or a lot.
What's up gamers, welcome to the WAN Show. We've got some awesome topics for you this week,
including something from AI, something from other stuff,
and some sad, bad news about the state of the world.
Dad news. Stay tuned for after these ad spots.
See you in a minute. Is he practicing to take my job?
Cause it really seems like it. I don't like Luke anymore.
I don't like this side of you.
Oh man.
Okay. We got it. We'll be all right.
We got it. I'm fine.
Little power nap. Yeah. I like it. It's good stuff.
Effective.
All right, let's do this thing. Until you have like 20 minutes for a power nap and you fall asleep at minute 19,
then it's just everything's worse. Yeah. I don't know how people like,
maybe like micro sleeping or whatever it is, like where you just like take little naps throughout the day.
Yeah. It really seems to me that to be able to fall asleep
quickly enough to take advantage of that, I would have to just be in a perpetual state of exhaustion.
There's supposed to be this trick where you think of a word
and then you think of an alternate word that starts with the first letter of each letter
of the root word that you came up with. So like root.
You'd have to come up with a letter that starts with R, two letters to start with O and the letter that starts with T.
Or sorry, a word. Two letters to start with O. I meant a word. I know, but it's fun.
It is, yeah, fair enough. I'll take it. He has an actual learning disability
and I actually go after him hard every single time I get an opportunity.
Literally worst friend, really.
But I just get too into it.
Yeah. Like I'll just, I start focusing on it like really hard
and then I'm like, I'm more awake than. Dude, there's literally no sleep follow sleep tricks
that work for me. Most of them either I get it too into it
or I get immediately distracted
and it takes so much focus to stay on top of it. Counting past sheep 15 is like impossible
because by the time you get there, your brain's like, ooh.
Penny, shiny, shiny, penny. There's literally anything else that we've been talking about.
Well.
All right, let's do this thing.
Don't move for 15 minutes and you'll be asleep.
No, I'll just be super agitated is what I'll be.
And I'll be your crying shoulder. I'll be love suicide.
I'll be better when I'm older.
Good song, good song.
All right, let's, okay, I'm doing it. All right, let's just do it.
Hey there, everybody. Welcome to a chilled out, relaxed WAN Show.
So smooth. We've got a great show lined up for you guys today.
We're gonna be talking about Apple's iPhone 16 Glowtime event,
the PlayStation 5 Pro announcement, Luke. We also have some good news in this week in AI
and we're gonna be talking about how the US government is pushing for greater VPN access.
They're pushing for greater VPN access. I think it's a good thing.
It's smooth. Goes down easy.
Just like this intro to our intro.
Yeah.
The show is brought to you today by Manscaped, The Ridge and Acronis,
along with our chair partner, Secret Lab and our laptop partner, LG.
Why don't we jump right into our first topic, which is of course that I was wrong this week.
Yeah. Twice. Now I assume that you have watched literally nothing.
Nope. I assume you know, I mean, I don't think there are any two tech products
that you could care less about than the iPhone and the PlayStation.
Yep. Yeah. So why don't I catch you up on exactly what happened
and then we'll go from...
Wow. It's been three minutes
and we've already thrown something at our producer.
I'm sorry, I was talking.
Why don't we, what do you wanna start with? Should I catch you up on the iPhone or should I?
Let's do the iPhone. Okay. So Apple announced the iPhone 16 lineup.
So you got the 16, the 16 plus the 16 Pro
and the 16 Pro Max. If I recall correctly, honestly,
I'm not obsessed with Apple's lineup and figuring out exactly what it is.
I'll look at it when I need to and I'll refresh myself, but other than that,
it honestly isn't something that I pay that close attention to. But this time around,
and this made people pretty angry, I was approaching the iPhone announcement event
from a bit of a different perspective. So I feel like and what happened was our video
ended up having a pretty positive overall spin on it
when largely the reaction from the tech press
and sort of influencer army out there was pretty negative.
But I'd like to explain why. So first of all,
let's talk about what makes the iPhone 16 lineup new.
They're getting the new A18 processor family.
So we have a regular A18 in the iPhone 16
and then an A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro.
As far as we can tell from Apple's comparative benchmarks,
like they didn't compare both of these new processors
to one single predecessor. They compared them to different things.
And if you do the math from previous Apple presentations,
they seem like they're probably pretty close. So it looks like they're very similar
in terms of the at least TPU performance, GPU performance and neural processor performance.
But all of this is going to become more clear as time goes on.
There's upgraded glass. So their ceramic shield is now significantly stronger.
I actually don't have a summary of the specs
in my notes, which I normally have when I run through something like this.
So we'll have to kind of figure that out. But the things that really stood out to me
were actually not necessarily the hardware. Oh, there's a new button.
There's like a programmable button. Just kind of cool action button, which I kind of like.
Was that ever a thing in the past? On the iPhone?
I read some comments of people talking about like, oh, they took the button away
so that they could give it back to us now. And I was like, what?
I mean, they had the home button, but that wasn't programmable.
Did they have like a button? Action button was on the 15 Pro. Yeah, it was on the 15 Pro,
but now it's on the regular 16. So there were a few things that people were pretty,
and the camera button is new across the board. So we have a dedicated shutter button,
but no, no iPhone in the past has ever had a shutter button.
So there were a couple of things that people were pretty upset about.
And one of them was that in the video, I said that I was probably gonna go,
cause I've been talking about switching to an iPhone for a little bit, for a while now.
And I think I'm just, I'm overdue. And there's a lot of things about iOS 18
that are looking very compelling to me. And there's some Android,
there's some Android Army members who are telling me that these aren't new features to Apple,
or that they're copied from Android, or that they don't make that much of a difference,
or whatever. But the reality of it is that to me,
like the phone operating system that I use doesn't really matter,
and I don't really care who's copying from each other. Realistically, Google and Apple copy liberally
from each other at this point. And it doesn't really matter to me
where it originated from. What matters to me is that I need a new device right now,
and the iPhone 16 lineup actually looks pretty compelling.
I think that's kind of the root of where your thoughts on this stuff came from,
was that you need a new device and you're on an old one.
And I think you and I even talked about this, I don't remember.
But a lot of people that are unhappy with the event,
it's because they have a current generation device, and they're looking at the upgrade and going,
this doesn't really seem like a lot. But we're at, I mean, it's called iPhone 16.
The jumps per generation is gonna slow down. Phones have been boring for a long time now.
And the way I'm kind of looking at it is you can be disappointed quite genuinely
every single generation,
or you can start shifting your goalposts a little bit and look like one or two generations back
for your improvement jumps. And I think it's gonna be more than one or two.
I think realistically, what this comes down to is that the days of us getting something major
to upgrade to every single generation,
not only are they dead, but they've been dead for a long time.
I completely agree. I've been over it for a few years now at the very least.
And so I guess that was,
and the amount of speculation that we were paid by Apple
to have kind of a positive spin on, guys, anytime you see someone who accuses us
of being paid by Apple to be positive about Apple products,
you can immediately just dismiss anything. Were you even invited to the event?
No, of course not. Yeah. Apple's still the extent of Apple's media relationship
with me up until now is that they emailed me once.
Are they kind of cool with Mac Address? Oh, I don't know if they are.
No one has kept me up to date on it. Okay, I don't know. I'm not sure.
Maybe, but as far as I am concerned,
and as far as the LTT channel is concerned, Apple has never gone past scheduling
a conference call with me. They never actually went through with the call.
It did get scheduled, but it was canceled minutes before we actually went through with
engaging for the first time. Apple has no interest in working together with me.
So people were mad about a number of things. They were mad because they felt
we were overly positive about the event. And I think that a big part of that comes down
to that difference in perspective, where most of the rest of the tech media,
if they're running a 15 Pro now, or a 15 Pro Max, are looking at this going,
oh, boring. Yeah. Where's the innovation, Apple?
And I think they just have to get used to the idea that that's gonna happen over a much longer cycle,
whereas I'm looking at it going, man, my AirPods Pro 2s just got way better.
Ages after I bought them, which I'm pretty stoked on. I didn't even know that was a thing.
That sounds great. It's a kind of behavior that... What feature are you gaining?
For me personally, not much. They're optimizing the noise cancellation.
They're adding some like... And this is retroactive to what you have now?
Yeah, it looks like it's like some kind of machine learning assisted,
quickly switching in between transparency mode for conversations and turning everything back up. Oh, that thing looks really cool.
Yep. It's something that absolutely exists in other products,
but my assumption is that based on how well Apple has handled active noise cancellation,
it'll actually be implemented pretty well and I might actually use it.
They're also adding like hearing aid-like functionality to AirPods.
I've been using them as casual hearing protection for a long time, but they are more formally talking
about using them that way with the improved active noise cancellation.
If you cancel out a wave, the wave is canceled.
No, I was thinking, you mentioned hearing aid and then noise protection.
Both. I thought you were saying those were the same thing for a second.
No, not the same thing. But you're talking about different stuff.
So I thought that was pretty cool. I actually opened the video on like a software update,
essentially, and I think a lot of people were kind of surprised to see that.
The other thing that people kind of went after me for was that I told them my intention was to go with
the iPhone 16 Plus, the non-Pro.
And a lot of the feedback that I got on that
was Linus, you know, if you're gonna go into
the Apple ecosystem for the first time in a long time,
you should be having the full experience. But the reality of it is guys, like I can pick any iPhone
I want, like we're ordering all of them through work.
I just literally grab off the shelf, whichever one I want to use.
But the reason that I went with the iPhone 16
or iPhone 16 Plus, I haven't actually 100% decided which one I want, I'm gonna hold them first,
is that I don't think people should be buying the Pro.
Don't get me wrong. I don't know what the difference is. There's features on the Pro that I would like to have.
The regular iPhone 16 still doesn't have a high refresh rate display.
Ooh. Yeah. 60 Hertz. Which for like $800?
Aye. Pretty embarrassing.
But most of the other stuff that's, then again, neither does the device
that I am upgrading from. It feels nicer.
I have a high refresh rate screen now I can feel it. It does.
But I guess what I've discovered is for my phone,
I don't know if I, I don't game on my phone.
It does make touch feel more responsive. I can absolutely instantly tell
if I'm using a high refresh rate device. And things like higher polling rates on the touch input,
it definitely makes a difference. But I think I have just become not that much of a power user.
And a lot of the other features on the Pro, I just don't need them.
The studio quality microphone, 4K 120 FPS recording.
I don't need that stuff.
It's got another, I think it's got another camera. I don't know man. The iPhone's ability to film in log
makes video on iPhone extremely interesting.
Sure, but I'm not using it professionally. This is just my phone.
Do I need to shoot 4K 120 on it?
Like I can, they added. I could see it. They added ProRes recording to the non-Pro.
So if I just want to record in ProRes and I don't need 120 frames per second.
Is there ever like, you never want to shoot like a little slow-mo thing of your son playing
badminton or something like that? I don't know. Sure, do I need it at 4K?
Oh, it's four, okay. So you could still do. Okay, yeah, oh yeah. I can still do high, I can still do high frame rate.
I just, yeah, it's just, it's a lot.
People are saying, okay, yeah, the LiDAR. The LiDAR is great.
You know what? That is great. I don't take that many pictures.
And the handful of features that need the depth sensing.
I can, I know enough people that I can borrow a phone from.
Like there's been, I think it's come up twice. Once when I had to do a facial scan for that VR headset,
the big screen beyond. And once when I was a bit part,
I, when I had a bit part in an undisclosed film that I don't know if it's ever even gonna get made
at this point. I haven't heard back about it in a while, whatever.
Anyway, I used it to scan the room that I was in
because that was useful for them for VFX like overlays.
I wonder if part of this is people that, can you pre-order yet?
I think we've placed orders. Did they set up pre-orders already? I actually don't know.
It's a minor detail. I have procurement. We'll take care of that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a way to go. It's nice.
What was I gonna say? I wonder if some of this is people that bought the pro
that are, yes, you can, you can pre-order it. I wonder if this is people that bought the pro
that want the tech guy to make the same decision they did.
I do think there's a lot of that. And I can see why they would want to
because it's $1,500 Canadian. It's Canadian.
This is Canadian. So it starts at, I believe, 1,200 U.S.
And it is funny. It is funny to me seeing how many people
are legitimately angry at me. Like I've betrayed them. The pro max is 1,750.
Because I'm using an iPhone.
The pro max is what my car cost.
It's not my current one. Yeah, I was gonna say. Surely that's not right. No, my first car.
I'm sorry. You're getting older. Your first car was a minute ago. You might have to have some inflationary adjustments,
which we'll be talking about a little bit later. It's still a lot of money.
Yeah, I mean, we're, and so I was, realistically, I was looking at the iPhone 16 going,
okay, is this really, do I need a titanium phone?
Or is aluminum probably okay? Are you gonna end up, that was not in a case?
Are you gonna put it in a case anyways? No, I'm not gonna put it in a case. Yeah, okay.
But like, it's aluminum, and dude, their glass is like very shatter resistant.
So I'm really not that worried about it. I used to be no case. I was no case with my previous phone.
This phone's so huge that I decided to get a case for it
anyways, because I was like, I feel like it's just gonna get knocked off of things more often,
because it's enormous, and I'm happy I have one. Look at this.
There's a massive bite out of that corner. Oh wow, yeah, you really hit that one.
Yeah. She, that case is doing work. And it is actually, it's been dropped a couple of times,
but something that's kind of nice about it is that I just don't care,
because I don't even like the phone. Nice.
But I don't want to replace it. So there's a case on it, but I don't care for it,
if that makes sense. So it's just like, ah, whatever. Yep.
Which is a nice, it's nice to just not worry about it.
Another difference for the pro, is that the bezels are slightly smaller.
So in about the same form factor there, the screens are 0.2 inches bigger.
But then if I cared that much about that, why would I get an iPhone with like a giant forehead notch
in it in the first place? Like I, I don't know guys. I mean, feel free, feel free to like come at me
and let me know. But I think that people should probably just be getting
the regular 16 if they, if they want an iPhone, if they want the ecosystem.
And it's funny to me how we get so stuck in our tech bubble,
and we get so stuck in our sort of, in our priorities
that sometimes we forget that most people don't care.
Most people cannot tell a 60 Hertz display
from a high refresh rate display. Are also only looking to upgrade their phones
when their battery life starts to annoy them too much, which is usually every like three years.
Or more, more. Like my battery life didn't really start getting bad
on this until about the last year or so. And I believe this is up to,
I believe this is six years. It probably depends on their usage. Like if they game a lot,
so they're doing some really brutal battery cycles,
and it's going to be sooner, if they don't later, et cetera, et cetera.
Nokey asks, you often say you prefer a phone where you can take photos and videos
of kids important moments. Would the iPhone 16 shutter button be a good addition for you?
I never need to be that quick on the draw. Like as long as I've got a gesture
that I can activate in a reasonable amount of time, and the on screen button is there
in a reasonable amount of time. Like I am, I'm so well adjusted now
to the ergonomics of holding my phone so that my thumb is here for the shutter button.
I just, the value of a dedicated hardware button for that,
for me is extremely low, extremely low.
There's still things that I'm super not impressed about.
I mean, the fact that Apple's base storage is still 128 gigs.
I was just going to talk about that. On devices that cost like a flip and ton of money,
the fact that storage upgrades cost so much.
$300 to go from 512 gigs to one terabyte is.
We did the math, Luke. Crazy. Apple literally charges so much
that their NAND flash chips could be made of gold.
Literally, we got, no, I'm serious. We grabbed some pieces of the golden controller
and we compared them to NAND chips.
And we did the math and how much gold it was
to weigh as much as Apple's NAND chips.
And wait for wait, Apple storage and memory
cost as much as gold. Was this for a video? Yeah.
I was gonna say, why would you need the pieces from the gold? It was, I believe it was from the.
You just weigh the other one and then look up gold value. I believe it was, well, yeah, but we had the gold
so we could do it physically. That's why I said, is it for a video? Cause it's for a video, then it's a cool visual thing.
Anyways. Yeah, so it was freaking hilarious, right?
Though, because it's crazy.
It's like when you compare printer ink to Chanel number,
whatever, like these obscenely valuable liquids.
Funny enough, I watched that video. Oh.
The like printer video? Yeah, yeah. I watched that one. You're one of the very few who did.
I didn't watch, yeah. Terrible performer. How'd you like it?
I was actually, it was pretty good. Yeah, I didn't know about the whole tank thing and stuff.
There was one really mad comment that was saying, everyone knows you should just get
an older laser printer. They had a bunch of upvotes.
I get these questions all the time. And it's like. Like genuinely.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They were like, everyone knows like our advice was bad.
They didn't get to the part of the video where we talked about that. Oh, oh, very cool.
I can't, I can't help people. I can't help them.
Any who. So I'm kind of excited to try it,
even though I'm definitely gonna have some issues.
I don't think that having USB 2 speeds is gonna bother me that much.
Day to day, I very rarely offload. I noticed Plex actually.
Wait, why is it USB 2 speeds? On the 16 non-pro, it's USB 2, even though it's USB-C.
Like, look, there's absolutely stuff that is gonna make me mad.
But how often, when's the last time you offloaded photos from your phone via USB?
Yeah, that's fair. When's the last time you connected your phone to a computer via USB?
Oh, decently often. Okay, to transfer files though? No.
Okay, so who cares? Yeah.
Who cares? I do think it's interesting.
Do they have any color overlap? Oh, black and white.
Crystal asks, will you miss your S pen? The answer is absolutely.
I have become, I've gone from, why are they taking up space in my note
with this stupid pen to whenever I want it,
I really want it, predominantly for marking up screenshots.
Why don't you get a new note? Is it just Apple time?
Yeah, I could, it's just time. Apple time? Yeah, it's just time.
So basically, I think that's what it boils down to.
And you know what the last part I think is?
Is, I mean, we've talked about this on the WAN Show, so you guys will kind of be familiar with this already,
but I'm so tired of negativity.
It's like, why do we have to compare it to last year's iPhone 15 and say it's not enough?
What do you mean it's not enough? If it's not enough, then keep your iPhone 15.
Yeah. That's totally fine. That's maybe even good.
That's good. You just, yeah, who cares? If anything, I would actually,
now that our mobile processors, especially Apple's,
are fast enough to do pretty much whatever we could need to do on our phone, reasonably speaking,
I would actually love to see less frequent upgrades
and longer software support or whatever that looks like, because you gotta remember,
Apple is driven somewhat differently
from other phone manufacturers. They are a lot less motivated
by the initial sale of the iPhone, to be clear. Oh, they're happy to grab it, though.
They're happy to take your money, but they are far more motivated
by the size of the iOS ecosystem
and the number of people that are buying stupid, man,
they've all unpicked up wordscapes, like the mobile, like word, crossword,
spelling, de-jumble thing. And I've been playing with her sometimes.
Dude, dude, the lengths that they go to.
We're go-kitting into playing boomer games with our partners.
Nice. What is happening? I play the New York time games with Emma.
A wordle or whatever it is. And yeah, those things. And you play wordscapes?
Yeah. How the mighty fall. Nice, I know, right?
We used to be true gamers. I used to play Left 4 Dead 2
with my posture like this, boys.
Oh, boy. Sorry to keep going. Ooh.
I heard that. Yeah, so we've been playing wordscapes lately. Dude, the lengths that they go to,
to extract money from you. Oh, I'm sure. Apple gets a piece of every one of those transactions.
At the end of the day, the most important thing to you is that you are on an iPhone.
Not necessarily that you are on the latest iPhone, but that you are on an iPhone.
Because the bigger the install base is, the more of that sweet, sweet app store money
they're extracting from you, and the more incentivized app developers are
to continue to prioritize the iOS platform.
So, I forget where I was going with this.
What was my last reason? I forget, it doesn't matter.
Let's talk about the PlayStation 5 Pro announcement.
This was a little more recent, so I'm gonna remember all the details a little bit better,
but in a nutshell, Sony upgraded the GPU.
I was a little surprised. Oh, we also get Wi-Fi 7, higher base storage.
I'm trying to think if there's anything else that was really upgraded going from the PS5 to the PS5 Pro,
and I don't think so. There were some things I was a little surprised by.
I didn't expect the CPU to stay Zen 2.
Yeah. Already when the PS5 came out, I remember feeling like,
oh yeah, it makes sense that it's Zen 2 because the development cycle for this is so long
that it would have had to be, but boy would it ever have been nice if they,
if the dev kits were all Zen 2 and it was like Zen 3 for the real products, you know?
So, I was a little surprised to see Zen 2 stick around,
but it also kind of makes sense.
Wait, hold on, what's going on here? Okay, hold on. We'll get to the PS5 Pro in a second.
Shraff and Floatplane Chat says, Linus, this is such a disconnected take.
When a product costs $1,200 and there's no improvement to justify it,
that's when we should be negative. This is a consumer protection issue.
No. Not at all. A consumer protection issue would be
if Apple tells you it's something that it isn't. Yeah. A consumer protection issue would be
if Apple deactivates your iPhone 15 Pro
and forces you to buy an iPhone 16 Pro. You are not compelled to buy this.
This is not food, it's not shelter, it's not water.
It's a fucking iPhone. But if you have a 15 or especially like a 15 Pro.
You don't need a new phone. Yeah. Which is not a bad thing.
Like that's the biggest take from the event
from me is that you don't need it. And I am certain, honestly, it might have even already
happened because I just don't care that much because I'm not going to upgrade my phone.
Yeah. But whatever new pixel announcement, I'm not upgrading to it.
So like I don't even really care what it is. What I'm looking for is gonna end up being
like the pixel 10 or 11. Yeah. When that launches, I'm gonna be evaluating that
versus whatever iPhone is launching at the same time in comparison to the phone that I currently have
and deciding, am I gonna get a battery replacement or am I gonna buy one of these phones?
Yeah, so. And then I'm interested in it. Basically, back to my point of us being more focused
on like the positive aspects. Remember too, guys, this isn't a review.
This is a summary of a product announcement. So obviously, I'm gonna talk about the highlights.
Why do I wanna drag myself down? Why do I wanna drag everything down
by dwelling on the negative? And at the end of the day,
if it's not a big enough upgrade over last gen, well, that's fine because Apple's not targeting last gen.
They're not selling it to last gen. The question is not,
the question is not, is $1,200 compelling enough
for someone who already owns an iPhone 15 Pro? That's a stupid question
because it's not $1,200. It's $1,200 minus whatever you could sell your 15 Pro for.
That's the actual value. And that, I don't know, that's up to you. I have no idea what they're worth in the secondary market
that you can go figure that out. The question is, is $1,200 worth it
for someone who needs a phone? And so, I think that's the difference.
And it looks like just on the surface to me, like it looks like, yeah, probably.
That's the difference in perspective that I wanna start approaching things with,
is as someone who is the actual target market
for this product. Okay, so let's go back to the PS5 Pro.
So the main things are it's got a better GPU, similar architecture, which again surprised me
because we gotta remember this product launched four years ago, I think it works out too, right?
