On May 14th at approximately 3.15 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok Response Bots prompt on X. This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated XAI's internal policies and core values. We've conducted a thorough investigation and are implementing measures to enhance Grok's transparency and reliability.
Getting, like, images of, like, the beginning of war games or something. Just, like, white text on a black background popping up at 3.15 a.m. Pacific time. I was trying to law and order that one. You know, there are two sides of the XAI white genocide controversy. One. Yeah, so real ripped from the headline stuff. Look, okay. At 3.15 a.m., I just see the hot dog skit from I Think You Should Leave. Because at 3.15 a.m., it had to be Elon, right? There's nobody else.
It sounds like he might keep a lot of people up around there, but who else would do something like this? I mean, he may have been standing over somebody's shoulder while he told them to do this. But, you know, this wasn't a lone gunman situation.
So for people who don't know, for people who aren't terminally online, for a couple of, like, good half of the day on, I think, Thursday, if you asked Grok about anything, it would... talk about that briefly and then oh by the way you know white genocide is and then some absolute fucking nonsense And yeah, so anyway.
elon made somebody make a change and it went bad and uh then they had to do a oh we have no idea how this happened but we're gonna don't worry we're gonna evaluate our code review process so the guy who says he can do whatever he wants is not able to submit changes that are unreviewed by people who actually know how the show works.
I'm surprised that they copped to it because it doesn't seem like accountability exists anymore. If you're in this position, you can just do whatever you want and nothing happens to you. I'm sure that the person who wrote this post got fired into the sun shortly after. But anyway, AI, it's great. Everything's going well over there. The AI farms. Grok is the Twitter AI. I don't know if we actually said that. Like the agent?
If you don't know that, that's good for you, I guess. Is it agentic? So you can add... I think I have stopped using Twitter entirely since Grok became a thing, but my understanding is that you add Grok, and then Grok will respond to you. And so the thing that happened out of this is people really quickly realized that they could ask Grok really ludicrous things, and then it would segue into white genocide as the Afrikaners.
oppression by the freed out of apartheid South African populace. You know, the most pressing and urgent and unifying social issue of our time. Yeah, so... Anyway, the responses were really funny because people were asking, like it was one of those things where somebody posted one thing and then there was a thread of 300 other responses. where they got Grok to respond like it was Jar Jar Binks, and they got Grok to be extra horny and all sorts of other stuff.
It was one of those ones where you were looking at it and you were like, Oh, this can't possibly be real. And then when you clicked over into the Twitter, then they were all real. So there is nothing. And I mean, nothing that can't possibly be real at this point. It's, it's, Hey Grok, how many times has HBO changed their name? HBO's streaming service has changed names twice since 2020 from HBO Max to Max in 2023.
And back to HBO Max in 2025. Already nailed it. That's three changes, and you said it was twice. Earlier services like HBO Go and HBO Now existed but are distinct. The rebranding reflects corporate strategies, not consumer demand. regarding air quotes, white genocide. And then you click show more to get them a bit from like, Or you don't. Or maybe you just don't click show more. Just don't go on Twitter is the takeaway. That's been working pretty well for me. I just looked up a Gentic.
Kind of curious how old that term is, if that's been around. I don't think that's been around every, I'm on Merriam-Webster. Agentic? Agentic. Yeah, that seems like a new one, maybe. It's extremely buzzy. That is the buzziest of buzzwords. Every single example they have of it in use starts from 2023 onward. I think that word was invented by the AI industry. Seems right. I'm getting old. I brought Crocs, and I don't hate them. Croc, turn this into a haiku.
claims of strife in the fields kill the boar stirs heated hearts Truth lies veiled, unclear. Yep. We don't need to talk about Crocs Crocs or anything else here. Yeah, no. No, it's really, it's pretty remarkable. I'm sorry, but the query about clearing sinuses seems unrelated to the provided analysis on white genocide in South Africa. Could you clarify what you're referring to for sinus relief? Common methods include, don't use these things. They're terrible. That's it. Let's start a podcast.
Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pot. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Welcome. Hello. It's week three of your civic duty happening. Week two. Oh boy. Actually. Yeah. I'm kind of feeling this thing. It sure feels like the end of week three or four, but...
