Hey, Tim. How you doing? I'm all right. How you doing?
Not bad. Not bad. How's your day been so far? It's been pretty hectic.
Yeah, hectic. What are you working on at the moment?
Well, we just we just came off of the 4060 and 7600 embargoes.
And that was that was a big effort from the entire team.
Right now we're working on some stuff that I can't directly talk about
because it'll probably come out after this video has.
But it's very, very cool. And I'm really excited for everybody to see what it is.
Awesome. So how long have you been at LMG now?
I think I would have started here sometime in July last year.
So almost a year. How are you finding it so far?
It's pretty hectic. That's a general theme here, isn't it?
It's been a lot of fun. I made the decision to come here.
When Gary called me up and I have not regretted it since.
I'm very happy with it. For everyone watching that may not know, what is your role here?
Well, kind of the meme is that nobody knows what I do here, which is, you know,
well, it's six parts funny and six parts kind of like, okay.
But actually the what I do is pretty diverse.
So I work in the Labs, which is to say that I am part of the first round of Labs hires.
But when I started, I was supposed to be part of the engineering development team.
I was supposed to be creating the actual implementation for the test that we wanted
to run the physical mechanical side of things. That turned into doing a lot of almost side projects working alongside the writing team
and making sure that they have, you know, if a weird engineering thing pops up
and they want to make something like the water cold Mac studio.
Alex, I worked on that as well as the 24 Peltier cooler rack.
Alex and I worked on that. A couple of other weird things like that.
A video just came out, the Turbo Desk, which I guess we haven't titled it that,
but that is the internal code name for the Carl Jacobs $100,000 desk PC.
We've been calling it Turbo Desk. It's labeled Turbo Desk in all of my documentation.
And I built that from scratch, designed, built, engineered everything.
So there's that half of it where I work with the writers really closely.
But then the other half, the part that I've been more leaning into in the last couple of months
is developing all of the process documentation and all of our policies and procedures
and the way that we do things within Labs.
For example, if you, let's say that you unbox a computer, if you're a reviewer,
what do you do with it? What are the specific steps that you need to take to collect all the specifications
to make sure that you have the device that the company says that you did?
What sort of measurements do you take to validate independently the things that they're telling you?
And then on top of that, what sort of tests do you do? How do you run those tests at a very, very granular level?
Step by step instructions for everything.
And then on top of that, how do we interact with other departments?
Labs creates a data set. How do we hand that off to the requester of the data set, which could be the writers,
it could be a creative warehouse, it could be the social team, it could be anybody.
All of those sorts of things need to be documented, need to be created in process
so that we can be an actual professional outfit,
because we are working towards becoming an academic laboratory.
Wow, that is a, you have quite a lot on your plate.
It's pretty intense, yeah. Plus, we have had a couple of people start pretty recently that I've kind of just fallen
into managing, and so I'm making sure that other people have projects on top of that,
and trying to find a balance between the stuff that I need to do on my own time,
as well as making sure that other people keep their balls in the air, so to speak,
is it's a new and exciting adventure for me.
Yeah, so I'm guessing not a single day is the same for you here.
No, I wouldn't say that. There's a lot of variety, and I talked about this during the
What's It Like to Work at LMG video when I was interviewed for that, but it's a lot of fun
because of the diversity of things that I get to work on and almost play with.
Like, there's this one thing that I discovered when I was at work, and it's open source,
so I think I can talk about it. Juice Labs or Juicy has this really phenomenal program where you can run a program on something
that has, say, an integrated GPU, or something that's not very powerful in terms of graphics
processing power, like a laptop. But you can run a program on that laptop, and then over
TCP-IP, you can, over the internet, you can run the actual compute program on a different GPU,
on a different computer entirely. So rather than moonlight streaming, where you're running the
program on the GPU and you're streaming the frames to your non-powerful PC, instead you're
running the program on your non-powerful PC, streaming the GPU compute to the GPU, and then the
GPU streaming back as a fully post-processed equation or whatever the end result of it is
for your thin clients to actually work on. And so I worked on that a little bit here,
and I took it home, and I use it all the time now. It's super cool.