PS5 came out in 2020. PS5 released the PS5, no, not the slim,
or was it 2022? Yeah, November 2020 was when the PS5 launched.
So four years later, I was kind of expecting,
you know, I don't know, Zen 3 at the very least,
I was expecting an architectural change to the GPU,
but then as I was sort of working through the script
with David, I was like, no, it actually makes sense
because from Sony's perspective,
the most important thing, because this is a mid-cycle refresh,
that realistically, they aren't going to sell a ton of.
Especially if you compare this to base PS5s or PS4s, right?
These Pro models are furthermore affluent customers,
therefore they're more the more discerning console gamer,
right? You know, it slips tea like this, right? Who can definitely see the difference in the pixels?
Oh, you know, realistically, who can see the higher refresh and higher frame rates?
So making sure that developers have continuity
between the regular model and between the Pro model
is way more important than squeezing a little bit more performance out of it.
Wi-Fi 7, I think, is actually a pretty important upgrade
that is maybe not being talked about enough, especially by us.
Like we turned that video around extremely quickly
and so there were a couple things that I think weren't necessarily wrong,
but are things that I would probably want to do differently to go back. I would talk about Wi-Fi 7
and especially in the PlayStation ecosystem where you might have a PS portal
and your PlayStation 5 Pro is not connected via Ethernet.
Having Wi-Fi 7 and a Wi-Fi 7 router, even if your PS portal doesn't support Wi-Fi 7,
which it doesn't because it's a PS portal, it would be better to have a stronger connection
between the PS 5 Pro and your routers. It's still better.
The better every link in the chain can be, the better off you're going to be.
So Wi-Fi 7 is something I would have talked about more. I also would have more explicitly talked about
the lack of a disk drive. That was something that we kind of glossed over.
And at the very beginning, we had a bit where by the time you buy a stand,
and I think David and I had talked about how the visuals should also have the disk drive
and it should just like add up the whole price and compare it to a thing. Cause we said something along the lines of like,
by the time you buy a disk drive, this thing costs darn near twice as much
as a base model PlayStation or cost about twice.
I forget exactly how we worded it. And I probably would have expanded on that more later
because I think that people were pretty upset when they felt like we were justifying the price.
When we talked about how it wasn't Sony's most expensive console ever,
that crown actually corrected for inflation, goes to the PS3, which came out at 599,
but that was back in, man, when did the PS3 come out?
Like 2002? Oh boy, I'm going to get this wrong.
2006, okay. So that came out way back in 2006.
I said I'd touch on inflation. Quite a few people were really upset
that we made a with inflation comparison to the PS3.
And I'd like to explain why we did that. And the reason they were upset was because,
and I get this, people are sick
of seeing a price justified today because of inflation.
Well, it's reasonable for it to be $700 because if you compare that to $500 for the PS3,
inflationarily, they're very similar. In fact, that was more dollars back then.
But that wasn't what we were saying. We weren't trying to justify the price.
In fact, the very opening of the video. Wages haven't scaled with inflation. I'll get to, yes, I'll get to that.
We weren't trying to justify the price, though. What we were saying was there's a precedent for this.
That's what we were saying. This isn't their most expensive console.
So is that like one of the communication things that you would have wanted to change something? I would have wanted to clarify that.
And I can see why people are upset about it because, yeah,
their wages haven't flipping scaled with inflation.
So the buying power of that much money is not the same
even if it's the same inflationary wise. Exactly.
However, something that I feel like
a lot of people overlook in stuff like this
is that the costing of a product from a company, from a consumer electronics company like Sony
is contingent on their costs for their sourcing.
Do you think Sony makes power supplies?
Does Sony have a power supply manufacturing plant?
Do you think it's that? I think it's more that there's no competition really in the space.
We talk about that. But I just want to talk about the importance
of why this inflation number matters. Sony buys power supplies from light on.
And those power supplies cost more now than they used to, yeah, yeah. Because commodity prices have gone up in inflation.
Do you think Sony manufactures microprocessors?
No. Do you think Sony has their own iron mines
where they get iron to make steel?
If we were talking about Samsung, maybe who knows, they do everything. That's true, but we're not.
But Sony, no. Does Sony manufacture DRAM?
No. Sony is their designer,
but they don't actually manufacture
just about any of the raw materials
of a PlayStation 5. Like certainly they're doing board assembly. And just like EmHop pointed out in the Philippine chat,
fab time is huge right now. Fab time is crazy right now.
Yeah, Ranmachan says, I saw a chart yesterday that showed how much TSMC is essentially gouging companies
due to manufacturing capacity and it's rough. And that was why the second thing I said was microprocessors.
Yeah, Sony doesn't make microprocessors. We are in an environment right now
where there's an effective monopoly on cutting edge node microprocessors.
As much as it's been kind of hilarious for people who hate Intel, many of whom are justified,
to watch them struggle with the rollout of their fab business, we should be rooting for them
because Samsung has proven time and time again that they're just not gonna catch TSMC.
Here's a hot take. Then again, so is Intel.
I'm surprised they're as cheap as they are. With how few people can make them cough cough one place.
I think we're lucky that they're not making it way worse.
And maybe they're not making it way worse because they know other companies would then
have more opportunity to spring into the space and they would rather there's less people competing
so they're happy to take their really significant cut
that they are, but they have an effective monopoly on cutting edge chips.
And the fact that they're not like just astronomically more expensive is I think we're...
Yeah, I remember seeing a quote from, I think it was TSMC's chairman or something like that,
basically making the observation that NVIDIA is sure charging a lot for these AI processors.
Yeah, yeah, I don't remember that quote, but I know what you're talking about. Yeah, like, huh, we could take more of that
because who else is gonna make it? Nobody, no one. No one.
Like they could effectively charge,
there's limits to this, but practically anything for certain product lines
that like, a government is not gonna just not buy it.
Yep. So like, I don't know. I think, yeah, I think the fact that you can go out
and buy a very respectable, super solid CPU
for your computer for like a hundred bucks is...
And it's from a monopoly that you're also going through middlemen for is wild.
Like, yeah, I don't know. Yeah.
I think... They're cheap because they're a loss leader.
You buy the console and Sony gets the licenses when you sell the games.
They have no competition right now. Yeah, but you don't decide that. That too.
That's not up to you. Yeah, and when there is no competition, there's no real reason for them to do that.
Yep. And who's competing with the PlayStation 5 Pro right now?
Microsoft? Yeah. No?
Yeah. Not even a little bit. My understanding is the rumors
that Microsoft has actually canned their mid-generation refresh.
I don't know if that will end up being true or if that's even the recent rumor mill.
But Sony is effectively competing against absolutely nobody.
And what they're selling is an experience that only has a value to those few who value it.
And back to our conversation about the iPhone.
Cause I think that in both cases, a lot of the criticism of our coverage
came down to the same thing. Guys, Sony is not selling PlayStation 5 owners
a $700 upgrade. Sony is selling people who want to buy a console,
a $700 console.
And if you want a disc version, yeah, you're gonna have to pay another 80 bucks
for an add-on disc drive.
Dude, the writing's been on the wall for game discs forever.
I think this is... Getting to the last generation with disc drives.
Oh, man.
I hope not. Yeah. I hope not. Me too.
No. I think we're gonna get one more.
I think PlayStation 6 has a disc drive, but I think that it is,
I think that it moves to this add-on model
that we have now. And I think they de-emphasize it extremely heavily.
And then I don't think PlayStation 7 has one.
Okay, well, sorry, what was I saying? Right, so they're selling a $700 PlayStation
to someone who wants a PlayStation 5, but a bit better.
And if you have a PlayStation 5 and you were going to upgrade to it,
you wouldn't be paying $700. So, PlayStation 5. You would be selling your PlayStation 5
and you'd be paying whatever the difference is. So you'd probably get a few hundred bucks for your PS5
and you'd pay $400 or whatever, which if we're being realistic,
four years into this product's life cycle,
it's not a ridiculous amount of money.
I wouldn't pay it. I have personally never bought a PlayStation.
That's not true. You've never bought a current-gen PlayStation?
No, I've never bought a PlayStation. I was given a PlayStation 2.
Oh, you were given that? Yeah, I own it, but I didn't buy it.
All right, fair enough. Because I knew you had one. Yeah, I got a PS2. All right, fair.
I thought I got you. No, it was a gift.
Okay, so question, I'm jumping off topic from PlayStation.
Do you have anything else to say about PlayStation? No, just we're evaluating it
from the perspective of someone who's interested in buying it. And I think that's something
that our viewers are just gonna have to get used to. We are not evaluating it from the perspective
of someone who hates consoles and thinks they're stupid.
Yeah. And we're going to be realistic. Like it was, I don't know.
It's tough seeing people say, yeah, it's easy for someone like you
to come down and millionaire explain to us
why it costs so much, but you're just out of touch.
It's like, well, okay, but if someone else said it,
would it be more true? The information doesn't change.
Or less true, because what it really boils down to
is that there's about 200, 250 bucks worth of GPU
and SSD upgrade in this thing. Stop millionaire explaining to me.
And it costs about 200, 250 bucks more,
kind of depending on how you want to do the math. Yeah. And it's like...
They're gonna make money off it because they have no competition. So that's what companies do.
And it's like, and we're not, I'm not being an apologist.
I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying it is.
Sorry. Yeah.
The whole iPhone thing, the comment that I saw a few times
after we moved off the topic was that
we were ignoring negatives. In the video that you did for the iPhone thing,
did you mention anything about how like, it's cool, whatever, but it might not make sense
for you to upgrade if you're on 15? I just thought that was obvious.
I did not mention that it might not make sense
to upgrade from the 15. That wasn't my perspective.
And I think this comes back to a point that you've kind of been hammering on for a while.
We don't need everyone to have that perspective.
Oh yeah, for sure. If you want that perspective,
you should be watching a video from someone who has an iPhone 15.
I don't. If you are seriously considering this thing, I would watch...
I would value, personally, like actually completely detaching myself
as much as possible. I would value seeing your video
because it's a different take. And then I would watch a range of other videos
that also have other takes. And then I would find where my opinion is on it
somewhere in the middle or whatever.
Maybe I align perfectly with someone who knows. But like, you figure out where it is.
But I don't personally even want a reality
where every single piece of content on a product is exactly the same.
Because if that happens, there will only be one reviewer left.
Yeah, and there's no... Because eventually people will stop watching all the other ones.
There's no value to it. No one wants that. This is a funny thing.
I often get asked by up-and-comers or people who want to start a tech channel.
You know, like, do you have any advice on my style?
Like, what can I do to make my videos more like you? And I'm like, you don't.
Yeah, make your own. You should have your own ideas. You should have your own perspective.
However much the audience is gonna yell at you for not exactly copying what everyone else does.
In the long term, it's better. They'll value it.
And the proof is in the pudding. My perspectives, my takes have changed over the years.
And that's not flip-flopping. That's being open to new information
and new ideas and new perspectives. Theoretically, if you follow the scientific method,
your stances on things should change with new information.
You should be trying to have the most accurate one you can. And I did mention some negative things.
Like, I mentioned that you can get cheap Android phones
that have high refresh rate displays when I talked about the 60 Hertz display on the non-Pro.
I mentioned that I would miss side loading and that I would probably still need
to have an Android device handy. Like, I did acknowledge issues.
It's not like I'm just trying to, yeah, it's not like I'm just trying to like
be an Apple apologist all of a sudden.
I'm never gonna get an invite to one of their events. That's never going to happen.
And like, honestly, it really just doesn't matter anymore. I don't know if you'd want to go.
It would be so much more work to make the same video that I would make in my basement.
Yeah, because you're just watching the keynote anyways. Yeah, so like...
So like, why am I there? Yeah, I don't know. Like, I can get hands on with it,
but let's be real, it's an iPhone. Like, that's...
All right. Okay. We've bashed the things that you were wrong about.
Yeah. Moving on. Should we do this one?
I'm still wondering what this one is.
Oh. Oh, sure. Yeah, we could do a couple of merge messages.
Sure. I mean, that was kind of like two topics, right? Yeah, I think that was two topics.
If you guys want to interact with the show, you know, send a little message to producer Dan
so he can put it at the bottom of the screen or send you a little response or forward it internally.
The way to do it is a merge message. We don't want you wasting your money
just throwing it at the screen. If you want to throw money at the screen,
you should get high quality merchandise in the mail for your efforts.
And we've got a deal for you.
This week, we are heating things up
with a special promo for Wansho.
We're bringing back, Luke, you gotta get your thing. Oh, they don't fit.
Oh. They didn't have my size. Did they bring the wrong size? Yeah, but I have other colors to show you.
All right, cool. We're bringing back some pieces for a limited time
now that it's almost fall. These are the color block hoodies
that we released a couple of years back themed around our various channels.
So I'm wearing the ShortCircuit one. Here's LTT, here's the Techquickie one.
We thought it'd be fun to throw these back up on the site
for just $39.99, but the catch is that they're only available
as a mystery. So you never know which one you're gonna get.
And we're gonna heat things up even more.
Coming back at the same time, Wanswet pants.
And if you buy a mystery color block hoodie, you'll get these for 10 bucks.
Heads up. Which is nuts. Heads up. This is kind of for our big boys out there, okay?
We have very limited stock of the smaller sizes.
We're stocked a little bit deeper on the bigger sizes,
but the discount will apply automatically when you have both a mystery color block hoodie
and a pair of Wanswet pants in your cart. So if you're looking to send a merch message
while being able to get some stuff that's on sale that won't be available for much longer,
now is your chance. Also on the store, the offsite laptop bag
is available again. To be clear, guys, it is not going to fit
an Ohio class submarine in it. It is a laptop bag.
It is not a, what are they called?
The like messenger bags? Yeah, it's not a messenger bag. This is a laptop bag.
Sorry for any miscommunication around that. LMG.GG slash laptop bag, it's up there.
And I guess that's all we have to say about merch messages. So all you got to do is add something to your cart.
You'll see a little box for a merch message. That'll go to producer Dan. Let's show you how it works, Dan.
Hit me with a merch message. Sure thing. Hey, Lidar Nuke and Duo and PVS 14.9 Vision Monocular.
Sure. Sure. I knew that thing. Yeah, cool.
If given the choice and that it was unproblematic, would you choose to cover older military tech?
If not, if so, under what circumstances?
Older military tech. Yeah, I don't see why we wouldn't cover
a military tech thing. The issue for me is that we don't really get
into tech history that much.
And we definitely don't, I think, have the street cred
in the military space to speak intelligently about that kind of thing.
Like I would be doing all the same research that anyone else would do, you know,
browsing forums and Wikipedia and, you know,
downloading schematics off of War Thunder or that are not supposed to be there or whatever.
Waking military secrets, yeah. Given the reference in the naming,
covering like night vision goggles, I don't think is a thing that makes a ton of sense for us.
I think it would have to be like, how do they make sure
that like, I don't know, these electronical components
are able to survive in like warfare zones.
I could say that being like a good tech wiki. Yeah, it'd be kind of interesting. What makes an electronic device battle-ready
or something like that? But how does it help resist EMP pulses, stuff like that?
Yeah, I don't see really the why we would get into like a specific piece.
Like that really seems more like a gun channel could,
okay, I could see us being brought in as a collaborator on something like that.
Like if they wanted to discuss,
if they pull the board out of something and they were like, okay,
and then to talk about what makes this board special compared to consumer electronics at the time,
we sent it to LTT or the opposite,
considering they had that like, was it PlayStation 3s? I think it was at that server farm.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like little things like that, yeah, could make sense.
But I think there isn't as much crossover
as you might think. But there's some.
Next up. Sure thing. Hi, LLD, you've teased a smaller backpack before.
Is that still in the work? So or was it replaced by the, I don't know, laptop bag?
Just cut off there. By the? Okay, by the.
It is definitely still in the works. Our latest sample of it is very good.
Luke, you saw it last week. Yeah, yeah. I really liked the side pockets.
I won't say too much about it. Yeah. I don't know how much we're talking about,
Did I even show you the little hidden pockets that are in them?
I don't think so. I don't know if those are going to make it into the final, but we're going to push for it.
Depends on, depends on costing a little bit. But yeah, no, the smaller backpack is coming.
We're working on naming for it. I think we're going to have to do one more sample,
but hopefully that'll be like a pre-production sample rather than a sample sample.
And if we can sign off on that one, it can go to production.
We're very, very excited about it. Right now it fits like a 15.6 inch gaming laptop
pretty comfortably. We think we can make a tweak that would allow it to fit
most 16 inch devices, even at that size.
It's the one that I was wearing in my AMD Ryzen,
Ryzen 9000 coverage from Computex,
if I recall correctly. So it looks a little bit different.
Computex line is 22 or four. It looks a bit different now.
And the internal layout thankfully is way better.
It was, my notes after that trip were not good.
And I wasn't 100% sure if we were going to, if we were going to even be able to move forward
with the product because the design of it
was so dependent on it being basically unusable
as far as I could tell. But Matthew, I think is the one who did the work
on tweaking the design while also dramatically
improving the usability of it. Yeah, here's the video where I think it
made its first appearance. This is apparently a hack.
If you just go back and forward, ads disappear.
And the more you do that, the more it trains YouTube to just not bother serving you ads.
Really? Yeah, it doesn't seem to account for it that you go right back onto the video.
It's just accounts for that you bounce off the video the second you see an ad.
Here's the question. Yeah. If ad block is piracy.
Yes. Is ad aversion piracy?
Like avoiding ads. Oh, like ad avoidance.
Like going back and forward to make it not send it. Resume viewing, resume viewing, that kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah. Creepy. I think as long as you are,
because you're not breaking terms of service, it's not against the terms of service to...
Close your eyes. Is it officially against the terms of service to use ad block?
Yeah. Okay. Whereas navigating away from a page
is absolutely not against the terms of service.
But if you automated it, so if you had a browser extension
that every time you clicked a YouTube video, like micro-loaded the page and unloaded it
and then loaded it again, I think that would qualify as an ad serving countermeasure.
Cause it's the automation of it. But not manually running it?
That whole argument where ad block
is basically the same as closing your eyes is stupid.
Yeah. Because it's not. Yeah. Closing your eyes is the same as closing your eyes.
And they'll compare it to like TV commercials or whatever else, right?
No, because you would just close your eyes.
That would be the same thing. But when you automate something,
to me that becomes a...
Is it also the distribution of it? Of said thing?
Hmm. So you're talking like if you made your own script
or something like that or you made your own tool. I want to address this really quick.
Sidrax in full plain chat said, I just hate malvertising.
I strongly agree. I hate malvertising too.
We're not telling you, don't run this. We're also not telling you don't use ad block.
Yeah. Literally never happened.
Never said that. Yeah.
Yeah. I don't feel like re-ashing that one today.
Sure. I have never said don't use ad block.
I'm trying to think like maybe there was some way to show in the garage in 2013
where somebody's gonna like, got him. It's like, I don't know, whatever.
Okay. I have never, that I recall, said don't use ad block.
I've been very consistent for a lot of years that...
I don't know. Val Herick in full plain chat said Linus literally
called me up last night and told me not to use ad block. So what are you saying?
I told you not to tell people that. That was a conversation between just the two of us.
You called me too. So is that why you're so tired this week?
You're just calling all of the audience members? I actually have to confess something.
You broke into the Floatplane database? I have to confess something.
I bought an auto dialer. It wasn't even me.
It was a recording. Oh, so it isn't even... They couldn't even tell it wasn't me
because those guys are idiots. It's not even AI of your voice?
Nope. Nope, Justin. It's literally an old fashioned auto dialer. They got bam boozled.
Wow. Yep. Wow.
Get wrecked. Anyways, yeah, it's not a thing, dude.
We're just... And we've both got some Linux ISOs, okay?
So relax. Yep. Or don't relax.
It actually doesn't really matter to me.
Stay tense. I'm probably gonna do one more if you're okay with that.
Yeah, hit me. Sure, sure, let's see. Hey, LLD, did Plex ever fix your issues?
Got my first NAS set up a bit ago. Transcode it. Downloads are crucial for me.
So decided to try MB. Haven't had any real issues.
Might be worth a look. I am probably going to try jellyfin or MB at some point.
Overall, I've been pretty annoyed with Plex.
That issue recently was a permissions thing in TrueNAS where I was having trouble with that show
you wanted to watch, so that wasn't a Plex issue. That series of Linux ISOs?
Yeah, series of Linux ISOs, sure, whatever. The point is just that I haven't actually tried
to do a lot of local downloads lately,
so I haven't realistically played with it that much.
But Plex has been pretty well-behaved for me lately,
and I actually saw some pretty promising news. I think it was either this morning or yesterday.
Plex announced that they're going to split out the photo backup functionality
that they used to have in the main Plex app into a separate app.
And I remember talking to them about that, because the photo backup function was really cool
and really easy to use and really convenient, and I really liked it, and then they just deprecated it.
And I was like, well, that's sort of uncool because I thought that that was part
of the function of this product. So now it's a separate app, and I wonder if that's going to help them overcome
some of the challenges that they've had, because from what I gleaned,
the issues that they had continuing to support that feature basically came down to library access
and constant changes when it came to accessing the library
and then backing it up, especially as a background task.
So if that can be a dedicated app rather than part of the video-watching app,
maybe that'll help them do a better job of it. So I want to check that out, but I know absolutely nothing about it yet.
And I'm going to have to, I'll give it a chance. I mean, I have a lifetime subscription.
So if I sort of- If you go away from it, you can always just come back.
Yeah, but the cost of Plex is not a factor for me.
For a lot of people, the cost of Plex is a major factor. So they want something free and open source,
So the cost of both of them is the same for me personally.
It might change what I would recommend to someone else. I might say, hey, give these free options a try
before you spring for the paid one. But for me, it doesn't matter. So I'm going to give it a shot.
And then the other big thing that I'm waiting for is that NAS software that I invested in from hashtag.
You doing the research on this before the NAS software comes out though,
because I'm assuming you're going to have some video on the NAS software kind of does make sense.
Yeah, but my whole thing with the NAS software is I want to have to do as little work
and research as possible. Oh, no, I mean, like if you're making a video like,
hey, do this stuff to set up your NAS or whatever, I don't know, having an informed opinion
on the Plex, Jellyfin, whatever debate would be good.
No, I probably won't. Oh, okay. Because a lot of my opinion is going to come down
to ease of setup. And so my goal, my big ulterior motive
Should have stayed out of it as much as possible. With this whole investment into hashtag was that
whatever I want to install on a NAS that I think is good,
I will have a back channel way of saying, hey, can you guys support this and make sure
that everything just works so that I don't have to think about it.
And then by proxy, everyone else will be able to install,
let's say Plex or image or whatever, super easily
and won't have to think about like the stupid permissions
issues that like I switched which VM I was using to download ISOs and it made it so there was like,
it turned it in like read only for certain containers
or cause it's using like Kubernetes. I was on the older version of Trunez scale.