Technically, there are two more full weeks on the schedule, although maybe it's going to end earlier. I don't know. You're not allowed to talk about it outside of the courtroom. Well, I don't know. It's weird. I keep weighing that in my mind. I'm definitely not talking about any details specific to the case. Yeah. But what about just like, I don't know, the amount of clutter in the courtroom or...
Does the judge have like a hey hang in there picture with the kit? No. No, but I would really appreciate some flair like that. They brought donuts yesterday. Really? Were you guys too? Yeah, so apparently it was Juror Appreciation Week this week. Oh, man, you picked a good week to be on a jury. I did not get a donut, though.
What? Trying to slim down a little bit before Summer Game Fest. Oh, well, I mean, you gotta get bikini ready for Keeley Key 3. Yes, I think I was the only juror not to get a donut. Wow, that's a, you know, those donuts were bought by Freedom. It was a struggle.
Yeah, I'm telling you. So yeah, I'm still locked in a courtroom most of the week, so we're going to do another little grab bag this week. Like last week, a bunch of tech topics that we've just been jotting down throughout the week, but some of them... are related to tech in the courtroom, so I hope that that flies.
That seems okay. It's stuff that would be common to literally any trial that anyone would sit in on. It's more just like here are some common courtroom elements, not anything about the thing that I'm in specifically. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that seems right.
So, yeah, so grab bags today. Next week will be Q&A, so if you have questions, send them to techpod at content.town or post them in questions seeking answers if you're in the Discord, and we will get to them there, and then we'll figure out if you're still...
If you're still in on week four, we'll figure something else out. Maybe we'll get Adam on to talk about Computex or something. Yeah, that sounds good. We also have, I had a couple things spill over from last week that we didn't get to last week, so... I have a little bit of a catch-up, like a follow-on on microstutter. Okay. One of the things, so I'm going to do some more microstutter testing out of the people like the PC World video quite a bit.
Yeah, I saw it being shared quite a bit, actually. Game developers were sending me notes asking questions about it because they were like, I want to use this to figure out why there's a huge hitch in such and such place in my game. I was like, I can help you. And I love that.
Let me be very clear here, I'm not condemning game developers in any way here, but I love that modern video games have reached a level of complexity that even the people who make them have to perform forensic analysis on them to figure it out. Pain points. Well, so the problem, one of the people I talked to was like, the problem isn't that we don't know how to use the profiling tools because the profiling tools are good and will tell you exactly what the problem is.
the problem is finding out where you should focus with the profiling tools okay sure and this is a really good Like if you do a playthrough of a level and go to all the nooks and crannies and then you overlay this graph on top of the video and watch the video at like 4x speed.
You'll see where the, where the hitches are. And then that gives you an idea of where to load up the profiling tools and go back in and do the thing. So it's like, it's systematizes something that you usually have to do a fair amount of, um, of, uh, deep dive analysis to get to. If people want to find out how to do this and I'm available, you can hire me. I can help you set up these processes for your studio.
You can find my information on the internet or just send me an email to the podcast email and I'll respond there. Sorry, this is a sidebar. Yeah. There have been a lot of sidebars in the courtroom. That word has wormed its way into my vocabulary.
Do you have a personal domain? Of course you have domains. I have a personal domain. Do you have one that is like... I do not have a consulting business website. Well, I didn't even mean that exactly. I think this is like Blue Sky has brought this question about.
The idea of turning a domain into kind of your username across It's currently really just one social platform, but the pitch for that service is like, oh, you'll take this domain and this social graph to all platforms and services built on this protocol. A lot of people are just registering firstnamelastname.com, for example. You are never going to get that, ever, ever.
No, probably not. Somebody has mine as well. I was not smart enough to register it 15 years ago when I had the chance. I could have registered my first name, last name domain in like 1997 yeah of course yes but like I chose not to it was just 70 bucks a year at the time it was really expensive yes but like it's kind of gotten me thinking about like
I guess a canonical personal domain is what I'm talking about. The one that is very closely identified with you as a person and as a brand. I hate that we have to talk about people and their brands, but you know what I mean? So I have one that's a private one that I just use for friends and family email and like, like, that I don't give to services and stuff like that. And then wheelsmith.fun is my brand. This is my Blue Sky handle. I don't have anything on that website, I don't know, I guess.
