What's up y'all? How y'all doing? I hope you're having a great day, floaters.
I still hate that name.
Well yeah, that's the idea. It's just like how I have my pillow right side up here.
I love trolling the people. They're good people. They're good people. They can take it. They can handle it.
They don't sink. They're floaters.
They were sinkers. They couldn't take it. They'd be too dense. They're not dense people.
A lot of good people on both sides of the density.
Very airy, one would say.
Airy? How's our latency, by the way?
Okay, I can see. I measure it by when you have heard me. It's something.
It is for sure something. Yeah, it's about 300 milliseconds or something crazy.
Okay, that's the way it be though. Are you in a closet? Is that a coat hanger behind you?
This place is effectively a closet.
Nice.
It's very small. Good job choosing a closet.
There's nowhere else to choose.
I can move the desk, but it's like...
I think this is actually the best angle I have.
Why does your company abuse you like this, making you stay like that?
No, this is fine. The hotel room is fine.
It's abuse.
We're abusing Luke.
We're not even sorry.
It even looks like a small closet.
It's not like I have a broom.
Why did you say that we were abusing you?
This is abuse.
What if I move my laptop and won't get it back? It's fine. There's nothing to put on screen that's any better than that, basically.
Yeah, that's rough. It could just be like plain white wall.
I mean, plain white wall might be better than plain yellow wall.
I think they're all going to be kind of yellow.
Hey, Dan, should we add like a little bit of lighting to the away kit?
Yeah, maybe. Probably wouldn't hurt. Just a little ring light.
Yeah, I think that would probably be a great idea. Sure.
Here. I'll try to show you what we're working with.
Because it's very difficult to color balance. Yeah, and he looks like Mocher yellow.
Absolute ass. Smoker yellow.
It's such an easy color to picture in my mind's eye.
Smoker yellow. Sticky.
Wash your hands, Luke. Okay, and then this is the room.
Nice. Quality.
That's it. I don't think there's a better spot.
Yeah. I don't know.
Yeah, does he not have a webcam that I have on?
I can throw that on. What? You didn't use your webcam?
I don't think it'll be anything. At this point, I think a C920 is like arguably not better.
I think I'm not going to be able to.
The last two places I was at, I didn't tell Dan which was which,
and he preferred the non-web cam. I'm just saying.
Really depends. I'm just saying.
I'll look it up though. We can try it. No, I'm over it.
Let's get the show started. It's pretty late. No, I'm going to try it.
What? No, it's late. Let's go, Luke.
Yeah, Dan wants to go. Dan wants to go home, Luke.
Have you ever considered that maybe what Dan wants is important?
No one else has. It's fine.
My god. Oh my god, the hair.
Look at that. Yeah, it's not bad actually.
I like it. When you almost dropped the... You know what?
We should both do it and then just like not acknowledge it the whole show.
Hold on. It looks like the same to me. Can I get it going?
Can I get... I need to... That's not as good as yours, man.
How do you get that volume? Well, that's the problem is my hair is unnecessarily thick.
I mean, look, don't complain about that in front of most men our age.
That's like when a woman complains about being too thin.
It's just like, yeah, you know, it is actually a problem, but also...
Yeah, no, this is not going to work for me.
All right. What? Where did he go?
Okay, he's back.
The quality is back to being terrible.
Except this is the webcam. Maybe you need to get a better webcam.
I checked. It's not actually a C920. It's a Brio.
Maybe you need to get better with your webcam.
It's a lighting issue. You just don't have enough light. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Let's switch back to being a bit nicer. Let me color balance again.
Do we both tell him not to bother switching so we could start the show?
He just, yeah, such a listening problem, that guy.
I might have got it from someone.
That's not the way you want to be like branded, Luke.
You know, has a listening problem. That's having a listening problem.
You know?
Yeah. Trevor W. says, I'm balding at 28.
Check your privilege, Dan.
Wait, wait until you hear about my genetic disposition to probably not ever go gray until
I'm like 60. Wow.
Lucky. If it happens before that, I'm going to bloody lose it.
That is what we call a champagne problem, sir.
That's terrified. Oh no, I could go gray by 60.
Why are you terrified of going gray?
Yeah. The silver fox look is like very in, I think.
I was about to mention the silver fox. I think I would just go full silver.
I think the silver, the silver fox look is in, right?
I don't think it's ever been out.
Like who's the original silver fox? I know George Clooney was like our generation's silver fox, but like what was silver fox a
thing before? I don't know.
JFK says Cory is the name.
Yeah. Yeah, I could see that.
No, not silver fox. Silver fox.
Like foxy. Yeah. The one that's right, it's somebody.
No, we're not talking about Firefox.
Bloody Floatplane chat.
I don't think I'm going to get any better than that.
Leslie Nielsen. Yeah. There you go.
Yeah. And Steve Martin, who I, as a child, could never tell the difference between.
I mean, they were both funny men who did silly slapstick with gray hair and they like even
kind of looked alike. So I don't know that Sean Connery was like that good looking when he aged.
I was actually surprised because, you know, like my, my childhood Sean Connery movies are
like the rock where he's like the old guy, the grizzled veteran.
And then like going back and watching his early films like Jack Nicholson too.
I was like, Oh, Jack Nicholson was like good looking.
Huh. Cause he sure aged funny looking.
Same with Sean Connery.
No, we're not doing another poll to confirm if you all use Firefox.
We already know the answer. Yeah.
California. We've looked into doing a wallet, but we've just, it's never had a good raison d'etre.
We just haven't found a way to differentiate from the buzzillion other wallets that are
out there. Dean Martin, Bert Reynolds.
Hmm. Pierce Brosnan. Yep.
Yep. Yep. Oh, did you see the, uh, the rock, uh, weight loss image?
Yeah. What the heck dude? Dude.
Well, he probably got some medical advice like his heart was probably going to explode.
Yeah. Well, he's never officially admitted that he's on steroids.
Oh, really? Yeah. So like, he's probably off steroids and just like, he never said that he was on them.
So he can't like say that he's off them now.
Hmm. He never did anything where it would matter, right?
Like you never competed.
No. Yeah. Okay.
Just WWE, which is like, you know, I mean, like it, it matters in terms of like being a
role model and stuff, but not in terms of.
I think that's why he never admitted it, but then it has like an inverse issue, which
is then you set extremely unrealistic expectations.
Yeah. For people who aren't juicing.
Yeah. So you're not promoting doing it, but you're also like, yeah.
John Brer says WWE is a real sport. You know what?
I'm actually, I'm actually going to back him on this. It's not a game because there is no competition.
Okay. But I, if you're going to tell me that like floor routine gymnastics is a sport, which
it is, then WWE is a sport. Then WWE is definitely a sport.
They go out there and they like do acrobatic stunts. That's a sport.
Totally. The actual like performance part is, I mean, honestly, I'd rather go to the elementary
school play, but the actual like the performance like athleticism part of it is pretty, pretty
sports like I would say. Yeah.
Some of the stuff they do would like definitely actually hurt.
Oh, I'm not saying it's like safe or like not hard.
Yeah. No question. It's kind of nuts.
It's just definitely scripted. I think so.
Yeah. Should we do this thing?
Luke, you ready to go?
I'm ready whenever, my guy.
Let's do this thing.
YouTube check. Everything check.
Scripted like the LG video. The LG video wasn't even scripted.
The intro was scripted. That was it.
Yeah. It's been, there's been a lot of conversation around our like views are down thing with
people having all kinds of interesting opinions about why some of which have some truth to
them, some of which are just entirely not like someone was set on Reddit.
They were like, oh yeah, like like the back, the back to school shopping with the Chromebooks,
like it was so scripted. I was like, okay, but it wasn't.
And it's like, oh, well, I guess it like felt scripted.
So, you know, like, well, then what are you talking about?
That was a great video that's doing well. Like that.
Yeah. That one's also performing really, really well.
So it's, it's one of those things where like I saw someone.
There was actually a lot of feedback that like react content is the reason it's like,
we've actually done very little of that recently. Those weren't the videos that performed really poorly.
And the most recent ones started out performing really well, but then fell off super hard.
But also in general, react videos have been average or above average performers for us over the years.
And it's like, people bring their own personal biases in, right?
So they like or don't like a certain thing.
So they're like looking for confirmation of, of their own biases.
But at the end of the day, the numbers, like I had, I'd have this conversation with Luke as well,
because he was kind of pointing at a bunch of videos going, well, like, I think these are the problem.
I'm like, oh my God, but these ones are like above average retention.
So how do I, how do I reconcile?
Cause I have my own biases too. How do I reconcile everyone's individual feelings, which are totally valid with the overall numbers, which are also valid, right?
Everything's valid. It's just a matter of weighing the different valid hypotheses.
Anyway, we'll talk about it a little bit more on the show. Let's get this thing going.
Yeah, I guess we can talk about it on the show.
There's, there's been a bunch of other creators stepping up talking about it too, which has been really interesting.
Yeah, it really does seem like, okay, well, let's just, well, we'll talk about it during the show.
We'll save it. Should we do this thing, Dan? Yep.
I'm punching it. Well, I'm going to try, hold on, my studio crashed here.
Maybe that's why I don't get any views, cause the studio crashed.
Yeah. Yeah. Parallelogram says, I think the LG video is the most disliked video on Floatplane.
Yeah, I, we reacted to so many more of them.
I, I think this is one of those ones where when I was reviewing the video, I kind of thought I was like, oh yeah, I thought we had like way more.
And I thought there was like a lower ratio of like the ones that got the LG monitor sent to them and ones that didn't.
And I think just to keep, we've been trying to lower video length.
And I think that initiative just came along at exactly the wrong time.
Yeah, not for those. Yeah.
So that one should have been longer and it should have been more spaced out with like the LG sponsored bits.
So yeah, that is what it is.
All right.
Oh, this is, yeah, this is still crashed.
I really do need my dashboard to be up.
Kind of important. I mean, kind of.
Kind of. Yeah.
I'm kind of tempted to tweak the title actually.
I met the real Linus.
I met the OG Linus.
What do you think? I'm spitballing right now.
I hear you typing, but I'm not actually. OG Linus, I think is pretty good.
I met the OG Linus. I met, I met the Linux guy.
I met Linux is not bad. That's from when bingo.
That's pretty good. That is pretty good.
I met.
I met the Linux Linus.
That might just be hard to read.
That's a little rough, I think. Yeah.
Chat says real greater than OG.
Is OG like the future now? Like, are we just old?
No, I think OG is still a thing.
I mean, it's the OG way of saying someone's the OG.
Dang, dude. Dang.
The notorious Linus.
I like that. That's a dated reference.
Yeah, I like that a lot. I think that's really good.
One Linus met Linus.
Now let's just leave it as is. I don't know.
I met.
I met. Did you go with OG?
You know, I was trying to check into a hotel here and they were asking for the company name
and I kept saying it over and over again and they were really struggling with it back and forth
and then Sammy handed them a business card and they were like, ah, Linus.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Apparently it was that misleading to say Linus.
There's a few people saying I met the Linus.
Like, all caps, that's not bad. How I met your Linus.
I think is pretty good. What is it right now?
I met Linus, all capital. I met the Linus.
I think I like, I met the Linus. Yeah, let's do it.
Yeah, let's do that. So I'll wait for you to change the titles
and then I'll punch it.
We should just have chat named the Wen show from now on.
I like it. That'd actually be hilarious as a Floatplane perk.
You get a vote to change the. I don't hate it, to be honest.
I mean, you'll hate it when viewership is terrible because they're not professional titlers, but sure.
Well, no, but like, we get the veto, you know,
but they can input. They picked it this time, it was good.
This was the best one. Okay, ready.
A tale of two Linuses. It's currently one and oh, the chat is beating us.
I mean, we don't know that until it goes live and anyone clicks on it, but sure.
Okay, I'm resuming the selected now.
What is up L's and G's and oh, welcome to the Wen show.
We have a great show lined up for you guys this week. I had just about the most exciting,
freaking phone call of my life. I have told Luke basically nothing about it,
but I had about a 25 minute conversation
with the Linus Torvalds.
And, and there's so much more
because I have some exciting news to share
about the outcome of that conversation.
I don't want to get ahead of myself, but it looks like something might be happening.
In other news this week.
Okay, Valve may have some new VR hardware coming
extremely soon and I am cautiously,
hopefully optimistic.
You took one of my two and it was honestly
really hard to find those. Silk song is here and it's been actually crazy.
I've heard about it from practically freaking everyone,
so that's exciting. And I don't know.
Come on, look, you gotta sell them on the exciting show.
Intel launched the first battle mage based
workstation card and you should be hyped
because it's cheap. Okay, enough mulling the intro, forget it.
Which is sick, that's good.
The show is brought to you today by Thoram.
Delete me and Squarespace and of course
that's alongside our RAP partner D brand, our laptop partner Dell, and our chair partner,
Secret Lab. So I am going to
go ahead and share with you what I'm going to share with you today.
I'm going to share with you what I'm going to share with you today.
I'm going to share with you what I am going to,
I'm going to share something with you guys.
It was way back in, oh man,
good lord, when would this have been?
I think it was during CES, yes.
During CES, I don't know why,
but I was suddenly struck with the idea of,
hey, after 17 years doing this,
why don't I just, why don't I just shoot my shot?
See if the OG Linus creator of Linux
is down to do something, because I don't know, he appears on camera
once in a while and stuff, he obviously computes, right?
Yeah, why not, right?
We've certainly been aligned at points in the past
with respect to how we feel about certain hardware vendors
and how they treat our respective industries.
There's got to be some synergies there.
So I'm only going to read my emails verbatim,
because I don't want to leak the DMs or whatever.
I consider an email that someone sends to me
private information, generally speaking.
So here's what I said, here's what I said. By the way, it's really, it's pretty funny
watching the AI summary of our thread,
because it's Linus proposed a collaboration
then Linus said this and Linus said that anyway.
This might be a bit of a long shot,
but we've received hundreds, probably thousands,
of requests over the years to do something with Linus,
and I sent this to basically every email address that I could find.
Here are some rough jumping off points, building the perfect Linux machine for Linus Torvalds,
an April Fool's video where we have him straight-faced
host one of our videos and just never acknowledge that it's the wrong Linus,
having him react to various Linux missteps
that I've committed over the years
and maybe provide some commentary or advice.
I said truthfully, I don't have a concept
solidified in my mind, but I wanted to put out feelers to see if there's any appetite
for any kind of collaboration,
regards the other tech Linus.
I heard back
literally,
hold on, I'm just trying to find the time stamps here.
It was within like minutes though.
Like I was floored.
I heard back, and I'm not going to go word for word,
but basically it was something to do with
Highlander from 1986.
There can be only one, right?
I thought you meant our Linus World Record for a second.
Nope, not even a little. And then there was some mention of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
and the admittedly correct assessment
that both had epic music.
And I was left kind of going, okay.
So is this a yes, is it a no?
How about this? Tell you what? I'm going to assign myself some homework.
I'm going to watch those films and so to make sure that I get all the references.
So since CES, I have watched
all of the original Mel Gibson Mad Max movies.
I have watched Highlander and a little while ago
I reached out again and I went, okay, I totally, totally get all the references now.
And hey, are you interested in doing something?
And earlier this week,
I actually got on a call with the man himself
and I don't want to promise anything because for a thousand reasons, right,
it might not work out and that might not be anyone's fault
and there would be no hard feelings whatsoever.
Something isn't really done until it's done
and there's nothing wrong with that.
But right now, right now it looks like
we are going to build an ultimate Linux machine
for the Linux Torvalds.
And, and, and, and he will help build it.
We will have him here in the studio.
I almost wonder like if you should put like rainbow cards in it,
like if you should have an NVIDIA Nintel and an AMD GPU
so you can like for, for work reasons.
My goal, my goal would be to,
would be to make it as, as stable
because I know that that's something that he values a lot.
Like we'll almost certainly be using ECC memory for instance
because that's something he's really quite passionate about
from what I've seen in the past. So I want that, no, I want this to be quite a series.
I want to have some fun, obviously. That's what we do, right?
We're going to have some fun, but I want the machine to be serious
and what I want from you guys.
And Dan, I'm actually not sure necessarily what the best way for us to tackle this is.
Maybe what we could do is we could do a Floatplane post
sometime over the next week or two. I want to get some feedback from the community because
this is a super rare opportunity.
And obviously the whole point of the video doesn't have to be
here's how to put a memory stick in a Linux computer, right?
Like I don't think that's what people are going to be watching this for.
No, I want to like, I want to have, I want to have a conversation,
you know, Linus or Linus, you know, chatting about our,
about our very, very different experiences
and our very different sort of approach to the tech world.
There are some parallels. We've both ruffled some feathers over the years.
Yeah, yeah. So I want to know like what would you guys,
because to me, building a computer opposite someone is,
it's almost, it's almost not the point, right? It's more like a, it's more like a hot ones.
It's an excuse to be in the same room at the same time, right?
Sparky ones. Dude though, I am like amazed at how easy it was
to get him on the show. He was just like, oh yeah, that sounds fun.
Let's do it. Like I thought I'd have to grovel.
I offered to bring the whole production to him
and he was like, no, no, I think I could do that.
I could just come up there and I was like, okay, that's incredibly generous of your time.
I know this is a little premature.
Yeah. But I hope it goes so well that like he wants to do something again.
I think this is really cool. I think it's so cool.
I think it would be awesome. And it's one of those things where just like,
I just never asked because I assumed,
I just assumed, I don't know, the answer would be no.
And I think, I don't know, and maybe it's like an insecurity on my part.
Maybe it's just, maybe I've allowed my perception of myself
to be colored the same way that I think some people do
as sort of like the tech clown.
Like I, you know, he drops stuff, he does this, he does that.
I don't know. I don't know why I thought he'd say no or ignore it.