It's just like such a mess and I'm sitting here going,
I don't want any of this. I just want to have my files and like I can read
and write them and stuff. Yeah, it's the whole thing.
All right, are we done now?
Are we moving on? I don't know, who knows?
You want to pick a topic, Luke?
This one. Which one? Let's grow up. Might just be a man and say it.
Cause I don't know what's going on with it. Be a man, do the right thing.
I fix it. Sure, yeah. What's happening there?
Tell me, inform me. Honestly, I don't know.
So why don't we do this together? Oh, oh boy.
So earlier this week, yesterday,
I fixed it announced their smart soldering iron.
This thing's kind of wild by the way. It's, this is cool, 100 watt heater,
ready to solder in five seconds. It can run off the wall for like an entire work day.
I think they advertise. It has a literal web interface
that you access through like Chrome,
like through a browser, like an actual, you know, like a web interface.
So that you can configure it. And yeah, I don't know, it looks pretty cool.
I've definitely seen some discussion around the price.
By the time you buy the soldering iron and the dock and you know, whatever else,
people are saying it's like hundreds of dollars, which when you compare to some of the more
value oriented options is not that competitive.
Yeah, but there are also soldering irons that are wicked expensive.
There are, but I think that for the people who are into like hackos,
you're gonna pry them from their cold dead hands. Yeah.
I'm showing our producer cam for no reason.
Oh, I'm a JBC boy. Oh, really? Oh, okay, there you go.
Rolls Royce, baby. Actually, the one I have at home is like a $40 clone
and it's like, okay, but it doesn't have a battery pack.
You can't like move it around. Oh yeah, that's right. Dan's the one.
He's the one who made us spend a fortune on those stupid soldering stations.
That's so nice, dude. I was sitting there. They're a partner.
This is not an endorsement, but I was sitting there trying to learn
on my soldering iron. Oh yeah. This actually happened.
I was trying to get Dan to like teach me how to solder. And I was, you know, coming along,
but I was struggling a little bit and then he gave me the nice soldering iron. I instantly did it.
Cause you're learning the techniques. You're not necessarily, cause you're, for me to use a really broken soldering iron
is difficult, but I know what's wrong and for somebody learning, but you don't need like a $1,500 station
to learn how to solder with. Yeah, so it's like, it's definitely a skill issue.
It's for sure a skill issue, but still the nice soldering iron
just made it so much easier. And something that has like temperature control
like this and it can get hot really quickly and it's not super unwieldy.
It's a nice thing about the JBCs is they are like this size
for their, their ends and stuff like that, but they're ultra professional levels.
Yeah. All right. So, oops, where am I going?
Last laptop, there we go. So back to this thing. So I've seen some, some commentary on the pricing.
Some people are not super thrilled with it. Some people are, are more thrilled with it.
Anyway, Vitor responds and says, now I want an LTT soldering iron
and Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit says,
he does seem to be good at copying our products.
There's been a fair amount of speculation as to what exactly he means by this.
Is it gentle ribbing? Is it genuine upset?
And more than one person has pointed out
that on the very day that he posted this, one of our videos went live
with an iFixit sponsorship in it.
So what I will say is, I also don't know.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to reiterate everything that I've said about the iFixit relationship
and we'll go from there. Sure.
So if it's gentle ribbing, gentle ribbing received,
if it's not gentle ribbing, well, I don't know.
We're good on our side. We're chill.
We believe in the iFixit mission. We have absolutely no intention of becoming iFixit.
We're not going to even begin to approach
the kind of replacement parts that they stock,
the guides that they create through their community,
even the type of content that they produce. They do such a great job of their teardowns
that we've looked at doing that type of content before
and we've just kind of gone, yeah, I don't know, maybe someday, but realistically,
this seems like it's pretty well served, evaluating the repairability of devices
and stuff like that. We absolutely value iFixit as a partner.
We specifically went out of our way to make our driver available as a standalone driver
for people who just want a driver upgrade and they're going to put it into their iFixit kit
and use it with their iFixit bits. We went out of our way to make sure
that our driver was compatible with iFixit bits. So there's a whole thing.
We talked about it in the ShortCircuit live stream when we announced our precision driver
where the ISO standard is actually not
what everyone including iFixit does and I forget the exact detail,
but basically it comes down to manufacturing tolerances. So you're supposed to have this socket,
which is actually a, if I recall correctly,
a metric translation of what is actually an imperial size.
So that's supposed to be the size and then the bits are supposed to be smaller,
but what everybody else does is they make the size bigger
and the bits smaller or whatever. Basically you're supposed to make this big enough
that at the upper range of the tolerances for the bit size, they'll fit for sure.
And what we did was we made this at the lower range
and then our bits were smaller, I forget. Hold on, let me think about what it is.
So what happened was our initial drivers, this was too small.
That's right. So everyone else makes the bits the size
and then they make their driver bigger.
Slightly oversized. And what you're supposed to do is you're supposed to make the socket the size,
you know, four millimeters or whatever it is, and then the bits are supposed to be smaller.
So in our first samples, we had bits and sockets that fit perfectly,
but when we went to put someone else's bits in our sockets, we realized they were,
the ones that were at the high end of the tolerance range were too big.
So we had to go back and we had to make ours wider like everyone else and anyway, it doesn't matter.
The point is that we went out of our way to make sure that the driver was compatible
to reduce waste. So if people already have a set, they can upgrade to the fidget spinner slash precision driver
without wasting all of the bits in the case that they already have.
But we also wanted to offer an option
with the ideas that we had to improve the product
that would include bits and a case.
So, you know, I don't know. If he's serious about it,
I don't really know what to make of that. We're still down to work together.
I disagree, I guess. I will say that.
I disagree that it's a copied product. I fix it, didn't invent precision screwdrivers.
I fix it, didn't invent bit cases.
And, you know, from my point of view, either it's a copy at a higher price,
in which case he shouldn't be worried about it.
Right. Or it's a product that innovated with things like this magnetically detachable,
nicely cool, stackable case, deeper bits
that make their way into, you know, recessed housings more easily,
an all-metal driver that has bit storage. They do have one with bit storage,
but it's not all-metal, higher quality bearing,
replaceable tops, stronger magnet.
No, I think it's about as different as a product can be,
and still be a precision screwdriver.
Oh, we added magnets to the inside.
Yeah, that's nice. It's a parts tray, effectively, yeah.
And to be clear, the iFixit one can also be used as a parts tray, but it won't be magnetic.
Yeah. So there you go. So yeah, I don't know.
Is he mad? Who knows? Are we working on a soldering iron?
Not at this time, but if we thought there was room to innovate and make a better soldering iron,
I'm not gonna rule out anything. We definitely have other products in our roadmap
that are tools, and therefore, we'll probably overlap with anyone who sells tools.
But part of our product development philosophy
is that we don't just make the same thing that's already out there.
If we aren't adding something, then I don't see why we'd bother.
And in some cases, what we're adding can be as simple as making it more affordable.
Most things I have to do around my house basically just require a screwdriver.
So I have LTT screwdrivers for everything.
I had to use a hammer last night. Wasn't an LTT hammer.
I was disappointed. We actually do have a potential product spec for a hammer.
I have some ideas. OK.
I know it's entirely a joke, but all right.
It's true. I mean, what I said is not untrue. I used a hammer last night.
And I literally pulled it out and was like,
it's like blue. It's not orange and black.
I have ideas. And you know what?
Sometimes it can be as simple as coming in at a lower price.
I think that anti-static work mats
are overpriced, essentially.
So our mod mat, which we actually created in collaboration with ModWrite, who
has been doing mod mats for, Lord only knows how long they
Didn't they patent it? Yeah, like way back in the day.
So they're pretty OG. So we actually partnered with them.
And ours is going to be coming soon. It's going to be very price competitive compared
to what's out there. And that's still profitable.
So yeah, if we see an area where we can improve
the state of the market, then yeah, we'll go for it.
But if we don't, then we're not just looking to come in
and copy someone else's product. And I reject the assertion that this is a copied product.
And if it is a copied product, they should have no problem recopying it.
And then there's this better. And that's how competition works.
Then everybody's product is better. I mean, we didn't patent anything here.
Even if we could have, which I really,
I don't think we could have. But even if we could have, that's not really how we roll.
I do think at some point, we'll probably have to patent something.
But that's not a bridge that we've really had to cross yet.
I think if we ever did like a new, you know what?
It's probably better for me to just not even say. There are a couple of things that we
have in development that could potentially benefit from being patent, but patent tax right off.
Yeah, sure. Let me get right on that.
All right. Yeah. OK. Tony Ray, hopefully we're still cool.
We love you. I fix it. And if you guys are mad, sorry.
Speaking of madness, the US government pushes for, well, the dock just keeps floating around.
The US government pushes for greater VPN access. Last week, the White House met with Amazon, Google, Microsoft,
and Cloudflare, as well as civil society advocates
to encourage tech companies to offer more digital bandwidth
for government-funded internet censorship evasion tools,
which is an insane sentence to me.
Tools supported by the Open Technology Fund, or the OTF,
which is funded by the US government, have surged in popularity in countries like Russia, Iran,
Myanmar, and Myanmar. So I missed the end.
According to OTF president Laura Cunningham,
the number of VPN users they support has more than quadrupled over the last few years
to around 46 million users each month.
The OTF wants discounted or subsidized server
bandwidth to help meet that growing demand.
What is the witch to me?
Sounds like the government is basically being like,
yeah, we don't really care if you like pirate movies and music and stuff, we want all your data.
That's my, that's what I get from this personally.
Tools supported by the OTF, which is funded by the US government,
have surged in popularity in countries like Russia. So they want resistant groups and whatnot that are in,
maybe not super friendly to US countries to be able to do their thing.
But do they want encryption for their own citizens?
This would allow them to see all the things. To encourage tech companies to offer more digital bandwidth
for government funded internet censorship evasion tools.
Isn't that such a wild sentence? Huh, but, but, but, um, interesting.
Yeah, I don't know a ton about the OTF.
I don't know how far the fingers of the US government
are in the OTF, but if you run the VPN yourself,
you can do a whole heck of a lot. But are they saying they're running the VPN?
I don't know, I don't know. Or are they saying they want tech companies to offer more bandwidth, wait,
for government funded censorship evasion tools?
For those, not for all of them, for those.
It's very interesting to me.
It sounds like a two pronged attack.
This is the vibe that I'm getting. So the one prong is, hey, we get to help groups that are in
Russia, Iran, Myanmar, and other places. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is valid,
which is probably something that they want to be able to communicate and organize.
A multitude of reasons, for sure, for sure. And then the other one is like,
oh, and if other people use it, we get to have a really good look into what they're up to.
Well, yeah. Wow, 46 million users a month.
Wild.
OTF VPNs. Yeah, like what is an OTF VPN?
No, this is good stuff. Do they do open VPN?
Did I see an open VPN logo? I recognize that logo immediately, yeah.
So wait, no, this is good then. So these are tools that you can use to build VPNs.
Like this is not necessarily... Very interesting.
Because I don't know, though. I'm not aware of a sick back door and open VPN.
I don't know what this means, though, or if this is just a list of things. Like I don't know if this means...
Do they make... Are they responsible for open VPN, guys?
I don't know. Help me out here. I have genuinely no idea.
Like I don't wanna get into like a WireGuard versus open VPN debate.
Like, but WireGuard may be better. It's on here, though.
It's on this list, that's why I'm saying like, I'm not sure what this list necessarily means.
Like do they just put funding into these? Yeah, maybe.
They're part of the funding for open VPN WireGuard and Tor.
I see this, but I don't necessarily know if this means this is from the Open Tech Fund
or if this means this is the funding that it's received. You know what I mean?
They've got to have received more funding than that overall. Oh, wait, maybe that is overall, I don't know.
Because it says Free and Open Source Software Sustainability Fund. Your mom's an open VPN.
Why do we even talk to any of our chat so much? Read the last paragraph.
Through the Faw Sustainability Fund, open VPN will focus on growing its core continuity.
This isn't the, is that a different thing?
I don't know. It is the Faw Sustainability Fund,
a fund within the Open Technology Fund.
I don't know, I don't know where this rabbit hole goes. But it's definitely weird.
So there may be downsides, but fundamentally-
It's probably good. Better VPN access seems-
Probably good. Okay, I'm gonna say it's a W for now.
And hopefully I don't end up eating those words. Yeah, we don't have very good information on this,
so I don't think we can really say much, unfortunately, but we'll move on.
What I would like to talk about is NVIDIA purses.
Yeah, what?
AI researcher Teresa Barton is selling a limited run
of 10 purses crafted out of NVIDIA GeForce GT730
graphics cards for $1024 or $1,024.
Her website also indicates that she will at some point be selling a handmade bag made out of-
A handbag. Yes, a handbag made out of a H100 AI chip
for $65,536.
While Barton says the cards themselves are non-functional and ethically sourced
from data center dumpsters, the fans still work,
which is, I mean, that's,
that's neat, that's cool. Yeah, I don't know. Is there like a little battery bank somewhere
to power the fan? I see the fan has its- The fan is on the outside and it has its own plug.
Yeah, there's gotta be- There's gotta be something there. There's gotta be a battery in there or something.
I think one of my questions is, how much stuff can you actually store in this purse?
Like, is it purely aesthetic? I do think that they look surprisingly neat.
Yeah. I read this title and I was like,
oh, it's gonna look like junk. And then I saw the actual purse thing and I was like,
oh, it's not too bad. What is the justification for the price here?
Because she literally says- That's a purse.
They're made of e-waste. I don't know, I think purses in general,
it's just, there's prices, whatever, you know? How do these items end up so divorced from their costs?
Like, is this,
like about, here, here, is there like- I honestly think if you try to figure this out,
you're just gonna hurt your brain. Is there an objective? Like, is she, is this contributing to some kind of-
Oh, I think 1024 is just computer number. No, no, no, no, no, no, that's not what I meant by that.
I know. Oh, Mike, I just got assaulted by LTT ads.
Oh, they just went away. I get it. All of the verticals of ads on this website,
which there are many, they were all LTT ads for a split second and then they went away.
Oh. Sorry. I just, I was kind of expecting it to say like,
oh yeah, proceeds are going to some kind of research
into AI or something. But no, this appears to be just like-
I don't know, maybe she's just a bespoke designer that made only 10 of a thing.
And if you're gonna do that, you're gonna charge a bunch.
Yeah, I guess so.
Okay.
Sure. Well, hey, you know what? I wish you luck.
I bet you at least one person bought it. You think so? I feel like it.
You think so? I think so. I don't know, dude.
I think that seems pretty unlikely. I think even most people who spend a lot of money on purses
probably expect to be able to carry something in them.
I do not agree with that statement at all.
Wow. I don't really understand what I'm looking at here.
So you're basically telling me this purchase
is ineligible for this. Why is it even here then?
I guess shop probably doesn't deal with a lot of things that are over 30 grand. So they never really thought about that scenario.
This just seems like, is this a social experiment? Is she just trying to grab headlines?
Like this can't seriously be the best sales
pitch you could come up with. Is this like $60,000 one? Yeah. Yeah, I don't think she thinks anyone's gonna buy it
personally. But like, you know enough rare one-of-a-kind
GPT-4 training GP, you know there's lots of them. And if you know enough to know about GPT,
then you'd think you could just use chat GPT to like write a better description for it.
That's literally all it says on this entire page. This particular page I think is more
about the bringing eyeballs in. I think she's meming, dude.
Oh, at least to a certain degree. Yeah. Fits a phone.
Nice. Yeah. Longer short chain available.
I bet at least one has sold. I think she's meming. That doesn't look good.
The other pictures looked pretty good. Well, pictures are just stupid
because this picture is not a GT730.
This is the H-101. So what is it doing on this product page?
Like what is this doing here? This is not any of those things. This is ancient.
This is like, yeah. GF100.
This is Fermi. This is a 480.
So like, what am I even... I don't think she expects to sell any.
I think she's meming. Should I buy one? No, but I bet you she sold one
because of what you just did. Don't actually do it.
I want to know if it's a real site. Am I actually going to get a purse in the mail?
Do you want my credit card? No, I don't want to.
The only way I'm going to get an H-100. At some random time in the show,
maybe you should throw that thing back at me. What?
I'm sorry, I was talking. No, it's fine. Just the thing I threw at you,
you want your water bottle back? But he didn't throw a water bottle at you, Dan.
It's on your side of the table. With this?
That's my water bottle. Oh, I drank from it. I couldn't find yours.
Oh, okay. Do you have any diseases? I'm sure we've done worse.
Appreciate it, baby. Subscribe to Flow Plane.
And subscribe to our sponsor, Manscaped.
Blonde and Gold are in this year.
Oh, he's actually doing it. But if you don't like blonde, trim it.
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Okay, the Lawnmower 5.0 Ultra Gold Edition is available in limited quantities,
so head over to manscaped.com slash WAN and use code WANSHOW to get 20% off and free shipping.
That actually looks pretty slick. Not bad.
The team does such a great job of the footage for these. A lot of it looks like it was provided by the brand,
except that I recognize backdrops and stuff that we have.
This footage, no, this is our footage. Oh my God. Look, someone bumped the table there.
Like this is not. Good job, James. That's ours. This is ours?
Yeah, I know that set. Yeah, that's the screen thing. Yeah, this is all our footage.
That's how man is killing it. No, it's over in the corner where WAN Show Set used to be
at the very far away of the other, yeah. There's a piece of glass
and then they have a display behind it. Yeah, like, no, the team's great.
Let's bring it back there. Yeah. This is where Edzel was experimenting
with some of the UE5, like real time tracking stuff.
I remember that, yeah. Yeah, cool. Anyway, the show is also brought to you by Ridge.
Look at us. They're also bringing gold to you this summer with their-
Hey, that's us too. Massive sweepstakes, yep.
Did you see it was Dennis driving? Yeah, there he is.
That should be. Now, you can drag race like Dennis
in a gold-plated Cybertruck. Oh, what am I looking at?
And if being the center of everyone's attention isn't your style, don't worry.
Okay, that happened. I know. They were telling us before the show.
The Chirad got pulled over, right? That's actually Chirad right there. Yeah.
Okay, sorry, we're really losing track
of the sponsor talking points here. I mean, this was so good.
Ridge, massive sweepstakes. They have other prizes to choose from.
And yes, that is real footage of Dennis and Chirad on the highway in Salt Lake City.
Anyway, the winner of the sweepstakes gets to choose
between a Hennessy Velossa Raptor, a gold-plated Cybertruck, or $100,000 cash.
This says, what would I pick? Ooh.
Oh, it cut back to me. Yeah, that's what it's supposed to be. What would I pick?
What would I pick? I guess I'll take the cash.
What would I do with a Velossa Raptor? Weak. What?
I love that the follow-up sentence was,
what would I do with a Velossa Raptor? Not the other one.
Well, I mean, yeah, yeah, that makes so much sense.
I'm trying to acknowledge something that's a real option. I mean, I don't...
What, I would be seen in that? You could melt it into a controller.
Like, dude.
I'd be on the parking lot scraping it off. I don't know, man. I'd be legit.
I'd be legit. Look, Reg, hopefully this is compatible
with the sponsor spot we're doing for you right now. Here, I'll talk about your key holder.
There you go, there you go, be distracted.
I would be... They do have a Cybertruck and a Hennessy version
of their things, their key holder and their wallet. I would be embarrassed to be seen in a Cybertruck.
At all, or the gold-plated one? Is the gold-plated one less or more embarrassing?
It's cooler. So it's less embarrassing? Yeah, it's cooler. I think it's so bad that it comes all the way back around
to kind of cool. This might be a weird take.
I actually think where it says just Ridge on the side of the gold-plated one actually just looks good.
I rarely like when you see just the brand logo on things,
but it's just something to break up, just the sea of it's all the same.
Right there? Yeah. I think it actually looks sharp having something on it.
Yeah. That thing looks so tacky though.
I just can't. So if you had to pick a vehicle, you'd go with the Hennessy Raptor.
If you had to pick something, you'd go with the cash.
Hold on a second. Hold on, let me think.
Pfft.
Are you looking up their value on the resale market? No.
You have to pay people to take them away. I'm just a little curious.
Price of stainless steel per pound. Oh dude, see I would have a really hard time going back
to filling up at the gas station. I am not into having a gas vehicle anymore at all.
Can you go anywhere in a cyber truck? Hmm.
Will it turn on?
Get the truck and electrify it, it's a fun project. Ah.
Not what, if I'm gonna have an electric truck I'll just get a Rivian.
Dude, getting a, getting a like over a thousand horsepower
Hennessy Velociraptor and taking the engine out and electrifying it would be kind of hilarious.
That would be completely unrained. I'm putting my cappuccino.
Ha ha ha ha! Dude, I'm sure the engine for the Hennessy
is bigger than your whole car. Somebody put an LS in it with twin turbo chargers.
They had to like remove most of the front end in the hood, it's 800 horsepower.
Oh my, that's actually terrifying. Death speed run, yeah.
That would have like the power to weight ratio
of a slot car, like that would be ridiculous. It's like nearly one to one.
That's crazy. Actually, I think the engine weighs probably more
than the car. More than the rest of the car. Yeah, so it would affect that slightly.
Top Gear 1224 says, what's more embarrassing, a gold cyber truck
or a purple Taycan? Gold cyber truck. Yeah, I really think it is.
The cyber truck is just brutal, dude.
Anywho, from now until September 16th, you'll get two entries for every dollar spent
or you can get four X entries when you purchase the cyber wallet
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oh, we've got a key holder and a wallet. Oh, why am I even holding these up?
We've got wonderful footage of them. There you go, that's what they look like. Wow, so you look so nice.
So enter now at ridge.com slash when or using the link in the video description.
I take the cash. I'm just gonna take the cash. Take the cash.
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Okay, we're supposed to do a few merge messages.
Dan, go ahead and hit me.
Sure. Hey, line us in the talent. I'd be curious to your thoughts on, yeah, that's nice.
That's that. No, I'm not responding to this merge message. No, no, no, no, I don't like it.
No, that's good for you. No.
Okay, whatever. Talent is a derogatory. I take it that way.
It is not. I don't think he means it to be, but right now.
No, talent is not derogatory. It's, it removes the person from the statement
where you're just like an object. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Hold on a second, I, what, really?
I've always thought it's... I think they meant it as a derogatory,
but it's like, no, that means that you're the real person and we're just like accessories to make your show.
What? Oh, man, see.
Because I've called you guys the talent before because from my perspective, like I'm producing the show
and you're just kind of like a part of what makes the show,
right? So you remove the like human aspect that your people... He's the human we're the...
No, no, no, I'm not, I'm not a person either. Like the show, it becomes the entity, right?
Wow. And you are just kind of a part of the show,
like set dressing, right? I... It's a whole thing.
Most of chat does not appear to be aligned with that, Dan.
No, no, no, it's definitely supposed to be...
No, I don't understand. I don't... Because I thought, because...
Hold on. Because a lot of people have said, hey, Dan and the talent before,
but this is the first time that like Linus has been... No, no, they're calling me untalented.
