. I think I'm going to go hike into the mountains
and read Lord of the Rings in the mountains so I can read descriptions of mountains while on a mountain.
You're totally not going to do that. Probably not. But I'm going for a hike on Monday.
But anyways. You're not going to take Lord of the Rings with you? That'd be so lame.
Yeah. That'd be so lame you wouldn't be able to hike on the mountain.
Oh man, you've been on one today. You've been good. I'm spicy today.
You've been quick with those.
Police using AI to write reports.
That's dumb. Axon, formerly known as Taser International.
Is selling software- Evil company, Inc. Axon, axon, axon.
Is selling software to law enforcement that uses AI
to create draft police reports from body cam footage called Draft One.
Notably, they're also the dominant vendor for police body cameras in the United States.
At least some police departments, such as the Oklahoma City Police,
are already using Draft One. The software is only intended to create a draft
that an officer can then review and edit into a final report.
There's no way this could go wrong. Both because the AI is not 100% reliable,
and also because an officer who testifies in court needs to be consistent with written accounts
authored under their name. Yeah, they can't just read it before they go to court. Yeah, let's see how this goes.
It'll surely not be terrible. Guaranteed to be terrible. It'll surely not be terrible.
What a joke. People suck so much.
Wait, where did my note on this go? What happened to my notes on this?
What notes on what? Oh, wait, hold on. Did I not have notes on this?
Maybe I had notes on something else.
No, oh, man, I was missing one of my really good notes on something.
The non-tech shutting down thing. I had wanted to talk about how one of the big challenges is
that there's no money in the written media format
that a non-tech relies on anymore. I agree. I think it's also that the techie space
is a higher percentage of ad block users. Ad block hits things like static web ads kind of the hardest.
There's no money there. I know there's review sites of more normie things
that do a lot better because lower ad block.
Tech is going to basically, tech is going to eat its own tail by automating things to death.
I was reminded of that when I saw this post on r slash hardware
about our snapdragon for a month challenge, where someone used an AI generated summary to basically, there,
save you 18 minutes. It's like, you realize that an AI can't use these laptops
in a real world situation and then report on that
unless someone is actually doing the work.
Yep. Good luck, everybody. Yep.
It's super. That's a weird community.
It's super weird how sort of tentative
and scared people have to be to say, I thought it was a good video there.
Man, the tribalism is a, it's a, it's a whole thing.
Anyway, good luck, everybody. Nice hash.
According to multiple reports online, crypto broker nice hash has sent out an email announcing
they'll be charging a $6 a month service fee to users with inactive accounts starting on October 1st.
According to the email, users can avoid this service fee by simply engaging in an activity on the platform,
such as buying or selling crypto. It does not mention account deactivation as an option,
but many have rushed to do so regardless.
I guarantee I know why they're doing this. They also implemented a series of other fees,
including $10 to change your account's email address.
Look at this.
So reset to FAA, 10 bucks, recover account, 10 bucks.
Seriously? 10 bucks. Okay.
You said you know why they're doing this, other than just being. Okay. This part, I don't know.
The previous part, I thought it was just because they probably had a lot of stagnant accounts
from like the absolute peak of GPU mining. And they're sitting there with all these stagnant
accounts that have Bitcoin sitting in them. I was like, well, I can slowly drain these out
from people that are not paying attention to their accounts, even if, hey, you know,
maybe I sort of forgot about that account because it only had like 10 bucks in it.
I did this over like a few weeks with my GPU and then sort of forgot it existed over time.
Yeah. 10 bucks would be nice, but it wasn't impactful
enough that I sort of forgot about it. You can drain that out, but you do that to
10,000, 100,000 a million. Now it starts being a big deal.
So you can just, but I don't know, extremely highly monetizing their customer support
was not a curveball expected to come right after that.
So now I don't know. Well, anyway, we don't work with them anymore.
We did one sponsored video with them back when they seemed pretty chill.
And it blew up anyways. Yeah. People were mad about it. And hey, yeah, maybe they're, maybe they're
holes. So great. I'm glad we stopped working with them. Yeah. Like this one line, the monthly service fee
for inactive accounts. Yeah. I suspect they're just, you know,
if you're going to ignore it, we're going to drain it, which isn't a good thing, but I understand why
they're doing it. The FBI is bad at shredding hard drives,
apparently this seemed a lot more interesting when I was first reading it.
But yeah, basically government not do things
properly sometimes. And this is really exciting.
Man, there's been so much good, like pro labor news lately
and like pro, you know, like regular people news.
There's been some bad news. Like there was the Canadian government
mandating the rail workers back to work. That was not super cool.
But this is super cool. Following a year long investigation,
the US National Labor Relations Board has found that Amazon is a joint employer of subcontracted
drivers that work for its partner companies in Palmdale, California.
Amazon's refusal then to negotiate with their currently striking union
was thereby determined to be illegal.
The company was likewise determined to have made unlawful threats.
I have no idea what the actual impact
will be on Amazon, but this is sick.
Being able to just hire a firm that can be spun up
and closed down or contracted and not contracted on a whim,
being able to hide behind that and essentially
not have to pay people living wages and not have to treat them properly
is such a broken loophole in, I was going to say,
the American system. But as far as I can tell, it's basically a lot of places and it's gross.
This is far from a death blow, but this is a good start.
So let's do away with that. At least one person checked their nice hash account
because of that thing and found 150 bucks.