So I guess going back a bit, where did all this begin? Where's your background from,
I guess, start from, let's say, school? Sure. Well, I actually, I didn't go to high school. I was homeschooled when I was a kid,
and I was kicked out at a fairly early age, like kicked out a number of times when I was a kid,
but the last time for good was when I was 15. And so after that happened, I didn't finish high
school, I didn't go and enroll in a public school or anything. Instead, what I did was I went and
found a job as basically a tire jockey, a calitire, which is a local tire repair shop here in
Canada. I don't know if they have locations elsewhere. Anyways, I got a job in an auto shop,
and I went down that road of working towards actually becoming a journeyman mechanic. I never
went to school to be a mechanic, because there's kind of two pathways. You can either take the
courses prior to doing the work, or you can do the work and then just write the tests afterwards
to get your hours. And that's the one that I did. So I'm a journeyman mechanic, but didn't
actually go to school for any of that. But then after that, I actually, when I got my GED, because
there were a number of factors around that reason, that decision. But it was basically just,
I felt like I could do better with my life, and I wanted to. So I got my GED, and then I moved
to Calgary and started in academic upgrading at SATE with the help of some close family members
who were able to provide me some support. And after I finished academic upgrading, I went into
the mechanical engineering technology program at SATE, which is basically an associate's degree.
It's a two-year diploma that I took over three years, because I wanted to do work on the side,
as well as working pretty heavily in the student's association at that time. I wanted to start to
give back to my community from the support that other people give me. And how do you know this
was happening? Yeah, when I was at SATE, I would have been 23, I think. Fairly young, but late
when it comes to going to college. Yeah, so I went to MET, I graduated top of my class,
second Tuvalo Victorian. I am still ticked off about that. I know why the other guy got it,
and it's favoritism, it's not me. But either way, so I graduated that class, and then I went
immediately to enroll in another program on Vancouver Island over at Kamosan College,
which was the mechanical engineering bridge. So it would have taken the associate's degree that I had
from SATE, and then turned it into kind of a transfer credit program into UBC, which is one of the
best engineering schools in Canada. So I did that, I graduated through that program, and then Gary
called me up, and he's like, hey, would you like to put aside school? Your resume is already really
impressive, and we'd like to have you on our team. And I was like, you son of a bitch, I'm in.
So I put school on hold for a year, and I'm now 27, almost 28 in a couple of days.
And the plan is to continue to go to UBC. I'm actually enrolled in classes right now,
at the same time as I'm working full-time for LMG. That's kind of where I'm at.
So you said, in all of that, you said you moved to Calgary at one point.
Yes, yes, sorry. So I grew up in Regina in Saskatchewan.
Were you a fan of LMG before this? Yeah, I had seen at least some of LTT and
ShortCircuit content before this. I wouldn't say that I was a superfan, but I definitely
was aware of it. Like when I was a kid, like early teenage years and later teenage years,
I volunteered really heavily with this organization called Computers for Schools,
which is a phenomenal group, like absolute phenomenal group. If you have a local
computer for schools, I would heavily recommend that you go and donate some of your time to them.
They're great. Basically, they take old electronics, typically in bulk from Crown
Corporations, if you're in Canada, or from other organizations who just want the tax
receipt rather than creating more e-waste. They'll refurbish them, they'll remove all the
personal information from those computers, and then they will donate them either to nonprofits
for a very low fee or to schools for free. Taking e-waste out of the ecosystem and turning it
into actual useful things for people who are disadvantaged to be able to learn. So I donated
a lot of my time to Computers for Schools, and one of the things that I learned there was
basically around the entire, like, how does personal computing work and how do you build a
computer, but also getting into that kind of, like, this is gaming, and these are, you know,
cool people who are doing cool things. So I've been watching LTT for a fairly long time.
All right. So you've been here for just under a year now, right? Yeah. Cool. So what would you say is your most favorite project that you've worked on so far?
In terms of projects that I've worked on, in terms of videos, I think, honestly,
the TurboDS video probably takes the cake. I want to probably say that this video has come out
after the actual build video, because we're releasing it at least in two parts,
where it's the glam one that's already come out for sure, and the actual build process,
and that video was super, super fun to shoot. I got to spend eight hours with Linus and Alex
and Tyvee, and I think Colin was there. We were building this thing that I had been designing for
months and months and months, and I had already built it almost completely once before, because
we had to set it up beforehand, and I had been doing that over the course of two weeks, and then
we had to take those two weeks and compress it into eight hours. And so, like, I had done all of
the test fitting. I had made sure that all of the coolant loop was cut to fit for all the tubing.