It's definitely a sick burn. But like... But a lot of the other merge messages
that use Dan and the talent in them, right? Yeah, because the on-screen players are the talent.
Offer referred to as the talent. Yeah, like that's just... I think that's just an industry term.
I don't think it's meant to be derogatory. Like if you say...
And... Yeah, but that's derogatory to you because you're like the people as well.
If you say and director, then like...
I don't think that's disrespectful. I think that just describes their role in the production.
Am I off base here? I don't know. I think we're all a bit off base.
I didn't realize that this would be so polarizing. So immediately.
Yeah. All right. I've never loved the turn personally,
but I honestly, my amount of cares is quite low.
Yeah, because like... But I've never loved the turn. Oh, all right.
Well, for what it's worth, Luke? Host makes more sense. I think you're talented.
Because is... Well, not everyone's a host though. Here's a question about the word talent
because I just looked it up and I'm still not... I've taken it and maybe I'm just taking it wrong.
I've taken it as like, you have an innate skill. It's not something that you honed.
But you were just naturally good at something. Dude, you're applying video game logic.
I get to be... That sounds very likely. Do I get to be right on WAN Show first?
Are you guys actually siding with me for a change? Yeah, I think Linus is right too, yeah.
Sure. It's all... It's a bit of a thing. Yeah, talent is used for anyone on screen,
not just the host. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're calling me untalented,
but they're just meaning on me, but no. Originally, the reason why I didn't originally like it
is because it seems derogatory to everybody else.
Oh. That was my original reason for not liking it. Oh, referring to the person who is like the star or whatever.
Those are the only people that are any good. As the people with talent. Yes.
Oh, I see. That's like, when I originally didn't like the word,
that was my reason. Yeah, but I don't think like a director
implies that they're not a talented one. I think it's just, yeah, no, talent is just...
Yeah. But the directors tend to be the ones with the money.
No. That's a producer. Yeah. Yeah, no, director...
The director is not also... If you're good, sure.
But if you're a good talent, then you also have money. And if you're a good...
Actually, as far as I can tell, most everybody else ends up not making a ton of money, but...
Yeah, then you're an extra. You're not even talent. Well, no, no, I just, I was trying to come up with like,
I mean, I guess if you're like... See, but like, yeah, why is there a distinction there?
No, an extra is still talent. Are they? 100%.
100% Although, often extras are given no lines,
so they have like no real effect on like...
Luke's literally pushing this up. I'm going to have a year.
Background extras, supporting artists, junior... Oh my goodness. Have we custodian-alized the extras?
No, that's right there. No, no, no, no, I mean that we don't call them extras anymore.
Oh. Oh. Now they're junior artists.
Oh, that's... That's something that I didn't know about. That atmosphere sounds so much worse to me personally.
Oh yeah, that's awful. Whoa, that's such a downgrade. Excuse me, what's your job?
Could the atmosphere go stand next to the potted plant?
Like... You've got some bad atmosphere. Gross.
Oh man. Yeah, man. Yeah, this is not something I've thought about a lot
or cared about much. I turn into gas.
I mean, if you could do that, you might be one of the main characters in the show, I may be slowly turning into gas.
I mean, we've seen plenty of evidence of it. Maybe.
Those poor chairs.
Okay, so when we frame it as Linus and the talent.
What was the question? I don't know, I want to finish this thought. Yeah, what does that mean?
So Linus and the talent means that I'm untalented.
No. Yeah, that's what they meant. It was a sick burn.
They were all as a series. No, but we've just established that talent is a role
in a production. Yeah, you guys are both talent because, there, boom, talent, untalent, talent,
untalent, talent, untalent. Yeah, but you still have a job here.
Well, yeah, but they were just memeing because they were pretending to misunderstand
the term talent as having talent
and they were referring to me as being untalented. I think that's why I don't like the word.
But they did. No, because in my mind, you're the one with the name.
So you get to be a person and then we're just accessories to your production.
No, because like, I've, okay. They definitely intended it to imply you are untalented.
Yes, but I've gone on the third party sets where I am like the main person
and I get referred to as talent. Or like on the contract, it'll just be like,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, here to for referred to as talent.
Like it just means a performer. That's all it means. Exactly, right?
I mean, my favorite term is watering the talent.
Right, I fill up your water bottles. I used to give the bands on stage their water.
Do you want warm water? Do you want cold water? It would be best for your throat, right?
Watering the talent, it's fun.
I don't know. From now on, I want to be referred to as shortened.
I'm not tall. So I actually see the whole term as kind of discriminatory.
Okay, atmosphere.
Kingant. All right, so what are we talking about?
What was the short? You wouldn't let me get there. I'd be curious to your thoughts on why tech and gaming cafes
haven't taken off in North America. It seems like it'd be a slam dunk
with gaming becoming super mainstream and popular now. They don't seem to be doing as far as my
terrible observations can account for it. I don't think they're doing as well
in Asian countries either these days. Oh, really?
I mean, I don't know. Because mobile gaming is taking off, that's why.
Oh, but are you talking about like a themed cafe though? Or are you talking about like an iCafe
with like gaming computers in it? Is that all what they're referencing? No, I think they're talking about themed cafes.
Oh, my bad. Cause like there was that bar downtown
that had like gaming themed cocktails and stuff for a bit.
Was that what it was called? Stronger, yeah. Yeah, but didn't they shut down during COVID or something?
I think they at least shut down one location.
Looking it up. Yeah. I guess, I guess the question for me is, you know,
what is it? Man, this is tough. Cause I have to confess that when we went to Japan,
like went to the Pokemon cafe, for example, I was super unimpressed by the whole deal.
The food was not just not very good. Like it was functionally inedible, a lot of it.
We're sorry? In Japan.
It was packed. Like business was booming, but it was just kind of sucky.
And I just kind of wonder if the expectations
for a themed restaurant are totally different here because I wouldn't see a business like that
succeeding very well here. Your food still has to be good.
Like I've never been, but my understanding is- Every food quality in Vancouver is actually insanely high.
My understanding is even like Hooters has decent food,
though I've never been there. That's what I've heard.
Don't quote me on that. But I don't think it's good enough to have a theme
with a themed restaurant with just like disgusting food
in it here. Yeah, apparently the wings are great, says Chat.
Yeah, there you go. So they used to to know about nowadays, the wings are good.
Yeah. So maybe that's part of it.
And I think that one of the challenges is that in order to have like a gaming themed cafe,
it either is like sort of generic in which case
I don't know if it would appeal to people as much or you'd be paying licensing fees
because it's commercial use of the IP. And I think that affects the quality.
So like the Pokemon cafe seems to be actually run
by the Pokemon company. And so the kind of margin that these licensed brands expect
has a direct impact on the quality of the product in a lot of cases has been my experience.
With that said, I mean, I think we've talked about,
you know, restaurant ideas before and like Yvonne and I have talked about lots and lots of business ideas
over the years. Like one idea that I had a while back
that I thought would be super cool is I wanted to create
like like toddler land.
And so the idea was that it would be like an attraction
for adults where you have this warehouse
that you decorate the outside to look like a normal house
but everything is scaled up. You walk through a giant front door
and you experience this entire environment
like what it would be like to be thigh high to an adult.
So there's like giant stairs and you can like sit and eat a meal at a giant table
with giant cutlery and like, I don't know, it'd just be like a weird, it'd be such a like a,
you know, an Instagrammable like thing to do. Big spoon on like suspension crane wires
that like flies food towards you. Well, not even that, no, I hadn't gotten that far
because that would be a lot of work. Sweet though. Mostly it was just going to be creating a giant environment.
It was kind of inspired by these upside down houses that you can go to, but just like...
Have you ever been to dark table? I have, yeah. I like those types of experiences personally.
Would the meals also be giant portions? Yeah, I mean, sure, yeah, I'd be down.
Like you source produce that's like oversized and stuff
and like, I don't know, I don't know, just like wacky ideas, but...
I've always had this kind of brainworm idea
that like, if I don't want to,
if I finally just want to chill, I would like go, you know, move further out
than where we are now to a smaller area
and then open just like a very small corner cafe diner thing
like Luke in Gilmore Girls and just like do that.
Interesting. To be like, I'm just going to chill now. And I would have to have enough money
that it wouldn't have to be super profitable
or maybe even profitable at all because like those types of businesses are often...
You'd want to buy the property outright. Maybe find one that's commercial zoned on the bottom
and then live above it kind of thing. And then just live above it like he does in Gilmore Girls, exactly.
Are you a Gilmore Girls fan? Oh, yeah. Really?
Yeah. I did not know that. Yeah. Huh.
Yeah. Hold on. Okay. Let's play a game. True.
I mean, I haven't watched it in a long time, but yeah.
Well, yeah, it hasn't been airing for a long time. Like, are you like quizzing me?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not going to quiz you. I've only seen bits and pieces. I'm just trying to figure out...
The game I want to play is I want to try to guess what it is that you like about it.
Okay. So I think you probably like the Smart Snappy Dialogue.
Yes. Absolutely. Very much so.
That's a huge part of the draw. It's not the only draw. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no.
That's why I started there. That's why I started there. I think you like probably the relatively realistic
and believable character interactions. It's very dramatic as a show,
but it doesn't get into like, I cannot believe that any human
would behave this way territory, I think, for the most part.
That's kind of all you need. It is very dramatic, but there's never usually like,
like I don't think there's any like murders.
Yeah. It's not like, oh my, oh my goodness.
It's like... It stays pretty grounded. Yeah.
What else? For me?
Yeah. I'm answering now. Yeah, I found some of the characters pretty relatable.
I found the mistakes that the characters go through
or like the choices that I didn't agree with to feel very human, if that makes sense.
Like I might not have agreed with the choice that this one person did,
but I could see them doing it.
Or I could see like one of my friends like doing this thing or whatever.
I found Rory insufferable. Often, yeah. I just like it like...
She's not my favorite character. Sometimes there's characters that I dislike enough
as people that I just kind of have a hard time watching the show. And I just found her extremely difficult to be around.
In my opinion, and someone in chat said this, but I'm not actually just copying them.
It's also my opinion. The show is about Lorelai and Luke.
Right. And I didn't like Luke just because he shares my name.
You're not that shallow? No, not quite. Because I definitely...
And his character is just... I root for any character named Linus.
I get so few Ws, Luke.
There isn't that many Luke's either, but the ones that I do have are pretty cool.
You literally have an apostle. I don't wanna hear about it. I have that.
Skywalker's pretty sick. Luke from Gilmore Girls is pretty based.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't wanna hear about it. We've got it going on.
Yeah, I don't know. It's just a good show. I like...
I find... Some people might not even like this,
but I don't care. I find a lot of modern media is like,
ugh, like it's all about the grays.
Like, you know, the evil guys, you should probably like them a lot.
And the good guys are like actually really bad. And meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh.
We're gonna make sure that you come out of this learning something and having moral questions.
And like, sometimes I just wanna watch something and be like, cool.
Yeah, the Nazi's lost. Yeah. And that's good. Good.
Like, I just leave it alone. I don't... Anyways.
And there's another form of content that aligns with that whole concept,
which is just where it's like relatively casual
and you actually just wanna relax and watch something.
And I think Gilmore Girls falls in line with that.
There's another like, there's a Canadian show
where it follows a family that owns a,
it's like a convenience store or something. Oh, Kim's Convenience. Kim's Convenience.
Yeah. I like Kim's Convenience. Okay. For I think similar, but not the same reasons
why I like Gilmore Girls. I thought Gilmore Girls was better,
but I still thought Kim's Convenience was pretty good. Yeah, it wasn't something like Kim's Convenience
wasn't something I was gonna sit down and watch dedicated. Sure. But if it was on.
Yeah, it's cool. Yeah. And like Gilmore Girls was somewhat similar.
I used to watch Gilmore Girls because the computer at my parents' house
was in the family room where the TV was.
So like my mom would be watching Gilmore Girls or whatever. And it was good enough that I would like headphones off
and like actually pay attention to it while I'm doing other things.
Slice of Life shows. Yeah, another chill. Slice of Life shows.
Or you can go on the dramatic level and have more intense topics,
but I often do like it when it's like, yeah, the Nazis lost and the Nazis are bad.
There's a time and place for the like, the morally gray, learn things, question things content,
but it's just, it's so constant these days. It's just like, man, relax.
I don't, I actually just wanna chill. The world has enough of this already.
Have you looked at politics at all?
I don't need more of that personally.
My goodness. All right, I forget what the question was,
but go ahead, Dan, hit us with another merge message. Yeah, sure, yeah.
What even is this show about? How did we get, was that a merge message? I think so.
Yeah, that was a merge message for the last 15 minutes. Hey, Wanda Diallo.
With the PS5 Pro comes my continued sorrow
that storage is soldered. Thoughts about the idea that PS4 hardware
could outlive PS5 hardware since high failure components can be replaced.
That's an interesting question. And to be clear, I wanna acknowledge
that the PlayStation 5 has some non-soldered storage.
It does have a storage bay that you can install
an M.2 SSD in which, in my opinion,
was such a pro-consumer, like healthy move that I can't,
I can't say enough how unexpected it was for me
from Sony of all players.
But with that said, what Eric points out
is that the boot SSD is very much soldered
and you cannot boot off of that M.2 drive.
Could PS4 hardware outlive PS5 hardware
because you can just replace the drive anytime you want?
Man, I'd love to think that Sony could issue
an update or something that would allow you to move all of the boot partition,
like any necessary OS files over to the M.2 drive.
I kinda don't think they would. But then I didn't think they would have an M.2 slot
in the first place, so I don't know, maybe they would. But remember, Sony acknowledges, I think,
that the performance of the M.2 slot is not as high
as the soldered SSD. But then I don't think we've seen a game yet
where it's made a difference. I think, really, my answer to all of this
is that it should be terrifying for anyone who's into consoles that it's basically
just PlayStation right now. That is horrible.
It's very bad. Does it matter? Absolutely.
Well, hold on, hold on, let me finish. Does it matter if every Sony exclusive's
just gonna come to PC anyway? I'll let you finish, but.
Oh, I did finish, I finished. No, I'm doing the Kanye reference.
I know the reference, but I'm already done talking. All right, all right, all right.
I think it does. I think it matters for console people.
For PC people, I don't think it makes a difference. What's a console person even gonna be in a few years?
I mean, Microsoft has publicly acknowledged SteamOS now.
I think we're going to get a Windows console OS
for handheld, at which point we're gonna get a Windows console OS for desktop,
because it's basically the same thing. Get that, then I think it's fine,
but I've heard no whispers of that. And honestly, PC on a TV right now
is not a great experience. It's not a console-like experience.
It's not great. You can configure Steam to launch on startup
and launch in big picture, but. It's not. You're 100% right.
Like there is, I don't care,
but I understand the reasons why certain people like consoles.
And they're getting less solid,
because consoles are getting more annoying to use, I think over time, they're just weird and sucks.
But back in the day, the argument was like, with my N64, put thing in, turn thing on,
I am playing game. That's it, which is awesome.
It was so funny. I saw one comment that had a fair number of upvotes
that was just like, there's like charging more
for just like, it's like slightly better and it's more expensive.
And I was just like, just like on PCs.
Sorry, man, but welcome to the party. Yeah, exactly.
I apologize that you're here. Yeah, yeah, and?
But yeah, no, they're so PC-like, you're right. Yeah, which unfortunately, they seem to be inheriting
a lot of the negative aspects of PCs and not inheriting as many of the good ones.
While PCs are actually gaining good things from consoles.
Consoles are retaining a lot of the negativity that they've had, like paying for access
to online multiplayer, like that is mind-blowing.
And you look at the way that Microsoft has just
brazenly changed the way that Game Pass works
so that it kind of sucks on Xbox compared to on a PC.
Yeah. And effectively have just said, I don't know, get good by a PC, then if you wanna get a good deal
and gain the tablets, what? Yeah, it's I think a somewhat uncomfortable time
to be a console gamer, especially if you're an Xbox console
gamer, but even if you're a PlayStation console gamer, it's just all little uncomfortable right now.
And if you're someone who's like a TV gamer,
maybe let's call it that, then yeah, it's just awkward
because Windows isn't an amazing solution.
You can do it, but it's, yeah, it's not great.
As long as you need a keyboard and a mouse,
couch solutions for that are just kind of awkward and really bulky.
And I don't think there's any getting away from that, to be honest. No, but there's so many games that you can play on PC
with a controller now, like it's kind of solved,
essentially. It helps a lot. Speaking of which, speaking of games
that you could play with a controller, I have a hot take that the internet is not going
to like me for. You played more of Final Fantasy six
and it's not that good. No, I did play more of it. It's very good.
Nice. I'm still very happy with that game. It's going to take me a long time to beat it, but on a, I got pushed with a very strong recommendation
to at least try a game. Uh-oh. So I did.
What game? And so far it's really good.
What game? Star Wars Outlaws.
Oh. It's really good so far. I thought people said it was okay.
I thought people said it was terrible. Wait, no, I'm thinking of Jedi Survivor. Yeah.
Okay. So sorry. Is that a hot take? Outlaws?
Do people hate outlaws? It's because it's from Ubisoft,
which is I think why people don't like it after playing the game.
It has one of the coolest, I'm going to say most innovative and then someone's going to be like,
oh, they lifted it from this any game. I'm sorry. I didn't know.
Most innovative like lock picking mechanics. The story seems really good so far.
The characters seem cool. The design of the environments are fantastic.
The city that I'm in is awesome. There's some things that leave things to be desired.
I think the speeder driving mechanics are not great.
I think the general gun play isn't fantastic. Yeah, people are mad that you can't shoot and also drive at the same time or something.
Kind of weird. Yeah, okay. You can use a ability to do like...
Like a take down or whatever it is. Like an ultimate kind of... Yeah, but it has to like charge up.
That is definitely awkward.
But it also has barely impacted my gameplay at all, so I don't care.
I haven't played that much. So maybe it becomes more of a thing the more you play. I don't know.
But so far, having played it,
I think most people are saying it's bad because Ubisoft is bad, not because the game is bad.
I think the game is pretty good. How many hours are you in?
Counting it in hours is already becoming disingenuous.
I'm not that far in. I'm through the intro to the game area
and then I've spent probably like 20 minutes after that and then that's it.
So I'm not that far into the game. But like the sound is great.
The story already has me quite interested. The lockpicking mechanic is so cool
that there's a thing that constantly turns.
And then in a rhythm, it like shows the pattern that you have to do.
And then as it comes back around making like ticking noises, you have to like almost preemptively press along
with the rhythm and then it unlocks for you, which is like actually kind of fun and satisfying.
You like feel like you did well when you did it
instead of a lot of other lockpicking mechanics and games where it's just like tedium.
Right. I don't know. I just can't with Star Wars anymore, dude.
I just, I... Oh, I'm just, I'm just, I'm completely ignoring that at Star Wars.
Oh, okay. That makes sense. I haven't seen a lightsaber in the game yet.
I don't think it matters. You're like outer rim, whatever, space out law person.
Okay. No part of the game so far has been in like Star Wars
has not been important even slightly so far.
I don't think we've ran into a single character that's like a major character from the mainline series.
Personally yet, there's no lightsabers. No, there's no even reference to any of it so far.
There are technically stormtroopers. I think I've seen like four and they didn't matter.
Yeah. Okay. And the last one,
I think I've got for you here. Hello Linus Duke and Dan question for Luke.
I currently am desperately searching for a job
at a market that seems almost dead for developers. What do you think of jobs that ghost applicants?
We've done it by accident. I am sincerely sorry for anyone
that we ever didn't get back to.
It was not our intent. Sometimes I end up doing it and I don't also,
like he's saying intend to, but for some of the positions here,
we just get an insane amount of applicants and it's a little bit hard to keep track.
You can keep bumping to get a response, but in general, you're recognizing
that it's a tough market out there. Don't just apply to one place.
Yeah. And don't wait. Dude, I had not one.
You gotta take care of yourself first. But two articles in my newsfeed,
like before even refreshing that were like, I've applied to 900 jobs and like haven't gotten an interview.
And I've applied to 400 jobs and haven't gotten an interview. It seems like it's getting hungry out there.
A big part of the problem is? Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, spicy taking coming.
No. Oh, okay. AI written applications.
Oh. AI written cover letters, AI written applications. Like they're so good.
Application rates at jobs are going through the roof, not in line with unemployment
because the barrier to apply to places is lower than ever,
especially when they ask for cover letters and stuff, because people just aren't writing them.
Interesting. And then the average quality of people's writing is going up
because a lot of AI writing is better than the average person's writing.
Uh-huh. Yeah.
Now, tell me this. If you're using AI to write your application
and then they're using AI to sort it. Yep.
This is a whole thing. How are the humans actually involved in this transaction?
I don't really think it's going to have to find some way
to change the dynamic of how hiring works. I don't know what the answer is, but...
We go back to everything's in person. You walk into a store and hand in a resume
like your dad told you to. Yeah, we meet potential employees at, like,
you know, events and adventures. We have to go back to online dating,
but for, like, jobs? I feel like...
Speed applications. You all get together and, like,
do, like, speed dating, but, like, job applications.
Crazy. No, do not show up here with a resume. I'm just saying.
You know what was very surprising to me? When we did the screwdriver pop-up.
Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. Tim, zero, zero, zero, X3.
And I actually do believe this. My brother-in-law uses a bot to apply to 1,000 jobs a day.
He got 10 offers since he started zero before.
And people hear that.
So then they start doing that because if you're getting zero offers, you're desperate, right?
You're going to do something. This makes sense. You have to self-preserve, right?
People are going to try to fight. So they're going to hear that and they're going to start doing that.
And now this person who was previously able to apply
to, I don't know, maybe 50 jobs a day, Max, is now applying to 1,000.
Then you times that by a bunch of people. And then all the workplaces have too many applications.
So it either takes them basically months to go through it, which is what, like, some of the positions I've had
where I have 2,200 applicants, like, yeah, it's going to take an obscene amount of time
to go through it all. Or they don't feel like doing all that work.
So they just sort it with some algorithm or AI reading thing or something.
So like, yeah, this is broken, basically.
And I'm not, I'm genuinely, I have no clue what the next step is, but I really hope,
I don't know, some startup or something finds some solution to solve this, because it's...
So... It's bad. At the precision pop-up,
I noticed we had a little booth
that was like an LMG jobs booth. You know, Ariana and the new HR.
Oh, shoot. Probation, I think.
Well, whatever, whoops. Pretty sure that's wrong anyway, so I think you're okay.
Nice.
Yeah, let's go with that. I'm going to say pretty sure, but yeah.
Cool, anyway, they were there and I dropped in,
I was just like, what are you guys doing here?
And they were like, oh yeah, it was someone in management's idea.
And I'm like, they're like, why? Is it a problem? I'm like, no, it just wouldn't have occurred to me
in a thousand years to have like an LMG jobs booth
at like a product launch pop-up thing.