So maybe go check your nice hash account. Yeah, go check your nice hash account.
Get the money out of there and then run away. Back when it was cool, it was actually
pretty convenient and pretty cool, which is why we worked with them.
Definitely get your money out before they take it. Found like $4.50, nice.
40 bucks, 15 bucks.
Someone said a lot somewhere. I don't know what it was, like a few hundred.
Oh, all right. Anyway, all good.
You good? Oh, yeah. Okay. It's time for my show after dark.
Oh, very nice. I'll take him a second.
Oh, yeah, Dan's on this. Man, what's he going to talk about?
You know, I lived here my whole life. I had never been to the Cultist Lake waterslides.
Really? Never, not once. Have you been, have you done the 72 foot drop one?
Is it super new? I don't know. If it's not super new, then yes, because I had.
It's basically like a vertical drop. Yeah, they had two that were sort of like that.
One of them was the tandem. The wavy one. There's no tandem.
They only have one on the wavy one now. No, I mean, sorry.
It was still a really steep drop, but it was the bowl. Oh, no, not that.
Oh, man, we put my dad, my brother, and I all in one tube
and did the bowl. And my dad was able to touch the lip on the other side.
We got so much.
It was awesome.
We used to go to Cultist all the time. Yeah, it was good.
All right, anyway. Yeah, no, I've never been.
So finally went. Yeah, it was good.
It was a pretty good time. Yeah, it was fun.
Let's see, what else is new? Oh, wait, it's $170 bucks.
People just keep chiming in like they find a bunch of money. Yeah, go get that money.
It might be zero, but if it's not, hey, you got something. Spend it on LTT Store.
Ooh, that's cool. I don't believe that one. Yeah, well, I mean, you never know.
Some people are pretty pro-y. Yeah.
You own any crypto right now? No. Yeah, I got nothing. I'm out, dude.
Yeah, I get it. There's been a bunch of times where I've called it
and I could have made money, but I just, at this point in time.
I just don't want to follow it. Exactly. I don't want to put the effort in.
I'm sure if I did, I could make some money, but there's other things I could do. I don't remember my pass codes on my ledger things.
It's also just another job, basically. Yeah, I just don't care anymore.
I think I'm out. Yeah. And which exchange is the one that's probably
going to disappear and take all your money this time? I've got a buddy that you know, but I'm not going to name.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's super into it and has made.
Oh, yeah. Disgusting money. Oh, yeah.
And continues to, to be honest. Doing great.
Oh, yeah. Proud of the boy, but yeah, he pours a lot of work into it.
Yeah, it's his job. It's what he does. So it's like, okay, cool.
But I don't want to do that. I'm doing other stuff. So it is what it is. We all got our things.
A 5k and nice hash, not even joking. Completely forgot, BTC was like 15k back then.
Nice. It's sick. Yeah, good for you. I guess that makes sense if it wasn't necessarily
super valuable back then, but it's gone up a huge amount.
Yeah, it's sitting pretty good right now. Okay. Yeah, so like $359.71 in my nice hash.
Don't forget. Don't forget who reminded you.
lttstore.com. lttstore.com. Full-point subscriptions.
Oh, my. We need to allow people to gift them.
Are we working on gifting subscriptions? Not right now, but we will be. Okay, cool.
That is a plan. There is a, man, how much of this stuff do I want to say?
I don't know. I don't know. How about a lot of it? No.
Let's have another business meeting.
Well, there's a, there's a huge thing that we're working on that I legitimately cannot talk about.
Why would you even tell me that then? Well, you know, you know about it.
I don't remember. You'll have to tell me. You'll have to remind me.
Nope. And as part of doing that, there are some things
coming that will be good upgrades. I heard back from David.
He said, pretty insane, $17,000 after fees and shipping.
So even without giving away some of his cool pieces,
or not giving away, but even without auctioning some of his cool pieces, he's still way up on what he spent on his
collection. Okay. So he is up. Savvy buyer. He's up.
Savvy buyer. Very cool. Yeah. Good for him.
Yeah. Yeah.
All right. Yeah. After dark.
It's already after dark. You're after dark. You're doing it. You're doing it.
Your face is after dark. Got him. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to read you a merge message now.
Hi, old date. Last week was the first WAN Show I've missed since 2019.
Wow. Because I'm weak. You're weak. Because I was going to marry you. Oh.
How could you let that happen? I read ahead. That's why it was. I know. I should have scheduled the wedding.
Yeah. That seems like you're really on a Friday. Some things in life are important,
but your partner needs to understand that. Yeah. Why didn't you put it on like a screen mirror?
You were on the streak. Now you're off the streak. Yeah. Weak.
Yeah. You're not a streak anymore. You're a stain.
A stain on this show. Yeah. On this institution. I suggest you let that marinate.
OK, sorry. What was this? Oh, OK. Right. What's your favorite memory from your wedding?
We were just busy berating you. Oh, I'm sorry. Why are you two divorcing each other?
You missed WAN Show. You missed WAN Show. I guess you can't live with this, man.
He's intolerable ever since.
OK, hold on. We're going to come back to this for a second. You had me put Letter Kenny on my Plex server.
Yeah. I watched a few episodes.
I didn't think you'd get it at all. I never suggested you watch it. I just wanted to watch it.
OK. You didn't think I'd get it? I mean, there's an entire episode about fart jokes.