I'd made sure that all of the wires were effectively harnessed and soldered correctly.
Everything booted correctly. I had to do a little bit of drilling and some welding for some parts
that didn't fit. Like, everything had to fit perfectly, so we could get it done in one marathon
shoot. We did, but it was absolutely terrifying, because at the end of that shoot, the thing wouldn't
turn on. Ah, so it turns out, it was either there was, if I'm recalling correctly, there were either
one of two issues that could have happened, both of them were Linus' fault. Either something had
gotten into the socket when he had installed the CPU, or there was too much mounting pressure,
because he had installed the bracket for the block upside down. And so we fixed that, we figured
it out, but it was like 8.30 or 9 o'clock at that point. It was just, it was stressful, so stressful.
And we were still operating under a time crunch for that point, because we didn't know that they
weren't going to pick it up for like two months, but we were like trying to get it out the door.
So that was, that was a lot of fun in terms of, like, actual shooting a video. But then I also
want to say, like, in terms of projects that have been really cool, as far as my favorites go,
reviews and embargoes are a super double-edged sword, because we've come a massively long way
from where we were when the lab kind of came online for AM5. That was our first review launch video.
Nick and Danes and Gary were the ones that were testing it. I remember coming up into this room,
which hadn't even been set up. It looked basically like a junkyard with all of the wire and all of
the like ceiling panels and the boxes. It was a massive mess. And I came and I set up some tables
and I set up the benches and I messaged Gary. I'm like, hey, these are ready to go. Let me know
if you want me to start testing or what you want to do. We didn't even have a project plan at that point. We had no idea what we were doing. We're just like, you know what, this is a bunch of things
that they've done. They, LTT doesn't really have project plans before. They don't really have
actually records of the things that they run. So we're going to have to kind of start from
scratch. And we did. And it was hell. It was absolute hell. AM5 was a massively problematic
launch, but then it led to us learning a ton and then putting some processes in place for the next
one. And then 4090 happened. And then we got wrong data on a massive graph and we got called out for
it and it's like, okay, so I guess we needed a review process too. And so like every one along
the way until the 4070TI, 4070TI is when we really started to hit our stride in terms of like,
we're putting good data together. We're getting out a lot of the issues with potential data
handoffs. And that was the first one where it really started to feel like everything was kind
of coming together. We kind of nailed it and hit it out of the park. We got a couple of big
shout outs from a couple of other members of the community and other reviewers being like,
this is actually coming together. And then we kind of realized at that point, A, this was working,
that the process changes that we were doing were correct. And B, the reason that this was so hard
for us and not for everybody else was that we were the only people that were actually testing
all of the cards, every project. Everybody else reuses data. We don't. And that's the big
differentiation. When we pull a graph that has 12 different cards, that means that we spent
10 to 12 hours on each of those cards prior to the week before the embargo happens.
Nobody else does that. You look at any of the other reviewers, they have either dates on their
charts or they just don't admit it. And if you look and compare their old data from previous
videos to their new data from a current video, it will be the same. Ours isn't. The only one
where we reused data was a couple of days ago. And that was for a specific reason,
because the 7600 and the 4060 Ti came out within the same time. So we needed to put them together
in the same data set. And so that that's a fair use of data. But we're not going to reuse that
data set, because those aren't comparable. What we are doing in the lab is we're creating a big
bucket of separate data sets, lots of little bubbles within the bucket, you can kind of like
hold up to each other and say, Oh, you know what, that kind of looks like it's approximately the
same. But those bubbles can never coexist or can never collapse into each other. They can only
coexist separately, independently of each other. So everything that we do is on a new project
with new parameters, as we're revising, as we're changing things. And that should, as far as I'm
aware, never change. Yeah. And I think, I think it is super important to be using freshly tested
data. Because I think, like for example, things as simple as a new driver update might have caused
the same card to perform differently than to a year ago. Yeah. And we've done tons of regression
testing. We've found out that this is an actual thing that needs to happen. You cannot reuse data
from October and then call it comparable to data from March. It is just not acceptable. And for
reviewers outside of us to do that and say that they are presenting an argument that is fair and
valid. I can't accept that. I absolutely can't. It's it has working here. If it has done anything,
it has made it really hard to watch tech content without pointing out flaws.