That's kind of what I was wondering. I was looking at bradshoemaker.blank this morning, seeing what I could get. I think I could get, well, I won't say which ones are out there, but I could not. Bradshoemaker.town. Very obviously could not get .com, .net, or .org. I would get .org. If I have one of the three, I would take .org, actually. Really? Yeah. More than a calm, non-commercial, you know?
What about EDU? What if you incorporated it as an education? I'm not so sure. We had to create a school when we started homeschooling my daughter. Really? You have to have found a school. It's like you just fill out a piece of paper and send it to the state. Does that mean you could get a .edu? I don't know the rules on that, but maybe. You should really look into that. Yeah, I got to think about what the...
If I realized I was going to get a .edu for it, I probably would have changed the domain. I would have picked a different name for the school. Yeah, does it have an official name, like an actual school name? Yeah, it does, but I'm not going to share it because it's my home address attached to it. Of course. Of course. But yeah, so... Yeah, I don't know. I...
So when I did the fast mail thing, when I switched to fast mail earlier this year, I kind of rethought my domains and looked at the ones that would make good, like, professional emails and i dug up one that had been sitting fallow for a decade and attached that and started using that as my main email and it's been really nice because email is actually usable when it's not when i don't get 3 000 spam messages a day But I don't know.
I don't know that I would, you know, I've been wondering if I should be doing a, if I should have a consulting site. I feel like I don't know what I would put on it other than, yo, I can help you ship games and just like a big picture of me. But, yeah. If people have thoughts about this, please let me know. I'm bad at this kind of, this is the kind of marketing I'm terrible at. Yes, I'm in the same boat on all counts.
domains blog slash homepage the whole thing but yeah I just I've got this on the brain because I just got an email from my registrar that all of my stupid vanity like joke domains are up for renewal in three days and I'm like maybe I should like Save 40 bucks a year and just get rid of these because I'm probably not going to use mydragula.com anytime soon.
Oh man, my Dragula.com. What you should do is put a gif of somebody playing Dragula in Fortnite. I could do that. And then just put that up there and just have that loop. Yes, I'm currently attempting to configure Nginx, the web server slash reverse proxy, so I could actually run multiple sites off of that pretty easily. Yeah, see, like, the perfect site for MyDragula is...
Something that just pulls a random video on YouTube that's tagged Dragula. Okay. All right. Let me think about actually putting that to use. Anyway, I've got a number of, I've got a couple of domains that could be my sort of like canonical personal domain, but I'm not. Yeah. I'm not sure how stupid to get with it versus how formal. Is .maker a top-level domain? I don't think so. Oh, wait. Oh, wow.
What I really wanted, .box came online sometime last year. Yeah. I really wanted shoe.box. That would be pretty good. But I looked into services that would sort of squat, or not squat, kind of camp unreleased CLDs, because they will announce
They will announce when new top-level domains are going to be debuted. I'm sure .box is going to be expensive, too. Actually, let me rephrase that. They don't announce when they're going to debut. They just say, hey, .box is coming at some point, but they never say, hey, at 11 a.m. Pacific on this date. So you basically have to pay somebody to try to snipe a short domain on a new top level as soon as it comes out, but I just didn't bother.
Anyway, back to microstutter, I guess. Yeah, so... so i'm going to do a do more videos about that because people were into it and use the same
same techniques and then kind of dig a little deeper on some stuff. The, um, the interesting thing, so the first one I'm digging into is, is like the myths, like the common, common was is like, is the common wisdom on microstatter accurate? Cause like the, the blurbusters recommendation not to pick on blurbusters because they're awesome but like the blurbusters recommendation is to set your lock your in-game frame rate to like one or two frames below the refresh rate of your monitor
So I've been experimenting with that. I also have been experimenting with stuff like figuring out what your 1% lows are and then locking the framerate to just over that. Ah, um... to see if that helps reduce the starter. That's an interesting idea. It definitely makes the computer run cooler than running just full bore all the time. Yeah, because I've noticed...
Modern games are starting to spike my CPU a lot, and I'm on air, so I hear it. I really hear it. The CPUs are getting worked. I had to adjust my fan profiles when I switched to those. I'm still testing the 9950. X3D, and I had to switch my fan profiles from 8 to 16 cores
because the whole computer was heating up if I didn't increase the fan speed more than I was doing with the 9800. So, yeah, so doing some of that testing, if people have stuff, if people have, like, I don't want to say myth-busting, but if people have questions about microstutter or perf that they would like some maybe some common wisdom tested or myths busted, let's say.