I didn't think you'd necessarily... People sharing their farts with each other.
Wait, you've watched that far. You like it. I watched three episodes.
I can't tell if it's like stupid funny or just fucking stupid.
Like, I just... It's actually great. What I think you might legitimately like more is Shorzy.
OK. Yeah. I didn't suggest you watch this at all. People said Fartbook is the worst episode.
Well, that's good because it's not very good. Fartbook was pretty rough.
OK. It's like super campy, just some dudes in Canada
doing what they can. Shorzy is better, in my opinion.
Yeah. OK. Yeah. A lot of people are like, I like Letter Kenny,
but Shorzy's better. That's for Shorzy's far superior to Letter Kenny.
If you're going to watch one of them, watch Shorzy.
All right. Yeah. OK. Anyway.
But I didn't recommend you watch either. Yeah, I'm just...
Yeah, I'm just... For me, Letter Kenny was side monitor content.
OK. That was funny sometimes. OK. Shorzy's actually pretty good.
OK. All right. So, favorite memory from my wedding.
It's hard to pick one. Luke wasn't there, so...
No, that's not because he missed it. He didn't know me yet.
Favorite memory from my wedding. Yeah, I met you right afterwards.
I think...
Man, how do I pick favorite? It's hard. It's such an emotional day.
It's such a roller coaster. Everything was chaos. We were late for our own...
I think that's surprisingly common. Yeah, well, like...
Like the reception, I think you're saying? No, not the reception, the actual ceremony.
We were slightly late for it. Everyone was already seated and ready to go
and we rolled in because our wedding day shoot ran a little bit late and like...
The weather was incredible. We got married in late April
and we did that because it was cheaper.
Because as long as you're not in May, the rates are way lower.
Because the chances of the weather were in Vancouver. So the chances of the weather being good in April
are hit or miss. And the whole day was on and off showers
but it was like the skies cleared every time we needed to be outside
and then it rained the second we needed to go inside. Like it was actually kind of magical.
That's cool. Like it was sprinkling and then we had our outdoor ceremony
and then as people were heading inside it started sprinkling again. It was like, wow, this is incredible.
And then it was clear for our shoot in the morning which was also outside.
Like the whole thing was just kind of incredible.
Obviously there's like the moment,
the wings and she's walking up the aisle and we had bubbles everyone in the audience
had like bubble blowers. So there was like bubbles everywhere which was really cool.
Ivan tearing up the dance floor was definitely a highlight.
That has to be. That's the Ivan that used to work here.
We were colleagues at NCIX before he worked here.
Just the like breathing afterward when it was over
I could see that. And kind of going, I think we threw a really good party.
You know? I could see that. Because it's kind of like,
it was the first thing we accomplished as a married couple.
Sure. Was to throw a hell of a party
as kind of the way that we saw it because Ivan had like an emotional breakdown
in the lead up to the wedding. Realizing that she had completely lost control over like,
you know, what do you mean we're doing it this way? What do you mean we have this now?
Why are people, I understand the desire to contribute
but I actually didn't want that there. Don't bring it here. And like, and I basically was like,
hun, it's not about you.
Like, yes, this is your wedding but this is,
but your mom is marrying her first daughter.
Yeah. There's other stakeholders because she was like,
I don't even know a lot of these people that are there. And just like, you know, like a lot of,
yeah, a lot of really tough stuff. So it was basically like, look, here's the deal.
Let's just go with the flow. And what we're going to do is on a honeymoon,
we're going to take our wedding finery. And we're just going to, what about second ceremony?
With just you and me and a witness and we'll like, we'll have someone over.
We'll do the, we'll do the donkey ride through the town.
We'll do a new, we'll do a new wedding photo shoot. We'll do, we'll, we're just going,
it's not going to have any legal significance or anything. We'll sign the documents at home, obviously.
But if that will allow us to just detach from this and just
have fun with whatever it is and, and lose control a little bit of, of the details.
And then it, and then it won't matter if, you know, the,
the, we don't have enough cake or if we, or if someone is
unable to, or if we don't, we never got to eat the food.
We just, we had so many people there because,
because our families wanted to invite people that we didn't even know, but we went around and, you know,
had FaceTime with everyone, which back then meant seeing people face to face, not using your phone.
So we, we, we were able to
just throw a party and enjoy everyone else enjoying it and us
enjoying that and enjoying parts ourselves. And like there was stuff that we just weren't that into,
like some of the first dance stuff and, you know, that other people, it was really important to other people
for tradition and stuff. And then so, so before we had this sort of frame of mind
change, that was causing a lot of stress.
And I was like, look, the worst thing for this day
is for it to cause stress. Oh yeah. That is not what anybody will benefit from.
And I think the, the approach of like, we'll just do it
how you want on our own sort of version of it thing.
If you can afford to do that, I think that's super sick because then yeah, I think it helps release some of the
pent up like, cause some people, they wait for that for their entire life.
So like if anything is slightly off, they're going to
go crazy over it. So being able to let go of that is cool.
Crystal says, yikes, shouldn't a wedding be about the couple?
Sure. In theory. In practice, the world is, the world is never that clean.
Yeah. It's just not that clean. And at a certain point.
And you can, you can fight for that. Cause sure enough, that's true, but you can fight for that,
but it's going to be a fight. Yeah. And you can have lines like you, you can absolutely have
boundaries, but at the end of the day,
are you willing to damage a relationship over it?