But I talked to them after the fact, and they were like, yeah, we were actually like,
what's the, not bumping, pumping, bumping would be like club, right?
Yeah, they were like, boomin', boomin', business was boomin', was effectively what they said.
And I was like, oh, that is cool.
And I guess in the context of this conversation,
that makes sense, like we're going back to human connections, to wild, right?
Like that's not what I was told growing up. I was told, send your resume, maybe drop it off,
ask to speak to a hiring manager, but like good luck, none of them are going to talk to you by the time that advice made its way to me.
So, wild.
I don't know if I ever got a job out of the blue.
Trying to think, like I volunteered at the pool.
Oh, dude. What? My family just, oh yeah, all of us.
My mom got into the film industry by biking up to a film set and like talking to the director.
And then the director could tell, they were in like the middle of nowhere.
So he was like, yeah, sure, bring me a resume like today as like a joke.
And she actually biked all the way back home and then biked all the way back to the set
and gave a resume. And he was like, that's not sure, you have a job. And then she became, that was a union position.
So she skipped the whole, like you have to work through Indies to get into the union thing
because she technically got union hours from that, meaning that she was in the union.
So then she was just working for like big Netflix shows immediately.
Almost all of my early career jobs, I just got by like basically showing up
and being like, I'll work right now. I can do this right now.
And they were like, sure.
I'm sure my brother has similar stories.
My family's kind of, yeah, we've been all over that.
Huh. Yeah. In response to your question, how'd I get a job at NCIX?
I was well known on their forum. They had thousands and thousands of posts.
They very much knew who I was before I showed up with the resume. Kind of how Sean got a job, sort of.
He still had to like- From our info team. Win the interview rounds or whatever.
He had to go through the process. But we absolutely knew who he was. Yeah.
All right. But yeah, it sucks out there.
It sucks real bad. It sucks for both sides because I've gone to pretty crazy lengths
and it's sometimes taken a long time to fill positions in some of my teams
because of the insane waves of applicants we'll get. The most we ever got, I think was like 22, 2300.
But properly giving an appropriate amount of time to each one of the 22-ish, 100 applications is brutal.
Hold on a second. Who is Top Gear 1224? Says he was notorious actually.
What? What was your username on the NCIX forum?
You too, Tybeck.
I wanna know now. A new line is from the NCIX forum. Let's see if I remembered them.
Or if I get to pull Thanos, I don't even know who you are.
Yeah, we'll see if we get a response anyway. Sorry, I got distracted there.
Yeah, I know. So it sucks for the people putting in applications.
And it also sucks for the other side because I don't know that having an ocean of applicants
actually means that you are for sure going to get
the best one, because it's such a crap shoot. When you're just going off of pieces of paper
that try to describe a person, it's like, no dude.
Depends on what they're applying for. Like if they're applying for a writing position,
piece of paper is pretty good. Yeah, maybe. As long as they actually wrote it.
If the piece of paper is writing, but are you actually getting the writing sample
with the initial application? Or are you just getting the resume and stuff
and then you request the writing sample afterwards? Depends. I mean, a lot of the time you can,
at least if they actually wrote it, you can tell a lot about someone's writing ability
from the resume. Another problem, cause it's pretty easy. Like, okay, cool.
We have this super Nido, was this written by AI checker,
except that so do the people that are trying to get past it.
So they can just make small edits until it says 0%.
Like it doesn't mean anything.
Top Gear was meming and Tyback says, you don't know me,
but you were impossible to miss on the NCIX forms.
Sounds likely. Yeah, that's kind of my jam. No, there's no archive, no key.
It's actually a real shame. There was a lot of tech knowledge lost there.
It was low key, like kind of an amazing resource,
an amazing archive because the threads about products
were tied to the bottom of the product page. So if you browsed the product archive,
you could find all this discussion about products that was highly, highly relevant
and probably difficult to track down anywhere else. It's a real shame that that site
is just vanished into the ether now.
I maintain that I would love to acquire the domain and IP
and resurrect it, but we have not been able
to reach an agreement that I consider
to be reasonable up until this time.
Taren asked me about it the other day though. He was like, do you like still want to do that?
Sure. Like if you can negotiate it, but the offer that I got last time was not,
had no basis in reality. So it was very difficult for me to...
As time goes on too, it's worth less and less. Like, are they recognizing that?
I don't know. I mean, I haven't talked to them about it in a while. Basically the last time I made an offer,
it was pretty much based on the cost of a four letter.com
and then plus like some.
And then what they came back to me with was essentially
an offer that would have some kind of like
long-term revenue share and like a bunch of, and I'm sitting here going,
you understand that this brand is like completely trashed
and worthless, right? Like it's not, even the people who know what NCIX is,
know that it imploded spectacularly and was like shady at the end.
Like it's, the IP is worth nothing.
The brand is worth nothing. It's a four letter.com.
The computers with people's personal information on them were auctioned off.
Yeah. Yeah, it's...
The bit man asks, if you got NCIX.com,
would you bring back the net linked name?
No, I think what I would do with the NCIX channel
is like a software and troubleshooting channel.
I think that would be the closest thing to sort of its origin story
while also fitting in well with our current portfolio of channels.
I would love to do something like that.
Yeah. Top Gear asks, is the issue of the creditors or the seller?
Or that's not really what they asked, but whatever, close enough. It's a combination, right?
Because the ownership of the IP
was not necessarily the corporate net linked computer ink.
So if I were to acquire it,
there could be some dispute as to who I was supposed to pay for it.
And none of that, as far as I can tell, has been legally resolved.
And no one who's involved has any interest
or any motivation to resolve it until someone comes in with a bag of money.
So it's kind of a chicken and egg problem. So I just think it's just gonna,
I just think it's gonna just languish forever.
And I think that's also something that the seller doesn't understand
is the baggage associated and the risk associated
with digging up this corpse could be diseased.
Well, just never sell it though. I mean, they'll die eventually.
But that's not them selling it. No, I just mean like, you know,
I remember telling my wife at some point, she wanted me to like pick something up. And I was like, any problem goes away
if you wait long enough. She's like, no, I'm like, no, really. I mean, yeah, eventually we're all just gonna,
you know, big crunch or whatever the current theory is for how the universe ends.
Now that this is gonna matter. Yeah, eventually. The fact that humans were on this planet
will be irrelevant. Eventually. Eventually. Yeah, sure.
When the sun just goes, whoop. Wait, we digging up corpses to eat?
No, no, no, just roadkill. I wanna be U.S. president.
It's recycling. All right, what are we talking about?
More topics. Oh, sure, yeah. This week in AI, strawberries, UI benefits,
and meta being meta. Do you wanna do the AI roundup?
Yeah, sure. There's some pretty interesting stuff this week. I wasn't sure.
I didn't know that strawberry was actually 01.
I don't know. I didn't dive super far into that.
So maybe the person who wrote this is correct. I just, I didn't think that was the case,
but I didn't verify this or anything.
So maybe it is, I'm not really sure. But either way, I'll go through the talking points
regardless, and then if you guys wanna look that up, if you care at all, then you look at that.
Sure. But I'll go through the talking points. OpenAI has unveiled its new strawberry AI language model.
Starberry. Star, star, star, I thought it was strawberry for days.
Oh, wait, no, it is strawberry. Oh, it's starberry in the dark.
Why do I not say starberry? Yeah, I thought it was strawberry. Gosh darn it, notes.
Okay, well, that's fine. Handyman is saying it is. Starberry 01.
I think he means- Strawberry 01. I think he means that it's-
Look, if you want real news, go watch a different show. This is just us talking.
I do have some cool stuff to show for this, but yeah. Okay, so strawberry, I guess it is the same thing.
Thank you, Handyman. I believe Handyman. So they unveiled their new strawberry AI language model,
which the company says has significantly improved reasoning and problem-solving abilities.
The new model's official name is OpenAI 01,
with initial versions available now, which are 01 Preview and 01 Mini.
OpenAI says that 01 Preview outdoes GPT-4O
in competitive programming, mathematics, and scientific reasoning.
Users, however, say that this improvement is far from global
and comes with significant delay due to the multi-step
processing occurring behind the scenes before answering a query. So we're just adding more power.
Before we move on to other this week in AI topics,
I want to go over some of the things that I did.
Oh, Luke did a thing. So one of the examples that they had was how many E's
are in the word strawberry, which is, I think, why- Or sorry, how many R's?
How many R's are E's or R's? Yeah, R's, I did E's because I wanted to switch it up.
How many R's? So how many R's are in strawberry? Hold on, is this a trick question?
Three? It used to say two. It used to say two.
So previous models would say two because it couldn't count very well.
It didn't have, it couldn't deconstruct problems, things like that.
Okay. So I dumped- Do you mind zooming a little?
Don't want to show you all that. Anyways, I already did. That's fine. We're doing some stuff with OVH.
It's going to be cool. I copied some texts that I had
and had it count the amount of E's that were in it. And it did it.
And then I was like, I don't want to verify that. So I made a smaller amount and then asked it to count that
and then I did verify it and they were correct. So it can count that properly now, which is cool.
Okay, I didn't know that was hard. That was not super easy.
And then I looked up a calculus question,
a fairly basic one as far as my understanding goes. And I compared its answer to what the internet said.
And it sounded like it was pretty correct. Ignore this part.
Do you mind zooming a little? On the calculus question?
I just- For the audience. In general, do you mind zooming a little?
This is- No, it's not. Control plus. Okay.
But yeah, it's interesting. It came to the same final conclusion that I found in Answer Bank on the internet,
which was interesting. And then this is a question that I had shown on Wanshow
before that it couldn't answer, which was this New York Times game
with the rules of the game. And then can it do it basically, right?
Oh, it totally did. So that was wrong.
Oh, it was? Because I was trying to see, so this knew the 01 preview, you can't do attachments.
So I was trying to see if I switch to a previous model,
like GBT-40 and do an attachment, can I then switch to 01 preview
and make it read the attachment? The answer is no.
No longer allows you to switch the second that you have an attachment.
But I just fed it the information this way
instead of inserting a picture. So I just laid it out for it basically.
It took 62 seconds, but it was not wrong.
It won the game. Wow. Instantly. Well, in 62 seconds.
Yeah. I then kind of realized,
the works instantly 62 seconds of the time. I mean, more like the first time it tried,
but so the challenge here,
oh, I don't think I even told it.
Isn't it crazy? Okay. I didn't actually ask it to do it in six words.
Yes, Christopher, we do. I didn't ask it to do it in six words,
but the goal this time was to do it in six words.
Sometimes they'll be like, oh, do it and try to do it in four words or whatever.
And when I play with Emma, usually we try to beat the amount
that it asks you to beat it in. So it says six words. We'll try to do it in four words or whatever else.
So I then asked it, after I did it right away the first time,
I said, can you do it in as few words as possible?
Because that's not in the rules. So it wasn't aiming to necessarily do it
in a few words as possible. And then we went way off the rails.
This was rough.
After Y, we need a word starting with K. So we can consider the last letter of Koy is K
by rearranging the sequence slightly,
which is not a thing at all.
Additionally, alternatively, we can add a bridging word if necessary, which is necessary and then it just didn't do it
and decided the last letter of Koy was K.
Which is a really different misspelled word.
Sort of not how that works. So I tried to work with it and then it ended up answering
but it answered like sort of multiple times in one answer
and also the final one was actually eight words.
And it was like, congratulations, you won using eight words. And I was like, that's worse than six.
So yeah, I don't know. It's not a silver bullet
and in classic open AI fashion, they're being a little closed about how it works.
Nice. But it is interesting.
You can see it sort of think,
like throw a question at me and I'll show you how it in quotes thinks
because this part's actually important.
Sorry, what do you want? You want a question? Throw something at me to throw at it.
What's better, a zip up hoodie or a pullover?
Sure, why not? I don't know. Like you're putting me on the spot here.
I don't know if that's a smart question. It's not.
But let's see. So when it does this whole thinking thing, we'll see if it actually has to think.
Yeah, okay. So we can see what it does. Evaluating hoodie types.
Yeah, cool. It's very neutral, very good. But you can see the steps that it took.
Noticing convenience and style
for adjustable designs and casual aesthetics while pullover hoodies excel in warmth and simplicity.
And I wanted to dive more into it. I wanted to try to play chess against it to see its spatial reasoning, but I didn't have time.
But I was chatting back and forth with Wendell about this for a second.
These are odd. These are weird.
Oh yeah? Noticing convenience and style, did it notice that?
Did that happen? They're like, they're very humanized ways of doing this.
Right, but is it actually different from what it was doing before?
It's, I think, I feel like they're trying
to make it more approachable and friendly by humanizing it.
And I don't know if I like that. And I wonder if this is part of the contention
that has led to certain people leaving open AI.
Cause this is like genuinely kind of weird.
I think they just generate random text to it.
Cause like this is all factors that would have had to be considered by any other previous model anyway.
So if the only difference is that, like,
and how do they prove that this has anything to do
with the actual model training anyway? Like I don't, why would open AI be motivated
to show us any part of the,
of the narrowing down and categorization that helped it to understand my two comparatives here.
Well, originally they were supposed to be open and now they're like the least open version.
So I think that's why they would show us. But I think, in my opinion,
the reason why they're showing these steps is they're trying to justify the time taken,
which is, that does make sense. This is why it's taking time.
Because it's not blitzing towards one answer. It's trying to compartmentalize the question that you asked
and then solve each section individually and then bring an answer to you to deal.
That's like the whole reasoning steps and stuff. I haven't done enough research on how this works yet.
This broke yesterday. I've had no time, but it's definitely interesting.
It is worse than old models at certain things.
Some people have called that like an overthinking problem.
Where sometimes the solution is like easier
than it tries to make it. And by in quotes, again, overthinking,
it causes some problems here and there. But yeah, they don't show it actually, it's faking.
They hide it for competition. Yeah, I mean, okay.
Like I was saying, they're very strongly humanizing what it's doing.
They're not, it's not exactly what's happening. That's fairly obvious.
It doesn't work that way. It's not noticing anything. But then wasn't it kind of already like friendly?
Yeah, but by doing that dropdown, it feels like you're trying to look behind the curtain.
I see. And there's another curtain. And I don't think, like in the same way
that people used to argue with me before it was able to look on the internet,
they're like, no, it is looking on the internet. Do you remember that? Yeah, yeah.
People aren't gonna get this. I see. And I don't necessarily think that's good, you know?
In other news, speaking of things that are not that great,
the state of Nevada has announced that it has paid $1.3 million for a Google-powered AI system
that will assess unemployment claims using evidentiary documents
and transcripts from appeals hearings and recommend to a human referee
whether to approve or deny benefits. Nevada officials promise that every case
will receive human review and they expect the new system will eliminate
the backlog of cases that has existed since the pandemic by reducing the time it takes to write a determination
from several hours to just five minutes in some cases.
Here's my question. How do you do a human review in five minutes
of something that used to take several hours unless you're just mostly going along with what the AI said?
I don't know how realistic what I'm saying is,
but I've also been reading some stuff about how the,
you know, the whole, like, get a chat GBT
or whatever style program to help you with the thing and then review the output before you submit.
That's being followed through less these days. Well, yeah, dude, fixing a bad output in some cases
as someone whose entire job for a lot of the last,
probably eight or nine years has involved a significant amount
of taking other people in this case, other people's output and fixing it
is actually a significantly higher mental burden
than just thinking about it and putting it down for myself in the first place,
whether we're talking about script review or whether we're talking about,
like a planning document for an event or whatever the case may be.
Imagining for a second that by having the AI do the work
that someone can just review it
and that those skills even are necessarily transferable
or fully transferable is so naive. You also have to understand humans, right?
Like someone's gonna fall behind.
And need to catch up because their boss is mad at them and they're feeling like they're gonna lose their job
so they just start stamping things faster. Like it's, I don't like this.
It clearly still hallucinates. It's clearly still does,
is able to be lightly pushed into problems
that are not super easy to detect if you're not really looking through stuff.
It's not ready for these types of scenarios.
And Meta's global privacy director recently admitted
during an Australian Senate inquiry that the company has been using public photos
and posts on its social platforms from as far back as 2007 to train its AI models.
Meta claims the only scraped accounts of users over the age of 18.
Is this even news? No. And Google's notebook LM app
now has a feature called Audio Overview which can summarize the documents it's given
into a lively bantering conversation between two AI hosts.
Essentially a fully automated podcast.
That actually sounds completely unhinged
and I would potentially listen to the crap out of that.
I would love, we should just feed the WAN document to it.
See how it does? Yeah, see how it does. So accurate it is?
I'd be actually pretty down. If you did this with the,
I don't know, the automated meeting notes that you get, if you try to have something automatically take
like exactly transcribe what people say from meetings, it's hilarious anyways, it's wrong all the time.
Oh yeah, 100%. They all are. 100%. Oh dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude.
Oh, have I shown you this?
I got a clip.
Oh, hold on. This is amazing.
Oh, I should send it to Dan. Do I have it?
I wiped my phone a little while ago so I actually don't know if I have this clip on my phone anymore.
I'm so upset right now. Oh, let's see if it syncs to Google Photos.
My Google Photos a little messed up though so things don't always sync there.
Okay, well, do a thing real quick if you don't mind. I'm gonna see if I can find this.
Google the Way Back Machine. When Google search deprecated its cache feature
earlier this year, Google liaison Danny Sullivan expressed a hope to compensate for the loss of the feature
by linking to the Way Back Machine. Now, according to a blog post from the Internet Archive,
that hope is now a reality. Google likewise confirmed that search will be linking
to these archived websites. Users will be able to find these results
by clicking the three dots next to a particular link and searching the more about this page option
on the about this results panel.
Which is actually pretty cool.
So that's good news. Yeah, I thought that was super cool.
That's cool. Being able to find Way Back Machine stuff better
is pretty excite.
So I'm actually really, are you still looking? I think I found it, but I am...
Dan, do I have just like a standing share folder with you yet?
No, but you can just send it to me on chat if you want.
Nah. All right, while they do that, some other really good news actually.
We're all in GabeN's family. Valve is officially rolling out Steam families
for all users. Family allows up to six members of a household
to play any game from their shared library. This includes the ability of multiple people
to play multiple games from the same library at the same time or the same game
if the library contains multiple copies. So cool.
The previous family sharing system blocked playing multiple games from the same library
if the owner was already playing a game. Which was really inconvenient for me
because if I wanted to play tape to tape over in the LAN area and someone's playing Beat Saber over on the TV,
I couldn't do that. So you had to go sign in a stupid other account
to paint in the butt. If you're not playing the same game at the same time
and you're a family living in the same house, this totally makes sense.
I love family sharing. I've been in the beta for a while. I love it.
I love it. I love it. I love it. And it's great and everything else needs it, dude.
The kids wanted to, the kids want to try Anno. Yeah.
And I was like, I like logged into you playing. I'm like, these guys are so far behind.
So what I have to log in as a parent, I have to log my kid into my Ubisoft Connect account
in order for them to play this game.
Like the, we've gone so far backward from disks
and then now Steam has caught up to disks
and then passed disks in everything but resale.
Resale is still something we've got to solve here, Valve. But like, dude, I was just,
I was looking at it going, this is ridiculous. It's like dinosaur. I'd rather, I'd rather they just like
not bother playing the game. I like, I just don't want to,
I don't want to deal with this platform at all.
This is an absolute game changer for Steam users. It should be noted,
you can't just willy-nilly change families. There's a one year cool down.
So you can't just be like, yeah, yeah, I'll just like join a family and then dip
and then join a different family according to what's most convenient for our shared game library, but.
You also like, so the next note is a counselor said his children will be unable to leave the group
unless kicked out by a parent. Well, parents can leave at any time.
Once a user joins a family. So they crashed the car, man. Now you got real leverage.
I'm gonna kick you out of the Steam family. No, dad, I want to play the games.
I wonder about that rule actually. It says once a user joins a family,
they'll have to wait a year before joining another. As a child of a family that you may have conflict with,
is that weird? It seems like it might be weird. I wonder if once you're a certain age,
you can just leave anyways. I don't know, probably. Cause your age is determined by your birth date anyway,
not by telling it how old you are, like in Steam.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you don't say, I am 13.
You say, I was born in this year. So it should be fine.
Yeah, yeah. Yes.
Sound is very important for this video. They have to contact Steam. They can't just do it willy-nilly.
I am a little worried if there's like any identifiable information in the videos
or anything that needs to be blurred. Oh, what is this? Don't worry about it.
Don't worry about it. Okay. Just don't worry about it.
No, it looks like it should be fine.
You're thinking about sharing it to stream, but I can't see what it is. Yeah, yeah.
Well, cause it's a surprise for you. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's a surprise.
Okay. On my own laptop.
Oh, well, I didn't think of that. Did I?
No, no, no, no. I can do it on my own laptop. It just makes this sound easier.
This was taken in August.
So this was taken a little over a month ago.
And this basically summarizes in a nutshell
why I just completely don't believe anything I hear
from Google about the usefulness of digital assistance.
I've talked a fair bit about how utterly bloody useless my voice,
voice assistants always are for me. So no matter what the demo is,
whether it's that stupid camera that was supposed to take a picture
whenever it was the right time because AI or whether it's like your assistant's supposed to
like book an appointment for you and it's somehow at the right time
and the person on the other side isn't mad about it. Just like all these things.
And I hear from you guys like, oh yeah, I know like it works great for me. I'm sitting here going,
the amount of time you waste getting this stuff to work compared to the amount of time it would take
to just call your stylist and make an appointment. I'm sorry, I just don't buy it.
An assistant is a more convenient alarm setter. This is the kind of that I deal with
just about every bloody time I try to use the thing. Okay, so Dan, do I have audio?
So your laptop's currently playing something. So let's make sure that stops before we play this.
Your laptop's playing something. There we go. And I'm gonna turn that on
and we should be able to hear it too. I hope, yeah, go for it.
You guys got audio for me? No, I don't have it here.
Does Luke hear it? We should turn on C.
Can't hear it on C.
I'm not hitting it anymore. I'm just making that noise. Stream does, stream has it.
Oh, stream has it? I don't know why we don't. Wait, but Luke can't hear it? Nope.
Well, gosh, darn it.
Let's just watch Dan until he fixes it.
I mean, you gotta play audio or I can't. Oh, I see.
Yeah, I don't know. Let's look at him very intently. Why aren't we getting it?
I wanted to listen. Does it look like I'm looking at him?
I'm trying to look at his portrait. Oh, we were just gonna look at him.
I guess we could look at him. He's behind a monitor, though.
This feels like more, like if he's looking at the preview of the show,
then this is intense, like we're like... Yeah.
Yeah, we're overseeing. Micromanagement. I think I know what happened.
You press that key on your keyboard slightly too slowly. See how effective this is?
Yeah. He's gonna fix it because we're looking at him. I'm gonna have to take the stream down to fix it.
We can... Really? We probably shouldn't do that.
Let me see what I can do. If we go set this to seven. We can solve all the problems that OMG has.
He starts to apply changes. No, I'm not going to do that.