I don't think common wisdom testing quite rolls off the tongue the same way. I mean, we might have microstire mythbusters seems like a real good headline. I'll maybe shave the beard and do the goatee that week just so we... We get maximum crossover. People have questions, send them in, and I will add them to the list of things I want to test. I see PC game performance seems to be a bit of a hot-button issue again with the release of Doom of the Dark Ages.
People are... I mean, I don't know if it's performance as much as like... old hardware dying off. Yeah, well, it's the mandatory ray tracing. It's more the backlash I've seen is less from people who don't have ray tracing capable hardware at all, which would mean they literally just can't play the game. So let me mention real quick, Doom. The new Doom apparently has mandatory ray tracing as part of its lighting model, so if you have a 10-series GTX, you just can't play it.
Yeah, I think they're... Well, it works with AMD cars that don't have dedicated ray tracing hardware because that's brand new, just to be clear, right? Um, but you, you do like, there's about, there's, you're losing shader perf, right? When you do that, it's just, you know,
Same problem as the current gen consoles. Big trade-off. But yeah, that's what I'm seeing more complaints about is people who can run the game and are just not getting the best, you know, people that are, like, kind of just barely making 60 FPS, and it's... They have older, like 20 cards and so forth. Their min-spec is 8GB cards, starting at the 2060 Super or the AMD RX 6600, which is bonkers.
I mean, the 2060 is a six-year-old card at this point, right? It's getting long in the tooth. Seven, maybe. I haven't run the numbers myself, but I kind of spent a little time on the Doom subreddit reading arguments and, like, It sounds like this game has way more maps. I think this game has maybe double the maps. I keep finishing a screen.
Like, they put four levels on the level select in the new page between different screens, and I keep finishing a block of fourth encampment at the end of the game. and then there's another four levels after it. It's like 22 levels or something. It's quite a bit. I would love to hear the thought there, and maybe they'll do a GDC talk about this or something at some point.
I would love to hear if the ray tracing... helped them iterate on maps faster and make more maps than they would have in the past because they're not baking light maps constantly to make tweaks and stuff. Well, yeah, I'm really curious what their pipeline is like for this, because I wonder, I don't see evidence of lightmaps, like there's no weird... You know, no weird jaggy edges or stuff like that where you get the ray artifacts. Um...
I'd be shocked if there's not some light map on here to provide basic shadows and light, and then they're doing dynamic lighting on top of that. Yeah, but I mean, like, the compute requirements for making light maps. scales linearly, right? Like the fewer you do, the more time you save still, right? Yeah, that is definitely true. I mean, on the levels, some of these levels, I don't know how much you've played with that, but there's some really enormous open world levels. that um
That would be nightmares to run lighting calculations on. Yeah, I need to get back to it. I am moving to the PC. I started on PS5. That was the review code that I got. Yeah. And unlike 2016 and Eternal, I'm kind of feeling like that's not the best way to go. The previous two games, I had no problems playing through on the PlayStation first. Yeah, but here...
Here, I got several levels in on the console and was kind of feeling a little middling about it. And then I started over on the PC once it came out for real and was like, oh, this place is so much better, I might actually just start over here. So I played for reasons we don't need to get into. When they sent me a code, it didn't work in my main account because I pre-ordered and couldn't cancel the pre-order. And when I unlocked...
So I played it on my daughter's account for the first 10 levels and did all the testing for last week's PC World thing, and then it came out for real, and so I didn't have to keep switching back and forth between Steam accounts. I ended up just playing the first handful of levels again. That game's really good. Yeah. It is. It is.
Like, there's enough games out now that there's never a reason to, like, you should never upgrade your video card just to play one game because there's a million other games. But it's a, it's a hell of a, it's a hella one of those. Yeah, the time I've spent on PC, like, it feels so much better with a mouse and keyboard that I'm excited to get back to it there. I honestly kind of wish, like, I'm going to say this, and this is a...
You know, I feel like I'm 13 hours in and I think I'm like two thirds of the way through. I would be happy if I was done right now. Okay. I wonder if it's overstaying its welcome. I'm reaching a point where I'm using the same guns over and over again, and I'm intentionally changing up the way I do the combat because... I don't want to just play the same game for another 10 hours if that's how much is left. It's pretty good. It's a good one of those. Send me framerate myths you'd like busted.