What is a wedding? Maybe depends on the thing.
Yeah. But is it worth it?
Depends on the thing. That's the question you got to ask yourself. Yeah. You got to ask yourself, is it worth it?
I'm trying to think of my, my brother's wedding.
My brother's wedding went fantastically well, but I can
think of a range of things that could have happened that I, I probably would have like shielded him from needing to burn bridges,
but I would have burnt bridges with ferocity.
And like it's just it, you know, if certain things happen,
you have to dispense. There's that boundary line that you're talking about, but there's, there's some amount of flexibility that you can have as well.
Yeah. I mean, and to be clear, like, you know, we were lucky. We didn't have anyone get totally wasted and say something completely inappropriate or
whatever. Like it was never, it was nothing like that. It was just preference things.
And so you got to, you got to ask yourself, is my preference really worth this fight?
Does it actually really matter? You might also at the exact same time that that's happening,
start questioning why this thing with that person would need to be a fight.
And you can, you can kind of like strategically reposition these relationships as you go,
but it might not be worth having that battle, but you have to kind of keep in mind
that that person brought it to that point. Trouble, but love it.
My wife and I eloped a few months before the wedding, because we'd already lost so much control to her parents who were paying for it.
We went into our big wedding then with so little stress, because at that point it was just a regular party with a little recreation at the beginning.
That's cool. And if you play your cards right, there's some recreation at the end too.
Yeah, that's cool. I like that.
Yeah. SupLTT, live in a closet guy here again.
Nice. I bought PSVR2 as for content consumption without a PS5,
minus if you tried PSVR2 on PC yet, thoughts.
Also is merge messages end-to-end encrypted?
Given we're going to read them out, I think it's irrelevant, but I think they're just asking
silly questions. Am I a chat? I'll comment here.
I'm sure you can answer, but yeah. Am I quantum computer safe?
I haven't. No. I haven't tried PSVR2 on PC yet.
I probably should play around with it, but yeah, it's a good headset.
The fact that you need the adapter kind of harms the value of the price a little bit.
I kind of wish you didn't, but it seems like a pretty good play.
It seems like a pretty good play. I didn't get it. Insomniac and Chat pointed it out.
He's memeing on the telegram subject.
Luke was immediately ready to defend his platform. He's had a hard week.
We can make it worse. He's had a hard week.
We can make it worse. There's still time. Okay, let's see.
Hey, Luke and Dan, as infrastructure guys, are there any benefits to my job's work
from home practice of having us remote into PCs on our desk at the office
instead of virtualized PCs on the company servers?
If they are relatively unsophisticated, then there could be.
If everything is set up properly, there should be no reason that you can't just
use your system at home and remote into a virtualized PC from there.
Yeah, it depends on the security level of the things you're dealing with. And sometimes, like if it's dumb and it works, it's not dumb.
And if everything is just set up and then they just don't have to change anything
and don't have to figure anything out if you just remote into your workstation.
Yeah, that's probably fine. Again, though, it depends on the security level of the things you're dealing with.
Editing videos like- Sure. Okay. Do whatever.
Yeah, pretty much. But there's other things that wouldn't be good.
Sinus, Lake and Man. You have talked about poor search engine algorithm functions recently.
Your thoughts on YouTube shadow suppressing a video and claiming the algorithm anyway to
prove or disprove this? Sure, I can prove it. When one of the Paul brothers, I forget which one because they're both the same to me,
made the Suicide Forest video. Loads.
Yeah, I wasn't, sure. And YouTube claimed that they weren't suppressing the channel, but they definitely were because
you could search for exactly the name of the channel and it would be below the fold.
There, I proved it. Yeah, that was pretty wild. There was absolutely no way that that wasn't a thing.
Yeah. Yeah, so they definitely, definitely can do that.
So, okay, cool. Hey, what happened to the thing at the top of the of the Merch message dashboard?
What about it? Did I leak it too many times and now it doesn't exist anymore?
No, no, no, it's under partner spots. Did you minimize it? I went down. You probably minimized it.
Oh, stats. There it is. I accidentally minimized it.
Oh, wow. You guys pre-ordered a lot of scribe drivers. I've just been, I've been curious all show.
They're going to be gone again.
I don't know. Another, another 10,000 of them.
I don't know, man. Last time, what, they lasted three days? Well, yeah.
But surely there's a, surely there's a limit to the number of pens people need.
Like some number, what could it be? Here, hold on. Let me see if I can write it down on your ARM.
Oh, that was not that easy to get off even.
And I had to, I had to explain it just like the neck tattoos.
I forgot it was there and I never like warned Emma.
So she was like, um, what?
I think she'd be used to it by now. Sink Plane says. In her defense, it wasn't like she was mad.
She was just like, what, what's happening? More weird stuff. Okay.
Yeah. Sink Plane says, please stop selling prime in your venting machines.
Guys, I said in the video, they're, they're just there.
They were just in there for testing. I don't know where they came from.
Probably they just like someone who works there, who doesn't even know who the Paul brothers are.
Grabbed a bunch of random beverages. Don't worry about it.
It's fine. Also, they didn't taste that bad. I tried, I tried them.
They were not bad.
Luke, is there anything in your fridge or freezer from NestlÃ©?
No. Then stop. What? Not a single thing.