That is so true. That is so true. Okay, let's flip for a little bit. And let's talk about
what are you doing in spare time? What do you do for fun? I don't know. Spare time? What's that? I'm still I'm still working on making a community for myself
here, here out in Vancouver. So I don't do a whole lot of like, group events, but Adam from
the writers team, and I have been going to a lot of concerts together lately. And that's been a lot
of fun. Awesome. Yeah, I really enjoy, really enjoy seeing live music. I've worked around live
music with live music for a long time in, you know, bars and coffee shops and stuff. And that's
that's been a shout outs to any artists? Trivium, Thrice. We just we just went and saw nothing more
for I don't know how many times I've seen them at this point, three, four at this point. Absolutely
phenomenal show. Yeah, yeah, really good stuff. I also do a lot of a lot of like little side
projects at home, you know, just experimenting with either my home lab or like designing and
building things for, for, you know, various use cases here and there. And I also, I, it's kind of
nerdy, but I do a lot of miniature painting. I don't, I don't play a lot of D&D recently, because
again, I don't have really a community, but I do normally, or I have in the past played quite a
bit of D&D and I tend to be the DM for, for any sort of tabletop caning, because I just really
enjoy it. And yeah, I paint a lot of miniatures and draw a lot of maps and I really enjoy that.
Also keyboards, also cooking, really enjoy cooking and also everything outdoors because I'm
the majority of the way to being an ACMG mountain guide. So I really, I really enjoy that too. I
don't know how many, how many hobbies should I list? Hey, that's a, that's, that's quite a few, but
I do hear that, I think we've seen a little glimpse into your, I guess, enthusiast coffee scene.
Yeah, yeah. During the, what video was I called, uh, tax show and tell or something?
Yeah, a couple of months ago, they, they asked me to come and show off some coffee technology. And
so I, rather than show off the technology, I demonstrated the technology and I guess I took
up like three quarters of the video, just showing how to make third wave, like decent coffee that you
can actually extrapolate the specific variables and, and adjust for them and understand why things
are doing the way things, why things are doing the things the way that they are and it would adjust
for them. Um, and that was a lot of fun. Yeah. Uh, I've worked in coffee for a long time, uh,
in, in various different cafes and, and so on. You're a barista? Yeah, I've been a barista. I,
I've worked as a bartender for a number of years, uh, just, you know, part-time here and there while
I was in school and before that. Uh, yeah, it's, it's a lot of fun. It's, it's super in-depth and
like there's, there's this like subsection of the internet and I guess society at large, or at least
Western society at large that is like super gatekeep-y about it, but I'm not a part of that. I just,
I just enjoy it and I enjoy the science behind it and like being rigorous about it and just having,
having a fun time. So yeah, try to demonstrate that. Do you have any pro tips for someone? I guess
that's a rookie or a noob in the, in the coffee scene? Uh, I mean, there's buy better beans,
always buy better beans, grind them yourself. That's the first step. If you are, if you're
in the middle of having whatever coffee, you're probably not drinking the best quality beans that
you could, like a, a nice Katerra or a Pacamara or a Nestle 32 or a Ruru or something that along
those lines, a better quality bean is going to get you probably a solid 60% of the weight
actually having decent quality coffee and then start to, if you have the money and have the
interest in upgrading your coffee setup, then start to upgrade equipment, but don't do that first.
Nice. I guess on that note, what are some of the other jobs you've heard in the past?
Well, like I said earlier, I was, I was a mechanic for, for a number of years. I, I worked
in lots of different shops and lots of different types of, of, of work there.