You can hit me on BlueSky, post them in the Discord, or email them to techpod at content.com. Actually, let me... I apologize to anybody who's tired of hearing about Fortnite, but this is more of a technical thing than a Fortnite thing. But I'll just mention really quick, since we're talking about...
playing Doom on the PS5. The performance, well, okay, let me step back. I've been playing Fortnite at 120 FPS on the PS5 Pro. It has a mode for that. And like Fortnite is kind of mostly what I had been playing before I got my hands on Doom. I think it broke my brain. I mean, this is well known to be a phenomenon, right? I've experienced this over and over over the years, but when you play a lot at a certain frame rate,
You get used to it. It really scrambles your perception of lower or even higher, but especially lower frame rates. Like when I... This is probably the first time in my life I have ever said this, but when I had played a bunch of Fortnite and then I installed Doom and started playing it on the PS5, I could not tell for sure if it was running at 60 FPS or not.
Really? Yes. And looking at Digital Foundry, it is mostly 60 FPS. It sounds like it actually does drop enough that maybe I was seeing some legitimate stutter and it was not just my brain. Being so used to double the framerate that I couldn't tell anymore, but I was real... Or maybe, I don't know, maybe I'm just slipping in middle age, I don't know, but it was a really strange moment of...
staring at it going like, does this not perform as well as the last two did? Because the last two ran like butter on the PlayStation. On everything, yeah. I actually went and reinstalled Eternal in 2016 on the PS5 just to compare. But it was just a...
discombobulating moment for a second of like, I've gotten so used to this very smooth frame rate on this TV in this one game that it's kind of breaking me for everything else. Well, so one of the things that I've noticed is that the ray tracing stuff, shifts bottlenecks around in enough of a way that often something that would be efficient and good in a raster-based lighting world is not.
is not performant in strange and novel ways when you change to a ray tracing renderer. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know, that's weird. The perception, like I said last week, the big surprise out of all this stuff for me is how good people are at perceiving the microstutter stuff, even if the game... Like I said, averaging hundreds of frames a second. A handful of stutters here and there can make it feel really, really slow. And the consistency of the frame pacing on Doom...
The Dark Ages was shocking to me on the PC, at least. The other Fortnite subject, but really more of a tech subject underneath that, is that I inadvertently recruited AI-powered Darth Vader last night. Yeah, how did that... I got killed by AI-powered Darth Vader last night. Yeah, so they made a change. We're halfway through the Star Wars events.
They've added a thing where Darth Vader is one of the bosses on the map currently and now, as of a couple nights ago, when you go kill him and take his stuff, He then joins you. and follows you around the map and talks to you constantly with AI-generated Darth Vader voice.
Wait, is it the one in Samurai Solitude? Yes, it's the one in the... Well, is that what it's called normally? Right now it's called Samurai... The lower left corner of the map. Samurai Vader something something. But yes, it's the same. It's the same Darth Vader boss that's been there all month, but now... Now he follows you around and just talks to you constantly. Well, I was going to say, the real story is that they...
I mean, Disney bought the rights to James Earl Jones' voice before he died, presumably for a lot of money. It was in 2022, I believe, I read this morning that he had just fully signed over the rights to use his voice for Vader. Yeah, and so... What Epic did is they hooked up speech-to-text, feed that into an AI, and then do text-to-speech in James Earl Jones' voice.
So you can talk to Vader. Yeah, so he's like... With predictable results. Even if you don't talk to him, he's just narrating what you're doing constantly. Like a streamer? Well, but I mean, it's extremely formal. It's relatively convincing, as what Darth Vader might say, but he addresses you as your character model. I do like that. So I was using Poe.
It's like you seem to prefer Scattergun's Poe Dameron. He's constantly saying the name of your character model to you. Did you talk to him? Yes, I actually tried through the PlayStation controller asking him some questions. It's fucking weird, man. I don't know. The thing that shocked me is that within about...
I don't know, it seems like a couple hours of this going live yesterday. People had already gotten him to do some light swearing, drop a couple of slurs. Oh yeah, there's their foul-mouthed Darth Vader stuff all over the place. They claim they have hotfixed it already. Well, but the other thing is there's a lot of James Earl Jones voice generators out there. So you have a character that has no lip flap that you let people interact with dynamically. And.