I didn't think he'd necessarily even get my email.
But like... That part's kind of surprising to me.
I think for me, it's not my perception of you
it's just that like, he's been...
I don't know. I don't know how to say this and not sound like I'm groveling,
but he's kind of been like a somewhat of a godlike figure forever
in like our realm. So it's just kind of crazy.
So you're gonna have to sort of dial that back when he's here?
No, I know. Because what I will say is he doesn't seem to get it.
Like what a rock star. For sure.
And that's not something you like ever really say to somebody's face. What an absolute freaking rock star he is in our community.
Oh yeah. Because like, I was like, dude, you're gonna have to...
I tried to prepare him a little bit. I was like, dude, you're gonna have to understand that like,
there's gonna be people in our office that are like...
Oh, I'll chill. I'll chill, I'll be fine. It's so great to meet you, sir.
And he's like, oh, I mean, I'm like, understand you are beloved in our space.
And he's like, oh, I don't know. I mean, not everybody likes me.
I've ruffled a lot of feathers. I've been very outspoken.
I'm like, sir, you got to understand the way that you are outspoken
and the cause that you represent,
it's very aligned with our community.
Yeah, you've got some fans here. Yeah, definitely.
So I think he might end up a little taken aback
by just how much our community in particular
is gonna be like...
No way. Well, I mean, I think there's also been a very large push.
I know I've been talking about it individually a little bit, but I think honestly, that's largely because of the communication
in our community for a while, but there's been a really large push of people trying to kind of flee
over to Windows lately.
I think largely enabled by SteamOS.
Sorry, flee over to Windows? You mean flee from Windows?
No, flee away from Windows is what I need to say.
Yeah, okay. I was like, what are you talking about, bud?
No, yeah, fleeing from Windows, fleeing away from Windows.
And that's like... Man, the fact that it's even a possibility is kind of wild
to go to an open source option.
Yeah. Is crazy, considering there's effectively two, right?
And they're both just like enormous commercial giants.
So the fact that there's a genuinely really good alternative
that is free and open is nuts.
Yeah, I mean, tons of credit to Valve for the support that they've given.
100%. And tons of credit, of course, to the foot soldiers,
the ones that are out there doing the work to make this happen
because it has been arduous.
Yeah. And I mean, I...
You wouldn't have to go back that far for me to say,
yeah, this is never going to happen. Like, even Valve looked like they gave up
after the original Steam machines flopperoo.
And clearly they didn't, which is great, but yeah, it seems like they did for a bit.
Really did.
Legacy Uprising says there are only three OGs
and two, I couldn't care less to see on the show.
There's Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the only open source one, Linus.
It's like, yep. Yeah, I think that's a sentiment that's going to resonate
with a big part of our community,
which isn't to say at all that the contributions
to modern computing, for better or for worse,
from the other two were not monumental.
Absolutely they were. No one is questioning that. No one's denying that.
But in terms of like, you know,
if I was to pick a big three sort of figureheads, because again, a big part of their roles
was to be figureheads or is to be figureheads.
It's not like any of them was, you know,
developing everything over the entire span of there,
in some cases, decades-long careers, right? Like there are many, many contributors
to every major platform. But in terms of like, if I was going to pick
a big three figureheads, yeah, those would be them for me too.
Yes, we're not forgetting the laws. Don't worry, Chet.
Don't worry. We're not forgetting Steve Wozniak.
Now, Woz is somebody that I think would be
fantastic to have on the show.
I mean, look, let's start somewhere.
Let's start somewhere. And then if this goes really well, dude,
I mean, how fun would that be? That'd be sweet.
That'd be super cool. But let's start somewhere, because it never hurts.
It never hurts when we do outreach, you know,
to other people to be like, okay, and here's the time that we had, you know,
Linz Torvold's on, and it went great.
Or I don't know, maybe it didn't go so good. No, I'm sure it'll go great.
I think it's going to go awesome. Yeah. I'm just, I just wanted to, I'm too excited
to not share that with you guys this week. This is the kind of thing where if I wasn't
so amped about it to the point where
I'd probably end up leaking it anyway, then I would have saved and I would have just
had it be a surprise when the video dropped, but I just, I just really wanted to talk about it
and I'm psyched. I'm absolutely psyched.
And yeah, Dan, I don't know, maybe could we coordinate
with Sammy to get some jumping off points
for some conversations that people would like to hear?
100%. Okay, that would be amazing. So that'll be over on Floatplane,
LMG.GG slash Floatplane if you're not part
of our legion of Floatplaners just quite yet.
Speaking of legions of Floatplaners, I guess now's as good a time as any to head
into our next topic. Last week, it was a relatively short conversation,
I thought, but we discussed a little bit
of what's been happening on the channel with respect to viewership.
There were some theories that we kind of threw around on the show last week.
Since that time, we have done some additional digging
and I wouldn't say that we have an answer,
but we definitely have a lot more questions.
And I guess I'm gonna have to kind of bring producer Dan
into the conversation for this because he's one
of the ones that's been doing a fair bit of the investigation on our side.
So we've kind of, we've chatted a little bit
with YouTube about it, but in typical YouTube fashion,
the answer is pretty much get good,
which to be clear is fair and is a valid stance.
Like if there is an algorithmic shift,
that means that, yeah, a 0.2 or 0.4 difference
in click-through ratio means that, hey, your packaging just isn't good enough
for the modern meta anymore, or if there's a shift
where established channels can't just take for granted
that they're gonna get a certain number of impressions
and they're gonna have to get scrappier and fight for every viewer, you know,
just like they did in the early days. That's a valid answer and that's one that I can totally accept.
But Dan did dig up some things and we did see some feedback
from other creators, both publicly and in our inboxes
that would lead us to believe that it isn't quite,
quite maybe not quite that simple.
So Dan, do you wanna talk a little bit about, sort of maybe let's go chronologically.
So start with what you sort of discovered
right after WAN Show that we were kind of chatting about
on Teams afterward. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, we had a pretty brutal chat after WAN Show.
I think all of us here are pretty concerned about this downturn in viewership.
Like we're seeing maybe a 50% viewership drop,
so we went from one and a half, two million views per video to down to like a million.
So like huge, huge drop. I mean, less than that for that one in particular.
Exactly, sometimes down to 300,000.
I think that one still has like 400K or something like that,
even though it's been up for over a week. Yeah, something like that. Oh, 500K.
500, 7000, yeah, something like that. So I thought this was pretty weird
because in general, if our videos were just getting worse,
like we were just losing it,
you should be seeing like a downward trend
and maybe we are getting bad,
maybe that's a component of it too, but I built a tool to pull all of our videos
that we've ever made. So that's roughly 6,900 or something like that.
And one thing that I've also pulled
was all of the likes for those videos too.
Are you able to share any of this on screen or are you just going to kind of...
I can throw pictures up. I'm not sure how much of this you want to share publicly.
Yeah, that's for better or for worse, Dan.
Our transparency is... We're like panes of glass.
Absolutely. We're transparent and sometimes we break.
Yeah, yeah. I think we should show that where we got the tip from too.
Yes, that's right. Well, let's go chronological.
Sure, sure, sure, sure. I will grab some pictures in a minute if I can.
Anyway, I ran this chart and I saw that there was this shift
and it was really, really strange
because it was so sudden and we hadn't seen many other kind of...
I guess creators talking about it at that point.
And it was also very difficult to find other creators that were presenting similar to we were.
I pulled Mr. Beast, I pulled Veritasium,
I pulled a bunch of other channels and I think their upload frequency
maybe had something to do with their data
that didn't look like this. But what we found was the views were down
but the light ratio had gone through the roof.
So our average light ratio, I think, was something like 3%
and it had skyrocketed. Do we know this already before the heads up?
You want to start it? Did we know this light ratio thing already before we got the heads up?
No, this was the heads up, yeah. We had a good chronology.
Yeah, who was that then? That was Brody.
Okay, so there was a merge message that came in from a viewer
giving us a heads up of Brody Robertson.
Hopefully I didn't say that wrong. Let me check his channel.
We've engaged with him before.
And Fleming says Brody, yeah, I watched his video.
Yeah, Brody Robertson. So there's a merge message that came in flagging that video for us.
So a big appreciation to the merge message.
If I remember correctly, it was anonymous. That's right.
I don't know. But that sent us to Brody's video
and then Brody's video talked about this whole views going down,
likes going sharply up, revenue going...
Yeah, likes not going sharply up, but likes staying constant.
Meaning that if views are down but your likes are the same,
the ratio of viewers liking the content is skyrocketing.
And then a pattern as well of revenue also staying constant,
meaning that your CPMs or your amount of money per view also went down.
Yeah, that's another big thing that I found. I think that was a couple days ago now.
I was looking at our revenue numbers because, okay, are we getting less views?
If we're getting less views, we should be making less money. Every YouTuber makes money off of AdSense.
That should track. I did a linear regression on revenue to view count
and it is pretty much perfectly, statistically correlated with no outliers.
Revenue is stable around our average.
It hasn't moved within one sigma from that mean.
But viewership is down over one sigma,
so like 65 to 98% kind of outside normal.
And then like ratio is up by two sigma.
So it's like everyone who is seeing this,
I think your views are the same. I think they haven't changed.
And you can check your revenue numbers and you can check your like ratio as well.
Another thing that I did is I calculated our revenue per view,
which is kind of a CPM that we make.
It's like an RPM but not the one that YouTube reports.
YouTube's reported CPM and RPM have no statistical correlation
to view count at all. But if you take the number of views you get
and the amount of money you get, you get like an RPM.
That number has also skyrocketed by about the same.
And what I managed to do was I calculated our average RPM
and then I kind of flipped it around. So instead of RPM revenue divided by views,
I did how many views we should have got
for this amount of revenue that we generated.
And what I found is that it's a little bit more wonky,
but the views are where they're supposed to be.
The numbers are roughly where they're supposed to be
on the average, which I thought was very strange. Do you have any of these visuals for the people?
Yeah, they're going to take me a sec. Why don't you guys discuss,
because I got to like screen cap and download all these pictures.
It's been interesting. I was flagged to this video and in classic fashion,
I haven't watched it and I haven't read the comments.
Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy.
Here we go. It's probably full of furry porn.
No, no, no.
It's a dark Viper video.
But he released a video 17 hours ago.
I've been traveling, so I haven't been able to watch it, but he released a video 17 hours ago,
just in quotes saying, I guess my retirement is coming sooner than I thought.
And I've heard that it's about this YouTube performance thing
that's going on.
So maybe consider checking that out. I've seen some other creators talking about it.
There's some theories, I believe Brody, who really tipped us off on all of this stuff.
There's theories that I believe he said as well,
that it might be kind of being A, B tested.
So some channels are getting hit by whatever this is
and other channels seem to not be.
I have talked to other creators that think that they've had
none of these effects and I've looked at their results
and their overall revenue is staying kind of flat.
Their like to view ratio is staying kind of flat
and their overall views are staying kind of right where they expected.
And then you're seeing other creators where this exactly
similar pattern is happening where the like to view ratio
and the CPMs are just going way up
and the views are going way down and it's all on the exact, it happened to everybody
at the exact same time. So it's really, really, really hard.
We don't know, obviously, we have no idea, but it's really hard to point to this and say
there isn't something going on in YouTube land.
Obviously, you can always do better, sure.
And there are various theories for how something like
this could happen legitimately.
One of the theories that I've seen is that YouTube could be cleaning up idle autoplay.
So something that I do know is that an idle view
is not worth as much. It cannot be monetized as effectively
as an active, engaged view.
It's also less likely to result in clicking the like button
because you're sleeping or you're otherwise away
or idling. And so that is a potential hypothesis
for how a video could perform as expected
in terms of the revenue and in terms of the viewer engagement,
but not register nearly as many views
or nearly as much watch time.
It could also explain why some of these very low viewership videos
have really great retention and really great user sentiment.
The same or better. It turns out this is a good video.
It's just that like nobody's watching it
or maybe YouTube is fine tuning things
so that only people who are actually very interested
and very actively engaged are watching it. That's one theory I've seen.
So I've got our chart here ready. And I'm going to hold on.
Let me finish with the kind of random theories first. I'll keep writing some more.
Yeah, as soon as you're ready after that. Another one is that there's this new feature
called I think it's called hype that showed up in the dashboard right around that time.
And I think it has to do with helping to promote small channels.
So another theory that I've seen is that,
no, the viewer drop is real,
but it is mostly affecting only certain kinds of channels
or it's mostly affecting established channels
because this hype feature is kind of designed to elevate smaller channels
and diversify the content on the platform a little bit.
I think there could be some merit there, but it doesn't really back up some of the observations
that we've seen within our own dashboard over the last little while.
Like after that one video that absolutely
bombinated the hidden gaming setup
in my new desk one that still has half a million views,
which I want to just get this out there.
Most people on earth would be thrilled to get half a million views on their YouTube video.
And that's like huge.
I'm not down on getting half a million views
on a YouTube video, that's awesome. Like good job if you've ever managed to achieve that.
I'm just saying that when you have like a hundred staff
and you've kind of built a model around expecting a certain number of views,
then that can be a disappointment because that could mean that the model is no longer sustainable.
So that's where I'm coming from here. So right after that one that bombed,
we had our worst performing WAN Show in,
I don't know, years.
It was rough. Yeah, last WAN Show was an absolute bomb.
But then we had two one out of 10s in a row.
And when I say a one out of 10, that means that it is the top performing video
out of the last 10 uploaded to your channel.
That's a good thing. It sounds like a bad thing, but it's a good thing.
Yes, so we had Nintendo's greed could change the industry.
That was a one out of 10. It now has 1.6 million views.
And it looks like a pretty normal like ratio.
So I don't know if I would believe that it's supposed to have 3 million views by now.
And then we're being forced to buy Chromebooks, which was a really like back to basics old school LTT,
filmed on phones, completely unscripted. Me and David went shopping for Chromebooks.
That was another one out of 10, which also like has it's got a good,
you know, like ratio and everything, but not an outlier by any stretch of the imagination.
Then we had another bomb yesterday.
And so that unfortunately, I think kind of derailed the conversation
within the community to, yeah, you guys aren't getting views because your content sucks.
And it's like, look, I get it. The how many monitors is too many?
Sure, you can make the argument it sucked. Looking back at it now with people's feedback,
it's like, yeah, you know what? I think our ratio of not the ones
that got the LG monitors shipped to them could have been better.
And like it probably could have been longer.
It just was bad timing. We've been internally, we've been discussing,
hey, how do we get our video lengths down a little bit?
But that was shot before that happened. So the ratio probably would have been better.
Anyway, the point is just it spilled milk at this point.
Even with some of the negative feedback around it,
the viewership is very, very low,
but it's still not nearly as bad as that hidden desk one was,
which I think had a better title, better thumbnail, better premise and was like a real, real outlier.
I really thought that the title thumbnail
on the desk video was fantastic.
So, okay, with all that in mind then,
I don't know what to think other than
if they are A.B. testing something, it might even not be channel wide.
I mean, it might be video to video for all I can tell.
Or maybe they just aren't A.B. testing something
and maybe those videos just suck. And at the end of the day, like our action plan
just has to be make the best possible content we can
and upload as much of it as we can. That's all we can do.
That's all we can do. But it's still, you know, I don't think it hurts
to have these conversations. So, okay, Dan, you got us some visuals
to show the people now, right? I do, I do. Hopefully they can make sense.
And are we okay with throwing some revenue numbers or shall I keep that one out of it?
No, whatever. Yeah, okay. So, here is the first one I got.
At the top here, we've got... Dan, you might want to either hide yourself or put yourself in a sec.
I will get rid of myself in a second. In the top here, we've got views and the bottom one here is our likes.
No, don't do it, Dan! The green line in the center there is our average.
One segment, two sigma above that. You can see like ratio has gone ridiculous
and views are down two.
The next one here... No, no, put that back up. Do you have a mouse pointer that you can kind of use
to really show them the date?
Maybe? Probably not. Help the people.
Okay, fine. Well, basically it's... Let me do that.
It's around the start of August there, then. That's right.
Where the like to view ratio on the top,
just skyrockets, where the low water mark
becomes what used to be a high water mark, right?
And then right on that same day, pretty much,
you go down to the bottom and view performance goes...
And like some of that can be explained a little bit because if a video is only viewed
by the super hardcore audience, they're more likely to...
Yes. Tap like. But this is...
This does not explain that entirely.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
There, I made a pointer. So, yeah, as you can kind of see,
like this is where it kind of starts. Right in August, it all goes a bit weird.
And then if we compare that with all of our videos
we've ever made, which is this one here. So I pulled all 6,000.
You can see right at the end here, this goes up.
Most of it's just like noise
for the entire history of the channel. And then it just goes zoop.
And then same here. It just kind of drops down to nothing.
And there are definitely some outliers over the years
where there's days that have like a spectacular like ratio.
But those, if you go and you drill down into them,
what you're going to find is things like the dbrand sponsored video
where we just like uploaded that video of dbrand trolling me.
That has a phenomenal like to view ratio.
Or ones where, you know, Elijah said, hey, if we get 100,000 likes,
I'll make this weird hope poster with CEO Taren Tong,
which we did get and we did have to make. So those are some of the outliers that you guys are seeing there.
Everything else is pretty much our typical way of doing things
where we don't really call out the like button super hard,
our content. I wouldn't, I wouldn't describe it as say me.
I don't think that's fair, but I think it's consistent for the most part.
Another thing that I did is that second wind video that came out,
got shared around. This is their channel.
And I can see exactly pretty much the same thing.
Their like ratio goes insane. Their views kind of go down.
I've had to correct this one a little bit because they have sort of mini channels, right?
You got Yahtzee and them and there's all those sorts of spikes.
But the most of their channel performance is around here.