He's lying. It's impossible.
Maybe that I didn't buy. There, there we go.
Anything from any of these brands?
So far, no. No arrowhead crackers? Nope.
Oh, no arrowroot. I was thinking of arrowroot. I'm looking too.
With this baby, I'm not going to have that one. I'm not going to have bottled water.
Uh, go to the, go to the cereal section really quick. It's top right.
Nope. None of those. Okay. All right.
I'm safe too. Any of this? No. Is this all candy bars?
Cause just no. Okay. All right. Is it all candy bars? Yeah.
Okay. So none of those. I don't drink coffee. You don't drink coffee. Okay. Hold on.
Go to this. DiGiorno?
No, I don't have any of that stuff. Well, I, I don't know. Anything from Libby's?
I didn't know Maggie was owned by NestlÃ©. Jeez.
You want to know the cheat code to this? Why I'm pretty sure I'm not. I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Cheat code to this? Why I'm pretty sure I'm, I'm right?
Why? Cause I eat chicken rice.
Yeah. Let's find out. And you have a Maggie's like a seasoning.
It's like MSG and brown. Oh, seasoning.
That's going to be, I don't, I mean. That's what was really surprising.
None of that particularly. No, none of those. Keep going.
I don't have meal replacements. This looks like meal replacements. No. Okay.
All right. Healthier and healthier version. Ice cream. Okay. Pet care.
No. Anything from Purina?
Purina for me. I think. I didn't know that was Nestle.
I, I got Purina one. But no, yeah, I think. Cool.
I'm throwing that out and the cat. Cause it's touched Nestle now.
New cat. New cat. Oh my goodness. My point, my point is just that if you're gonna,
if you're going to be like, no, you can't. No, my, my problem isn't even who it's supporting.
Sure. My problem is that it has hydration claims that are not
based on the ingredients, not good. Sure.
Yeah. I didn't say it was good for you. I said it tastes good. Yeah.
I'm sure it probably does. It just doesn't really do the thing that it's trying to
publicly accomplish. Yeah. That's fair enough. I mean, that's my only like, Does Gatorade.
Should we carry Gatorade? Actually, I think Gatorade is pretty good.
It has a lot of sugar in it, but it does have a significant amount of hydration stuff in it.
It has good salts and things. Now, who are they?
Are they Pepsi? I don't know. Is Powerade is Pepsi?
I think Gatorade is Coke. PepsiCo. And like, it's a Powerade Coke.
So many food brands are like so bad.
I'm not trying to take that stance. There's no part of me that's like,
Logan Paul is more evil than Nestle or whatever else. I don't care about that.
That's whatever. Wait, how do you even know about the prime in the...
I didn't know that. Oh, how do they know about the...
I have no idea. What? What's going on here? Was it a video or a picture or something?
It's in a video that's coming out. I think it's a picture on the Facebook page.
Perhaps. So much the food theory video.
I didn't actually. But I'm sure it's probably pretty good.
Here it is. Oh, that's right. No, we talked about it.
Okay. So the video is coming.
Smash Champ's August update.
Unreleased content on Wansho. A leak from the chief vision officer.
This could be a problem in a sec. What did you just do?
Don't worry about it. Oh, yeah.
Safe. As a University of Florida. Got him. As a University of Florida hands off our Gatorade,
but you don't want to sell things. Also, you're a single unit of University of Florida.
Boom, got him. Anyway, so yeah, this is going to be a really great video.
It starts with Dan getting an error
when he tries to let me into the building. Oh, this is one where it all goes wrong constantly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's going to be really good. You guys are really going to enjoy it, but you're going to enjoy it when we release it, not now.
I get to play, I get to play some badminton. We show the court cameras.
You got to play badminton like four times because I'm incompetent. Sorry.
Yeah, Dan needed me to do a lot of takes of this because he kept not actually recording the take.
It had been set up for four hours. That's funny. I had never tested that.
That's funny. So that was, that was pretty exciting.
Okay, wait for it. Oh, that did make it in.
Cool. Yeah, of course it made it in. Nice. Oh, yeah.
Is this legitimately unlisted, by the way? Nope.
It's private now. Cool. All right. So that's what you did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I said it's private already.
Nice, nice, nice, nice, nice. Don't you even worry I got you.
Very good.
Anyway, what are we talking about? You're going to answer another merge message. Oh, yeah, hit me.
Hey, D to the LL. In terms of scalability,
do you see WAN Show growing bigger with other hosts or production value,
or do you enjoy it being just the three of you? No, it's, it's, I can't think of a production
at Linus Media Group that has gotten less support for expanding
from me than the WAN Show. It's all held together back here with rubber bands and paper.
Look at our set.
Like seriously, it's, it's not good. It's a wall.
There's so many wrinkles on this. I don't even, I'm not even talking about the quality of the wall.
I'm just like, look at the. Go watch five seconds of the yard and then come back.
I don't know. At this view, it looks great. Look at the space we dedicate.
That's sick. Dude. Dude, he's got a human organ bag behind him.
And then, and then we go to Linus's. Oh, second wall.
Hold on, hold on. What about, what about random merge? There, boom.
Nice. There. Set that. Nice. Blurry merge. Set decoration, blurry merge.
Nice. Blurge. Uh, I think if you poured too much production value into WAN,
it would get significantly worse. Yeah.