There's nothing to say you couldn't pre-generate lines. If you wanted to have an instant viral video, just pre-generate him saying something truly repulsive outside of the game and then soundboard it into the game. Anyway, yeah. This is not the first time they've done something kind of like this, but this is by far the furthest they have gone with this concept. The Obi-Wan series, they did some like
I guess you'd call it sort of vocal puppeteering. You remember? Did you ever read about how they did that? In the TV show? In the Obi-Wan series, because Vader's in that, you know, the six-part Obi-Wan that came on YouTube three years ago now. But that was like... That was like using a voice generator to an actor. So that's what I mean when I say vocal puppeteering. That system is called Spreaker or something like that?
So you say something and perform it, and then it parses it and regenerates it in somebody else's voice? Sorry, I think Spreaker is a podcast platform, and it's a stupid name that sounds something along those lines. It's something like speech or...
speech or speaker with a couple of extra consonants in there. But yes, it's middleware that takes an actor's performance like they had somebody in that case they had somebody actually speak like actually deliver the lines for the show okay and then they turn those spoken lines into or they kind of clothe
the actor's performance in the vocal tones of somebody else, in this case, James Earl Jones. Okay. That's what I mean when I say vocal puppeteering. Somebody else performed the lines and then they just sort of... Transforms. the actual tone of the voice to sound like somebody else. It's so weird. Yes, but this is much further than that because you really can kind of just get him to say whatever.
Did it sound generated? I haven't played with him yet. I'd say the phrasing within a sentence is pretty good. Generally, when he delivers one complete applause in a sentence, It mostly sounds fairly natural. There are definitely spots, though, where it feels quite chopped up and pretty stilted. I tried asking him an actual in-character sort of question to see what I would get, and the answer was at least kind of plausibly Darth Vader. Okay. Did you call him an audio name? No.
The other thing is that you're still in the match when you have him following you around. Like you're still, there are still people gunning for you left and right. So like, Does he get in cars with you? No, he just kind of teleports around. Oh, so he won't ride in the car like a normal bot? Yeah, like if you hit a jump pad and go flying across the map, he'll just turn around after you land and he'll be there again. He just kind of ports.
That's how all the helpers usually work. He also leaps massive distances. He'll leap 100 yards to catch up with you and fight somebody. Does he heal you or anything? I didn't see. I just had him the one time and I didn't really... Definitely, people were going after him rather than me. That was the nice thing, is that they would try to attack him, and then I would just kill them while they were fighting the bot.
Look, Darth Vader took out two of us in a four-person game last night. He jumped in and whomped somebody off the side of the mountain and then lightsabered somebody else right down. But the AI speech stuff is... Fucking weird and creepy. I... I... So I'm generally, like I generally, you know, I support voice actors, right? I think games are better for having human voice actors as a general role.
This is one place where I'm kind of interested, like at least with this, they paid like James Earl Jones got a fair price for his voice, right? I would feel really gross about this if this was some voice actor, like the person who provided the voice for Siri, right? That person got a day wage for basically their voice being part of... Really? Well, yeah, because they did it for a startup, and then the startup got bought, and...
And it was a kind of sad story about this a few years ago. That hurts. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm less offended by this here because as we have talked about before, Fortnite is utterly shameless to begin with. Yeah. So, like, of course they are going to do something like this. That seems right. And it fits with this in a kind of weird way. Yeah. All right, I've got a whole column of bullet points here labeled courthouse tech. Do you want to talk about some...
I've just been kind of jotting down every little thing that's happened this week related to going to that place that is from a tech angle. I'm interested in court tech. Well, some of these are fairly tangential to that, but here was an eye-opening moment I had with my new mobile carrier this week. We've talked about doing an MVNO episode, but you have not changed carriers yet. We were waiting until we have both spent some time with them, and you're still on one of the big carriers.
MVNOs for people who don't remember mobile virtual network operator. They're basically the smaller boutique cell phone carriers that piggyback on the actual infrastructure of the bigger ones. I'm on one of the bigger... I think they're one of the bigger ones. I'll wait and we'll get into more detail if and when we do that episode. I've been pretty impressed with the one I'm on and I think it's one of the more well-supported ones.