And then you can kind of see there's a bit of drop off, but that like ratio goes crazy,
which is very, very strange as well. If we move on to our revenue here,
this is from a more recent kind of time period.
But you can see that the views drop off here,
but revenue is still within that 65% middle band.
And then our revenue per view goes up like in saying,
they're like way out of normal,
which is kind of interesting as well.
Very, very, very strange.
If you want to see that as a linear regression,
you can kind of see here. So this top one is the provided CPM.
So basically, yeah, like no,
absolutely no correlation between CPM and views.
And then the bottom one here is our views to estimated revenue,
which would kind of tell me that our revenues not being adjusted
because we're still getting the same amount of views and we're still getting the same amount of revenue.
Or rather, we're not getting the same number of views. Sorry, yeah.
Yeah. The expected amount of revenue is weird.
This last one here is that kind of flip.
So you can kind of again see on the right hand side here,
we've got our...
Right, like these two graphs track
really, really closely with each other
until suddenly at the beginning of August, they decouple.
Absolutely. And you do see some slight decoupling, but not consistent.
And if you can think about where our numbers are supposed to be,
which are roughly around 1.5 to 2 million, these are there.
Just the views are really low. Some of them are still coupled.
I don't know what's going on. I don't know enough.
Nice. But that's really strange.
I've got more. But wait, there's more.
But wait, there's more. Which one is this?
This is Dark Viper. He posted that video today.
I see the same thing. You can see his like ratio goes crazy
and hits views are down. He hits two what would be all-time highs
for like ratio in the last month.
You got to be kidding me, right? Mm-hmm.
While his views are in the absolute toilet
at low points for this entire data range.
See here? Yeah. Like, come on.
Come on, man. Another interesting thing that I'm seeing is
like the like ratio is super decoupled from views initially.
Like, you'll have a video that has 100,000 views
and it has 80,000 likes. And the likes go up even more.
Like, I was tracking the... Do you want to go back to talking heads?
Yeah, let's probably do that. Have you really seen it that bad?
100,000 views, 80,000 likes? That's insane. Yeah, the second wind video I started tracking
immediately after it got posted and like I was looking at the like ratio on that.
It was within the first hour. It had like 40,000 views and like nearly 40,000 likes.
Like the ratio for it was just at the absolute top.
They're lagging. And I think a couple other channels have mentioned that.
I think Dark Viper mentioned that. I think somebody else did too.
Yeah, I saw someone mentioning that they encountered a situation
where their internal dashboard actually registered fewer views
than the external view counter. Which they said in like some number of...
Big number of years of doing this they'd never seen.
I've never seen it either. Normally our internal real-time view counter
or even the non-real-time internal view counter in the studio
registers significantly more views than what's visible externally
because I think whether it's more vetting
or whether it's just not updating as frequently because of the load that that would put on the external platform.
That view counter is not as accurate supposedly
as the one that we have in our dashboards.
Yeah, I spent the last week or two building a tool to kind of cross-check any channel from any time period.
Likes, comments, stuff like that. Everything is consistent but the number.
I don't think any of us are experiencing a lower view account
or what's happening is we're being served to a smaller group
of more engaged viewers.
Because if the light count is consistent but the light ratio is going through the roof,
I don't know. I don't know what it is. But what a view is has changed in my opinion.
Or is being tested to change. However, I have it from someone I would consider
to be extraordinarily good authority
that if that were happening, they'd know
and they don't know about that.
Well, we're not getting less money. Yeah, so I mean...
Alright, party on! That's a complicated...
It is a complicated question. That's a complicated conversation though
because in the eyes of a sponsor,
which I don't know if this has happened to us at all
but theoretically for any creator on YouTube if they're working with outside sponsors
in the eyes of the sponsors, you're getting significantly less views.
So if your theory is correct and there's a bunch of theories
and we have no idea which one is correct, if your theory is correct and we're actually getting the same amount of views,
then it's really screwing over our ability
to work with outside sponsors which will extremely negatively impact groups like us
which are like larger companies
that are quite heavily reliant on that sponsor money.
Or hear me out. Maybe it won't matter that much because...
And here, I'm gonna...
Let me see if there's a way for me to do this easily.
Okay, I'm gonna try and show a one-week view.
Let's go from last Friday to this Thursday.
I'm gonna kind of show you... Oh, man!
Okay, this is tough.
So what I'm trying to do is show the...
Oh, balls, I suck at this interface. Okay, there.
What are you doing? I'm trying to bring up my Shopify dashboard.
So the point that I'm trying to make here is that...
Yeah, this is not gonna demonstrate very well because we actually typically have a Friday spike for WAN Show
and then it lulls and then it spikes again on Fridays so it's kind of cyclical.
So it's gonna look like it is going down. But day-to-day this week,
or even last week when we had the big viewership dip,
there wasn't a reduction in sales on LTT Store.
So it's possible that the sponsors won't care
because our referral rates might seem,
to Dan's point earlier, like they're actually skyrocketing
but way more qualified views or impressions or referrals.
Yeah, to me, they're more high quality.
Would this change how we communicate to sponsors
or are we already talking in a conversion rate sense?
I don't really know the business side. I don't think it would change anything,
at least not in the short to medium term.
I mean, a lot of the partners that we work with,
we've worked with for a very long time through good times and through less good times.
And we try to work with our partners
in a reasonable fashion where, hey, if they get a banger of a video
that does six million views, we don't charge them extra for that.
And in the same vein, when they get a dog
that gets half a million views, they don't come to us going like,
I want my money back, where's my money back? I think they understand that there's
a certain amount of variability here and if they stick with us,
we've been such consistent performers on the platform
for so long that we kind of have to understand each other
that it's going to come out in the wash. Eventually.
Eventually. Speaking of the wash,
unless Dan, did you have some more things you wanted to share with the folks?
Because otherwise we should probably discuss the silver I'm wearing.
Yeah, I don't know. I think if people want to reach out
and have me run their stats or if you have any more data for me,
I would really appreciate that. Yeah, I guess try and find me
and we'll have a look at your channel.
Yeah, Loose Guy, Twitter, email me. I don't know.
We'll figure it out. Product.
Okay, yeah, let's do it. I actually had brought up one of the bigger reddit threads
on this and I was going to kind of dunk on people's theories a little bit,
but I guess it's probably not worth it. Yeah, every one is wrong.
Yeah, basically if you think you know the answer
and that it's black and white, you're wrong.
You are just wrong. You're just actually wrong. I have charts for that.
You're wrong. There's just so...
Get red. Oh my god, there's so much certainty.
There's so much certainty in this reddit thread that is just utterly misplaced.
Well, YouTube's videos have been going down for years.
I have it on extremely good authority. That's not happening.
Seriously, that's true. Well, okay.
There's one theory. I want to be too surprised if your ship is down a little bit
from COVID era, but...
You'd be surprised. YouTube is going hard.
YouTube's going strong, boys. I heard they're doing better on shorts than TikTok is now,
which is pretty nuts. There is one theory that we had actually discussed internally
as well and that's something I've got a bit of an update
for you guys on. I think we touched on this last week where we felt
that the channel was really being cluttered up by members-only videos.
So we've had some internal discussions this week
about just killing the memberships on YouTube.
That may move forward. Right now, it is not confirmed.
We'll definitely keep the ones that are just like emotes
and flares and stuff like that,
but the actual members-only videos, I think,
may go back to being Floatplane exclusive.
However, YouTube has asked for sort of a little bit of time
to figure out if there's something that they can do
to keep us from just walking away from this feature.
Because I think what I suspect, I don't know this for sure,
but what I suspect is that we aren't the only ones complaining
about the way that it's just embedded in the feed
and potentially turning people off of our channel right now.
When we turned memberships on, they weren't like this.
There was a members-only videos tab
and kind of like a Patreon or Floatplane
or any other kind of off-platform service.
You would drive people to memberships to that tab yourself
as a creator. You would control how you're calling it out
and how you're promoting it. The way that it is now, it just seems to be kind of shoved
in the face of anyone who might have a passing interest
in your channel, and I think it's really turning people off
at the moment, and that's something that no creator,
I don't think, if they aren't supremely arrogant,
would be in a position where they want to do.
You don't want to be turning people off of your channel.
And I honestly don't think this is like Floatplane bias
because I recommended and supported us,
not recommended, but supported us putting
Floatplane content on YouTube.
It has turned me away. This YouTube exclusives being in the main feed
has been very annoying for me as a YouTube enjoyer
of not just our channel, but other people's channels as well.
It is very annoying, and one of the big things that it does
is it pushes me away from the individual channel.
I think it can give people a sense of FOMO
in a good way that converts them to become a member,
but I think it can give people a sense of FOMO in a really bad way, especially if that's not something
that is part of their budget right now.
Just because I think that our behind the scenes team
is freaking awesome, I think the content's really great.
Sammy kills it. That doesn't mean that everyone should spend
five or $10 a month to get it,
like if that's not a manageable amount of money for you.
I mean, Luke, I don't know if you want to talk about
that indicator that you had that times have been pretty tough,
but we fully recognize that times are pretty tough out there,
and the first thing that you should cut out
is throwing money at your screen if times are tough.
I can talk about it. It's up to you, really. No, I'm okay with it.
Sure. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
Something I've noticed, and it makes me sad
because I don't want this to be a situation that people are running into, to be completely honest,
but something I've noticed is that we can check,
mostly in Stripe, I'm sure it's possible in Braintree,
but Braintree's really annoying to use for anything, but we can check in Stripe what the error codes are
that we're getting for failed payments, and you can look at those error codes over time,
and the error code for insufficient funds
is a line that is trending up percentage-wise.
The amount of failed payments that are because of insufficient funds
is rising over time, to the point where there was one day,
in particular, where there was a lot of cancellations
that seemed like on the platform, and I was looking into why,
and it didn't seem like there was a lot of manual cancellations, so I was like, God, it's a lot of failed payments,
and I looked into it, and it was just a actually
somewhat stunning amount of insufficient funds.
And yeah, just like Linus says, right, like it's...
And the insufficient funds code is completely discreet
from the like... Yeah.
Sorry, what's the other one? Rejected or...
Denied. Because denied could be for any reason,
but the insufficient funds one is like, for that reason.
Actually, there's some backup for this in Floatplane Chat.
Hovership says, I work in banking, and this is sadly so true.
Dude, it's crazy, and again, I can't stress it enough.
I love doing the Floatplane stuff. I adore the Floatplane team.
I want to be able to do Floatplane stuff basically forever.
I appreciate your guys' support. I also don't want you going to insufficient funds
on a credit card. Like, oh man, it's just...
It's so destructive to your life
to just carry credit card debt like that.
And you know, I can hope that these are just
like really, really low-limit credit cards that people have kept low-limit because of control
or whatever. I can really hope that it's those things,
but the volume of errors that we're getting
indicates that it's not that.
Yeah. Firefighter6122 in Floatplane Chat says,
I work in insurance, and we are seeing the same issues.
Dude. Oh, it's so rough. It's so uncomfortable.
Yeah. I appreciate your support. I don't want you in that situation.
Yeah. 100%. Please feel free to come back later.
The exclusives are there all the time. Yeah.
So you can come back and see them later. It's okay.
Yep. And I've said this to people before because we've taken
some criticism for not having regional pricing, right?
And I fully recognize that five US dollars is not
a reasonable monthly amount if you are in India
or some parts of South America, for instance.
But one of the things that I have said publicly
is that maintaining the subscription is an amazing way
of helping support our channel, our development team,
the incredible work that our editors and Sammy do
on the exclusive content, not to mention other participants.
We had a really great meet the team with Sammy, who was featured on actually the last two Scrapyard Wars.
That just went up this week. It's a great team, and they love getting your support.
And that really does come from the people who maintain
their subscription monthly. However, if it is a financial burden on you
that is not reasonable, don't forget that Floatplane
offers DRM-free downloads.
We have that. That was baked into the platform from day one.
Well, it's per creator. Sorry.
The ability to set that up was baked into the platform
from day one. We have had it enabled from day one.
We have zero intention of ever removing that. So you can always create for yourself a pay however much
you want tier. You could subscribe one month a year.
So you could get effectively, you could pay 8% for Floatplane,
and then you could queue up the downloads for everything you missed over the last year, dump it all in a folder,
and watch it at your leisure. We appreciate your support, but we do not want to drain
your bank account. That's not what this is about.
There is a rate limit on it. Yes, CWP, but over the span of a month, I think you should
be able to grab everything that was uploaded.
There's like, I haven't looked into it in a bit,
but there's like a GitHub thing for a script for Plex
that will download it just right below the rate limit
and stuff like that. We had to do the rate limit thing because people were kind
of abusing it, and so it's just like, this is why we can't have nice things.
But we are not out to put you guys
in financial straits.
Okay, I think, oh yeah, Dan, was there anything else
you wanted to share with the people? I'm not sure.
I think it's still developing. I would love other channels, get their names,
if they want charts, if we can cross-reference data,
if we can figure out what's going on. It's about it.
Cool, why don't we move on to- And everyone's wrong. Yeah, yeah, pretty much.
That's about it. Including us. Yeah, yes.
But not for long, if I have anything to say about it. Oh my God.
Dan's putting the paper on. Ah yes, I'm supposed to explain a bunch of messages.
So once again, can't emphasize this enough.
If cash is tight, hey, wear your existing sweater
for another little while, okay?
But if it's not, check this out. Our washed crew neck sweater just launched last week,
and I gotta tell you, people around the office are absolutely loving these.
They're made with 100% cotton with a breathable terry fleece interior that is perfect for the fall,
and you can get them at LMG.gg slash crew neck.
Also, oh, look at this. We have a deal on magnetic cable management this week.
You can, oh wait, I was supposed to explain merge messages.
Right, so the way to interact with the show, we've never been really that supportive of the idea
of just throwing money at the screen. We kind of feel that you should get something in return.
Why not some quality merchandise? So all you've got to do to send a merge message
to interact with the show and send a little message there
or get a response from producer Dan
or have him curate it for me and Luke
to discuss later on during After Dark is add something to your cart on lttstore.com
like the new washed crew neck sweater or the magnetic cable management deal I'm about to tell you about.
Fill in the merge message field, go ahead and place your order,
and it should go through.
We'll show you guys how it works in a second, but first I'm just going to tell you about
the magnetic cable management deal we have this week. You can mix and match packs of individual components
and get 10% off if you buy two, 15% off if you buy three,
20% off if you buy four, and 25% off if you buy five or more.
This includes all arches, power bar keys, power brick holders, and cable tie holders.
So it's the perfect time to add on to the magnetic cable management you already have
or to try it out if you've never tried it before. You can shop magnetic cable management at LMG.gg
slash m-c-m.
And it really is, whoops, whoops, whoops, whoops, whoops, there we go.
It really is this easy. We actually did a collab with Kyle from Bitwit last week,
and he hadn't tried out m-c-m, and I cable managed his desk for him with it,
and he was like, oh. And I was like, yeah, and the best part is,
hey, that cable that we forgot to put in. Easy. Easy. Easy.
It was definitely the best part. Easy fucking magnets.
I don't even care how they work, but my god, are they ever outstanding?
Oh yeah, right. So one of the things that I've been going out of my way
to make sure that I show you fine folks is giving some credit to the team
for the amazing job that they've been doing on our photo shoots lately.
Absolutely love it. So cool.
Got that, like, vintage look to it. Ariana and Reese, I think.
Yep, that's who we're looking at here. Sorry, I got a very, very small,
very small picture up there.
Very cool. And really making the most of the side of our warehouse.
Great job, guys. All right, Dan, do you want to show the folks
how a merge message works? Yeah, sure. I've got a couple for you here.
Why don't we start with this one? I only wear jeans. When jeans?
Oh my god. How do I put this?
Never. Jeans are so hard, dude.
And I can't afford Sidney Sweeney to wear my jeans, you know?
Apparently that was, like, their most successful campaign, like, ever.
Sure. You should just recreate the ad with yourself.
Oh my god. Yeah, sure. If we had jeans, I would totally do it.
I wish we did more, like, meming on topical things.
Like, I wanted to talk to the writing team this week
and do, like, a bit in one of our videos
where I, like, steal a hat or something.
I don't know if you saw the viral thing from the... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, from the U.S. Open. But we just, we operate on a relatively...
I think Self Park has a shorter time between
starting to work on an episode and it airing than we do.
So it's hard for us to be, like, on it with the cultural references.
It's maybe not a great thing. Look, I'm not saying it's a good thing, I'm just saying it's a thing.
It's a little tough for us to do that kind of stuff.
I forget how we got onto this, right? Jeans, yeah.
Jeans are so personal.
Everything from the rise to the cut
to the washedness to the rips or not rips
to patches and the trendiness.
It goes so freaking fast.
I think it's just not in the cards for us.
I mean, look, we have managed to finally do pants successfully.
I don't think we had a successful pant until the cargo pants.
That's been legitimately successful.
Not just like it did fine, I guess.
We didn't lose money on it, right? That was the high watermark before.
But we now have pants that have been successful.
So who knows? You know, never say never, but never.
And the other one I've got for you here.
Hello, the lad, the dad, and the Chad. Luke, given your based opinions on supporting AMD and switching to Linux,
what are some of your favorite pieces of software? Anything that you find novel or useful?
Hmm. Uh, wow.
Is this incredibly lame? Well, he thinks.
Oh, okay, are you good? I don't think I necessarily have one.
A lot of the software that I use is actually the same, which is one of the reasons why I think the switch has been so easy.
Um, like if I want to play a game on my laptop,
I can just play the vast majority of steam games and it's fine.
Um, I use Chrome for work.
I use Zen, which is like a Firefox off-shoot browser for personal stuff.
Um, on my laptop, most of what I'm doing is communications platforms,
which teams is terrible on Linux, but it works.
It's terrible all the time. So it's really hard to differentiate it that much.
Um, uh, Slack works perfectly fine.