I feel that very strongly. I support Luke's viewpoint because I don't want to spend anything on WAN.
Yeah, but also like, dude, if you, if you try to make the,
the like the news sections more structured or even more planned out,
it's just going to get worse. Yeah. People want it to go off the rails.
People like it being fun, including me.
Speaking of off rails, you guys were noticing this last week.
I have some bad news.
There's a little line in it. It's so minute.
You're probably not going to be able to see it, but basically where the plastic flows in,
where's the gate on this piece of the mold? I think it's actually at the bottom with the gate.
So, oh, sorry. Well, the gates where the plastic shoots into the mold.
I think it's on this side. Anyway, the point is that where the plastic flows and meets on the flat of the screwdriver,
there's a little line that looks like a scratch down the two of the three flat sides.
And the only reason it doesn't show on the one flat side is because that's where
the two halves of the mold meets. So there's already a line there. There's already a seam,
but it basically just looks like a little scratch here and a little scratch here.
But the problem is that the scratch goes all the way through.
So you can never get rid of it. It's there and it just looks like it's scratched out of the box.
And that's why transparent screwdriver is
not dead, but certainly not happening anytime soon.
It looks really cool. Yeah. I wouldn't mind the little line,
but the problem is we can say that and WAN chat can say that.
And then some users going to get it and see the line and ARMA it.
And then we're going to say, no, we had it disclaimed on the product page and they're
going to say, but what about the trust me, bro guarantee? And I'm going to not want to deal with that.
Yep. So product doesn't get released. Yep. So it goes.
Hey, Linus, missed the days of needing a PCI card for everything
because I could have a cool computer with all the gadgets.
Nice. We're going to get that now a day. What else has that nerdy customization energy?
Framework, laptop, investment, disclosure. Old cars.
You can get all kinds of cool like modules and stuff.
Whether you need them or not. I don't know. Well, that's up to you, but you can definitely get them.
What else? What else has that get a modular synth and then not be able to afford anything ever again?
Oh, you're supposed to use it for the work and you're supposed to bill people
properly for the work so that you can afford the modular synth.
It's supposed to be a return on investment. You didn't buy music for me.
You don't know how much that costs. Okay.
Do you bill those hours a lot more than you tried to bill me?
You bought a service. Okay. Yeah, but it's, it all comes down to hours, Dan.
It all comes down to hours and expertise. You have to bill the hours appropriate for the level of expertise and for the, and for the-
How is this fight still going on? Because Dan hasn't internalized that he lost yet.
That he lost? Because you have to account for the sporadicness of the work.
So the level of expertise and how feast and famine it is, you got to account for that.
You got to have smoothing in your billing.
You got to smooth over the parts where it's the famine
with the feast and the cats to protect the granary.
That's why I have so many of them. This is good advice. You should, if you do freelance, listen to this.
No, that's true. I can't tell if he's mocking me or not.
No, I'm not. I'm going to look at his face. I'm not mocking you. Keep the tone up and keep talking about this subject and then just sell courses.
Dude, I could make so much money selling courses. Infinite money.
Dude, it doesn't, no offense. It doesn't look that hard.
Yeah, I could do the music for them. Colton's been trying to get me to do a course for literal years, literal years.
Yeah, literally. Yeah, I keep telling him.
I'm like, nobody should buy a course from me. Everything that I am an expert on, I should give away for free.
So I don't know, I give up.
But then he always says, no, people would pay for it. And I'm like, yeah, but like, then it would have to be really good.
I think that's part of it. I get like anxiety.
Like if it didn't have to, if it could just be like generic nonsense, but like with really high energy, I could do that so easy.
Oh yeah, but that's what most of them are. I know that, but I just, I couldn't take pride in that work.
No, I'm not saying you should actually do it. I'm saying if you did do it, you'd rake in the cash.
Dude, you know what I would be the best at though? Yeah, the right tone and stuff. You know what I would be the best at?
Is a televangelist. Oh yeah. I could crush that. That's what you were built for.
Dude, it's so easy. Told you, cult. Dude, why won't you listen?
It looks so easy. Why the tech town, dude? Yeah.
You're, you're, you're basically just like a, a well, well-kempt beggar.
And you just like, you just, man, dude, I went, I went to church a lot of times in my life.
Okay. Do you know how easy it is to just crack open that book?
Read literally like two sentences. I could told, I could 100%.
You don't even have to do the work anymore. You can just pop it in chat GPT. Just be like, write a sermon about this.
Because the message is usually only like five to 10 minutes.
Dude, easy. I could do it. No problem. I'm ready.
I wonder if pastors are using chat GPT. Oh, a hundred percent.
A hundred percent. Probably. No, we, we actually talked about it on windshow before.
Oh yeah. Or there's like, yeah, I need like a, I need a Sunday message about like forgiveness, whatever.
And chat GPT will just be like, yeah, sure. This, this, this and this.
Dude, crazy. Nice. Yeah.
Jesus.ai, I'm afraid to click this, but I'm going to do it. It's just shrimp.
I'm clicking it.
Yeah, get out of there. Not a good site. Don't go there.
Yeah, get out of there. Also, you might be, you might be banned now.
At least getting a little time out.
There. Yikes. Don't go to that site.
Hey, LLD. Thoughts on computers going through the same fate as what GPUs did going from
upgradable to un-upgradable and the backlash Lunar Lake is getting on not supporting upgradable.