I had a really eye-opening moment though this week because I'm using the absolute like bottom tier $10 a month plan because I've worked from home and I just don't need that much mobile data, right? I'm paying $10 a month for two gigabytes, but because I've been going in and out of an actual office type situation every day this month, I actually burned through that two gigabytes. Oh, yeah. And...
I just assumed, like every big mobile carrier out there, when you run out of data, you just get throttled down to basically nothing, right? It's like, oh, I'm going to get pushed down to like 100 kilobytes a second or something if I run out of data, right? Wait, what, did they just turn you off? They turned it off completely.
As in, my phone would not connect to cellular data anymore. So, I mean, the nice thing about the MVNO, though, is your month-to-month, so you can just up to the higher tier and drop back down the next month, right? Oh, yeah, in their defense, like,
Well, first of all, I had not enabled any of the, like they call it, like topping up or whatever. You can turn on a sort of threshold thing, or actually I don't think you can customize the threshold, but basically the automatic top-up thing is, it's like I think when you hit 90% of what you've already got allocated, they'll...
and you can set how much you want them to add on if you hit that. Oh, so you can buy a la carte gigabytes? Yes. It's like $2 a gigabyte, although they make you top up at least two, so it's a minimum of $4 to add another two gigabytes, but it's still super cheap. you can set that so it's like okay I'm going to pay $10 a month for 2 gigabytes unless
I run out, and then I'm going to pay another four to get another two gigabytes. Not a big deal. But the crazy thing is, like I said, you literally have zero data. This happened when I was on the street walking up to the bus stop. And I realized you literally can't open their app and load their interface to add more data. Wow. And they do offer an SMS top-up option. But that's an account security feature that you have to turn on, which I had not known about and thus had not done.
I also tried to add more data over SMS and couldn't. You have to use the admin account to open the app to enable SMS top-up. It was fine. I had podcasts on my phone. I just listened to a podcast on the way home. it was a really jarring moment of like oh my god they are serious about this like they're There are maybe some trade-offs for the $10 a month phone plan. If you don't pay attention to your data account or allotment and have everything configured to handle running out.
like you're just going to go without until you can get to Wi-Fi. It's interesting because the one I've been looking at, I was looking at the unlimited plan because right now we're on an 8 gig. shared verizon plan which is like as little as we leave the house it's all we need When we ran out, they were like, hey, get another X number of gigs for like $12 or something. And it wasn't 24 gigs. It was like a gig or two or something like that. But they just throttled us, so...
We went down to basically 3G speeds, which it turns out 3G speeds are basically unusable in 2025. Yeah, I would believe that. Yeah. I had a like 640 megabyte day. I don't know what happened. I have been streaming music from my Plex at home over the VPN. But that can't be... I don't... I did the math. It's like...
I think it was like 32 kilobytes a second, roughly, because I was transcoding the music. All my music is FLAC on my Plex library, but I had it set to transcode to 256 kilobit when I stream and oversell. I don't think it was possible for me to stream enough music that day to have hit 640 megabytes in one day. So sometimes iOS will just screw you. Frankly, I've had iOS just
Like Gina's phone one time, iOS went absolutely ham and used a gigabyte of data in like two days. Right. It was kind of like that. There's that Wi-Fi assist thing if you don't turn that off. So if your Wi-Fi is shit, then the Wi-Fi assist will use your cell service. Oh. So you have to turn that off. Oh, I need to look at that.
because maybe we'll get to this. This is actually another topic on my list. The courthouse Wi-Fi is a bit questionable. So I wonder if it was falling back to sell in places. It's possible. Oh, that's good to know. Okay, I'll look into that. Yes, that one will get you. It turns out. Alright, I'll talk about the Wi-Fi thing really quick. Yeah. They have this massive holding pin in the basement. uh kind of lower level you know below the first floor That's like a...
I bet that room seats 300 people or more. It's like the place they send everybody when a summons goes out and they call a whole group of jurors in for potential service. That's where they're directed to. It's the, hey... You go down in the basement, you sit there and you watch a video. You know exactly the room I'm talking about, right? It's a huge room. It's probably at least 300 people of capacity.