Discord works perfectly fine. Obviously email in a browser works perfectly fine.
So the things that I do on my laptop are fairly limited and they're all the same.
Um, outside of that, I haven't dove in super heavily on the customization stuff,
which I want to do. I just haven't necessarily had the time for it yet.
Um, I feel like this is such a similar take to what I went through
when I did the switch to Snapdragon where I went in thinking that I was going to care
and over the span of the much more than a month, I ended up daily driving it.
I was like, oh, it turns out I don't care.
And most of what I do is in a browser these days, I could just as easily probably use Chrome OS.
But that in my opinion is honestly like a, a better state.
Like I, I'm more excited about the fact that I just kind of like shrug off that I'm running it now than, um,
I run it by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But like, but the fact that that is actually totally fine is crazy.
Like it's, it was not, there was no skill involved.
I'm not some like, uh, Uber Linux nerd at all,
but I'm running the like scary operating system and it's been completely fine the entire time.
And everything I've tried to do has just like worked. There's been things that have honestly been easier.
You know how when we did the challenge, we were both like stunned at how easy the printer was.
Yeah. Yeah. Especially considering how hard they are on Windows.
Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, most things I've ran into this time have been easier or,
it's just been in an, in kind of like an inverse to normal fashion.
It's been less annoying. Um, like using Windows 11 these days is there's so many little pop ups and pokes and annoying.
Are you sure you don't want to use edge? Hey, this new file you installed, are you sure we can't open it an edge?
Do you want this weird notification thing? Do you want this other garbage?
Like anytime I try to do anything, it wants to forcibly take the focus window away to some new thing that I don't want.
And then it just keeps doing that over and over again. It's really, really frustrating.
Windows Firewall randomly started blocking LAN Minecraft games.
Just like out of nowhere. Like what? Like it was working fine between my kids' computers.
And then all of a sudden it's not. And I'm like, oh my God, who cares?
I'm sure it was in the name of security or something, but oh my God, who cares?
I'm just trying to play a video game on a local area network and they're both set to private.
That's made by you. That's made by you!
Exactly. Exactly.
What's the excuse? Dude, there's been, there's been a persistent bug in Halo Infinite for at least a couple weeks now.
That's, that's as long as I've seen it over. Where the first time you launch it on a system, it prompts you to log in, but the login is like behind.
And you can like click and it'll be like ding, ding, ding, ding. Like you can tell it's there, but you have to alt-F4 the game and then launch the game again and then it'll show up.
And it's like, bro, this is basic.
If you can't handle having a login screen in your software, then don't have one.
Also, by the way, never log me out.
Oh my God, who cares? Never log me out, but also if I'm, if I'm like global,
global Microsoft account logged in to my computer already, don't ask.
Right! Like, my God.
So anyways, it's been interesting. And then when I click yes, be like, okay.
Yeah. I don't remember if it was after the last Linux challenge.
I think it was, but I don't fully remember where I decided I would like try it on my work laptop.
And then eventually I abandoned that because there was so much tedium of like keeping it running that I thought it was lowering,
even if by a small amount, it was lowering my productivity at work.
And I decided that I couldn't do a like personal thing that resulted in the lowering of my work productivity, if that makes sense.
It's like one of the main reasons why I use Chrome for work is because of all the different profiles that I have.
I find Chrome is by far best at managing that.
It's not the like, the, the small individual day to day usage of the browser.
It's, it's purely just the profile management is like amazing and it kicks the butt of everything else.
And profile management doesn't matter to me too much for my personal stuff because it's one account.
So it sort of solves itself. But yeah, I eventually ditched running Linux on my work laptop because it was too tedious and honestly, legitimately, at this point,
I suspect that I might be more productive on Linux because of the amount of time that it just gets out of my way.
I think if we redo the Linux challenge, it's just going to be boring.
It might be. Legitimately, it might be. We'll have to like, we'll have to really pad it out to get, you know, a 12 minute runtime or a nine minute runtime out of just like,
yeah, everything kind of went okay. Well, and like something that might be a little bit different is I'm running Linux on my laptop, which is a lot lighter use.
And again, it's a lot of browser stuff and whatnot.
But like, I also don't game as much as you used to. Like I remember that being a big challenge for you last time we did the Linux challenges.
You were like, oh, this sucks because like games came out and I couldn't play.
If we do it once, Battlefield 6 is out. Hopefully I'll be playing some more of that.
Yeah, is it supported on Steam OS?
I don't know. And like Silk song is here.
I'm excited for that. There's some games coming right now that are exciting.
Silk song, I'm pretty sure it's supported. Yeah, but yeah, it's interesting.
I have something to add to Luke's, you know, softwares that he likes there.
We do have an actual series on the channel called LSD or Luke's software discoveries.
Two whole episodes from 11 and 10 years ago, respectively.
He shows you how to simplify your screenshots with push.
I don't know if push even exists anymore. So I don't know.
Share X, I guess. And also top five hidden uses for VLC, Luke's software discoveries, episode two.
Wow, that one actually did like pretty good for that era.
Half a million views. Not bad. It's not too bad.
Yeah. Cause if I remember quickly, Luke's software discoveries never went like that well either.
So that that considered, I think that video must have done pretty well.
Imagine being proud of having a Gildan t-shirt partnership.
Wow. Anywho.
Times of change. Yeah, good job. I don't know.
The final takeaway is honestly at this point in time, I think if I move my laptop back to Windows,
there would be more TDM involved with keeping it up to date, dealing with its updates,
dealing with Windows getting in my way, popping things up, shoving ads in my face, doing those types of things.
Then Linux's general just getting out of my way.
I've also found that like updating ARCH is this big scary thing and then you install it
and it's so far for me been like just as easier, easier than Windows Update.
Dude, Windows Update is so annoying.
Like you click check for updates and it's like no updates.
And then you click it again two seconds later. It's like, here's a gigantic service pack level update.
It's like, bro, why isn't this downloaded already?
I've only been doing this for a few months. I'm sure I'll run into something that sucks eventually, but I also just have my data,
whatever small amount of data that I have stored on an extra partition.
And if I need to reinstall ARCH, I can just do that.
According to Crystal, push does still exist and they do technically still have a page up,
but now just hold on a gosh darn second here.
Download Windows XP to eight and download iPhone app store.
Literally doesn't connect to anything. So I don't know.
Yeah, I think we can move on to share X or honestly,
these days just nipping tool and pasting the image somewhere tends to work.
Most chat applications could take attachments now.
Okay. No, I'm super necessary tool anymore.
Want to do another topic? What do you want to talk about?
What do we got here?
What was another one of the title topics? Have we gone through? Oh, not title topics.
The show. Intel battlemage one. We could do that.
Oh boy, sure. You sound so excited. I mean, it is legitimately pretty cool.
The dual slot low profile ARC Pro B 50 has an MSRP of 349 US dollars,
a slight increase from the 299 they mentioned at Computex earlier this year,
which Intel blames on a combination of memory pricing and tariff risks,
which to be completely honest sounds actually fair.
I don't know. The B 50 features 16 XE2 cores, 16 gigabytes of GTDR6 memory bandwidth of 224 gigabytes per second.
PCI 5.0 8X interface for mini display ports, all at a TDP of just 70 Watts,
allowing it to be powered entirely by the PCI slot,
which is a feature in this case that will be cared about.
Yeah, how much the rest of this people care about?
Apparently the B 50 performed favorably next to the $400 NVIDIA RTX A1000 8 gig,
which was an ampere 2024 release. But it has double the memory, which is pretty cool that, you know,
Intel's not cheaping out on memory because that's apparently something
we can't take for granted these days. Especially pretty cool right now, considering a lot of the applications
that you're going to want to use GPUs for are actually very heavily memory bound.
SRIOV is also a very cool feature to support.
So essentially this allows it to be split up virtualization style like a CPU
and shared across multiple VMs if you don't really need high-end 3D performance.
SRIOV the home did some initial tests and it's apparently pretty flippin' decent.
Also, it could be the cheapest way to get AV1 encoding in a small form factor case
because it's dual slot, low profile.
So Intel continues to do some super cool stuff on the GPU side.
Just want to shout out that the B580 is a heck of a lot of gaming GPU for $260
in stock across multiple SKUs.
This is two SKUs in stock, $260 and $270 on new egg.
You, wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second.
Get Battlefield 6 and more with purchase.
What is that? Is that real? Before we dive into that, just want to say this before I forget,
John Doyren from the lab just messaged me and said that the B580 can also game.
It's not the best, but at 75 watts, it's actually not bad, which is really...
The B50. B50. B580 is the consumer.
Did I say 580? Yeah, yeah. B50.
He said B50. I read it wrong. Hold on.
Is this deal real? I'm not sure what you're seeing. I'm on new egg right now and it says you get Battlefield...
Hold on. Where is it?
Did I imagine it? Am I crazy?
This just says free 3D mark test. It says additional items until gamer days.
Until gamer days. Holy crap. You get Battlefield 6 with an ARC from August 25th to September 14th.
That's actually... What's the value of a base version Battlefield 6?
What does that make the cost of the card if you were going to buy Battlefield 6?
Redemption URL until gamer days offer $70.
Is that like $120 B580, basically?
That's crazy. That's actually nuts.
How much is Battlefield 6 in USD?
It's $70, apparently.
Whoa. And yet, in spite of us pointing out that you can get a heck of a lot of GPU from someone
other than Team Green, NVIDIA is, I think, at all time high market share.
Did that come out this week? Yeah.
Here we go. This is from Tom's Hardware, published three days ago.
NVIDIA dominates GPU shipments with 94% share.
94% guys, I get it, okay?
The cool thing to do is to root for AMD and Intel to survive in the GPU space so that
you can get a cheaper NVIDIA card because they have competitors.
But if nobody buys these other products, even when they are legitimately good, like that
B580 for flipping under $200 if you were going to buy Battlefield 6, that is a fucking
insane value right now. Dude, it's close to $100 if you're going to buy Battlefield 6.
Go buy a stupid 5060.
Go be a sheep. Buy a 5060. Basically, if you're not getting the word out about there being other options, you have
no one to blame but yourself when NVIDIA prices their cards like the actual monopoly that
they are. 94% is an actual monopoly.
Yeah. That is nuts.
There's laws around effective monopoly, right?
I mean, I don't think anyone's going to protect gamers, right?
Like the thing is that a lot of anti-monopoly laws are designed to protect people from
being exploited, right? Right.
So when there's a monopoly on food production, that's really bad.
When there's monopolistic behavior in financial services, that's really, really, really bad
or insurance, things that people need.
I don't think you're going to get a consumer watchdog coming in and going, hey, these entirely
optional video gaming accessories, these are too expensive.
It's not going to happen. What is that impacts us as people who are technology enthusiasts and gamers?
I don't think even the most stalwart of gamers is going to make a straight-faced argument
that it's somehow as important as food or shelter or water or transportation, right?
Like it's...
I think it just kind of is what it is.
Yeah. That makes sense. It's unfortunate, but it makes sense.
I'm still a little bit stuck on that Intel deal.
I know, right? Is that worth a video?
I mean... Like the cheapest BF6 PC and you include that bundle because it's just like so insane?
I mean, that's not a bad idea, yeah.
Because that is one of probably the craziest GPU bundles I think I've ever seen, literally ever.
No, I wouldn't say ever. GTX 460 had some bundles where it came with, I think, Metro Exodus or something like that.
And that was a very affordable GPU.
There have been times back when AMD and NVIDIA were really at each other's throats competing,
legitimately actually competing, where you'd buy a card and you'd get like three or four games with it and stuff.
I remember that, yeah. That hasn't really been a thing for a very long time.
I don't remember that... Not to dog on the games, but I don't remember them being like massive, extremely important multiplayer titles.
I mean, you know, Orange Box.
Orange Box came for free with a GPU that I bought.
So like, no, there's deals. How expensive was that GPU though?
There's been deals. I don't know, 250, 300 bucks.
Remember, back then that was like a pretty high-end card though.
But still, there's definitely been deals.
But this is probably the best one that I can remember seeing in a while, where there's an actually, hotly anticipated, actually AAA looking game
that comes with a $260 GPU.
That's pretty outstanding. Dan, do you want to actually send that video idea to me?
Can you just throw that in my inbox real quick? And then I'll follow it up next week.
I don't know that we'd be able to execute on this in time to have...
I wasn't listening. Basically, cheapest Battlefield 6 PC.
Got it. Yeah, thanks. It'd be great if we could get early access to the game so we could actually validate that it runs really good, but I don't...
Do we have contacts, potentially? Figure that out.
I have one. Yeah, if you know someone, then that would go a long way, because the last thing I would want to do is just go off the recommended specs on the box,
because it's not necessarily the best.
And we would have kind of our own standards and our own thoughts on what we feel is a really playable PC,
and we want to make sure that we get the CPU, and especially memory.
A lot of discourse on how much memory is enough for gaming these days.
Some people are saying 16 gigs is still enough. I was talking to Ploof today because we were shooting a video at my house with the world's biggest TV.
We got Hisense's new 116 inch.
Oh my God, guys, don't miss this video. This thing's incredible.
Anyway, the point is he was saying 32 gigs isn't enough for him anymore,
because he's a person like you, Luke, who's late for the lobby because he has two games running anyway.
So he'll often have multiple games running, plus a bunch of Chrome tabs, plus his voice comms,
and he's like, yeah, I often run out of RAM and I'll get like warning messages with 32 gigs.
So I kind of need to go 64. So there's a wide range of what people consider to be enough RAM for gaming,
and so we'd want to make sure that we are validating that before we recommend a minimum spec that realistically is very minimum,
and you're not going to be happy with, right?
Yeah, I don't know that I can get us early access, but I know a really good person to ask, basically.
Okay. All right. Well, yeah, we'll see what we can do.
Maybe we'll chase it down next week, and I don't even know if we'd be able to execute in time,
because this deal expires in like, by Monday, it will be...
Oh my God, where's my calendar? Just let the calendar behave like I expected to.
When was the end date? Yeah, by Monday, we will have, I think it was the 14th or something.
We'll have like less than a week, so I don't know if we're going to get it done in time.
Besides, now that we've flagged this deal on WAN Show, they might all just sell out anyway, so it might be too late.
I mean, I can't imagine that Intel has literally 0% market share.
They didn't even show up on the...
It said NVIDIA had 94%. This is from Tom's hardware.
NVIDIA had 94%, AMD had 6%, and Intel literally didn't even show up.
So I got to imagine that New Egg is not stocking that many Asrock Challenger Arc B580s.
What, the 20 in stock? 30? I don't know.
Can't be that many.
All right. What do you want to talk about next?
Oh, you know what? Actually, I'm going to pick something.
Before we do our sponsors, we have an update to the Roblox Child Predators story.
This is Elijah posted this in here. Two weeks ago, we talked about how YouTuber Schlepp, known for taking down child predators on Roblox,
had his accounts banned and received a cease and desist letter sent by Roblox.
Well, things have been heating up. Chris Hansen, yes, that Chris Hansen has thrown his hat into the ring,
announcing a documentary involving Schlepp and many other journalists and investigative teams.
Lawyer and YouTuber Law by Mike has also thrown his hat in the ring, announcing a lawsuit against Roblox
over their failure to properly protect underage children.
I do not know Law by Mike. I do know that some Law YouTubers have been known to kind of, or not even Law YouTubers,
but some YouTubers have been known to kind of file performative lawsuits,
but not actually follow through on them. So I don't know much about him, but it is something that has happened.
Conveniently, Roblox also announced they are getting an ESRB age rating system for games within Roblox,
and by the end of the year, all users who want to use communications features
have to have their age estimated by the platform in order to confirm they are over nine years old.
Okay, Roblox, this is yet another case of taking action, but like, what?
Is nine really old enough to be the minimum age to chat with randoms?
What are you doing about the adults that are talking to the nine-year-olds?
That's the concern. I don't care if a bunch of six-year-olds are talking to each other.
That ain't the issue, buddy.
Roblox throws me off, man.
There's this situation. There's the like incredible amount of effectively IP theft that happens on the platform
that just seems to go completely unchecked. Like, something about it I don't like.
I haven't actually used it enough to speak to it properly, but from the outside,
it seems like not a place that I'm happy about.
Got a couple people in float plain chat saying Law by Mike is a legit lawyer,
more so than a YouTuber, so okay, that's good to know.
And then there was another one that I wanted to...
Yeah, this is pretty funny. DrainX in float plain chat says, if you're in a fight against Chris Hansen,
you might not be the good guy.
Yikes.
Yikes. All right, let's jump into our sponsors here.
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So good work, Colton. Wait a second. When did we hire this guy back again?
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All right, Luke, do you want to pick one?
Sure. Let's see what we got here.
Congress may force NVIDIA to prioritize U.S. AI GPU customers.
The U.S. Senate has added an amendment to a major defense bill
that may force NVIDIA and AMD to prioritize U.S. customers
of their advanced GPUs over foreign buyers.
If the amendment sticks, NVIDIA and AMD could not apply for a GPU export license
so long as United States entities are waiting and unable to acquire those same chips.
Okay, so basically until Meta and Twitter have as many,
sorry, XAI, excuse me, have as many GPUs as they could possibly want, also Microsoft,
nobody else can have literally any in terms of like how these companies would have to
allocate their production.
Apparently it also applies to China-specific models like the H20.
It's very interesting how the free market has become not very free market at all.
It's kind of remarkable how fast it happened, hey?
It's like we're just going to take a stake in Intel.
We're going to say, yeah, you can't ship products offshore,
even though they were actually, most of them produced offshore.
Made offshore. Yeah, you can't ship those products off American shores until America's shores are full of all the GPUs.
In response, NVIDIA tweeted that selling the H20 has no impact on our ability to supply other NVIDIA products
and they compared the amendment to the Biden administration's now rescinded AI diffusion rule,
which NVIDIA says was based on doomer science fiction.