I, I was the chair of my students association at SAIT for, for three years with that organization,
um, which was a wild ride, uh, because I was working effectively full time at the same time
as taking classes effectively full time. And the entire time I was, I was completely revamping,
revamping the, the way that the organization worked from a fundamental level. We rewrote the
bylaws, we got it passed in a nonprofit environment, which if you're in Canada and are aware of that
is quite hard to do. Um, we, uh, rewrote and got passed a full new set of policies and procedures
for the entire organization and the entire way that we interacted with students. And yeah,
like that was, that was a massive undertaking at the same time as going through an engineering
program, which if you're aware is typically quite hard, not gig keeping it. It just generally is.
And at least for me, it was really tough. So I did that for far too long. Honestly,
I should have quit my second year, but it gave me a lot of fun experience. And at the same time,
I was also being the, I was working, uh, as the president of my community association in Calgary
and working part time, uh, just, just weekend nights, like Saturday and Sunday nights at the
campus bar at the gateway. Uh, and yeah, those, those were, those were fun. I was, uh, I was having
a lot of fun, but also it was really stressful. And honestly, LTD doesn't really compare. There's
a lot of stress here, but that was, that was a period of my life. I mean, it's kind of cliche,
but it is, it's kind of a different stress. Like there's a lot more at stake here, or at least
it feels like there's a lot more at stake here. Um, but Nick has a really good line. He, um,
he, he says that, uh, he measures, uh, the way that a project goes by the severity of its worst
problem. And a lot of the problems that we're encountering, at least lately in the last six
months of Labs have been pretty low severity. So it feels like we're doing things right. We're
getting our ducks in a row consistently and on time. And that's been really good to feel just,
just to like watch the, the, the momentum of the big stone wheel start to carry itself. It's been
nice. Something interesting, uh, I want to ask you about is you were an engineering designer
at an oil field manufacturing company. Yeah. So, uh, one of the, one of the jobs that I, uh,
worked in a summer between school, uh, I, uh, was at this company called drill form. Um,
and that was, that was kind of my first like foray into actual engineering design. Um, as
opposed to just like the, the math behind it. Um, design work is different. It's kind of the
glamorous work of engineering, but it's, it's different when you're manufacturing something
for actual service in a company than it is for designing something for, you know,
school capstone or for at home, or if, you know, you're just printing something and
putting it on thing, your births or printables. Um, so I, I worked for this company for the summer
and we were designing things for severe service, uh, which is to say that the temperature ranges,
uh, for actual service for these items were between negative 50 degrees Celsius and positive
50 degrees Celsius. Um, as well as being in a heavily salted environments, uh, continuously
underwater, uh, and a bunch of other things. And so we were designing a lot of really cool stuff
that had to be incredibly robust. And so learning the iterative design process
was very hands-on. Like there was a lot of, okay, I'm going to weld this together and see,
uh, and put it under a, uh, uh, like a hydraulic tester and see what the actual press failure
is going to be. Is that going to be strong enough? If I get that done a hundred times
to see if, uh, if we can put this out into service in the oil field, that was a lot of fun.
Um, so that was, that was four months, uh, during the summer and, uh, I worked for a guy
named Mark Taggart, uh, who was actually the brother of one of my, uh, instructors at SAIT.
And I had a lot of fun. Um, that job probably defines the majority of the way that I approach,
uh, engineering, revisioning, um, especially the way that, uh, the way that, for example,
I worked on turbo desk, the way that we started with, okay, this could be as a complex idea,
um, a hunk of aluminum with a bunch of liquid channels flowing through it and a big heat sink.
And that's a concept. And that's kind of what Alex came up to me and pitched as the idea just
before he, uh, left for vacation, uh, when he threw it on me, uh, uh, in my first week.
Uh, but that's not how you approach an actual engineering problem. You don't come up with
the solution. You find out all of the specific problems that you need to solve. And then you
come up with a bunch of potential solutions to those miniature problems. And then you draw
a bunch of different lines through all of the options and you say, okay, this is solution number
one. This is solution number two. This one is solution number three. What are those competing
solutions for all of those problems? How do they look like within each of their contexts?
Does this one make more sense than this one, than this one on a bunch of different scales?
Like, are you looking through the lens of like the economics of actually manufacturing it
over a short term or over a long term? What about the DFMA design for manufacturing assembly?