You tweeted this at me. I literally replied to you.
They really liked their question. I am sorry. I don't read your Twitter. No, no, no, no, no, no, that person.
No, I know. I know. No, well, no, the answer. Then I duplicated the message.
No, the answer was that we made that video. Hold on.
Hold on. Well, maybe they just want everyone to, maybe they just want. They think they have a great question.
They want, they want it answered in front of more people.
Yeah. So we, we made this, we made this video, the one and only Emily Young here.
Okay. I just posted it in the chat.
Wish nothing but the best for her, by the way. So yeah, we made this video.
Build a PC while you still can. They're changing whether we like it or not.
They're not going to be upgradable forever.
All right. What's next? When.dlll with the FTC finally waking up to the monopolies of Google, Apple,
Meta, et cetera, and the EU pushing for stronger regulation.
How does this end? Just more fines or is something bigger coming?
Some breakups maybe.
I mean, Which could be good. Yeah. I think it could probably be a good thing if some of these tech giants were broken up.
Apple's a funny one because it's a bit of a weird one though because they don't have that many products.
China's getting into the tech giant game. Yeah.
So if you break up, they're not going to break them up. Yep. So if you break up all the American companies and make them less competitive,
that's a little weird. It's a little weird.
I'm not sure what to do there. Yeah.
Because they're already going. It seems pretty clear to me at least that they're going with a
similar model to a lot of their other business where they're like,
we're pretty good, but we do everything and we're cheaper. So it's going to be a good decision for a lot of different companies.
So if you break the other companies apart so they're less feature competitive and they're
also still more expensive, then yikes, that gets really rough.
Hey Linus, I'm opening an entertainment slash sports venue in October.
I'm curious what kinds of ideas you have for your badminton grand opening.
And if there's anything you really want to do, but can't.
We're kind of going to keep it small, I think.
Like we're at our capacity. We're designed for like six times 14, like 28 times three.
I don't know, whatever that works out to. So like 85 people, right?
So we don't want like 500 people there.
No matter what kind of grand opening it is. So we were kind of thinking like a hot dog barbecue in the parking lot.
Like, and you can come check it out. It's only hot dogs rated.
I didn't say what kind of hot dogs. They could have hamburger meat in them, okay.
Oh man, that's pretty good. Sorry. It was fast.
I'm sorry.
Next up. Yeah. So I think we're going to do a pretty, we're going to do a pretty small thing.
So I don't really get rated. I don't really have big plans. Yeah. Well, what about them?
That's scary. Well, they might just have to leave.
Like we don't have any parking for like a whole bunch of people.
So it is what it is. You might need to almost like security it.
I'd be like, sorry, too many beeps because I'm worried about the city's reaction
if it gets a little out of control. Well, theoretically, they'll be there.
Yeah. We invited the mayor. Yeah. So I'm worried about the city's reaction if it gets out of control.
I, I'm honestly not that worried about it. Okay.
Yeah. Don't show up if you're not going to like play badminton.
Yeah. It's for badminton. That's it. Yeah.
Hello, WAN.Dill.XE.Bing, so many extra letters.
When Linus says something, the community eventually comes around to his point of view.
How much of that is just him bringing attention to something nobody else has noticed?
A hundred percent. Both the warranty thing and the ad block piracy thing were a hundred percent.
Just like, this is, don't shoot the messenger.
The way that you packaged. Sure. The warranty thing.
Yeah. I'm not denying it. I did a bad job.
There's always, you know, you taught me about optics. Yeah. The optics on that were real bad.
Yeah. I did a bad job. Yeah. What are you going to do about it?
Nothing. Buy something from lttstore.com? Try to buy a screwdriver or a pen.
Yeah. Look, the thing is like I'm live here, guys.
I'm a driver. Guys, I'm live.
Yeah, the warranty one was persistent across a couple of it.
Yeah, but I was live every time. That's probably fair enough.
And I'm not perfect. And sometimes I'm in my own narrow viewpoint with the context that I have that other people
don't necessarily have and that I can't expect them to have.
But that's pretty obvious to me. Like I get it.
You've been making content for a long time. There's a ridiculous amount of hours of your face on video.
Sometimes things are going to be wrong. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my favorite is, I think my personal favorite is the time we did a WAN Show topic
where a guy bought a house with Bitcoin and we were like, yeah, but it'll never be used for
anything real. Because it didn't seem like it would.
The transaction costs are so high that it's woefully impractical.
But I think people use it for stuff.
One day I'll find mine. Nice.
Oh no. 2009. Bitcoins or dollars or the year when I started.
Oof, 350. Bitcoins somewhere.
Somewhere in the world on a hard drive.
No way, dude. I started right at the beginning.
No way, dude. Keeps me up at night sometimes. 350 coins.
Yeah, something like that. I mean, they were, they were like just coins back then.
You could just, you know, there was hundreds in a block.
Yikes. This is a random number.
It's somewhere. Somewhere. You have no idea where.
Nope. How do you have no idea where?
It's 2009. So what? I know where drives that I had in 2009 are.
I have checked all of them. Can I make me weird? I mean, they are written over.
Oh, so it's probably gone. I have gone through all of them with like
FBI grade recovery tools looking for blocks and things like that.
They're somewhere. Somewhere. Bomber.
One day. They're probably on nice hash.
I should check. Probably. They're probably not though.