To be clear, I think there's...
NVIDIA officially saying doomer is hilarious.
I think we have to admit that really quick.
I mean, this is the same company that literally called their software GF Experience.
That's fair. Nothing surprises me when it comes to NVIDIA.
They clearly have...
Look, I realize this is the pot calling the kettle black,
but they clearly have never outgrown their College Bro sense of humor.
Let's be real. Yeah, for sure neither did we, but still.
Yeah, I'm owning it. I'm owning it.
I would admit it 69 times and I would say nice every time.
Okay? Yeah.
Discussion here. We don't actually have a discussion question in the dock, but I gotta say, man, this is...
It's tough. It's another thing that in my opinion seems to just be, honestly,
the real effect of this is the dramatic promotion of GPU development
and just general compute development and manufacturing and research
that's going to be done within China. All of these things are...
We might be better off for the next extremely short period of time
and we will be significantly, deeply worse off in the future
if you wanted to have, you know, better control of this technology,
being basically the only company that anyone goes to for this stuff
would probably be the way to do it. And that's how things were for quite a long time
and you are repeatedly telling China and all of your Chinese customers
that they're going to have to find a domestic solution
and they're going to need to invest very significantly in a domestic solution
in order to stay competitive. And if you don't think they're going to do so, you're just stupid.
That was how you really feel, Luke. Hey, in other breaking news, this was just posted in chat by David Kane.
Google was just hit with a 3.45 billion EU antitrust fine over their ad tech practices
and this is in the same week that a US judge said,
yeah, you guys are a monopoly, but also, you know what? Forget it.
You're not really going to have to do anything about it. You can keep Chrome and you can keep Android
and we're not going to do anything to break you up because like AI seems pretty important and stuff.
So Google is getting some super mixed messages here, but wow.
Oh, in other news, hold on. Trump calls the EU fine unfair and threatens retaliation.
I feel like you could just kind of put that under any article.
Anyway, Google plans to appeal. You could probably put that under any article about Google
and the EU warns of stronger remedies if Google fails to comply.
Oh yeah, good luck everybody. So on the one hand, Google...
The next war is an economic one.
Yeah, the next war is realizing that you're already in the information war
and the economic war, not to mention the various other more traditional
but now proxy wars and all the various other types of wars that are ongoing.
It is moon pies. What a time to be alive, man.
Oh man, how do we miss this?
Apparently Ura is suing other smart ring manufacturers?
Yeah, that doesn't really... I thought they also got like a defense contract or something crazy.
Yeah, did they? Let me see.
Sorry guys, this is very much just like people in Floatplane dumping topics
into the chat and us looking at them there. We have done absolutely no prep on these whatsoever.
This is old apparently. Oh hey, you know what we have done some prep on?
You want to talk about Valve's new VR hardware right on the eve of the arrival
of your new VR headset that you spent over a thousand US dollars on?
Is that something that you'd like to talk about, Luke?
Not really. Why don't we talk about it anyway?
I mean, I'm still very excited about my big screen beyond. Has it arrived yet?
Yes, but it arrived the day that I left, so I never even got to see it.
Nice. I've actually been using mine a bit lately and it's as great as I represented to you.
In fact, it's better because I got my fixed one back and it is very much actually fixed.
So I'm not having tracking issues with the ones and I'm super stoked.
It looks so good.
And Valve has a new one. Valve has applied for a trademark on the term Steam Frame
and between the content of the filings and some heavy-duty data mining by Brad Lynch,
aka sadly it's Bradley on Twitter, it looks like new VR hardware might soon be officially announced by Valve.
Data mining of the latest Steam VR beta has revealed that Valve is appearing to be working on a rebranding
of Steam VR overlays to frames and Brad Lynch also speculates that the official name of the rumored
Deckard headset will be the Steam Frame with the major selling point being its Spatial Gaming Capabilities.
Lynch also noted that the Roy VR controllers are no longer marked as prototypes in the Steam VR drivers
and that drivers are now finished for a Steam Link VR USB dongle using Wi-Fi 6e slash 6 gigahertz.
So what this probably looks like based on that every rumor I've seen about Deckard
indicates that it's going to be inside out tracking with onboard processing.
What this seems to add up to is an inside out with built-in compute VR headset more akin to what we've seen
from the MetaQuest lineup or Apple Vision Pro lineup, but if the 6 gigahertz dongle is anything to go by
with the capability of wirelessly linking to your PC for high-fidelity PC gaming.
What remains to be seen is what the resolution Valve is going to be able to push is going to be
because I'm not aware of a wireless interface that can reliably and consistently match a wired interface
for displays yet, and if anything even the fastest display links these days are not enough
for what I was hoping would be the future of high-fidelity PC VR.
I have kind of out of the side of my eyes been sort of watching the rumors around Deckard
and kind of just hoping and hoping and hoping that maybe it's not the whole story
because I really wanted a second gen or I guess third gen.
I wanted another generation of Lighthouse for the third-party ecosystem of VR headsets that has sprung up
around SteamVR and SteamVR 2.0, but it looks like maybe that's just going to be dead?
I don't know. We'll have to see. The rumors seem pretty strong, but it is technically still rumor mill.
Yeah, it does seem like the evidence is really stacking up that Deckard is going to be a standalone headset
and that this whole ecosystem of outside-in tracking is just going to be kind of stuck where it is today with
what is it, 90 refreshes per second for the Lighthouses, I think?
That sounds right. I don't know.
I think they're 90 hertz. VR base station, blah, blah, blah.
Well, the base stations themselves are not. How often do they refresh you guys?
Someone's got to know. Lighthouse tracking 2.0 with alternating brainwarp.
75 slash 90 hertz, 150 slash 180 with alternating eye brainwarp rendering.
Now, to be clear, that's not the only data input.
There's also built-in accelerometer slash gyro in the controllers themselves,
and so the Lighthouses are, from my understanding, in order to make sure that they don't drift off course,
but still, I really hoped that large-scale outside-in would continue to be a thing.
I do understand why it's not a thing, because who has the space for it?
Who's going to go and wire 12 volt power into their ceilings
so that they can have a stealthy install of a bunch of base stations?
Who's going to get four of them so that they never have any occlusion,
even when they have an extremely large play area? Basically, me and only me, and so fine. I get it.
But hopefully Valve has taken that.
I mean, they've clearly taken their time, and hopefully they've cooked up something absolutely fire,
and I'm going to absolutely love the frame or Deckard or whatever they ultimately end up calling it.
Either way, Luke, I don't think you're going to be disappointed with your big screen beyond, because
No, I'm excited. If there is any onboard compute in Deckard, then there's absolutely no way that it's going to be light, period.
I mean, Apple, for all their billions of dollars of R&D,
it's typically not all of which went into the Vision Pro, but some of it did,
couldn't figure out how to make an on-device compute VR headset, not freaking heavy,
so I don't think Valve is going to crack that nut just right now.
Gay Coons. Yeah, I'm also just like, I don't know, you can't always time everything perfectly,
and even if I could, I feel like I still would have gone with the big screen beyond.
Yeah. It's very readable. It's a product that I'm happy to support, and honestly, I'm just really excited to get it, so I don't know.
Gay Coons says, what's the current state of using VR for productivity?
I got to say, I never got into it.
I tried it when I did my Apple Vision Pro review, and there were things about it that were compelling,
but wearing something on my face for such an extended period of time for the workday,
especially working in office where I frequently interact with other fellow humans,
it's just not feasible. It's not viable for me.
I still know people, not even just person.
I still know people that use it for what was kind of probably the most logical use case, I think,
for the Apple Vision Pro, which was like work while traveling,
and they still seem to find a lot of success from it, which is cool.
And yet, I'm basically back to traveling now.
I've been traveling a fair bit, and I have seen exactly zero Vision Pros on the road,
so that's clearly a niche use case.
Compared to when it first came out, I would love to see the numbers for this.
What percentage? Because Apple has, and no questions asked, is it 14-day or 30-day?
I can't remember. But Apple has a no-questions-asked return policy, which, for electronics these days...
I heard it was insane, by the way. Yeah.
What percentage of Vision Pros that were purchased have been returned?
Because they were flipping everywhere for two weeks.
And then...
Radio silence. Gone. Wiped off the face of the earth.
You know how practically every single pole is corrupted in some way?
Yeah. It would be cool to have an actual real pole of like,
hey, did you buy one, and if you bought it, do you still use it in any capacity at all?
Yeah. Apple Vision Dust Collector.
Yeah. Big time.
All right. Do we have any other headline topics?
Oh, crap. I screwed it up again. Sammy's gonna kill me.
I haven't done the Floatplane announcement. I was supposed to do it before sponsors.
Frickin', okay. Look, Sammy, if you want it right before the sponsors,
then why don't you put it right before the sponsors?
It's separated by like six topics. That's on me. They keep overwriting it and have to add it back in manually.
I'll put it down there in the future. After intense competition, and almost getting scammed multiple times,
the finale of Scrapyard Wars 10 is ready to be released for early access on Floatplane alongside the extras today.
I have a thing here that says Link Hoffman to provide to Dan during show.
Do we have it yet? No, don't do the Floatplane announcement just yet.
Oh.
Okay. We will let you know later when it goes live later today.
All right. Why don't we give a little more information on the thing that I was talking about earlier,
where Google dodged the harsh antitrust ruling.
The same judge who last August ruled that Google broke US competition laws has effectively decided not to do very much about it.
Judge Amit Mita called Google an overbearing illegal monopoly back then,
but now says that the emergence of generative AI has changed the landscape.
The ruling states that Google must share access to user-side data,
so things like search index and user interaction data,
with qualified competitors but does not have to share advertising data.
Google doesn't have to divest of Chrome or Android.
Google can continue to pay Apple and Mozilla to place Google search in Safari and Firefox respectively.
Oh, really? Earlier this year, Mozilla's CEO warned that cutting Google's search subsidy could ultimately put Firefox out of business.
This ruling also requires Google to stop entering into exclusive deals that make Google the default search on mobile devices
and to submit to six years of regulatory oversight.
The DOJ is expected to appeal this ruling.
So basically what we've learned is that once again in America,
you can do basically whatever it takes to get on top,
and the only thing that you will ever have to do as penance for that is
say you're sorry, maybe have a little bit of oversight,
and maybe pay a token fine.
Good job. You can always become too big to fail.
That is always an option. Yep, yep, do whatever it takes to become so big
that it would cause the failure of other things if you were punished for your ill-gotten gains.
Yeah. Nipolas Cage says, that's it.
I'm calling shenanigans. Shenanigans, shenanigans!
Hey, you wanted to talk about how Silksong crashed all the stores?
Yeah, so did it actually crash Steam?
I think it was just slow. Okay, I'm even surprised at that to be honest.
People couldn't check out. Is it a jug or not? Yeah.
Like the payment system failed. Dude, it's...
The highly anticipated sequel to Hollow Knight, Silksong,
is already setting records in spite of causing major hiccups for virtually all of its launch platforms.
Silksong has already recorded more than 100,000 concurrent players on Steam,
in spite of heavy traffic crashing the game's Steam page for several hours.
Wow. That's nuts.
The first Hollow Knight's peak concurrent player count was the first Hollow Knight?
Yeah, first Hollow Knight. It was 72,916.
IGN reported also running into trouble when trying to buy the game on the Nintendo e-store,
PlayStation Store, and Xbox.
Silksong is also a day one Game Pass title,
but Game Pass subscribers reported trouble downloading the title on the Xbox app and consoles.
Wow. That's actually kind of nuts.
Yeah, no, I saw this in the doc,
and while it's interesting that it took all those stores down,
I also just think it's cool that there's a game that people are really excited about coming out
because that doesn't happen that often lately,
and with Battlefield 6 sounding very positive so far in its pre-release work and Silksong coming out,
I wonder what is the Steam ratings for Silksong right now?
Overwhelmingly positive. That's pretty good.
Yeah, I'm not too surprised, but...
They definitely took their time.
I'm shocked that given it was the most wishlisted game on the platform,
if I recall correctly on Steam, that they went with 20 bucks for their price.
Because you can always discount it to 20 bucks later,
but it seems like they've just gone the, hey, yeah, it's 20 bucks.
You know, we might discount it at some point,
but we're just going to go the rate gamers are going to pay,
and here you go.
You got to respect it. You got to respect it.
I can't say that I would have had the discipline to do the same thing.
Luke, if you had the most wishlisted game on Steam,
would you go 20 bucks?
Honestly, I think it depends a lot on the team that I have,
and if I'm the team making Silksong, I think so, yeah.
As far as my understanding goes, they're pretty small. They're already incredibly ballin' from the original Hollow Knight.
I think you know that this price tag is probably not going to piss people off too much.
I don't even think 24.99 or 29.99 would have made people too upset.
No. 20 bucks is, dude, 20 bucks.
That's like two coffees these days.
Seriously. What's kind of interesting to me is that you said it's overwhelmingly positive on your end?
Yeah. It's just very positive on mine.
Really? I mean, I looked earlier, so I haven't looked in a couple of hours.
Interesting. Oh yeah, I see very positive now too.
Interesting. I'm wondering if this has crashed into, like it was so hyped that even if it's absolutely fantastic,
I wonder if people's expectations were just unfathomably high.
It's rare that I've seen this much hype for a game like ever, to be honest.
I mean, if it's crashing every single store that it's on,
you can imagine the amount of different people that are jumping in.
Yeah. It has a higher concurrent player count than the original ever had already.
And it's so hyped, you might be getting people who just frankly aren't that into Metroidvania,
is playing this game and going, I don't get it. Which I have to admit, I tried twice to get into Hollow Knight.
Twice I tried, twice I failed.
I think I have like three or four hours in it, and I just kind of got bored and didn't keep playing.
And yeah, Metroidvanias aren't my kind of game.
I never really got into Hollow Knight either.
And I haven't been like overhyped about Silksong.
I might check it out. It seems like it's pretty well positioned price-wise, so it's pretty likely that I'll check it out at some point.
But like, yeah, I don't know. It's crazy that it's been out for as little time as it has been, and it has 24,000 reviews already.
Like, my God.
So honestly, I think this is very likely realistically more on the overwhelmingly positive side of things.
But it's just being reviewed, like you said, by a ton of people that probably aren't actually super into the game.
Just heard the hype bought in, and then maybe don't like the genre necessarily more than the game itself.
There's that quote from the Helldivers developers that I've just always really, really liked,
which is, a game made for everyone is a game made for no one.
And when you hit this level of popularity, some of the negative reviews might be just because it was a game that wasn't made for you.
Okay, this is cool. Check this out.
What's up? You can actually see the rating in every language because of that new filtering feature.
So, English is now very positive.
I believe was overwhelmingly positive earlier today.
That's what I saw. Chinese, not that into it.
11,000 reviews, so that is the second biggest language market for this game.
Oh my God, so the 24,000 reviews is only in English.
There's so many more than that. Yeah, 60,000.
The Latin world, flip and loves it, is part of that.
A lot of these, I know that Brazil in particular is heavily tariffed,
and computers tend to not be as high performance for the average gamer,
is part of that just having a brand new game that is super, super hype that runs great on your machine.
Do you think there's just a little bit of excitement about that, potentially?
That might be part of it. I'm just guessing.
Why do the Turks love it?
The Poles, they love it. The Poles, they love Silsong, they just love it.
The Koreans, they're kind of positive along with the French and the Germans.
The Italians are very positive. Ukrainians, yeah, we're pretty positive on this too.
Apparently the, I lost the comment, but apparently the Chinese language translation was super botched on launch.
I don't know if that means they won't ever fix it, but...
Yeah, I can't find the comment, but apparently that was the thing.
Apparently it's very cheap in Mexico.
So they probably did some very focused localized pricing.
I wanted to go check out what the breakdown was for tape to tape,
but it turns out that they do not have enough reviews to trigger a language specific review score.
There's all languages, and your languages, and yeah.
Wait, they're different though. I know, I'm not quite sure what that means.
That's kind of weird. Yeah. Interesting.
Anywho.
Moving on, it took 15 years, but Instagram is finally available for iPad.
And this, this was the best they could do.
Holy actual f***.
That's all I have to say.
I can't, no, I can say more.
Look at all, look at all this blit, you're a photos app.
Supposedly. What is all of this blit space?
What the heck?
What are you even doing?
Just don't even bother then. Why'd they do it in landscape as well?
Well, because it's an iPad, you got to be able to landscape, but like, oh my God.
This is the best you could do.
This is very odd.
I don't really understand. Parallelogram says, what's wrong with blank space?
It made Taylor Swift millions.
Thank you Floatplane Chat. I love that you guys are there for me to make me feel better about my jokes.
Is that a song? No. Oh, blank space.
Yes. Okay. Um, okay, this is something.
Robot vacuums level up. Literally.
Yuffie has created a robot vacuum that goes up the stairs, sort of.
That's definitely the brand I would want that from.
Here we go. That's a joke.
Yeah, I know, right?
Yuffie shows off the new Mars Walker is a shell that allows compatible robot
vacuums to dock themselves and get carried up flights of stairs.
What? The only vacuum right now that will be compatible is the Omni S2
scheduled to launch in January, 2026 for $1,600.
The Mars Walker attachment has no price yet, but is an add-on.
It also doesn't clean the stairs. It just goes up them.
Yeah.
I mean, I, sure.
That's another one that I really just don't think I have that much to say about.
Wait, hold on.
The look on your face kind of says it all, doesn't it?
No, I'm just a little bit confused by the writing because like it says,
the only vacuum compatible is the Omni S2 scheduled to launch in January,
2026 for $1,600. Then it says, for this price point, is it even worth buying a robot vacuum
at this point? Or is it better to hire weekly cleaners?
Okay. Are there cheaper vacuums? I don't think there is.