We can solve all the problems that OMG has if we just have two managers per employee.
And then they just stand over them. Yeah. It's very effective.
They work probably twice as our employee. That's what the construction does.
And it's very efficient and there's never cost overruns.
Construction sites, worker and friends.
And to be clear. And like he said, timelines never get exceeded. No disrespect to the people
who are working hard on construction sites. It just, when you drive past them, the optics aren't great.
Yeah. Oh, honestly, the road workers, I understand almost more
because a lot of the times it's the whole hurry up and wait situation.
The whole crew can't be working at the same time. You have to wait for some process to finish.
But it just, you know, when you walk by and there's four people looking at the one guy
in the whole who's digging. It's just like, okay. Yeah, but sometimes the hole's too small
and only one person can do it. Exactly. I also, and anytime people bring up that argument,
it's just like, yeah, and then you go to work and sit on your darn phone anyways.
Like there's... I have a solution. Assuming that...
I also have a solution. The workers on the side of the road. How about you just turn up your laptop speakers?
Just because what you happen to be doing is inconvenienced by these workers
not having been done their job already. Doesn't mean that you're also not lazy at your job sometimes.
Shut up!
My solution is... My job isn't broadcast to thousands of people.
I mean, yeah it is. Okay, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.
Okay, my solution is dumber than yours but also might actually work a little bit better
than yours, Dan. Just play at the same time. So I'm gonna hit play at the same time.
Sure. And then Luke can just listen to it, slash watch it on my phone.
Oh, well... You have to... Oh yeah, I guess I'll have to do it.
Okay, are we ready? Okay, so let's switch to line a slap top.
Oh, Dan, why are you hanging out in the middle of my car console? Okay, here we go.
One, two, three. Yvonne Ho.
Who do you wanna call? Yvonne.
Who do you wanna call? Yvonne Ho.
She's right here.
Who do you wanna call? Ghostbusters.
Sorry, who do you wanna call? Yvonne Ho.
Who do you wanna call? Yvonne.
Who do you wanna call? Yvonne Ho.
It's brutal that it's writing it too. That's so bad actually.
It's writing it out, prop the Ghostbusters is very funny. The best part is that that interface
as soon as I deactivate the voice assistant,
the top context thing goes away. I can't touch it.
I can't touch it. I'm like, come on. While the voice thing is up, can you touch it?
No, no, it doesn't work because it's an overlay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's so annoying.
Dude, and to be clear, I use that function all the time
and it does work a lot of the time. It works just often enough that I depend on it.
And then so when it doesn't work, it's just...
Another potential W for the old Acura.
When I wanna call people, I press the phone button on the steering wheel.
That's me pressing the phone button on the steering wheel. And then I have a dial that just goes through my speed dial.
I actually... And I am a boring person. So honestly, the top four people in my speed dial
is pretty much all I need. Give me your phone. Give me your phone.
Oh, it won't be through there. Am I on your speed dial? Yeah.
But I mean in my... I'm talking in my car. In your car, okay.
My goodness. Look, I'm insecure, okay?
I just wanna know where I stand in this relationship.
I'm in there. The same spot. I'm number two suggested after the literal GF.
Nice. Hold on, hold on, let's see. I don't actually...
Okay, so this is interesting. I use T9.
So you'll see the way that I... Like when I open my dialer,
it literally just has me dialing random numbers. So with that in mind, yeah, I only have like my recents.
I just clicked like... Which is just 50% Yvonne.
And then like some random other people. You can...
It's like a hilarious... Yvonne and unknown numbers for the most part.
Well, those are incoming. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so if I were to do like outgoing only,
it would be probably about 80% Yvonne. I call almost no one but my wife.
I don't do like speed dial on my phone. Is there a speed dial thing?
Yeah, speed dial is still a thing. You can like... Oh yeah, okay, I have a favorite section there.
Is that better? That might be even better.
Dang, okay. So it's dad, brother, girlfriend, and Linus.
And mom. So the one that you're looking at here,
yeah, this is fine, right? Yeah, the one that you're looking at here,
I set this up when there were only about
10 to 12 people in the company. So I set it up with basically you and Yvonne
and then I think it's just like alphabetical. So I still have a bunch of people
that don't even work here anymore. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That are in like this top contact list.
Yeah, because things don't like... I forgot there was even a favorites thing on my phone.
I don't use that. Yeah, speed dial, dude, speed dial is dead. Like it's really easy to use.
You just go like this and then assign. But I just, I'm never gonna use that
because I can totally just...
Okay, I misclicked, but I can... I have you that quickly by just boop, boop, boop, boop, boop,
because once you have T9 memorized... It's quick.
It's so fast to call people T9. Dude, iOS 18 adding T9 dialing
is way too much of the reason that I'm willing to try it.
I believe you. I can't call people that T9 dialing.
And the only person I call is my wife, so it's stupid. That's like a phone screening for me
is an actual required feature. I'm not gonna switch phones if it doesn't have phone screening at this point.
Yeah. Which just won't happen. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.
Like I don't... I cannot think of a possible feature
that a phone could have that is gonna override my desire to have phone screening.
At this point, with how many spam callers there are, I'm using phone screening like every other day.
Xwar2 asks, do you guys think your social situation may change
considering the text bubble change in iOS 18?
On my end, it's prohibitive with my one friend being singled out as the only Android user.
How do I say this gently? Xwar2, you and the rest of your friends
are f***ing assholes. Switch to a cross-platform messaging app.
iMessage is not special.
You're welcome. Urban Fervers said iPhones have screening, I thought, yeah, so I would consider them.
I'm just saying this is... I'm not saying there aren't alternatives.
He's also saying iPhones have T9 dialing now. I'm just saying that is a required thing for me.
If one of the brand... If Pixel stopped having it, I would no longer use Pixels.
Just straight up.
Rubbernick says, how do you know what they are doing Linus?
The fact that it matters that anyone is on Android or iOS
tells me what they're doing. That's ridiculous. It's so stupid.
Speed dial is not T9 recursive.
The amount of time I've spent arguing about T9 dialing with people who just...
I think most people have literally no idea what it is. Don't understand what it is
and don't want to understand what it is. I've explained it so many times.
And you don't need to, but if you don't understand what it is,
don't argue about it. That's it. Someone says, what is it?
Oh, man. Okay, I'm gonna explain it. I'll explain it.
I'll explain it. I'm gonna explain it again. Okay. You know how on your phone,
when you open up the dialer screen with the numbers,
if you start typing someone's number, right?
It'll start auto completing the rest of the number.
That made a ton of sense back in the early 2000s
when people memorized phone numbers, which also no area codes.
Yeah, yeah. And phone numbers were a lot shorter. Phone numbers were seven digits.
When I was a boy, we didn't need area code to dial the area code
unless it was long distance. Anyway.
Okay, there's another way to start dialing numbers
where instead of dialing the numbers, okay? So the two area codes here
are both the two main ones in our area are 778 and 604, okay?
So if I dial 778 in the modern era,
that's gonna auto complete, literally half the people in my phone book.
And if I type 64, so it's not narrowing it down much. I've typed three numbers and it hasn't really done much.
But if you look closely, and this is a remnant of a very long time ago,
when it was really great for marketing to have your phone number for your business,
that you would expect people to maybe memorize, I hope,
because that's how people would remember phone numbers was by memorizing them.
If you could have the phone number of your business correspond to a word.
So say for example, you were a business that did house cleaning,
then you might want your number to be
one to clean, you know? Okay, so numbers correspond to letters.
Two is ABC, three is DEF, four is GHI,
and so on and so forth. So what you can do is you can dial the numbers
that correspond to the name of the person
you're trying to call, and it narrows it down way faster.
Wake it fast. If I type 5853, that could be Luke,
it could be Duke,
it could be Le-ve-je-de,
it's probably Luke, right? So as soon as you've typed probably three numbers
at most, four, unless you have an enormous contact list,
you have probably surfaced the person you're trying to call,
and on Samsung anyway, you can text with a swipe to the left,
and you can call with a swipe to the right. So for me, being pretty fast,
I can call Luke in, okay, well, here,
I don't know, give me a name.
Jake.
That was pretty quick. I saw it come up, I didn't see the whole thing.
My phone's slow, which slowed me down, but like. I said the, he typed three numbers
and then a list of people came up and I couldn't see it very clearly,
but I saw Jake's profile photo, I recognize his profile. So probably in about half a second, I can call someone.
It completely negates any need for me to have any kind of favorites
or ever dig around in my address book. And that's the reason that it's faster,
is because for whatever reason, when you go to contacts,
you then have to click search,
you then have to start typing. It's so many more interactions with the device
when what you should be doing is just dialing
the numbers according to the letters and it goes through your entire address book,
which when your address book is as big as mine,
can be a challenge. And admittedly, it's not as big as it used to be.
Like back when I was handling all of like our brand relations
on the sponsor side and product procurement
and also the team and, and, and, and, and.
You know, the random people that I might call
the list was a lot longer. Like these days, yeah, I mostly just call my wife,
but I'm definitely used to it. I'm definitely used to just, you know, doing that.
And you can put businesses in there too. Like if I want to call my vet, I'll just type,
here, hold on, I have to close the stupid address book that I opened like a caveman.
So I just type 838 and boom, my vets there,
assuming that I actually put my vet in my, in my address book,
which I, oh, you know what, I probably, I probably did,
but it's probably under a Fraser Heights Animal Hospital.
There you go. So three, seven, two, seven. I don't actually, I couldn't tell you.
Like if you ask me right now, like.
What is the number code for calling Dan?
Dan, three, two, six.
I'm gonna say six. Nice, nice.
But there was like some computation there. But yeah, I don't, I don't have to think about it
if I'm dialing. It's one of those things where it's just like,
if you, if it works for you, great.
And if you don't want to memorize all of that bullshit,
just don't, and don't care. And just not be bothered by the fact
that T9 dialing is there for everybody else. Because it doesn't affect
anyone other than the people who use it. It's totally fine.
Jeron de Vries says, I learned about T9 dialing from you.
Changed my life, best tech tip ever. Yeah, it's just, it just, it drives me bananas.
When I'll explain it like this, and then people will look back at me like a thupid.
It's like, no, it's not stupid. It just doesn't matter. It's not for you.
And that's fine, but it isn't stupid. Yeah, I don't use it.
I think it's cool. I think if you're a person who's like invested in it,
it's pretty sweet. There are definitely use cases
where I think it would be kind of nice, but looking at my phone and the people that I call,
I don't call that many people. The favorites tab is fine.
And honestly, I don't even use that. I can pretty much just operate out of recent.
Oh, dude. Especially in my car, when I can't rely on my voice dialing,
recent is like a godsend. Because I'm usually trying to call Yvonne anyway.
In my car, the top contact is Emma.
To call her in my car is probably half a second,
because I'll move both hands simultaneously. I'll press the phone button on the steering wheel
and then just enter on the middle of the dial thing,
because she's the first one. And when you press phone, it goes directly to the favorite.
So it's just like, rip, calling. Nice. Amazing.
And then if it's basically you or any one of my family, it's just like one or two dial clicks
and then enter and it's right there. It's like, okay, cool. Swee Kaku asks, silly question,
is Terran eligible for the $5,000 tech upgrade series?
I don't think execs are eligible, at least not anymore.
We did Colton though, and we did Yvonne. Come to think of it, are execs eligible?
I think some have opted out.
I'm not 100% sure. I don't know how it works. All I know is that the Floatplane peeps are.
Eli just says they're eligible.
If I ever get pulled, I'm taping Elijah to a pole,
so he can't do anything in my house.
I wouldn't blame you. We could actually just have like an Elijah cam.
Yeah, sure. And that would just be in the corner of the entire video.
So it would show what Elijah was doing, taped to the pole while you and I were working on it.
We could have his arms not taped down and we could give him like little puzzles
or something to play with. Yeah, like little finger puppets.
Sure. And then we can make sure there's a monitor
nearby with like subway surfers, so he can just have like distraction
so he doesn't just like start tweaking out. Yeah, having withdrawals.
Yeah, that's good. Elijah, we got you.
We're thinking of you. We'll make sure it's comfortable.
Okay, what else are we supposed to be talking about? Okay, yes, subway surfers.
Oh God. He's in now.
There are two more topics left. Long form videos in the shorts feed,
somebody on the subreddit posted a screenshot of a long form YouTube video being displayed as a short.
According to Google's support page, they are conducting a few experiments
with the watch page to increase discoverability across channels, formats and lengths of YouTube,
which could include a mix of video formats,
including long form videos where you'd normally see shorts.
Kind of weird. I get the motivation. I get it too. There's no money in shorts, not for creators,
not for YouTube. It's very small. Like we did that.
We had that short a couple of weeks ago that did like eight or nine million views
on that little underwater scooter-majig thing.
And compared to a long form video
that did that kind of viewership, to be clear, it's really hard to get that kind of viewership
on a long form video by comparison, but compared to a long form video
that did those kinds of numbers,
it's like a fraction. I think the monetization rate is like a 20th
or a 30th or a 40th or something like that. Like it's some tiny, tiny amount by comparison.
And so... Sorry, I thought you were done. So I can see them wanting to convert shorts viewers
to a longer video watching session. I don't know that having letterboxing and pillar boxing
or whatever, or like gigantic letterboxing,
I guess, is how it shows up. I don't know that that's the solution, but...
That's my biggest pushback, to be honest, is the format is weird.
I can see why they want to do it, and I can see why creators would be interested in it as well,
because short form content is very much seen
as a funnel somewhere else, whether it's to your courses that you offer,
to your merch, to your long form videos. Almost nobody sees it as,
or like something that gets a lot of eyeballs so you can sell sponsorships or product placements.
Like almost nobody is treating shorts like the end.
It's a means. Yeah, Elijah pointed out short to long conversion
is so bad though, less than 1%. So that's true. And I don't think that's at all surprising
if you look at how the mechanism of shorts works. But this could help increase it, I think, is the idea.
Yes, there are also, if you look into it, some really interesting strategies being employed
by creators to improve their short to long conversion.
And I promise you there are certain creators
that have way higher conversion rates than that. I also think there's other forms of conversion rate.
Like one of the most interesting short strategies that I've seen is a creator who,
they didn't take a slice out of their video. It's a genuinely unique piece of content,
but it's related to an upcoming video
and it's really interesting and it makes you wanna know more. And then that video comes out.
So they use it as a trailer almost? Hours later or a day later.
So yeah, it's basically a trailer. And you won't see any conversion on that effectively
because there's nothing for them to go to watch. But it might give you a stronger click-through rate
on that first notification because these viewers are primed to be interested in this piece of content.
Got it. And then they see that content follow through. Really interesting idea.
There's a bunch of interesting angles
that creators are taking, but. Nokia asks, didn't you guys get sponsored by Nexigo
to make shorts answering people's tech questions? How's that sponsorship revenue
compared to full video sponsorship?
I don't know how much they paid, but I would assume that it is less than
like full length videos like VODs and more than if we just uploaded shorts
without any sponsorship.
We uploaded a short, yesterday I think.
Oh no, today. We uploaded a short today. That's actually doing pretty good.
It's reacting to the cardboard laptop.
Oh yeah. Yeah, Evan and Caitlin made.
Met the Matpats retirement party. I almost said funeral.
He's alive. As far as I know.
Oh my goodness. Yeah. You just ominously add that at the end of all.
It's my best for now. For now.
Another 80 years maybe. Oh my goodness.
Yeah, that's cool though. That's good. Yeah, good job team.
Is Uber engaging in pay discrimination?
Non-profit news organization, More Perfect Union,
recently conducted an experiment where they brought together several Uber and Lyft drivers
and had them log into a shift and placed their phones next to each other on a table.
They found that the drivers were consistently offered different pay for the same jobs
with Lyft's price swings being the most drastic.
Sometimes this variation was only a few cents difference, but it could also vary by as much as $3.
Due to the black box nature of Uber's algorithm, it is unclear why any given driver
was offered different pay. According to an Uber blog post,
upfront pay may be affected by GPS location, estimated rival time promotional offers,
and surge heat maps that refresh every few seconds.
However, these should have been largely accounted for by having all of the drivers in the same place
at the same time. However, this pay may also vary depending on tests
that are being run by Uber. Our discussion question is, is this pay discrimination
and what is the likelihood that Uber can or is using this system to minimize driver pay?
That second part, 100%. As for whether it's paid discrimination,
that's harder to say because they would have to prove that they're discriminating based on some kind of
protected attribute of the drivers. Also, are these drivers all the same rating?
Is rating allowed to play into their income?
Does it play into their income? Is it just a way to get kicked out of the program basically?
There's a lot of questions to ask here.
I just thought it was interesting. It's interesting that there's variants. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense that if they're gonna play around
with the rate that you pay, they're also gonna play around with the rates that they pay.
Totally. And I would absolutely see them using this
to minimize the amount that they pay while maximizing the amount that they extract.
I mean, that's literally the name of the game. That's how business works, yeah.
Hey, Floatplane updates, speaking of business. Yeah.
Have you ever wondered why the WAN Show is late all the time? To answer that, oh my God, this is a monthly series?
Apparently. To answer that question. People like the first one.
We have a monthly series called Why Is WAN Late?
That just launched yesterday and is apparently already beloved.
So Sammy has been going around in the lead up to WAN Show
and talking to people about what's going on
in the lead up to WAN Show, especially when we are late.
And there's some pretty good behind the scenes. You can kind of see what it's like on a Friday around here.
This is pretty old. This is from, I mean, yeah, obviously when you were at...
Defconn. Yeah, Defconn, yeah.
And you're getting a fair bit of gray in the beard. Oh yeah. Dang.
Yeah, not the hair so much, the beard for sure. Well, you have a really favorable hair color to hide it.
Yeah. Like my gray has been coming in for a while,
but because I have a little bit of like blonde highlighting,
it's been hard to tell.
It's pretty obvious now though. I don't care.
I thought I was gonna be bald. Yeah, me too. I'll take it.
Dude, I'm so stoked to have gray hair. Like you're apparently supposed to look to the men
on your mother's side. Yeah, I didn't know that. Dude, my grandpa went bald in high school.
Oh, my grandpa had hair the whole time. Okay, then yeah. So yeah, I didn't know that though.
So I just look at my dad and be like, oh, like I had written off having hair.
I assumed by the time I was like 25, I'd be gone.
And I didn't care about that. Which to be clear, yeah, it's fine.
Yeah, I was like, whatever, I guess that'll happen. I guess I could pick it.
Seriously though, there's so many bald dudes. I don't know, who cares?
And then when I figured out like that isn't happening,
it was like fairly neutral, I guess, because I had accepted it so much
that I was just like, whatever. And now it's like, oh, I guess I'll have it,
but it'll be gray. That's fine. I don't know, I just, I don't care.
Yeah, out of some people. So people get really like self-conscious about it.
Really, really, really, really into it. Like I was quite taken aback when I was on Ludwig's stream
and he goes, hairline check, hairline check.
And I'm like, like he does that with his, he does that with his stream like very regularly.
And then he's like, oh, you're doing pretty good
for 37, are you on the, are you on the finasteride?
And I'm like, sorry, what is that? What even is that? I only know what it is because we had this conversation.
It's like a hair thinning drug.
I thought mine was worse.
Well, it's mostly here. Am I doing it bad? It's mostly here that it's gonna recede more.
So yeah, you could see, I'm definitely receding, but.
I don't know, it's just, I think like I respected
my dad the whole time I was growing up. My dad was bald the whole time I was growing up.
So I just, I never cared at all. Yeah.
Apparently that drug can be dangerous. So I'm not endorsing it anyway.
Yeah, I wasn't an endorsement. Yeah, like I don't even know if it's legal in Canada.
There's all kinds of drugs in the States that like are not a thing up here.
Yeah, supplements too. Anyway, it follows both Linus and Luke after 4.30 p.m.
and we're even tracking who's the latest. So go check it out.
We're also bringing back another special week on Floatplane Riley Week.
Riley Week will go live with a few specials centered around Riley. That's gotta be fun.
We'll talk more about it next week and maybe even show a little teaser of what's to come. So make sure you guys are subscribed to Floatplane.
And now it's time for When After Dark. Yeah. Dan, you wanna change the color scheme?
He's got this. I believe in Dan.
Nice. Nice. When After Dark. Nice.
Nice. Nice. Nice. Nice.
Nice. Nice.
It'll be nice. It's a merch message. Yeah, hit me.
Should we go back to the way we started the show and be all gentle and soft?
Nope. Hi Linus, Luke and Dan. Hi, Luke and Dan.
Hi, Luke and Dan. Well, last weekend and in the confusion, the movers stole my PC.
Have you had any PCs stolen? How do you prevent theft in such cases?
I had a pocket PC stolen. It's kind of my fault.
I left it behind in a nice rink. Oh.
And then when I went back, it wasn't there anymore and that, them's the breaks.
And that was pre like pins.
Like literally if the battery died on that device, it completely factually reset.
Like it was just, yeah, that was a real thing, by the way, that was terrible.
Yep. Yep. I don't think I've ever had a...
I don't think I've ever... Oh, okay.
I think this isn't what you mean, but like we've had equipment stolen,
but not like my computer. Yeah.
I've been very lucky. Yeah, I have never had one stolen.
I do take measures.
You know, general house security is one. That's not going to help you when movers take it.
So I have no real tips for stopping the movers
from taking it. That's a rough one. When I'm traveling with like laptops and stuff,
even if I'm not tired, if I'm just like sitting down in an airport,
I never like, I don't like just put my bag
on the seat next to me, because there's a chance I'll look this way
and it will be to my back and someone might just take it and walk away and someone might not notice.
I'll like tie it to myself or wear it or something
or like, it can even be pretty simple. Like I'll put the bag down.
I'll kind of like hook my foot through the shoulder strap while I'm sitting down.
Like it's not even a noticeable movement really. And just make it so that if you were going to pick up the bag,
you'd be picking up my whole leg and then just like, whatever, and I'll just keep it that way.
I might've had a beater laptop taken from the back of my Civic once when it was broken in two.
But I remember at the time, not even being sure if it was in there.
Like it really didn't matter. Yeah.
So maybe. My, the first laptop I ever bought still works.
This would be in- Oh, that ASUS thing? But pre that.
Oh, really? Yeah, that ASUS thing also still works. Yeah, I think you like gave it to someone,
the like brown one, right? Yeah, bamboo.
Yeah, yeah. Sweet, steal a bag, get a free Luke.
Yeah, basically.
That's one way to look at it. Hey, Dale, I recently installed a smart panel
and apparently my network closet and office are pulling 1,200 Watts total constantly.
Any tips for how I can bring down my $600 monthly electric bill?
For the network closet, there's not much you're going to be able to do other than buy new stuff.
And it, I mean, a fence at $600 a month?
Oh man, power must be way more expensive where you are. They're saying home office and stuff too, right?
They just, they added monitoring. They didn't say home office. They said my network closet and office.
Office, home office. Well, you guys are assuming that it's home.