Does this solution look like it's actually more createable than the other solutions are? Like there's a whole bunch of other lenses that you
can do and you should never start with the actual end goal that you think you want to have, because
it's very likely that in at least my limited experience, you will come to different conclusions
than you thought you had at the beginning. And so that job really, like, there were a lot of like
missed opportunities previously that I hadn't understood, but now in retrospect,
I know from a design standpoint why they failed. So I've taken a lot of stuff from drill form
into everything kind of forward and I'm really glad that I had the opportunity to do that during
school. Tim, is there anything you hope to work on in the future at LMG? Something you're looking
forward to? I'm looking forward to. If I was to say that I'm interested NVIDIA contents and like
I wanted to be a part of video content, what I'd really like to see happen is that I get an AMD
extreme tech upgrade for not not because I want the stuff because I want to show off something
that I've been working on. Yeah. For my home lab, I have I'm designing a server rack that has a 3D
printer and FDM 3D printer in the top of it, Voron Core XY, 2.4 if anybody who's watching cares.
And specifically, it's a heated enclosure. So it'll take the heat of all of the server,
the rack equipment in the lower section and based on whatever the specific temperature is that I'm
setting in the G code, it will vent the heat to the enclosure of the printer above so that it keeps
it consistent and ambient temperature for printing ABS or other materials that you want a nice enclosed
area for. So it's scavenging waste heat from equipment that's already going to be running
and it's just using it for, you know, to not waste energy. So I'd like to get that off the ground
and actually do it. But in terms of like what I want to work on for like things that are actually
useful to the organization, I think I think what I'd really like to see is for us to get some freaking
whiteboards up in the lab. We've been waiting for them for so long. I just want to draw on the walls.
Sorry. Sorry, swearing. I just want to draw on the freaking walls. Yeah.
Like, I can't count how many times I will start to explain something to somebody and like go to the
wall expecting there to be a whiteboard and just being like, okay, let's go find something else.
Here's a piece of paper. Let's here's the actual thing that I want to show you. Like
ideation happens visually. It's really useful to have things that you can place ideas down and
leave them for a little bit and then come back to them. And we have one whiteboard that kind of floats
around the room. But it's always full. It's always full because everybody uses it. I just want more.
Can confirm I've seen this before. Yes. One of the one of the things that I would really like to see
is once we've got once we've got like the base verticals outfitted onto our website. So like once
we have headphones and keyboards and GPUs and CPUs and we've got all that stuff, I really,
really, really wants to develop a like a wind tunnel. I am really interested in seeing the
thermal differences, the way that you can cool using different pressures using different CFMs
using the way that fans are structured is really fascinating to me. And I am by no means a thermodynamicist.
However, I want to know more about fluid dynamics and getting my hands on the ability to do that
from either whether it's just computer fans or whether it's the ability to scale up to a larger
size, you know, even as big as like a box fan. What does that do for your ability to retain
and expose heat to the atmosphere? Air is an absolutely shitty conductor. It does a terrible
job of removing heat and the fluidic properties of actual air like as it flows through a room.
And that's really fascinating to me. I would like to know more about the way that we
the way that we use computers from a fundamental like a molecular level in that sense and designing
a wind tunnel that we can test different fans and test different coolers across those fans would be
super neat. So I'm really excited for the chance to potentially next year get to do that. I know
of a couple of hobbyists who have some pretty neat setups, but I don't know of anybody who has
kind of what I'm envisioning in terms of in terms of the actual design of an all-encompassing
robust and academic and repeatable setup. That's the other thing is anything that we're
building here, it's not just jank. We do not do that in the lab. We create something, we prototype
it and then we refine it to make sure that every time we run a test, we get the same result. It's
important. Do you have any final words for Floatplane? Final words for Floatplane. If you can
apply pressure to the organization in any way, I would suggest that you do it as such. Ask Linus
to make more bunny hugs. Bunny hugs are great. They're fantastic for people who have sensory
problems and can't wear zippers. They're very comfortable if you just want to wear a hood because
you have no hair. If you feel a little bit annoyed at something, you can just put your hands in your
pockets and close your mouths and you're good. Bunny hugs are phenomenal and I would recommend
everybody wear them and the lttstore.com sells more of them. So if you want to say anything on
the comments of this video, please ask for a nice new bunny hug. Thanks Tim.