Oh yeah, there's way cheaper vacuums, but this is, that's the only one that's going to be compatible with the Mars Walker.
Yeah, but you could just buy two of them. You could just buy one for your upper floor.
That's what I was going to say. You might literally be better off just. Oh, 100%.
Some Roborock thing is like between $300,000 and $1,000.
So you would literally just be better off. Yeah.
Pancratz is in the chat. He's like, my first car was significantly cheaper than that robot vacuum.
Yeah. Yeah. And the Mars Walker is an accessory.
So presumably that accessory is not free on top of the $1,600.
I mean, I got to imagine that with how, okay, I'll say this,
with how much money robot vacuum manufacturers seem to have to throw around for sponsorships.
Dude. Clearly people are buying them.
They're also just all over every trade show ever.
There's something to be said about what the heck is going on there.
Dude, I can't believe how many pool robot companies there are.
Right? Yeah, we saw another one at IFA, but that was actually, that was nuts.
There's a joke about how we should do like a top five pool robots short as a joke.
There wasn't enough of them, but there are definitely some.
And again, same thing. They seem to have ample budgets for sponsorships.
So presumably people are buying these things.
It's not that they don't work. Like I'm not saying they're like dumb or whatever.
They're just, they're really expensive.
And there's places in the world that are, it's like more common to have a pool.
But yeah, the robotic self is very expensive.
It's interesting. Clearly high margin.
I'd say that much. Dolby has jumped on the AI bandwagon.
Dolby has announced some of the new features coming in Dolby Vision 2, the successor to its popular Dolby Vision HDR format.
The original Dolby Vision was meant to give creators the ability to fine tune how TVs present content in HDR.
And it really was noticeably better than HDR 10, which was its primary competitor at the time.
Dolby Vision allows you to include metadata that tells your device scene by scene how to fine tune the image that it is outputting.
HDR 10 did not. You were stuck sort of within a fixed band.
The new format seems to be trying to strike a balance between artistic intent and solving common viewer complaints.
So content intelligence apparently adds new AI capabilities to make the image crystal clear by improving clarity in any viewing environment without compromising intent.
Fixing things like content appearing too dark in less optimal environments.
Okay.
And then authentic motion is supposed to be the world's first creative driven motion control tool to make scenes feel more authentically cinematic but without unwanted judder on a shot by shot basis.
Okay. In this case, Dolby claims to have fixed the soap opera effect that is commonly caused by motion smoothing by allowing filmmakers scene by scene control over how the feature is leveraged.
Interesting. There are definitely cases where judder or even just 24 FPS just low frame rate has been very distracting to me in films that otherwise are just beautiful and amazing and perfect in every way.
Like some of the mountain shots in Lord of the Rings for instance.
Yes. Where it's just like here's some mountain peaks and they're like across the screen.
It's like, yo, that's just distracting.
I think that honestly the Lord of the Rings mountain scenes is like the most classic example of that problem.
I don't mind the authentic motion part if it's giving the filmmaker the tool because I trust the filmmaker with this tool.
I don't trust TV manufacturers and I don't trust AI and that's where content intelligence is sort of bugging me.
Like I get that everyone is- Is it actually AI though?
Is it like one of the problems we have with AI is like what kind?
Yeah. What are we talking about? Yeah, what are we talking about here?
If it's certain types of machine learning it might be completely fine and they might be putting it in the-
If this is just an auto calibration tool right where it's just using an onboard light sensor and it's just kind of like fine tuning the gamma curve or whatever then I mean sure.
But then like are you just calling it AI because everything has to be AI now or are you actually-
Yeah, like actually, honestly. Generate of anything because I don't want that.
I'm at EFA right now which is like, I don't know, it's not quite but some people brand it as like Europe's CES and man the AI branding is everywhere and genuinely often has nothing to do with anything.
I think we've seen it at least a couple times where the AI branding is for features that like are definitely not AI based.
Like I would actually bet money that they're not and in other cases it's like okay this is a very old like you know machine learning type of approach that they've rebranded as you know smart AI or whatever.
There's also examples where I mean this is classic but you don't even want it.
Oh well yeah sure. Like it's just worse.
Like EFA seems to have a lot of appliances which is not super normal for me at trade shows at least.
Like there's an entire hall of like washing machines and-
Oh are they AI though?
They're like all AI based and in a lot of ways it's like just stupid and I don't want it.
And I was ranting about how like I want the dumbest fridge you can give me.
Like I don't want my fridge to like tell me what groceries are missing because you just know that's for sure data harvesting.
And even if it wasn't data harvesting how could it possibly know how much sour cream is in the tub?
It doesn't know. I mean that's a good argument right there.
It can't know anything useful.
Maybe it like watches how many times you take it out and like-
Like a tool? Maybe it has weight sensors in the shelves I don't know.
Dude a tool that gives me 30% of the information that I need is not a useful tool.
Like I wouldn't mind having a live camera feed in my fridge that I can like log into like a security camera.
I could see that being useful if I just want to know like oh crap did I-
Did I get a second jug of milk last time I was shopping?
Because if I didn't then I should get like- Because we generally keep two jugs of milk in our house.
We have one that's in like the front so that the kids can like get it.
And then we'll usually have the backup one because that one will run out at some point.
And so it's like do we have a backup jug of milk right now? Like yeah sure yeah fine useful.
But like trying to like generate a shopping list for me dude.
We are decades away from that being useful at all.
Being functional enough that it could actually do anything.
I wonder what your input on this is. So we found a fridge I don't know I genuinely don't remember who made it.
I think it might have been Samsung but-
Oh hold on hold that thought hold that thought people are upset people are upset.
FanboyNZ says not bags of milk.
Timbit says jugs? Question mark question mark question mark brother.
I've been getting my milk from jugs since I was first born.
Some of that was latency some of that was I think I got that pretty quick.
It's jugs on the west coast. Milk in a bag is this weird like eastern Canada thing.
I did I went over there once and I stayed with a family for an exchange and I was like-
This just seems like a jug of milk with extra steps.
Are we seriously all on board with this? Anyway sorry sorry carry on.
So I think it was Samsung but I generally don't remember who and if it's not Samsung my bad.
But somebody here has a fridge that you can speak to and the only command that I noticed that it had was-
I was trying to jailbreak some of the AI systems while we were here.
There's like an AC that you can talk to and ask it to like lower and up the temperature in the room
when I was trying to get it to output like buffing recipes and stuff.
But I have so far failed I have not given up.
But there's yeah there's a fridge that you can you can ask it to open.
Okay. Verbally and it will open the doors for you.
Okay is that actually faster than opening it?
I mean if you're gonna get anything out of it- It's actually like kind of slow.
If you're gonna get anything out of it you have to be standing there anyway.
Yeah the thing that I thought was interesting is like I could maybe imagine a situation
where I want to voice command the door to close.
Yeah. But I can't really imagine a situation where I want to voice command the door to open.
Yeah. So I tried to while it only advertised saying open but I tried to while I was standing there voice command it to close.
And it just didn't.
Okay. So there was a booth attendant there and I was like hey so like is there a plan to support closing in the future?
Yeah. I was like oh no.
For sure no. I was like why? He's like oh child safety.
But it's a fridge. And my thought was like- Couldn't they just push it open?
Like it doesn't lock right? Okay so bashing the kid with the door as it swings open is not a child safety issue.
But hitting them with the door as it closes is a child safety issue.
And he just straight up was like yeah.
I don't know dude. This is kind of how I imagine the conversations went at like Porsche headquarters.
Like I only figured out fairly recently that it's their choice that I can't type on my keyboard while my car is not in park.
Or it's not in park only while it's completely not in motion.
So like my passenger is not allowed to key in a destination for me unless I am stopped.
And voice control is utterly useless for navigation. It just doesn't work unless you happen to live in magical fairy land where all of your streets happen to have names that are easily understood by a machine.
And it's like it's their decision.
And the amount of extra distraction that is caused by issuing a voice command multiple times.
Or like having to verify that it is actually sending you to the wrong place instead of absolute no man's land Narnia somewhere.
Is so much more than if I could press three characters and click the first auto complete like you can in a Tesla.
Like you can in other Volkswagen group vehicles.
Like I just like the kind of absolute broken moon logic that you encounter with product designers sometimes is just so frustrating to me.
And it's one of those things where it's like I totally get it.
Some people might actually disagree with me on this point.
And that's totally fine. But that is not the manufacturer's job.
The manufacturer's job is to get the out of my way and let me use the product that I paid a considerable sum of money for.
That's the manufacturer's job payment processors.
The other thing I would say too is like it's kind of funky to me because they have supported features in the car based on weight in the passenger seat.
For a super long time because there's the whole airbag thing.
Right. So they could just allow you to type on the screen if there's a passenger in the seat.
Yep. That would like actually be very easy for them to do.
Or better yet they could just piss off and while I'm while I'm like you know pulling out of my driveway I could go to instead of having to go.
Slam the brakes and type and then go.
Or I'm assuming you might be able to circumvent it by just being on your phone while you're driving which is the best idea.
Yes you can. You 100% can. Don't ask me how I know.
I guarantee you that people do that.
And now even more so guarantee that people do that.
And that's not better. Just worse.
So much worse. Just get out of my way and let me type a few characters.
Also I'm not trying to like dog on Porsche right now.
They're having all kinds of trouble. But they were like so proud.
So Yvonne got a Makani V earlier and they were like so proud at both of the dealerships we went to to look at various used ones because we were trying to get a deal of like how much more responsive the interface is.
I'm like bro yes it's better than what's in my take-hand but like it's still worse than a Tesla from like five years ago.
What are you guys even doing? Like come on man.
They're like oh yeah it's so responsive now you're gonna love it.
I'm like dude I have a smartphone. Don't you have a smartphone?
So you know what a touchscreen is supposed to feel like right?
This ain't it. What trouble?
Financial trouble. Basically the entire world is moving on to Chinese EVs and accept the places where they are tariffed out of competitiveness and even that is just a matter of time.
Like I would be surprised if one of Canada's responses to the US tariff trade war situation wouldn't be to say oh so you want to completely f**k up the integrated North American automotive supply chain?
Okay f**k you too. We're gonna just remove our tariffs on Chinese EVs.
See you later. That would be super destructive to us too but it's a super destruction that's already happening so alright.
Yeah we're already getting wrecked in that way so I don't know how much it would necessarily change to be honest.
This is one of those things where it's like forethought doesn't seem to be a super strong suit of...
This is just like the NVIDIA GPU thing. It's yeah it's very short-sighted.
Yeah. Yeah Regness says I support that idea.
I think we've got two of our premiers already that have gone on record publicly saying we should just drop the tariffs then on Chinese EVs because I think we have the same tariffs as the US.
100% tariffs on Chinese EVs.
Yeah good luck everybody. What else we got for this week?
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 Electric Boogaloo.
Lenovo has revealed its next handheld gaming device the Legion Go 2.
The same 8.8 inch size but it is now OLED with lower resolution 1920x1200 instead of 2560x1600 and 100...
Oh that's fine honestly at that size 1920x1200 is lots.
It also apparently has a 144Hz refresh rate with support for variable refresh rate.
That's sick a VRR OLED is that a first?
In a handheld? Does anyone have VRR OLED yet?
I don't know. Guys hit me up if there's a VRR OLED because there's Switch OLED but it doesn't support VRR.
There's Steam Deck OLED my understanding is it does not support VRR.
My understanding is that that was part of the reason that ASUS has given for not doing OLED on any of their handhelds.
We're talking handheld consoles. Yeah handheld guys, handheld.
Well people are saying phones are handhelds which is...
Okay I'm talking about not a phone.
The category naming is hard okay come on.
Yeah I don't think...
I don't think so. None that I'm aware of.
Madi CH said how about security with those EVs?
It's a complicated question because I understand what you're saying
at the same time we have like Tesla very obviously abusing the cameras on their cars
so it's like who do you want taking your driving data in your cameras?
Yeah they're getting super punished for it though for sure.
That's like definitely happening so...
Okay. So it's like you're definitely...
This is why I really like my dumb car
and I hope to keep dumb cars
because like you don't need that you can go away.
Yeah but then that means you're going gas pretty much.
Yeah the thing is if you want to be credibly seen as the good guy
instead of the other guy you have to behave like one.
So... Yeah.
Yeah good job everybody. Anyway back to the Legion Go 2.
It uses AMD's Ryzen Z2 and Z2 Extreme APUs with Radeon 890M graphics
32 gigs of LPDDR5X 8000 2 terabytes of storage
a whopping 74 watt hour battery
and will continue to have removable controllers similar to Nintendo Switch
with two USB 4 ports so you can simultaneously charge
and hook up to like an eGPU or something as well as a micro SD card slot.
It is expected to launch around the same time as the Xbox,
X, ROG, Ally, X or whatever that thing is called in October.
The one with the base Z2 chip will launch for 1100 US dollars
with the Extreme chip launching for 1349.
That's a lot. To put that in perspective the Z2 chip looks like it is going to suck
sweaty donkey balls. So for you to get like the new faster one the Z2 Extreme
you will be spending like actual desktop like with a monitor
and some nice peripherals money.
Okay. That's right. Our discussion question from Mr. Elijah Horner is
the handheld market is booming with so many companies now making second
or third or fourth revisions. How many how many into it is Aya Neo or GPD at this point?
Why is the Steam Deck 2 taking so long? Well, Elijah, young man that you are.
This is the thing about Valve. Yeah, lack of experience is I think the answer on this one.
Let me familiarize you with ValveTime.
ValveTime, October of 1997.
Actual Time, September of 1998.
ValveTime, four days.
Actual Time, two months and six days.
ValveTime, shortly.
Actual Time, six months.
ValveTime, 20 minutes.
Actual Time, 40 minutes.
ValveTime, soon.
Real Time, canceled after 10 years.
Just be happy if you ever get a Steam Deck 2.
And I kind of suspect we will at this point, but I honestly wouldn't be
surprised if it's going to be three more years.
Yeah, I do. We've been waiting for SteamOS to just have an installer for just like any computer
literally since before they even launched the Steam Deck.
This is just the Valve way and you know what?
When they execute on it, it'll probably be great
and they'll get to it when they get to it, damn it.
And you'll like it.
Okay, oh, oh, we got another one for this week.
Oh, this is fun. OpenAI has confirmed it reads your chats.
Last week, we discussed a recent OpenAI blog post
that announced ChatGPT's new parental controls feature.
Futurism noted that the post seemed to subtly admit
that ChatGPT scans your conversations and may refer them to law enforcement.
Okay.
Some of the response online has argued that directing police to individuals in
mental crisis could in some cases do more harm than good.
This past June, OpenAI claimed a court order to retain data for a New York Times
lawsuit went against the privacy commitments it had made with users
and yet this seems to conflict with their tacit admission that they scan your
conversations and may refer them to law enforcement.
So OpenAI has some explaining to do
and most mainstream users are going to completely ignore this
and continue to pour absolutely everything about themselves into ChatGPT.
Once again, good luck everybody.
Hey, are we ever going to get in all good news when, show Luke?
Is it ever going to happen? I don't think so.
I think we might actually be able to really, really force one if we want to
and it might be worth doing. But I'm going to yet again, I can't share my screen.
But I can't recommend this video enough. I recommended it before.
Linus knows the one I'm going to say. But there's a Wendell video that's getting a little bit older at this point.
Aren't we all?
Sad. It's about a month old.
It's called AI and You Against the Machine guide so you can own big AI.
Go watch that. It's awesome. You can run these models locally and then OpenAI can't read your stuff.
This is the way. So I know it's expensive.
Now might not be the time, but I think you should be informed and know what's going on.
Even if that just makes it so that if you're in conversation with someone who could,
they might be able to get that happening. Whether that's a boss at your work or I don't know,
maybe someone at your school could be interesting to be informed of that conversation
and potentially be able to drive some change.
So check it out.
Hey Dan, how close are we to the finale?
Have you gotten an update? Let's check Project Combs.
Nice. What do we have? Mark is watching it now.
Alright. Two minutes ago. So I think it's in.
Final QC. I think it's in the middle of being processed.
Let me check on the internet. Dude.
Luke, have you seen any drafts of part four, the finale?
No. Nope. I watched it today.
Nobody's shared me early drafts on any of them. I've just been watching them on full-plane as they come out.
It's an absolute banger.
That post. Scrapyard Wars X.
Is the clarification of the thing included?
I don't think we will be able to discuss that without...
Oh! Oh! Of...
Yes. Yes. Okay, cool.
Yeah. That's it. Yeah.
Good enough. I think they actually did a pretty good job of laying out the various things and various
outcomes and all the kinds of things that were themed.
I don't want any spoilers, but apparently Sammy wants us, without spoiling the results,
talk about how we felt about this year's Scrapyard Wars, Luke to answer.
I'm just reading the notes from the Floatplane announcement. Luke to answer me specifically?
Yeah. I don't know what he's getting at though. It's hard for me to kind of guide you towards the right things that you're supposed to talk
about here. Yeah, that's tough. I don't really know what to say here, just because I don't want to ruin anything.
Yeah, maybe you don't have to say anything then.
If you just feel like, you know, anything you say Canon will be used against you in
a court of spoilers, then just don't do it. I mean, okay, I guess I can talk about the episodes that are already out.
I talked before anybody saw any episode about how like insane that week was for me.
And I don't think this is like my best Scrapyard Wars showing as an individual.
People on my team did well and I think that was cool.
I think my contributions were less than I would have hoped that they were going to be
even watching it back. I've had some people comment, be like, oh, you did great.
And then I go watch it. I'm like, no, there is definitely things that I could have and should have done better.
I did notice. I did notice some cheating from you guys in the last episode.
Excuse me? We didn't cheat on anything. What are you talking about?
I noticed some cheating. I noticed some cheating. Go ahead.