Yeah, otherwise you wouldn't care about the electricity bill. You might, if you pay utilities and you're-
It's true. I don't know. I think we forget that our electricity is cheap here.
Yeah, no, I think the electricity there is just really expensive.
So reducing what your electronics are doing
or what your things drawing power are doing, the only way you can really do stuff
is like get more efficient to like power supplies or something like that. 1,200 Watts constantly.
That's a lot. Is a lot. Yeah, 2,240 would improve efficiency a little bit,
but we're talking like, you know, three to 5% maybe.
It's a little bigger percentages, yeah. Yeah, so maybe you're saving like, you know,
20 bucks a month and whatever that upgrade is costing you, it's going to take a minute to-
I'm really wondering like, what is the constantly? What is running constantly that's taking that much power?
Because there might be some things that you can do
where you can run like scheduled systems to shut things down or something.
Cause that's a lot to pull constantly.
Are you running AC overnight? Oh yeah, like AC could be a big part of it.
Tim says, I'm in Massachusetts, I have a home lab, I spend $1,000 a month in electricity.
Yeah, we're really lucky that our power comes from falling water here.
Yeah, you gotta, other than buying new stuff
that is more modern or doing less with it,
shutting it down when you're not using it, putting it on a schedule.
I don't know what to tell you, cause utility power costs, utility power costs.
I mean, you could put up solar panels, that's an option.
I mean, you're spending a lot in order to make these upgrades,
but like, it's also costing you a lot to not make them.
So it almost seems like you'd have to.
I feel like it's gotta be, because he said constantly,
my interpretation of that is like, even at four in the morning when no one's there.
So my assumption is that certain things just need to be shut down, whether that's AC
or something else. Maybe the computer. 1200 watts, like that doesn't even account
for having AC running. That's not enough, is it? Yeah. It's gotta be, he's leaving the computer on constantly.
Shut her down, put her to sleep. Hibernate it. Yeah.
Do something. I feel like something can change.
Up next, Linus, the closet gamer. You have said in the past that you didn't agree
with some of the decisions that LMG made. What were they who made those decisions then?
Oh man, there's all kinds of decisions that I don't necessarily agree with.
It's a big company now. I could probably just search my email. I mean, even in the earlier days,
I'm just gonna search my email for the phrase, I don't agree.
Oh my God, there's so many. Hold on.
Well, I'd kind of hope so at this point, to be honest. We've been around for so long if he didn't disagree that many times.
Like, he's like too agreeable at that point.
Okay, I search for... Which we know is not a problem.
Mm. Mm.
Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm.
Mm. Okay.
G-dub, sometimes I don't agree with myself. I like that.
That's good.
My position can change on things? Yeah. No.
Exactly. That's reasonable. Oh.
Yeah, I, okay, I'm trying to...
Don't foresee the results, no. I mean, hmm.
I, man, what could I...
Oh, I'm gonna search for try anything twice.
Cause that's a line I often use when people suggest something to me.
And...
Okay. This is regarding the compilation of Scrapyard Wars.
My response is just try anything twice. I support it. I do.
And I said, I'd, no, okay, I didn't.
This I didn't really have an opinion on. Man, I guess a lot of this would take place via chat.
Luke, can you think of something we did that I was like, I don't agree, but let's try it anyway?
Like I feel like there's definitely been... I promise you this has happened a bunch of times.
I can't really think of a particular example.
Like there's definitely concepts for videos
that I've been like, I don't agree.
Yeah. But we can try it and see how it goes or like titling a video where I'm like, okay.
Yeah, go ahead and try it.
I don't think that's the best approach.
I can't find anything right now though. I can't think of a particular one off the top of my head,
but I know there was videos back in the day that we'd go back and forth on and you'd let me try stuff
and sometimes it would work and you were wrong and sometimes it wouldn't work at all and you were right.
And it's just like, I don't know how it would go.
Okay.
All right, well, I don't know. Do you want to do another one? And I'll keep trying to find something in the meantime.
Sure. Do you have any for me, Dad? Yeah, I know that there's one or two in here.
Let's see if I can find it.
Hey, LLD, Luke, what's your favorite lean-back game
to relax with these days? Oh, I thought of something. Oh, okay, never mind, Luke.
Shut up. We're doing a fairly costly customer survey.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don't agree.
I told the senior management team that I don't think
it's the best possible use of money. I think that a lot of the things we're looking to learn
from it are things that if the product team at Creator Warehouse wants to know,
I could probably get them 70 to 80% of the way there
by just chatting with them for 30 to 60 minutes.
A lot of the questions we're asking,
I understand why they want to do it in this way
by hiring a survey company that specializes in the composition
of the questions and the sampling and whatever else,
and it has these connections.
I think that the polling and survey industry
is inherently flawed because truly neutral sampling
is the best way to do it.
Because truly neutral sampling is literally impossible,
especially in the modern age, and you see that with highly publicized survey results
like US election predictions, US election polls.
So we're doing it. We're spending what I consider to be a not very
amount of money that I'd like to spend on it,
but I greenlit it because this was something that
the team other than me and Yvonne and some other people
is aligned on and my whole thing is like, okay,
well then here's my expectations in terms of measuring a return on this.
And I hope you know what you're doing.
Tyback says this is a mistake. You're airing dirty laundry.
It's not dirty laundry. It's okay to disagree.
I've said that a bunch of times on the show. Show is Linus.
I've said a billion times on the show that this company makes decisions
that I don't agree with all the time. And that's okay.
And that's okay. You're never going to be in an organization
where you agree with literally every single action the company ever takes.
And I've provided my rationale, but let's make sure I provide their rationale as well.
Their rationale is that if we sample our existing customers,
it doesn't tell us much about the broader customer base
that's out there. If we just go based on gut feeling,
or what we've anecdotally observed over the years,
sure, yeah, that might get us 70% or 80% of the way there,
but if this gets us a few more percent,
that might at the very least help guide product development
in a more scientific, a more rigorous way.
Part of the justification is that that's just what these things cost.
So if we want to dip our toes into data collection in this manner,
this is just kind of what it costs to have a credible company do it,
and then we can decide after trying it once
if that's something that we want to do again. So there are absolutely, absolutely counterarguments,
and at the end of the day, I said, I don't agree.
And here's a check.
Bold. Well, you got to try stuff, right?
I mean, if I just wanted to... If all we ever did was my perspective,
then that could potentially limit our capacity
for new ideas and growth, right?
There is this whole problem with founders,
where in some cases to like grow past a certain point,
you either need to like cycle them out or certain job functions can't be done by them anymore
because they'll have a certain scope of thinking that doesn't necessarily continue to work.
And to be clear, there's certain times when I would absolutely stick to my guns.
Yeah. But when it's a difference of opinion,
you have to leave openings.
Yeah.
Okay, sorry. What was the question for Luke? I want to hear now.
What's your favorite lean back game to relax with these days?
Oh.
I don't do that as much these days.
Not playing games. You assume Luke leans back.
Yeah. Time has been expensive for me lately.
Genuinely lean back is a tough one
because usually I'm more like,
I'll go play Pokemon Go because it gets me outside.
I'm walking. I try to stay in constant movement when I'm playing Pokemon Go as much as possible.
Literally the opposite? Yeah, it's not a lean back, but it is relaxing.
I'm changing the words, which is not fair.
I think that makes sense. Yeah. So I want to include the answer
because it's sort of in line, but it's also completely not.
So a general lean back game, I haven't played it in forever,
but either Civ, civilization,
or FTL is not a lean back game. I sweat when I play the game.
I always make it like hardest possible. Oh, LZF stresses. Hell, go crazy.
I've beat all the challenges in the game on all the anyways.
That's impressive, actually. I am a FTL sweat.
It's one of my favorite games ever. Very sweat.
But yeah, so Civ or Assassin's Creed.
Right now it's, you can tell I played all the time
because I don't remember the name. Odyssey?
Odyssey? Odyssey? Let me look it up.
Did you ever mess with Fortress?
Sort of. Give me a sec, though. Yes, Assassin's Creed Odyssey.
I've been playing this game for, it looks like six years.
I play it, you know, every once, like every three to six months,
I'll go jump in and do a few missions and then leave again.
The setting is beautiful.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a beautiful game. Great sound.
You have a really cool partner buddy
and like this pet eagle that you have. The environment in the setting is just,
is absolutely fantastic. So it's a very fun game to go just chill in.
Yeah, I don't know. That's it, though.
Okay, let's see. What else do we have?
Hey, Leak, Lime and Dewdrop. Nice.
Linus, when are we getting more house build updates?
Oh, very soon. I actually reviewed a video today
that is fixing the,
we think we hope, fixing the corrosion issue with the water loops
and adding leak sensing.
Leak sensing is good. Yeah.
You have flow issues with that? You have a crazy pump, so maybe it doesn't matter.
We were having some flow issues, but that was due to the like particle filter
that we had in line. We got a better particle filter and it seems to be flowing a lot better now.
So cool. Yes, but no.
Linus, are you still grateful of having this job?
Years ago, you kept mentioning that you have the world's best job,
but you don't really bring this up lately being frustrated by the community instead.
It's a good question. Heavy.
It's a good question though. Well-framed too.
I am grateful. I have definitely found a more,
I have definitely found a less positive side of it,
particularly over the last year or so.
And I don't think it's new. I just think that for a long time,
the supportive voices largely overwhelmed
to the point of completely drowning out
the less supportive voices. Animosity and negativity in the tech space
has like massively spiked. That sucks a lot.
Out of curiosity, because other than Sony's own video,
we have the highest viewed video on the PlayStation 5 Pro.
Like it's not even close. So out of curiosity, I went over to r slash ps5,
like Reddit f***ing hates me. That's not subjective.
That's just a fact. Largely speaking, the Reddit community,
whether it's dismissive or outright hostile,
in general, the Redditor community just kind of hates me.
And so I went over. I was curious, do we even merit a post,
let alone getting any upvotes over there?
And not only did our PS5 Pro video,
which multiple people elsewhere,
like off of Reddit, pointed out how balanced it was.
Like we did point out the things that Sony did
that were making it very difficult for people.
The extremely high price for a console is a tough pill to swallow in this economy.
You know, like it's not great,
but we also talked through and explained
why it costs what it costs. So not only did we not merit a post,
even though people are clearly watching it. People are watching it.
But our last couple of PlayStation products,
so I believe it was the Portal and the PSVR,
had a bunch of discussion about them
when the videos were posted. Zero upvotes.
Not because there was any particular argument
against anything we said, but just because outside of,
outside of and even within the LTT community,
there is an amount of animosity
that I am having a hard time really coming to grips with.
It's been interesting... Which I think is fair.
It's been interesting watching the discourse change
around something like the framework investment. When we did it, it was with full transparency
and with the informed consent of the community,
you know, understanding what this was,
what it meant, what would and wouldn't change.
Sorry, are you talking about the framework investment?
Yeah. So not only the full consent, the excited involvement.
And over time,
that has morphed from enthusiastic support.
And I don't mean for everyone, a lot of people are still like very much,
like rah-rah-rah framework, in fact, too much. I mean, Austin posted that not completely positive video,
and people piled on him for it. It's just another edge of the sword of too much animosity.
There's too much fighting. So a lot of people are still very supportive,
but there's another sort of portion of the tech community
that just looks at it and goes, okay, well, Linus is compromised now
because he's got this framework investment.
But what I don't see is I don't see anybody
actually providing any concrete evidence to suggest
that the framework investment has affected my coverage
of any mobile device.
Show me. Show me where I said something
that was unfairly flattering a framework
or unfairly critical of a competitor to framework.
Show me. If anything, I treat them like the coach's son.
Yeah. I reviewed a script with... I got that vibe a couple times.
I reviewed a script with Elijah today. We had someone come to us with a complaint
about their customer service experience with framework. So it took us a little while, but we secret shopped them.
And I was not involved. Elijah, Alex, some unnamed people who are staying anonymous
because they're not staff. And if we can use their credit cards for mystery shopping,
then, hey, why don't we just not disclose their names and then we could use them again?
So a team of people put together a secret shop for framework.
And as I was going through, I went out of my way to,
if anything, I still did act in my role as editor.
But when I made a change to the script, I made 100% certain that everything I did
toned down the positivity as opposed to toned it up.
Or I explicitly checked with Elijah and I said,
does this still convey your thoughts about it?
I don't know.
It's been a really difficult thing.
We're deep enough in Wancho at this point
that maybe I'll just say this, but sometimes I make edits to the script
as we're going through and we're working together on tweaks to it
that are just meant to be a joke. They're just meant to get a laugh out of the writer
who's sitting next to me, like watching me change stuff.
And I put in a bit about how realistically
the value of framework's investment for me is less than...
I could probably name half a dozen laptop brands
that have paid me more over the course of my career
than the value of my investment framework.
That was a funny point. It was kind of poking fun at this idea
that somehow it was going to affect
my day-to-day operation of the company
other than to be extra, extra, extra careful about it.
I mean, you know this. Every single time the idea of framework has been brought up
when it comes to internal use. What do I say every single time?
If anything, you point out that they're expensive and you push against it.
If anything. And outside of that, you usually, like,
I don't want to be involved with the conversation. Because we were looking into getting frameworks
for internal laptops because of, you know,
their repairability and other stuff going on, but honestly, they're really expensive.
They're really expensive? They don't have touchscreens?
That's tough, yeah. There's a lot of people at the company
that are pretty ride or die for touchscreens. And again, they're really expensive.
So, I don't know. Hopefully they can figure that out. That cyborg relay says,
I've seen someone say you accidentally auctioned an engineering sample or whatever controversy it was
to attack that brand because they were a framework competitor,
truly unhinged. And the thing is that, like, it was very...
It was enlightening, but also disheartening.
Rossman's video supporting our De-Google Your Life series.
Because the portion of the tech community that...
I don't understand it.
If you wade into that mess,
it's...
I don't know. Maybe if you have, like, a background in psychoanalysis,
you can let me know what you think the kind of rationale behind it is.
But it's... It's pretty intense. It's tough.
And I still have a great job,
and I still am extremely grateful,
especially for the years where things were largely...
Not largely. They're still largely supportive and positive.
It's actually been... It's been really encouraging seeing viewership tick back up.
We're... I think we cracked, like, 80 million views on LTT.
We've been actually executing really well on content.
Overall, audience sentiment has been really good.
But the...
I do miss the days when it was almost universally supportive.
And that doesn't mean that I just expect adulation
for everything I do. I have always solicited constructive criticism.
We had a rule on the forum when we first started it
that you couldn't attack, you know, other creators in the space,
each other, other people... Moderators.
Moderators, basically anyone, but you could go after Linus and myself,
and it was genuinely fine for a long time. Most people would do it,
but it was not a huge population of people,
and usually the people would just kind of deal with it
and move on, and it was fine.
It was genuinely fine for, like, many years.
And now it's just... I think there's a little bit of shooting the messenger.
Like, people...
There's some people that are still extremely angry about, like, ad block is piracy thing.
Like, really angry. Which I genuinely, at no point in time,
have ever understood, because everyone's, like, happily posting memes
about pulling the pirate hat back out again and stuff, but then pointing out that that is also that.
Who cares? If you don't care. If deeply insults them, it's like,
what do you mean? If you don't care and you sleep well pirating movies and music, like...
Why is this a different line? I don't know.
Why is this a worse line? I don't... I don't know.
I've genuinely never understood it. I don't know.
I don't know, dude. Whatever.
Or, like, you know, when you have that conversation
that basically goes, but just, like, understand that when you pull the funding away from something,
it gets worse. Yeah. Like, dude, the state of news media now.
It's terrifying. Yeah. It's terrifying.
And the deeper you go down that rabbit hole, the scarier it is.
Yeah. We are so vulnerable right now
because we weren't willing to pay a subscription
and we're still not willing to pay a subscription to support, like, real journalism.
Yeah, so... There's been a couple of comments. One of them was saying that, like,
it's not just you guys.
While that is true, I genuinely believe that we get
a higher percentage than most because of a lot of stuff that happened last year.
Well, it's tall poppy. And that. Yeah.
And that, both, really. But there's channels that are just as big as us
that don't get anywhere near as much. And then also, there's been some comments of people
telling me to, like, pull this topic along
because it's clearly negative
and that we should just ignore the trolls. I hear ya.
I don't want us to do this all the time on Wancho, but I think sometimes showing kind of what's going on
on our end is just sort of being honest with the viewers.
And it's pretty intense.
Like, if you sort that Rossman video that you mentioned,
pretty positive video overall. If you go into the comments, it's not entirely positive,
but it's a pretty positive video. If you go into the comments and you sort by newest,
brutal. Yeah. And it's like, it's easy to say, well, forget the haters,
but this isn't that small of a niche.
You know, that's a video that has well over half a million
views now, thousands and thousands of comments.
And there's this almost universal, just like,
I don't know how to describe it other than just like,
yeah, animosity, hostility.
Anger and expression of anger paired with a note
that no action, no matter what you do, can ever be redeeming.
I noticed that at a very oddly consistent rate.
There was a bunch of different people, clearly not bots,
but just like, this doesn't make it okay
and nothing that is ever done can fix my opinion
of this person. It's like, whoa. Yeah.
What's the term? Moulding? Yeah.
Like it's tough to relate to.
Like I try to take feedback, right? Like I try to, we've always taken in data and tried
to throw it what's bad and keep what's good and keep evolving, keep evolving, right?
But when you get something that's just like,
I'm mad and nothing can ever change that I'm mad.
I don't even necessarily know what I'm mad about,
but here's what I've kind of grabbed onto
as the justification for my behavior.
I don't really know how to deal with that. Speaking of things that we've done that I haven't agreed with,
I strongly disagreed with a lot of the ways
that we handled the controversy last year.
But that's part of making decisions together as a team.
That's part of making decisions based on the best information
that you feel that you have at the time. I felt like there was a lot we could have said
and I wanted to say, but you have to manage.
There's also that it was in two parts.
It makes it complicated.
Yeah. I don't want to get way too many things. Yeah, we're definitely not going to do that
because if we were to make a decision about changing
what we have or haven't said about any of that,
that would be a decision we'd make as a team because what you have to understand past a certain point
is that the decisions you make impact more than just you.
There's a hundred people on payroll who depend on this company
and that was thrown into sharp relief last year
when I think a lot of the crusaders felt like they were taking down
like a big bad ogre.
When at the end of the day, I already made my money
and the people whose lives that if we went down,
which we weren't going to, we kind of are awesome
and we have a great team, literally world-class.
But if we went down, the people whose lives would have been
most negatively impacted would have been small creators.
I often hear people say, yeah, I don't watch LTT,
I watch small creators because I want to support small creators.
Oh, you mean smaller creators like Dan Besser,
producer of this weekly podcast who, by the way,
creates every day for a living here.
Lots of things.
Even in that same sense, if you start looking to external
to this company, small creators,
I have always believed in arisen tide lifts all ships.
When we were at our peak,
so was the entire tech YouTuber sphere.
When we slumped, so did everyone.
Now, I don't think that we can assign any causality.
It's not because of us. Yeah, there's been other challenges.
The whole industry follows a similar line.
And I don't think that... I don't mean that, relax.
I don't think that members of the tech media tearing each other down is constructive.
I think that we have always worked to build up.
Technically, no.
There's the one case where we were negatively comparing.
I'm saying we as a company, not us, not you and me as individuals.
We were negatively comparing other outlets.
Sure, but I think we dealt with that pretty decisively.
I agree, I'm just saying. I can't control what every single person says and does.
No.
Yeah, there was an error in a video a little while ago
that basically I was accused of being biased in some way.
I don't want to get into the exact details because it's just not worth it,
but I was accused of being biased and I was sitting there going like,
I didn't even touch that. I never saw it.
That's tough. I think that's largely because...
It might not work that way. Here, we have 100 plus people,
but a lot of YouTubers are one two-bit operations,
so people do think that they basically see everything,
but it's like, we're not. Yeah, we're super not.
So yeah, I am still grateful.
It's harder to keep track of that. There are definitely times.
I was swimming in my private pool the other day,
and I thought, no, really though. I was like, this is the pool that...
None of this would be possible. This is a crazy life I could have never imagined for myself
if I hadn't through a combination of hard work, talent,
and being exceptionally lucky.
I was in the right place at the right time. This is something that never would have been possible.
This is absolutely incredible, and just had this moment of gratitude.
I have to confess, I was thinking not as much about you guys. I was actually thinking more of my wife and the team.
Sorry, you guys are totally, totally integral to the whole thing,
for real. Yeah, that was like three days ago.
So yeah, I definitely think about it often,
but it's harder in the day-to-day these days.
It's been very challenging. Just to help us come up for error a little bit here though.
You mentioned earlier, teams are doing better,
things are getting better. All of that is true.
Not only are performance metrics coming back,
but I genuinely think the space is getting a little bit less toxic.
I think there's been a sentiment shift towards us specifically as well.
Yeah, I'm honestly looking more overall at the whole industry,
but that's probably also true in regards to...
I think they're kind of related. Maybe.
I think they're kind of related. I think a lot of... I think people are maybe tired of it.
I think people are getting... Because it's exhausting. It is.
It's very exhausting. I'm just tired of being angry.
Yeah. I don't have the energy for it anymore.
Like, why are we doing this?
The answer has to be because we love it, otherwise why?
Oh, oh, oh. You mean like the work? I thought you meant the fighting.
Yeah. No. Sorry.
I was like, I don't know.
Yeah. I don't know. That's...
Yeah. And I am genuinely...
It was a little doom and gloom for a while there. At this point, I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
I think we can get back, maybe not exactly where we were, but I think we can fix some of this.
And it's going to take effectively everybody.
Well, yeah. Creators, viewers. Can you guys be part of it?
Like, can we just... Can we try to, you know, not be upset about...
And if someone just likes the PS portal, even though it's locked down,
can we just be okay with that if they just like it? Is that okay?
Yeah. And to be clear, this means, honestly, mostly elsewhere, right?
Not just us.
And it doesn't mean just like accepting everything all the time.
King Ghost, I miss the friendly collaboration too.
Yeah. I literally, my favorite thing out of practically everything used to be going to events
and having these dinners that we used to do. Luke, we had dozens of creators at probably the biggest tech creator dinner
that has ever taken place. Yeah.
At LTX. And that was sick. And then literally, weeks later, we were living on ostracization island.
Yeah. Literally weeks later. Yeah.
As if it never happened and we never did anything to help build up the space.
As if we were evil people motivated only by whatever, like tearing people down.
I... That was quite the peak and fall.
Because that... I still got whiplash. Yeah.
I feel like videos were killing it.
I think public perception was super, super high.
And this is, I mean, this is a story that's been told a bunch of times in reality.
Yeah. But yeah, we were at a hell of a peak at that point in time.
Anyway, hey, we had a collab go live today.
Yeah. Evan and Caitlin. That was cool.
Yeah. We have some more collabs coming.
I'm very excited for everything that's coming.
And yeah, we've been killing it.