Couple more. Hey DLL, Luke, any advice on how to handle work
when your natural workflow involves spikes of productivity that management starts to expect consistent
levels of productivity equal to your spikes?
That's pretty tough.
I don't have any good advice for that. I think I do. Do your best, be open and honest.
That's all you can really do. Start a communication with your manager about
overall resulting productivity, not the productivity of every minute.
And try to find trudge tasks.
Like tasks that, you know, I don't know, maybe your job is to do.
Oh yeah, good distraction tasks are good. Yeah. Like when you're distracted anyway.
Yeah. So like things that you can kind of just get through, like maybe it's email, maybe it's something else,
where like, you know, this is an annoying task anyways,
and, you know, maybe you can be, your mind is kind of somewhere else,
but you'll feel yourself kind of click back in, and then you can get back to the main thing
you're trying to work on. Like try to do something, even if it's not amazing.
But yeah, try to show your overall productivity
over the course of a week or a month or whatever you want to use for your time frame,
and show that you're still doing well, and just explain, you know, my brain works a little different, something like that.
This is the second message like this during this WAN Show.
Go ahead, Dan. Are you sure? I mean, I guess. It's the second one?
It's the second one. You didn't see the one in Floatplane Chat. No, I didn't.
The only baby name my wife and I could somewhat agree on
is for our second baby is Linus.
I promise it wasn't my idea. Does Linus give his blessing?
So just think about this.
It's slang for penis.
Just seems like a pretty good name to me. Throwing that out there. If that's the case, just line them up for success.
Someone, it's literally in like Ocean's Eleven or something.
Like Matt Damon refers to a penis as his Linus or something like that.
Like this is actually a thing in an actual, no, no, it is absolutely a thing.
I'm tired of arguing with you, Crystal. I'm Linus-y.
I thank you for that. That's great. Yeah. So just consider that it 100% is a thing.
And in response to the person in Floatplane Chat earlier who said,
you know, I'm going to say that my kid is named after the Charlie Brown character.
Can I at least give you guys an alternative? Okay, go with this guy.
Way more important than me.
Okay. If you must, if you must name your child Linus, okay.
Two Nobel Prizes. Let's go. Okay.
There you go. 1,200 papers and books.
New scientists called him one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time.
This is apparently my namesake.
So let's all, let's all just remember who the original Linus is.
Actually, I think it's a biblical name. Hold on.
Not an important character.
Pope line. Oh yeah, there's Pope line. No, no, it goes farther back than that.
I looked it up and found a Reddit thread from 11 years ago
about this. And hilariously enough, people are talking about you and it.
But you seem to be, Urban Dictionary also says it.
What is this? Where is it? What?
Millionaire? There it is. Slang for the penis. Yeah, there you go.
Charlie Brown is slang for the balls. It is not. If Charlie Brown was slang for anything, it'd be a little further back than the balls.
Yeah, really. But yeah, I found this Reddit thread.
Yeah. They thought it was Linus. Yeah, I've gotten that number of times.
But then there's people talking about you, because apparently you linked this thread.
I did.
Oh, for Linus Sebastian of Linus Media Group from three years ago.
And then it's kind of weird that Linus linked to this thread. And then apparently some tweet.
Dude, it's definitely a thing.
Ocean's 11. I feel like it's a thing, but it's a thing.
I feel like it's a thing, but it's a thing for like four people.
No, it's in a movie.
I haven't seen anyone refer to the Ocean's 11 thing.
It's a thing.
Hold on. Man.
If it turns out that you're wrong, will you be disappointed?
If it turns out I'm wrong? No, it's a thing. Do you want your name to be penis?
No, nobody, Peter doesn't, Dick doesn't.
None of them want it. I might not be that bad. Unless they do.
Hey, how do you get Dick from Richard? Yes.
Yeah, ask him nicely.
It's an old one, I'm sorry. Yeah. I'm not finding anything about this.
Maybe Ocean's 12. It's in one of them. They definitely, they definitely say that.
It's definitely a thing. We need, we need, we need the flow plane chat to research this and come back to us next week.
Arrested development? Was it arrested development? That Reddit thread that apparently you linked to was a arrested development Reddit thread.
Buster referred to his, his dong that way.
It's definitely a thing. I trust me it's a thing.
I searched for Linus penis and now I am on the LTT only fan.
I thought we closed that down. I think it is. Yeah, we did, but I think you can still maybe find an archive of it.
Anyway, speaking of things on Reddit.
Apple's AI notification summaries. McDonald's, coffee, Ruin Mercedes abandoned Slitherbond.
Linus, I think it was dead. I'm sorry.
Yeah, that sucks. That's rough. I didn't pre-recorded, pre-recorded plan show.
The conspiracy theorists have so much ammo now. Oh no, it's been a rough day.
I mean, you had a bad week. Mine is much worse.
I mean, or better, you don't have to come to work on Tuesday.
Nice. Nice.
It's all coming up. So sincere, that nice was so sincere.
And it's nice that this is the end of the show. We'll see you guys again next week.
Same bad time, same bad channel. Bye. Bye.
Oh, currently, Budwoom's in an accident.
Oh, dude, he got a new car accident. He's OK.
All right. Oh, there you go. Good. There we go.
I'm glad to hear that. That he's good. Yeah. No, not that.
Don't be a dick. Hey, you might have been. Don't be a lioness.