Tell me what it was. There was a particular rule that you had to go out in pairs.
You could ask for an exception. Okay.
Yeah. So we did. What is even the point?
I mean, we got exceptions, too, but what is even the point of rules? What are you talking about?
What are you even talking about? We got exceptions, too. We got exceptions, too.
If you got an obsession, then it is all good.
Dude, we followed the rules. I didn't want any false accusations like with Scrapyard Wars 9.
So we followed the rules. That was not a false accusation. That was not a false accusation.
That was BS. That was not a false accusation. That was BS.
You absolutely cheated. I didn't. Garbage.
We followed the rules to a T. We followed the rules.
Respected them even. Respected them.
Because we had a person on our team who was, yeah, our driving situation was interesting.
I'll say that much. I mean, yeah.
You know what? Look. I like cars.
I like cars. I like turtles. You know?
Yeah. Yeah. We might just have to save our conversation for after you guys.
We'll hold it. We'll stop there. We'll hold it.
Yeah. Yeah.
You know what? I'm going to have to do the Floatplane announcement now, and then we'll just have to post it shortly
after when show ends then. Okay, Dan? Hey, I'm not the people who will be crying.
They're not here anyway. Okay. So early access for Scrapyard Wars 10, part four, we'll go up tonight as soon as we are
able to. And as an added bonus on September 9th, David is going to be doing director's commentary
live with some of the participants and with our lead editor for each episode exclusively
on Floatplane. If you want to know a little bit more about two time participants, Sammy, her meet the
team video just went up talking about her work at Labs and Creator Warehouse.
So you can go check that out on Floatplane.
We also have lots of extras, including one that I'm glad went up because there was some
discussion on the subreddit that Linus is the kind of guy who just like shows up on
set and you know, kind of like a home makeover show, you know, holds a paintbrush for two
seconds and then, you know, goes away and sits in his trailer or whatever.
Fortunately, in the extras for part three, that accusation was put to rest because I
can clearly be seen, oh, sorry, I can clearly be seen painting the entire room from start
to finish, working on it the entire time because no, I actually do do work here, you butt heads.
Not even in the extras, in just the normal footage, there was enough to show that you
were doing all of that in my opinion. That's a crazy accusation.
I don't know, man. It's just, I didn't probably ever. That's nuts.
Like I watched both because I think the extras have been fantastic, but just like, what are
you even talking about? There's so much footage of you painting.
My takeaway was like, oh, interesting, he spent that entire day painting, just watching
like the normal episode. Yep. That was basically all I did for an entire day, which makes sense and then added a lot
to the room. I think that was a good move, but my immediate takeaway was, yeah, he just painted for a
long time. Yeah. Anyway, if you want to know, if you want to be the first to know and have insider knowledge
on this year's Scrapyard Wars, join Floatplane at LMG.GG slash Floatplane.
And the final episode of this series will come out soon on YouTube as well.
All right, Dan, time for some merch messages. Sure.
We're already there. That sounds great. Let's see.
I push this button. I'm going to get my phone.
Hamnetic says, see sweet prerogative. I'll damn well spend the day painting if I want to.
Look, I just, I think Luke and I are both the kind of person who, no matter how meaningless
the competition is, we will do whatever it takes, no matter how small the prize is.
We will move heaven and earth to win for glory.
Like it's, I don't know, like I wouldn't think of myself as like a mean loser or like
a sore winner necessarily. Like I'll do, I loved, I love me some trash talk, but I'd like to think it's, you know,
it's always in, it's always in good fun. But I just, I love, I love the spirit of competition.
And yeah, Luke's like exactly the same way. So you know, if it involved just doing some kind of horrible task, have no doubt that
either of us would do it to win a worthless trophy.
Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much.
Yeah, Dan, too, do anything for the, for the L.
It like almost, it almost, honestly, I don't know, it's probably almost parabolic, where
like if it is, if it is the most meaningless thing.
Oh yeah, same, same, same, same, same. If it's like, oh, you can win like, you know, a $10 or a $15 flash drive.
I feel like I would try less than if it was like a plastic, fake, 3D printed trophy.
I think I would probably, you know, kill live on camera.
If the prize was just a firm handshake from Linus.
Amariah says. $1,000 and like your own private island.
It sounds like effort. Amariah says the competition, if it were more serious, it wouldn't even be fun.
I watch it for the dedication to the lowest possible stakes.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Dude, but you don't understand how important the trophy is.
Oh my gosh. I didn't even know there was a trophy to be perfectly honest.
I didn't know there was going to be a trophy to the end. I thought it was just like a, like a, you win.
Yay. Next video. Do we have any merch messages, Mr.
Dan? Yeah, sorry to get distracted. No, no, I'll go. L and the tips.
I was made the CTO of my organization and nominated as a distinguished engineer.
I mean, that's not even a weird flex.
All right. Heck yeah.
The expert in my field. If Floatplane Labs, et cetera, had DEs, then for what tech?
What if each of you made a DE? I don't know what. Somewhere.
I thought it was somewhere. Yeah. What if each of you were made a DE somewhere?
Like what would you be the distinguished engineer in like the expert in your field?
I don't know. I'm, I'm an all rounder. I'm, I'm a jack of all trades.
Um, you know what? There, that's my DE. I'd be the DE in distilling, uh, jargon.
Like I don't know if there's many people who do that quite like I do.
I'll, I'll sit. I'll talk to engineers at the actual DEs and absorb just enough of it to
regurgitate it back and have them go, Oh, Oh yeah.
Yeah. No, that's probably the, the best way I've heard that explained by someone who
didn't do an entire post doctorate degree in this. Um, good job.
And I'll be like, thanks. I have now forgotten all of it.
So as long as the, as long as the words on the page are right and you say they're
right, we're good. That's my superpower.
Man, I don't know if I have an answer for this. Um, so much of what I do these days is just like insert miscellaneous
management tasks. Um,
I like to think that I'm good at getting people to kind of like rally behind a
banner. So like, uh, alignment, I guess motivation.
Yeah, sure. I'll go with that.
Okay. Up next, or you're talking to me too. They asked you how to make the rules.
Troubleshooting. That's mine.
I like that. Why broke? You know what?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Channel broken. Why broken? Why broke?
Yeah. So broken. Power broken. Here, fix, do this.
Throw out buying. Trace broken.
If only I could figure out why life broken.
Up next. Hi. That's not happy.
Hi, LLD. It's like cobblers children, right?
My shoes are bad. Hi, LLD with many devices that were purchased during the pandemic.
Now aging out of schools and businesses. What are your thoughts on the future of e-waste in North America?
What future? It's a, it's a crisis.
It's an enormous problem and it's exacerbated by a trend towards less
and less repairable and, and deconstructible, right?
Like modern, it's like touchscreens. I actually didn't become aware of what an ecological disaster touchscreens were.
Or sorry, I should say environmental, not necessarily ecology.
But what an environmental disaster touchscreens were until quite recently
because the way that they're laminated and fused makes them much more difficult
to separate into their constituent parts, apparently.
Yeah, it's a, it's a catastrophe and one that humanity will probably not end
up having to deal with because we'll be dead.
What's the weirdest sponsor request you've had to turn down?
Oh man. What's the weirdest sponsor request you've had to turn down?
See, I was trying to think like it may be something from D brand, but I basically
never really say no to them. So yeah, I, you know, I think this is going to be.
We had one that we, we, we like reached out to them to see if they would do it.
And then they were enthusiastically down and then we decided to not do it.
Does that count? Do you know what one I'm talking about? No, I don't.
But I have, I have one Mr. Colton Potter potentially on the line here.
I'm going to try him. Sure.
I'm going to DM you the one that I'm talking about. You can decide to say it if you want. Oh, wow.
Sent to voicemail after only two and a half rings.
Well, I know where we stand, Mr. Potter.
I just DM'd it to you. Oh, uh, the, um, if you want to mention it or not.
Oh yeah, sure. I don't know. Yeah, sure. Go with that. I didn't even remember that.
I don't remember the context of it. Yeah.
I don't remember like what sparked it, but way back in the day, can I say the name?
Is that the, is that the first name? Okay, sure.
Um, there was, there was some reason why we were thinking about doing something
and we thought it would be funny if we got it sponsored by the hub.
Um, and they actually responded and we're like, yeah, we're down.
Uh, and we didn't really expect that response.
And then we were like, oh, wait, this is like real. Are we actually doing this?
And then the decision was no. So we had to be like, um, nevermind.
Sorry. That's lame as hell.
Which is kind of like quintessential nerd in that scenario, I think.
So maybe that makes sense. Hey, do you want to go on a date? Yeah.
Uh, um, uh, no, you're too pretty by.
Yeah, basically. So, um, yeah, I don't remember what the deal was.
That was like, it's not in my inbox.
No, this is ancient. I think it's like my inbox goes back to the start of the company smart guy.
No, yeah, for sure. See, I'm not used to that because someone deleted the inbox for Flo Plain.
Um, I don't know who that was. Yeah, you inbox for Flo Plain.
Remember we had Flo Plain club emails and then you just like randomly deleted it
one day, I don't remember why we did that. Oh, right.
Cause we didn't want to keep paying for them forever. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that we were, we were partially migrated, but not fully
migrated and you just needed the whole thing.
That was my bad. We lost like a bunch of history. Yeah, that was my bad.
It's fine. I mean, it's basically resolved at this point, but, um, I am used to like things
from that era, just assuming that I don't have them. So yeah, my bad.
But yeah, this was, I think this was done through Colton and I think any discussions
with you would have been vocal at that point in time.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I can't find any reference to it. That's frigging hilarious though.
It was, it was either them or someone very like them.
And I, I really, I don't remember. I wonder if it was like how to hide your stuff that is on the hub video.
Um, I don't think it was that frame.
Wouldn't it have been like Channel Super Fun, the dildo racing maybe?
I think it was a little bit after that, but I, I was going to bring that video up
because I think it might have been something like kind of inspired by. I really don't remember what it was.
It's been too long. It's like literally been a decade basically.
Um, but that was a thing. We, we reached out to them.
They said sure whoever it was, I think it was them. Um, and then we said no.
It's amazing how many people are relatively new to the channel and just like have
no idea what Channel Super Fun is. It's you float playing chats, just like lighting up with the what racing.
Uh, yeah, that was a video on Channel Super Fun way back in the day.
Um, I got, I got a text from my daughter that actually reminded me of this is
totally unrelated to anything, but remember that cool text that I showed you
from her a little while back where I was like, this is such a proud dad moment.
Guys, this is so cool. Um, I got, I got a text from her like middle of last month that was I fixed
the printer all by myself today for the first time. Exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark.
She goes, a piece of filament was stuck. Um, dude, it was so cool.
It freaking paid off the, the Christmas present for like the big one for the whole
family, I want to say two Christmases ago now was a bamboo Labs printer P1S and
then a few AMS's because the idea that I had in my head was that in particular,
my daughters, who I recognized immediately, we're going to just use it as a toy
factory, uh, we're going to eventually run into enough problems that I was
eventually going to lose patience with fixing it for them to the point where
they were going to have to start learning how to manage it themselves.
And they were going to run out of already prefabbed creations that they
could just print and get to the point where they were going to have to start
learning to model stuff and it's freaking happening. It took about, yeah, uh, about 20 months, but it's flipping happening.
My eldest daughter can do some basic 3D printer repair, including taking out
stuck filament. Um, she can take the full extruder head assembly off of it and replace it.
Honestly, what's more important about that, in my opinion, is that she was
really excited and proud about doing so, which means that she will probably
continue to grow. She got that dopamine hit.
Yes. She got the hit. That's a very important component.
Yes. She has learned troubleshooting.
She achieved something and, and she got the secondary dopamine hit of being
able to use the printer to make something she wanted.
She's already starting to do a little bit of basic modeling and that's
influencing my youngest daughter to want to be just like her big sister,
like they tend to do. And she's trying to do a little bit as well.
Um, dude, absolutely freaking stoked.
It freaking happened. Um, Tyler asks, uh, did your son ever decide if he wants to be in moral
to do videos? Um, actually, yeah, he expressed some interest over the course of the summer
and he is currently in the first, um, our second draft phase of a Kindle video.
So I basically told him, look, I don't mind a little bit of light nepotism,
but the way that it's going to work is if you want to, you know, do anything
that isn't just as my son, you're going to have to, you're going to have to
shovel some shit if you know what I mean. And so I basically picked the least glamorous possible assignment, uh,
which it turns out on the docket was a look at the latest Kindles, including
the color Kindle, and I went, okay, here's some basic guardrails of, you know,
sort of where to go for information yourself, um, other publications that
have covered it, just, you know, to, to learn what their thoughts were, but
think for yourself, um, customer reviews, filtering out, of course, that, you
know, inexperienced reviewers slash, uh, people who don't have other devices
for context slash bought slash paid reviewers, uh, might be muddying the
waters there. Here's what people might want to know, you know, it's what's good about it.
What's bad about it. What's complicated about it. Don't forget about price, blah, blah, blah.
I kind of laid out all these things and I went, okay, dump it all in a doc.
And again, a little bit of light nepotism, uh, one of our experienced writers will
look at your first draft with you and actually Ploof said it was not bad.
I haven't looked at it yet because he went through the first three, four
paragraphs, sort of showed my son, okay, here's what you need to tweak.
Here's what's pretty good. He kind of went, yeah, you know, it reads like a 13 year old wrote it, but a
good 13 year old, um, I sent him back to the kitchen and he's currently working
on draft two, which will then go into script review with me. So this will be my first time actually seeing the script and I have resolved
to have absolutely no mercy. If it's something that I would have changed with one of our writers, I'll
change it. Um, and I basically told him that the most that he gets to do in this, because
again, he's got to shovel some shit is he gets to host a little bit of it.
So he might host a segment or two, uh, but he's writing a video for the
LTT channel and it will either be good enough and we'll actually use it or it
won't be good enough. And I'll look at his resume again in another year or two.
It's kind of where we're at on it. Now that's it. We were talking about the dopamine hits and the, and the desire for more
situation with the repairing of the printer. Um, when he received that feedback from Ploove, um, was he motivated?
Did he, did he get to it? Did he start working on it? Yeah, he's, he's working on it.
Positive. I've seen, I've seen him working on it. Nice.
Yeah. That's exciting.
I'm hearing good positive things about this video potentially.
Arriving soon. Oh, while, while that potentially happens, five or six minutes.
Yeah. Cool. More. Okay. Well, we should try to get through the rest of the merge messages then.
So we can time it for the end of the show. Yeah. Hello. Short, shorter and shortest, like the pizza warmer.
What other not stellar videos would you like to completely redo?
My blackberry review. Well, late for that.
Yeah. Too bad you sunk them, Luke.
You know, I miss my blackberry.
Oh no.
Man, I don't know. Maybe you guys will be able to tell me what, what are my worst videos?
Which ones should I redo? Hit me.
The apology video. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
That'd be a pretty good one. Your next one, you'll get right.
You know what? So I don't think so, Dan.
I think, I think the next time a major scandal rolls our way.
Yeah. I'm just going to be like, deal with it.
Actually based, I would, I would support that. I just think I'm over it at this point.
Like no ukulele, no nothing. Just like, yeah, okay, whatever.
By there's been so many attempts to cancel my career that I'm just like,
I'm over it at this point. Like, look, next time go for the head.
And if you don't hit it, then give up.
Go home. I can't remember what the last one was, but I remember I was like out doing stuff
on the weekend and one of my friends messaged me like, oh my God, this thing is
happening. And I, if I remember correctly, you and I both were basically just like, yeah,
we'll, we'll get to it when we're back in office.
It's fine.
Whatever.
Sometimes the internet's going to internet. What else we got? Your worst videos are building PCs.
You can only do that so many times. Well, then why would you tell me to redo it?
Remake the first video with no AI. Yeah, I don't know. You guys aren't really giving me much here.
Survivor Slugcat says one that needs a remake is the Christmas album.
No, it doesn't. If anything, I think over the last little while we've gotten less musical.
So no, I don't think that's a very good idea.
You're saying.
Dan, is that true for like the. Oh, I thought you were going to continue with another one.
No. Hi, LMG. I just got a brand new monitor with HDR functionality.
Nice. Whenever I turn it on, it looks weird. Is that just me?
Why do people turn on HDR? I love the magnetic cable organization and bottle.
Ah, OK. Windows HDR can sometimes be a little bit funky.
I actually encountered it earlier today. Sometimes you turn on HDR in Windows and it's like pretty darn looking like it
kind of should at the desktop. And then other times you turn it on and it gets like all washed out and horrible looking.
So what you'll have to do is you'll have to make sure that your display is only
switched into HDR mode when you're actually playing content that benefits from HDR.
Because even if your desktop looks like hot poo poo, if you go into a game that
supports HDR and turn HDR on, it will look outstanding.
And then just don't use HDR at the desktop, I guess.
Win B. Yeah. Yeah. Win B.
Hotkey. Does it hotkey for that?
Yeah, if I recall correctly. That's sick.
I'm not going to do it because it might break the computer. OK, I have been given a link.
Sorry, Win Alt B. OK, carry on.
I've been given a link to Scarp Airdoors so we can post that when we're done.
Yeah, when we're done. G'day from StrayLia.
Luke, the refrigerator, you've often said that life is PVP as a bloke who seems set
on making the world better. How do you square that with the life is PVP philosophy?
Any tips? I would say PVE.
Any tips? I would say probably kill them quickly so they don't suffer.
I mean, just because it's PVP doesn't mean those other people can't be useful to
you. You should just kill them all. Yeah.
Yeah, even like even in a PVP enabled world, you can have people that can work
with you if you think about I mean, even if you think about just video games,
right, like if you if you think about one of the longest running ones now,
Eve online, it's like extremely brutal, extremely PVP enabled.