No, thank you, Anonymous. Yes, I am grateful.
And you know what? Maybe it was cathartic too, to have this conversation.
I don't want to do this all the time. No.
No, me neither. But it's good to re-center and refocus every once in a while.
Thank you. Yeah. And like, look at the channel, man.
He has five pro video, 1.4 million views, Apple event video, 1.5 million views, $50 versus
$50,000 computer, 1.3 million views, 1.9 million views on the why the YouTube video about taking
down, lowest rated PC, 1.3 million views, 1.6 on the tech upgrade.
Content has been killing it.
Yep. I understand the printer video isn't doing that well.
You still got 800,000 views on a printer.
No one even buys those. Show me anyone else who can get 800,000 views on a printer.
At a certain point, it's like, that's still pretty cool.
Like, yeah, it's not doing as well as the other ones, but it's a printer.
I remember using a line a lot like that when I would, back when I would pitch to brands,
I'd be like, especially IT brands, consumer electronics, you know, they can go to, they
could go to like a, okay, this is contemporary, right?
Or contemporaneous. So they could go to a Casey Neistat, you know, like Samsung or whatever, right?
Go to someone lifestyle, right? But IT brands, I would, I would often pull out this line.
I'd be like, tell me who else can get a million views on a hard drive.
I'll wait. Like it's, we are, I think we're really good.
And it's not, it's not just me. We as a team are really good at finding what's interesting about, about technology and being
excited about it and sharing that excitement. That's our superpower.
And watch that. And also watch everyone else's stuff.
I don't know. The tech space is cool and different angles are cool.
We say all the time, we'll say it now. If you watch review on something, watch other reviews as well.
Yeah. Like that's never going to change.
I want this tide. Not only do I believe that the tide lifts all the ships.
I want it to lift all the ships. The space is uninteresting if it's just a few players.
And that's how things slowly die. You, you want it to be vibrant and lively.
You want a lot of places for people to go for information, for news, for entertainment
content, all the type of stuff where the interest is this type of tech stuff.
That's how everything is going to be able to move forward best.
And that's how you, that's how you sow the seeds of the next generation of creators as
well. Like if we're just down and angry and negative all the time, how are we going to, how's
anyone going to get enthusiastic and replace me? Smashing on anyone for, for having a slightly different opinion.
There's no real space for, for new angles, new talent, new ideas.
New ideas. Yeah. So try to, try to promote the idea of, of different angles on things, different opinions
on things, different approaches to things. And then there's more of a chance that that person in their, in their bedroom with a camera
that had bought a new phone can make a video on it and, and start a career that way.
Jim's tech says the printer video was good. It was a bummer that the only laser printer you had was monochrome.
There are some good color laser printers out there that are cheap also.
That's a really good point. I think it was just kind of a limitation of the format.
We were trying to do that thing where the increments go up in 10x and at $400 you can
get a really nice tank based inkjet.
At $4 you can get a piece of garbage bubble jet.
We literally did get a $4 printer though.
It was like seven, six and a half Canadian dollars or something like that.
I forgot exactly what it was, but it was like 450 us or something.
And then at $40 you're not getting a color laser.
You're getting a black and white laser. So I would have actually really liked to show like a $60, $70 option.
That's like a color laser that will at least do like color documents or whatever.
We tried to kind of talk about it, but you're right.
You're right. That was something where we tried something.
So we tried this like increments of 10x format with the 50 versus 500 versus 5,000 versus
$50,000 computer thing. We tried it with the printers.
I don't think we have anything else in the queue right now, but we got to try stuff.
We got to try stuff. You could maybe do honorable mentions just to fill certain gaps.
That's an idea. Yep. But that's another thing is like, we'll have minor missteps here or there, but content
constantly changes and you're never going to perfectly hit every time we learn things
move on. That's part of the job. I think the content team is doing great.
I think they're killing it. And I think the views and general audience sentiment improving reflects that.
A random physicist says home feeder would be a great 10x video, like the $10 home feeder
based on what you did in Scrapyard Wars. You could do it.
That's one of the things with home theater stuff is like, well, that guy I think just
took pity on me or something. I don't know. Well, he knew who you were.
Oh, he didn't at all. Okay. Did the audio from that ever go in?
I don't think so. I haven't watched the full video. We have the whole thing audio recorded.
He had genuinely no coverage. Okay. All right.
All right. I'll allow it. I'll accept it.
He thought I was a very weird guy. But yeah, there's like old home theater equipment.
Sometimes people are just trying to move it on. That wasn't even old.
That was actually all kind of newer stuff. Anyways, that was weird, but yeah.
Yeah. Next.
Would you care for a second message?
That's got to be one of the all time. Yeah.
Let's go with something a little lighter this time. If you don't mind.
Let me just look. What is your opinion on geopolitics?
This might take me a bit to find one.
Would TechLink still exist if Riley didn't join LMG in 2019?
You talked about how it picked up nearly all the lost revenue
from LTT when LTT struggled. This one wasn't better.
Would LMG be entirely different now if there was no TechLink?
I love Riley. I didn't see a path toward having that high energy, irreverent,
yet informed style without Riley.
I basically had in mind what I wanted to do and waited until NCIX
went to crap and immediately slid into Riley's DMs.
Who else could be Riley? Yeah, I rather agree.
Tell me that. Riley is a unique pearl that has been grown
from a unique piece of sand.
Do that again, Luke? I'm just saying how you get pearls.
So you had to crack NCIX open and just like...
Yeah, extract the one valuable thing.
No offense to some of my former colleagues. There were other pearls.
They were just a little misshapen.
Next. Hey, DLL, as an ignorant American,
you don't have to say ignorant. My knowledge of America's hat comes from media,
like Pure Ponage, Letter Kenny, Shorzy, and LTT.
What Canadian-made media would you recommend?
Wait, Pure Ponage is Canadian?
I think they were, yeah. We don't even know what's Canadian.
That's a whole thing. Just assume most of it's American.
I think friendship is magic is mostly Canadian.
Yeah, the production was local.
Riley did a voice in it once.
Oh, that would make sense why he did that.
He was saying red-green, yeah. Yeah, yeah, red-green.
Fred Penner? Probably a pretty dated show at this point.
I don't remember, I just feel like probably.
Does anybody know The Beach Comers? Is that it?
No. Yeah, some people. It might be an old thing.
Is it really Park Boys? Is it really Park Boys Canadians?
Yeah. What? You know that?
Yeah. That's sick. Oh, yeah, Stargate.
What's that? My aunt was on Stargate? Stargate!
Stargate's sick. What makes it Canadian, though? I don't know.
Everything's filmed in Canada. Yeah, but is it culturally Canadian, really?
What is Canadian culture?
That's a question right there.
I think that's hard to nail down
in this part of the country. I mean, they have the same issue in America.
You can drive like 200 miles in America and be like,
I'm still in Texas. Yeah. Well, no, no, I don't even mean that.
I mean, you can still be in Texas if you're in a completely different country.
Yeah. Like, and it's very much the same here.
Like, in the lower mainland, I will literally go play badminton,
and I'll be like, oh yeah, I'm the token white guy.
Yeah. And then I can drive like, you know, four hours to five hours to Vernon
or something like that. And Yvonne and I will walk down the street and you'll have people be like,
What the? Yeah. An Asian?
Yeah. You know, like kids. Same province.
Dude, when she was there for her practicum, like little kids would play better.
Little kids, dude. They don't know better.
They're going to do what they're going to do. They don't know better or anything, but it's just like,
I don't know what that is. I think you get more unique Canadian culture
the more East you go. Yeah, probably more unique.
Yeah. Vancouver is such a mixing pot.
Yeah. Not always the most mixed,
but all the ingredients are thrown in. Oh yeah.
They're all in there. Yeah. Like I often tell people that it's like
stupid for me to travel for food. Oh yeah.
Because like, dude. Food in Vancouver, you just got to pick the like, dude.
If you know what you want, there's a city that will have amazing versions of that.
Like it's always a joke to me when people are like, yeah, you have to like,
eat the raw fish in Japan. I'm sitting here going,
in the same fucking ocean, right? And there's like plenty of Japanese people here
to like cut up a fish for me if I really need, if that's really what I'm into.
Like I just, like what are you talking about?
Dude, man. Like Indian cuisine,
Asian cuisine. Amazing. Amazing.
Like all of it. Middle Eastern, we kind of lack,
and Mexican. I was going to say Mexican. Our Mexican food size.
I am very jealous of this. Where?
Tell me. Don't tell me now.
I'm not going to tell you now. What is he talking about? You're going to like where it's located as well.
Really? I've been getting sick of where we live for food,
so I've been trying to find them, mostly just for you.
There's, I really, really like Mexican food.
Yeah. Dude, you can go to any random hole in the wall in LA.
Oh, dude, it's amazing. And you'll get this like giant thing.
It'll be like $8, $9. Okay, I haven't been out in LA in a little while.
If it's up to me, and I'm in the States, practically anywhere in the States,
I will basically just eat Mexican food. Oh, yeah.
Because I know I'm not going to get it when I come back. 100%. It's like you get like an enchilada here,
and it's like this stupid wimpy little thing. You go down there, you order enchiladas,
and it's like a whole plate covered in delicious like sauce,
and there's like unlimited pico and a little thing. You go get it.
Dude, the pico? Oh.
Properly made pico, properly made guacamole.
Yeah, dog. Oh, man.
So good. So yeah, we're lacking that.
Yeah, yeah, we... And to be clear, I'm sure you can get good Mexican cuisine in Vancouver.
Probably down in Vancouver, yeah. But what we don't have is like a huge Mexican community here.
And so that's the difference, right? Like you can get good Indian cuisine
probably just about anywhere, but you guys don't have Surrey,
where like it's cheap,
and it's everywhere, and it's like super authentic.
If you just pick a random one, it's probably going to be very good.
I don't go to random ones anymore. I don't either.
I only go to Ustadji. Dude, Masala and Langley. No, man.
Ustadji. Ustadji. I will challenge you to like a curry hole showdown.
Wait, hold on. Probably would not be the best thing to say.
I met like a hole in the wall restaurant
that specializes in curry. I know a place.
I did it.
Was that intentional? You have to tell me. Was that intentional?
It doesn't look like it was intentional. I know when it's intentional with Linus.
Oh, god. A pair of you.
Oh, sure. I think I'm like watering hole.
I know. Slash hole in the wall. Yeah.
Exactly. That's not curry that comes out of that hole.
That is not a curry hole.
Oh, man. I had a really, my favorite one was in the middle of Surrey
and they closed down. They changed ownerships. What was it called?
I cannot remember. It wasn't taste of Punjab, was it? No.
No. This was like a long time ago. Because they're Ustadji now in their way.
It's like actually better. Ustadji. No, they changed management.
Ustadji. Ustadji. Dude, the owner is a G.
I am definitely. There's like the weirdest pictures of him.
I've been to a couple of their locations now. Wait, is that actually their branding?
Is it Ustadji76? Yeah.
Oh, no. Scroll down. Scroll down.
Dude, the central city location. Keep going. Keep going.
Keep going. The central city location. Yeah.
What a G. Oh, yeah. The central city location has artificial turf on the wall.
What? Why? I don't fucking know, but it also has fairy lights.
I love this, man. They had Mr. B. in cartoons on the TV when I went in.
Look at the way he poses in front of his restaurants.
This is sick. Their branding is so inconsistent,
and they don't seem to give any fucks. That means it's good.
Their garlic don is perfect. The food looks amazing.
The picture. Oh, that looks so good. Their garlic don is flawless, and unlike McDonald's,
the food looks like that. No way.
It looks exactly like that. I will defend. I still think Missal is great.
We'll do both. Let's do it. That looks so good.
They pulled food out of their kitchen, and they took these pictures.
I swear to God. That's amazing.
What is this road? It's Canada.
We have one. Seriously, dude.
I love their branding. What is it? What are they?
Are they supposed to be? Oh, they're milestones. They look like these.
Yeah, they're locations.
So I didn't become aware of them until they replaced the place
I liked to go in Surrey Central. Yeah, this website decides amazing.
Oh, yeah. Like, what font do you use?
Yes. Conrad, take notes.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, apparently. Oh, okay. So that was a grand opening a while ago,
but apparently they're in Kamloops. So there you go. Anyway, you start G.
Does this site just scroll forever? What am I even looking at here?
It seems like this is their... Who is Buddy in the Jeans? Is this their Instagram?
Is this him? Yeah, I think that must be him.
That must be him. This is insane. Dude, it just never...
Incoming call. What is this?
They're videos. It's their food, yeah.
Dude. Okay. You start G.
We got to the end. Yeah. Anyway.
So yeah, I love Vancouver food.
Yeah, Vancouver food's great. Yeah. It's one of the best things this guy's got going for it.
Okay, like Chinese food. You can get everything from like,
like literal, like actual regional styles.
Yeah. Like Sichuan style, or like more like Hong Kong style,
like hot pot, Taiwanese style, you know, like you can get like, so like the China area,
you can get like different styles. And then you can also get like trashy American Chinese food.
You know, like you can get your sweet and sour pork and your oil drenched chow mein or whatever,
like its source. Yeah, it's great.
Okay, what are we supposed to be talking about?
I think we're done with that one. GLL, any way to vote on items,
we would like to see again in the store. I would love to see the black shorts again,
pre-orders or even Kickstarter style, where we need to reach a minimum order size.
Which black shorts, like the swimming trunks or the sweatshorts?
No, no, we had just like shorts. The sweatshorts, right? I think they were sweatshorts.
Yeah. I actually had a conversation with Nick earlier this week
about some of the ideas that we have
that we just don't know how feasible they are. Like we don't know what the order mix is going to look like
in terms of sizing. We don't know in terms of color.
Like is there the possibility of building our own kind of
Kickstarter style thing where we basically say, okay, yeah, like our MOQ for this is 2,000 units.
If 300 or 400 of you pre-order or 500,
like we set some threshold and we basically go, okay, yeah, here's where it's at right now.
Here's how close we think we are. Here's where we anticipate it will come out.
Are you down? Are you in? Yeah.
If you're going to anticipate when it would come out, you have to put a deadline.
Yeah. Yeah. And then we just refund if it doesn't make it.
Yeah. I think this person is describing a non-deadlined version, but yeah.
Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.
It sounds like they're describing more of like a,
like a threshold for resurrecting older items.
We don't have anything right now, but there is the possibility that, yeah,
an Astrop style or Kickstarter style that we could,
we could either bring back high demand items or,
or do kind of edgier or kitschier stuff that,
that we're really not sure about.
Is Drop just like a keyboard company now? Oh, no, no, no.
No, we have this stuff. Don't forget about headphones. Yeah.
Pop Gear says, okay, but how long would I have to wait after order?
Will it be like backpacks, six plus months? Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. Production times are weeks or sometimes months.
Shipping is like a month. It just takes time at sampling.
They got it. Like someone has to like make it.
Like it's one off, you know, and then it has to be shipped.
And then we have to like schedule the meeting and then we have to evaluate it
and then we have to compile our feedback. We have to send it back and then they have to like make another one.
Like it's making products is,
I feel like a lot of media,
and I don't just mean tech media. I feel like a lot of media
would have a very different perspective
if they had actually created anything.
Yeah. A lot of critics create nothing.
And it's definitely given me a better perspective.
Yeah.
More? Yeah. Or not.
We could just sit here in silence. I mean, that's an option. Yeah.
So excited to meet Monitor Koon.
Why can product, what? I have no idea.
Why can products that are still being purchased
out of stock on the store? I'm going to give you another crack at this one.
Go ahead, Dan. Why can products that are still being produced
be out of stock on the store? Why not just send it when it's made after I ordered?
We are generally not that into taking back orders.
Because our lead times are so long
that we end up creating negativity
out of an attempt to provide a service,
which is the ability to back order.
We act more like a manufacturer.
It's not like we have a water bottle factory. I don't own a water bottle factory.
But we behave like a manufacturer in that we place large orders.
We have to figure out our mixes.
We have to warehouse them. We have to market them, sell them.
We're pretty vertically integrated for a lot of our product stuff,
which means that our ETAs are dependent on
manufacturing and global logistics.
They're not dependent on whether our supplier down the street has stock or our other supplier has stock.
There is no other supplier a lot of the time. We're working directly with factories.
So it takes as long as it takes.
And you end up creating a lot of work for yourself
because no matter how hard you try to disclaim
that this is going to be three months,
people will message you and be angry about it.
And then heaven forbid it lasts longer. We'd rather just take your money once we have something in stock
or at the very least once we know with a fair degree of certainty
when we're going to be getting it. We've made exceptions and honestly,
it's worked out okay sometimes, but not as well other times.
Word 97 guy in Philippine chat said, oh man, when I was working in the snow plow industry,
we spent a year developing the crate it ships in.
Yeah. Things take time.
When you start getting into engineering and development and whatnot, things take time.
And you'll think it'll take six months
and then in month five, you'll go, oh, there's a big problem
that we didn't foresee and now it requires re-engineering or whatever.
The whole ISO standard for the size of the bits and the size of the sockets,
realizing that the entire rest of the industry was doing it wrong and we had to decide,
do we go according to SPAC or do we go according to compatibility
with the rest of the ecosystem? Even just making that decision is going to take a lot of time.
How could we see that coming? This stuff happens all the time.
So, like, I don't know.
Times of five, four. Hello, Linus, Luke and Dan.
As big fan of Overcooked,
I was wondering if Linus had heard of the game Played Up.
It's pretty similar. It's also published by some of the YouTubers
called the Yogcast. Oh, really? Yogcast.
I have not heard of Played Up. I know Overcooked, I know Moving Out.
My kids really like Moving Out. I play Played Up.
Overwhelmingly positive reviews on the scene. It's phenomenal.
It's great if you're, like, screaming at your friends.
Yeah. Cool. So good.
After having Played Overcooked, I haven't craved more of that kind of gameplay, really, personally.
But, um, yeah.
I might be down to try it sometime. But I also, I don't know, man.
Like, I'm old. Like, when I have half an hour to hang out and play a game,
honestly, it's a lot easier and more comfortable for me to just flip on a game that I already know how to play.
Dude, yeah. That you don't need friends for.
Got him. I mean, like, you got to get a group of people together
at midnight, right? Not...
Wow. You got to burn me like that. We both get...
First, you want to invite me to your pool party.
Yeah. Okay. Rude.
You weren't invited in the first place.
Turned off. He's off. Bye, Dan.
Bye. I'm sorry. Okay, welcome back, Dan.
We need someone to read the merch messages. Okay.
I need somebody to come to my pool party.
Please. Hello, WAN. It's happening in the rain.
Yeah, I met you at the LAN party. Just splash around on the floor.
Hello, WAN.DLL. With iPhone and Pixel promising plus six years of software updates,
do you think that they will try and push newer devices harder
or increase the benefits of the new devices and exclude from old theirs?
I think they're absolutely going to try to differentiate the newer products.
But I think that six plus years of software updates
is less an action that they are taking
to extend the lifetime of these devices and more an acknowledgement that that is
and is becoming the product lifecycle for phones
and they better just get on board or they're going to be left behind
and there's going to be no one to sell a new phone, no one who wants anything to do with their brand
when their competitors are supporting the devices for longer.
I think this is a response. I don't think this is proactive, particularly on Google's side.
Apple seems to have slowly acknowledged this over time.
You go back to some of the very earlier iPhones, they didn't necessarily get this nice long support period,
but for the most part they do now because Apple recognizes that the value
is in building out the size of the install base.
My company recently got acquired
and the newer organization is nothing but egos.
But I love my team and all the coworkers.
How would you deal with new leadership causing problems due to the lack of confidence and big ego?
It's the same story, man. You hear it over and over again,
acquisitions like private equity,
I don't know. It's tough. I'm sorry.
We've never been in that scenario, honestly. Yeah. I mean, I've definitely had friends
that have talked to me about how the company changed
after they're acquired and stuff. I can't think of too many versions of the story
where it ends real good. They exist.
They do. But people that it usually ends up real good for
is not the individual workers. Oh, no, but that's what I meant.
I'm only counting the stories I've heard from individual workers.
I'm not counting the ownership. Ownership does great when a company gets acquired.
That's kind of how it works.
What happens when you run out of bad shafts for the scribe driver?
Will we just be getting a scribe driver with the primo-nerling instead?
No, the primo-nerling is too rough for the whole pin grip.
What if I buy a screwdriver and then cut off the head and then machine it myself?
Why don't you just machine a pin at that point? Extremely expensive scribe driver.
That's probably worse. I like this. Yes. We've talked about this.
I live my life by that, Luke. You knew me.
I had a surprise. That's somewhat what I'm referencing.
We are for my... Never mind.
We have lots of supply of shafts.
What is it, four tons? This is not a concern for the time being.
We have a lot of shafts. However...
We're not concerned about not having enough shafts? We...
It's okay. Look, it's bad shaft. You're not missing anything.
It's rough.
Technically, it's ribbed.
Technically, it's knurled. I think that's worse.
Anyway, the point is we've got lots, but we have talked about this and we would consider
making a scribe driver from scratch, but I don't know.
We're years away from having that conversation. I think we've got plenty of scribe drivers.
You should take the...
You should take the branding from Nintendo, the new with the multi-colored things coming out of the new.
Do you know what I'm talking about? New Nintendo 3DS?
Yeah, new scribe driver. New scribe driver.
What's new about it? Technically nothing,
but it's made from new things? I don't know.
Yeah, a scribe driver. We'll keep mining for shafts.
Mine shaft. Shaft mine, shaft mine, shaft.
I don't know. There's plenty in the hill of shafts.
Shaft hill. Mountain?
Broken shaft mountain. That's a great movie.
Shaft mountain. Classic.
Hi Linus, Luke and Dan. This is the last one I got for you.
I was wondering if you think there is a chance that TSMC
will be broken up as a monopoly. Monopoly.
Particularly if Intel were to pull out of the fabrication space and focus on research and development.
So when you break up a company, you are breaking it up into
it's like an antitrust thing, right? You're breaking it up so that it cannot
utilize its advantage in one area
to give it an unfair advantage in another area.
TSMC, for the most part, just does one thing.
You can't break up TSMC.
Oh, hold on. It's so integrated.
I was going to say you could demand that there are TSMD and like tool development
breaks off from their pure manufacturing, but
in silicon, they're so
parallel and they're so integrated. I don't see how you could ever...
I also think that would quite genuinely be directly against the interests of the governments
involved. The government of
Taiwan is like not going to be interested in that.
And I don't care which one you ask, like the more pro-freedom
government that is currently in power or a more pro-China
government that if they were ever to manage to win somehow,
none of them would be interested at all
in disrupting TSMC's
current, just like March
to complete global semiconductor domination here.
Yeah, they're not going to disrupt that. That would be
unwise on like so many different levels.
That's it. Thank you so much for tuning into the land show.
Yeah. We're going to see you guys again next week. Yeah. Same bad time?
Same bad channel? Yeah. Bye!
Thanks for watching!