You have internal, you'll have like spies that will steal stuff from groups all
the time, but that doesn't stop people from working together because in order
to accomplish more, you have to work together and you will find people that
are generally going to act in a way that benefits you.
You can argue that effectively every single action like ever made is selfish,
but there can be selfish action. That's such a cynical viewpoint.
Yeah, it is. I agree. And I don't think it's realistic, but even in that scenario, there can be
things that people do that are selfish that benefit you.
So alignment. Yeah, alignment is very important and definitely attainable.
And it might not work every time, but like it's definitely attainable.
And there are people want to be on a team. And there are positive, there are personally positive results sometimes
that align with making the world a better place. I mean, I'd say a great example would be making a good product that helps
people fix things faster and more comfortably like, yes, you know,
this is a PVP world and, you know, it was the creation of our screwdriver
was capitalistically motivated. Obviously, I don't mind selling half a million of them.
But that doesn't mean that that has to be mutually exclusive to other
people finding a benefit from, you know, our team's actions.
And that doesn't mean that other people on our team can't benefit from,
you know, the sales of this. Like it's just. I think you can even argue like something like the trust me, bro warranty.
Like the idea of just somewhat automatically siding with the customers
and trying to make things good for people is, is honestly, it's so multifaceted.
It's, it's kind of easier for us. The customer service team can just be like less contentious than they would
have to be at other companies, which is probably nice. I assume that's nice.
I know for the full playing customer support, that's nice.
It just makes the, the approach to a lot of situations easy.
It's like, oh, you're mad and you want to refund. Okay.
Yeah. Sounds good. Hopefully you come back later.
See you. We've actually caught a lot of people very off guard doing that.
Cause they're like, oh wait, really?
Yeah. And then, and then sometimes they end up coming back and like messaging us
about the fact that they came back, which is kind of a funny way to close
that loop, but the, the idea that something is, is good for, is good for you.
Therefore it's, it must be bad for others is not good. I think also the idea that something is good for others.
Therefore it must be bad for you is a bad way of thinking as well.
Um, like someone else gaining a benefit and you not gaining it can still mean
that that is a good thing overall. And supporting that, uh, I think if you don't think super short-sighted might
result in things that are good for you and not necessarily good for them
happening in the future, because if you set that as like the, like, look, we are
going to try to do the thing that is right as much as possible as the standard
that you have, um, that you will ideally overall benefit from that happening.
I don't know. The whole situation is tough. Um, life is constant PVP.
I think the main thing that you're in PVP with is companies.
Um, yes, it happens with each other.
Like we are, I mean, only one person can marry Yvonne, which is a total bummer
for everyone, but me, from my perspective. So you were, you were in constant PVP with everyone else.
Um, yeah. In, in your eyes. Well, not anymore to getting with the Vaughn.
Yeah. Sure. Now I don't even have to take care of myself. I would still say yes.
Actually, that's fair. That's fair. There's whatever it's like 50% of marriages and in divorce.
But a lot of stuff is not zero sum like that.
Yes. Um, and you know, ideally you end up in a situation where it's not really that way,
but, um, you also need to keep your guard up.
Like you can't just like randomly suck as a husband anymore.
Um, not anymore. You can't just randomly suck as a husband.
Yeah. That would be huge news for her if I came out like that.
Oh my God.
Um, but yeah, I don't know. Anyways, it's, it's the, yeah, the main thing you need to keep your guard on out
for is, is company stuff.
Uh, the, the concept, there's no such thing as a free lunch is like super true.
I need to just be aware of it. Um, yeah.
If something's free, you're the product and that is very intense.
I've been talking recently about how, uh, the, like what we're paying for is
shifting. We're like paying to not have things now.
You're paying to not have ads. You're paying to not have your data stolen.
You're paying to not be involved in like really brutal, um, surveillance and,
and data harvesting schemes. Yeah. You're paying to avoid these problems.
Yeah. Um, and we're like forced labor in the products and stuff like that.
Sorry. Or like forced labor in the production of your products.
Like, like that's an extra, you know, and it's, it's a rather extreme extra
because that forced labor, who boy, it's real cheap.
Um, yeah. So it's, it's, it's interesting.
Um, I think it's also tough because then I, I catch myself with this as well
sometimes, but like the things I care about, um, or like, you know, I care about a
lot of things, but the things that I decide to action that I care about.
Um, it's hard to not try to push other people to like definitely just follow the
same things that I do and everybody's got their own little wars going on.
Um, I don't know. Something about recognizing that life is a constant PVP environment.
It's just also recognizing that people are going through it all the time.
Um, and it's tough to know what battle somebody is fighting.
Um, and that doesn't mean, you know, you have to be just incredibly
lenient with everyone all the time, but I think it's just sometimes
understanding that they're like everyone all the time is bringing an incredible
amount of baggage to every single scenario they're ever in.
You'd never know like why someone reacts to something so intensely.
And it's probably because of tons of other things going on, um, that you have
really no way of ever understanding. So just try to not take things too personally, keep your head down and
understand that basically every company is trying to loot you all the time.
Um, Hey, what did I just get linked here?
Sidecar, your personal automotive assistant. Someone just sent this to me in chat.
Uh, Sid BMW sent this to me.
Apparently the Taycan is the top car driven by people who use this app.
What does it do? That's like, that's wild.
There's so few Taycans on the road.
Oh, nevermind. I figured it out. It warns you about recalls.
I've had a few of those. I could see Taycan owners caring about that and it looks like it helps you.
Uh, it looks like it helps with trip planning, which the Taycan has
craptastic range. So nevermind. Okay. I figured it out. Okay.
Uh, Dan, next one. Sure thing.
Um, when water bottles was a new product, Linus mentioned a known issue with
the black and gold water bottles that the gold would fade quickly for some users.
Is that just a factor of the printing method? Uh, yes.
And we have, um, explored and explored and explored other printing methods and
have not found a good way for gold paint on the water bottle with the current
processes and manufacturing that we use to not fade.
So I think we either removed it from the site or we, uh, just have a disclaimer
on it now that we don't cover, uh, fading of the gold.
I can't remember which one it is at this point.
Uh, I'm going to check. It looks like we do still have it on the site and, uh, disclaimers.
Gold ink may be more prone to wear and discoloration from skin oils and exposure
to heat than other colors. Some fading is normal over the lifetime of the product and it is not dishwasher safe.
So that's what we ultimately went with because people got mad.
That's right. I remember now people got mad when we took it away. They wanted the option to have a faded gold bottle and we were like,
okay. Oh, speaking of which, we may have found a coating for the screwdriver shaft.
Gold. Define. Black. A gold coating? No, the black.
That would be cool. Oh, that'll like actually survive.
Well, anything, any coating is not invulnerable, but a lot better, but a lot
better than the OG. Uh, that's cool. That's pretty exciting.
So yeah, I think, I think people would be quite interested to see a black shaft
return. I actually have another merch message about that.
Oh, do you really? Um, and let me see if I can find it here.
About black shafts. Hi DLO, line us a couple of weeks ago you mentioned y'all were almost sold
out of fail shafts. Will more scribe drivers come back once you're out?
Hopefully black shafts return. Uh, so yeah, it was actually the scribe driver that drove us to, uh, re-explore
black coatings and look at some of the options, re-look at some of the options
we looked at previously, but maybe with different partners and then look at some
new options that had come to light. And, uh, we found one that worked really great on scribe driver.
And we kind of went, well, if it works on a scribe driver, then it should work on a screwdriver because they're like made of the same thing.
And so we've been exploring it. We still have not finalized anything with respect to black coatings and whether
or not that will end up in a product again. Um, but we do have some promising leads as for scribe driver.
Yeah, we've talked about it and the team wants to keep making them.
I mean, they continue to sell really well. Like how many scribe drivers did we sell yesterday?
For instance, here I'm going to, I'm going to check. I'm going to check.
You guys can be privy, privy to this information.
Yesterday was just a normal, very normal day on the store.
Like we didn't have any special promos running or anything like that. So just like a run rate, run rate kind of day.
And, oh man, the report takes a little while to pull.
Here we go. Scribe driver. So we moved like 30 scribe drivers yesterday.
So it like just sells and it's a great value.
It's a great product. Um, so the team's like, well, yeah, like, you know, this looks great on our,
you know, quarterly reports and everything. It'd be tremendous if we could keep selling it.
So I think the plan is to manufacture scribe drivers, uh, even though the
intention was that we would not even begin to dent the total number of fail
shafts that we had making this product. I mean, we had a hundred thousand of them and between scribe driver and
another thing that we have planned that we're going to do a production run of with fail shafts, um, before we probably have to switch that one
over to fresh manufacturing. Um, we're almost out of them.
So what, uh, what a success, I think that's really, really cool, uh,
because it shows that you can take a recycling project and turn it into
something so profitable that it's worth doing beyond just recycling.
And, uh, just so you guys know, we're going to
try to give you guys a heads up when you'll have your last opportunity to
grab a scribe driver, uh, before they become like not fail shafts.
Like if you want one that is a piece of LTT failure history, everything you
order today will be a fail shaft from that manufacturer that boned us.
Um, but at some point they will switch over.
So if you want to get a pencil or a pen, we have both mechanical pencils and pens now for a scribe driver.
Uh, now is a great time to get one and be sure that you will get a fail shaft.
Hey, three musketeers Linus, after finding to homie podcast, I was wondering,
are you still using homie at home? If so, what have you been enjoying since installation?
We'll hear this tomorrow on Spotify. Um, homie is super cool.
And when I finally fix all my light switches and get everything sort of aligned,
I may switch over to it, but as it was, we did the install and we did a
bunch of tests with it. It's like super awesome, but I already had what little I have working,
working with home assistant. And so I have not switched my home installation.
However, if, uh, if nothing dramatically changes with my home,
my home assistant situation, I may just go homie.
We're also looking at potentially doing a, another house renovation project.
Um, this is something that is still very early stages.
And if we were to do something that, you know, is not intended to be administered
by someone who feels like doing it as a hobby, homie is something that I would
strongly recommend. Um, it seems like they are, they are pretty serious about making the, uh,
the experience of bringing together disparate ecosystems actually palatable
for people who don't want to make it their part-time job.
LL, Andy, if you play, have you tried the ANO 117 beta?
If so, what do you think? I didn't know there was one. Um, I'm going to have to try it, man.
I gotta, I gotta tell you, I have not had practically any time for gaming
and my queue of stuff I really want to play. Like I haven't touched Clare Obscure yet, like in spite of it being apparently
like the bestest RPG experience, like ever or something.
Um, I, yeah, I was going to say, honestly, uh, I don't know if I'm, I don't
know if honestly either of us should play the beta.
Yeah. I think I can wait. I think I can wait with the amount of time that we have for games these days.
I feel like, uh, I would leave versions of previous me to do the beta stuff,
which is great. And I liked doing that stuff back then, but right now I will, I will wait.
I think work's been just very excited, crazy lately in no particular order.
Here's my games that I need to play on my like to do list.
The outer worlds, which I did put like an hour or two into, but I never really
like got to get very deep into it.
Um, Fel Seal Arbiter's Mark, Destroy All Humans, Dragon Quest 11.
Oh my God. This is so funny. This is so old.
I have played that Chinese game that's basically Breath of the Wild.
This was a you recommendation for Genshin.
Wait, me? Really? Yeah. Cause you were saying, I've never even played Genshin.
I know, but you were saying that I think it was Jaden.
You were saying was like really enjoying it back when it like first came out or
Jonathan, someone from the float playing team. This is like five years ago now.
So, um, I have played project triangle strategy, uh, play TIE fighter total
conversion, play rise of the third power, play RFL, play risk of rain two
with Luke Barrington recommended, uh, play reach the future, Final Fantasy
Tactics Mod, play that Final Fantasy game for Android, Final Fantasy
dimensions, um, play eight bit adventures, the forgotten journey and sequel,
play Octopath Travel. Actually, I played a little bit of Octopath Travel. I did not enjoy it.
I'm ticking that off. Uh, play the last bell, a base defense game, play Unicorn Overlord, play Astilebra,
revision, play Journey with Yvonne, try Manor Lords, play Disco Elysium, play
Paper Mario, the Thousand-Year Door, play Unraveled II with Yvonne. Oh, I finally did that one.
Okay. That's one. Um, try Warcraft II remake and Warcraft III, play Vellum with Yvonne.
Play Halls of Torment, play Drova, Dragon Quest HD remake.
Um, play Claire Obscure.
Now we're getting into more current, current, try Puck game, play Beyond
Doll Reason. Um, yeah.
So that's my, that's my to-do list. And that's not even just like the ones that are in my Steam library, but I
haven't played yet. Things like, I still haven't like finished Doom Eternal.
I only benchmark it. Yeah.
Yeah. Work's been crazy lately, man.
It's been all right. It's all right to be clear.
I'm all right, but like, yeah, it has been pretty crazy.
It's been pretty crazy. The views just deciding to go frickin haywire on us was not, not the best
timing in the world, I would say. Um, I'm very tired.
But hey, we're still here.
Who's Svino in chat? Is that Sven? Yeah. Oh, okay.
Can't believe you haven't played DQ-11 with DQ-11.
Oh, Dragon Quest. I've actually never played a Dragon Quest game.
People play this. I mean, are they like popular, popular?
I think they're pretty popular. Cause that new, like HD2D remake was like huge or something.
And let's see, is this one, hello.
Last one I got for you today. Oh, dang. I tried to reply to the one, hi, Dan, before you got to it.
Oh, I was going to be like, psych, it's me, Linus.
Well, I guess it counts as curated. Now, has a long time viewer who was heavily inspired by you to try
and start creating content as a passion project. What is the most actionable piece of advice you would wish you were
told early on, much less than three LLD?
Um, this is a super difficult question. I'm sorry to curate this.
No, no, that's fine. I mean, I'd say that the advice that I wish I had back then is actually
really accessible now because the whole content creation as a career
thing didn't exist when I started on YouTube, at least in the way that
we think of what content creator means now, obviously creating any
content makes you a content creator, but like online content creation was
not a career when I first got started.
And so, you know, there weren't really a ton of trailblazers that came before me.
There were some, um, you know, people like Chris Perillo, um, people like
I justine, um, but nowadays there's so much conversation around, you know,
what it takes to succeed that on the one hand, you know, the formula is
really well understood, you know, be yourself and, and engage with the
audience and be persistent and, and always be, you know, evolving.
And you know, all these things that, you know, everyone knows because you can just go watch a Mr.
Beast interview and he'll break it down for you. He's, he's very transparent in terms of what it takes to succeed on the platform.
It's just that the flip side of this coin is that the competition is so fierce
now that it comes down to who can most expertly execute on that formula and
who it can find a manner of engaging with that audience that is, that lasts.
Um, cause that's the biggest challenge. I mean, I was talking about this a fair bit last week and it was
something that I was reflecting on a lot. Um, when we thought, okay, well, that's it.
Like, you know, we've fallen off, right? Our views are gone. Um, then we turned around and had a couple, you know, 1.5, 1.6 million
view videos. I'm like, okay, I guess meets back on the menu. Who knows, right?
But I was thinking a lot about, you know, if this was the end, how privileged
I've been to survive this long in this industry.
And I really do think of it as survival.
There's not many people that, and I've never been, you know, at the S tier or
even the A plus tier, but there's not many people that have been at the B plus
A minus tier like I have for this long. And, um, it's a slog.
So I guess I'll, I'll say this is the most actual piece of advice that even
now most people don't like to talk about is that it is a fucking slog.
We are not designed as creatures to have a one to this many relationship.
And it is something that wears on a spot glass on literally such an
incredibly high percentage of your time by so many people all of the time and
be expected to be perfect all of the time. And it's something that wears on the viewers as well.
People, people grow, people change, people drift apart.
And it's, um, it's a weird relationship that as far as I can tell has never
existed before and who knows, maybe we'll learn something from it and this
type of dynamic will never exist again. Um, but you've got to be ready to grow a thick skin and understand that like
any job, it's work.
Don't romanticize it. You have a job to do.
So, you know, when the numbers are bad or when a comment is discouraging,
you're just going to have to put your chin up and you're going to have to just fucking figure it out because otherwise you will not survive.
Period. Yeah. Just like this show will not continue to survive.
Well, this, this episode. Well, we got the floodplain. Oh, right.
It's on top of the script. I tried to outro the video and you didn't let me.
Denied. It will survive slightly longer.
Sorry, the top of the script. Uh, yellow.
Sorry, I didn't unhighlight it. Very, very top. Second line looks.
Oh, that's the link. Yeah. Wait. So is it live or you have to make it live?
Okay. That's the last thing you have to do tonight before you get to go home.
By the way, you see that, uh, Hacksmith's, um, uh, uh, oh man, not, not carry
all carry all day, every day. No, fuck. Smithblade.
Yeah. No, no, no, not Smithblade. The knife with the pliers.
Every day carry. What's it, what's it called? This category.
Someone tell me multi-tool. No, no, no, no, no.
Yeah. Is it every day carry? Yeah. Every day carry. That's what I'm looking for. So his every day carry, um, Kickstarter thing is over 10 million US dollars now.
Yeah. For the Smithblade. Yeah. No, I know the Smithblade, but that's not the category of product.
I just mean is this thing that he's making. Yeah. The Smithblade.
The knife. Don't worry about it. The point is, dude, over 10 million dollars for our, for our fellow bro content
creator, good for him. It's so cool. What an absolute freaking Chad.
Great, great job. Fantastic. Uh, all right.
And now it's time to promote our own.
There it is. We spelled finale wrong. You know what? It doesn't matter.
Oh, no. Well, no, no, no, no.
Save. It's live. Go watch it. We'll see you again next week.
Same bad time. Same bad channel. Bye. It's six AM for me.
I'm going to bed. Good night.
We just got to close it. Get out of here. We're not applying yet.
Goodbye.