I've been going there for lunch every day. I've just been brown bagging my lunch and taking my laptop and working. Summer Game Fest is coming up, trying to book appointments and stuff. There was one day where they must have called a noon summons, though, because lunch starts at noon. And when I went down there, normally that room has about five people in it. But it was full. It was crammed full. And the Wi-Fi was utterly unusable.
on that day that's that's surprising and unfortunate and it made me wonder because i started wondering about where the bottleneck was it's like and there were no videos running when i got in there everybody was just sitting there on their phone and It's the same SSID across the whole courthouse, which is like a six-floor building. For all the jurors. Seven-floor. Yeah, or it's a public Wi-Fi. It's not even just for jurors. It's for anybody there who...
needs Wi-Fi on the spot. It's the big public open Wi-Fi for the building. Yeah. So... It couldn't have been a connection or a throughput capacity problem, right? What I assumed was it was probably not enough access points down there. Isn't that where the bottleneck would be? If they don't have enough access points, then they're trying to time slice the radio too many times for too many people? Is that...
I mean, that's possible. There's any number of places. It could have been upstream, out of the building. It could have been that they have the network. Like, often for guest Wi-Fi, you'll provision it so that it's like you know, like 10 megabits or something, so it's a small slice of your overall bandwidth. Well, like I said, though, I had been upstairs on that same SSID with no problems. Oh, so yeah, then it could have been more devices on that.
I don't think that room holds 300 people, though. It's a lot. I think it is. I did a quick eyeball count of the rows of seats. I think it's about that much. Yeah, most, it could be that they, I mean, it could even be something really stupid, like they ran out of IP addresses for that network, right? Yeah, sure.
People were getting kicked off or whatever. Amusingly, as soon as they made the announcement for the people who had been summoned to like, hey, we're going to run an orientation video, you need to watch this, the network immediately got more usable as soon as people put their phones down and started watching the video. Well, there you go. That's like a funny little...
like not exactly like corporate Wi-Fi, but it's the same type of thing. It's just public funded, right? Instead of like office Wi-Fi, it's public government institution Wi-Fi, which is probably going to be like
I'm absolutely not some private sector does things better than the public sector type of person, but I'm assuming this is maybe a little less well-funded than it would be in a big tech office building. I was going to say, it's funny because These days, getting a lot of people on Wi-Fi is a pretty tractable stadiums handle Wi-Fi by having special APs that have just a buttload of radios in them, right?
I'm curious. I wonder if they just don't have enough. I wonder if they haven't updated the access points in there. I wonder if you're on N or something like that. No idea. It's been a little flaky. Yeah, that sucks. Lucky Wi-Fi, bad. Can I ask you a question? Sure. You'd be like a phoenix, right? Sure.
Has your knowledge of Phoenix Wright games helped you on jury duty at all? Oh, I haven't actually really played a Phoenix Wright since probably the first one came out. Oh, okay. The source of all of my knowledge about what might... transpiring the courtroom comes from law and order. Oh, okay, okay. And secondarily, Boston Legal and the practice, and I'm trying to think what other...
I must have watched some other courtroom stuff. It's mostly Law & Order, though. You GameSpot folks were real Law & Order-y. Just as a group. Oh, yeah. See, we weren't... I was never a Law & Order guy. What? I know. What? I know. I may be seeing... Maybe seen one or two episodes of Law & Order over my life. What are you talking about? Yeah. Which ones? Who can say they're all the same? What?
The criminal justice system has two components. That's what I know about law and order. What are you talking about? The cops and the judges. That's how it goes, right? Yes, you're right. Yeah. The Lenny Briscoe, Jack McCoy era of Law & Order is... I don't know what that means. Okay, do you know who Jerry Orbach is? Yeah, I love Jerry Orbach. He's great. He's on Law & Order. Yep, that's right. Sam Waterston is.
Yeah, I'm familiar with his work. Orbach was the detective. I mean, the cast has cycled through a bajillion people. I mean, when you look at the Wikipedia page for cast people who've shown up on Law & Order, it's everybody who's ever worked in Hollywood as a day-right actor. And a lot of New York stage actors, like a ton of New York actors also. Absolutely. Absolutely. The overlapping era of Jerry Orbach and Sam Watterson is the era of Law & Order.
I got a really good YouTube short the other day that was actors being interviewed on late night talk shows and talking about Law & Order and not knowing how many times they'd been on Law & Order. And it was like... Four or five times in some cases. I believe that. Yeah, it was pretty good. It's pretty good. Okay, so what other tech is in the courtroom, Brad? Everybody has 3DSs, and you tap the screen to object. That's my understanding. That's right, and that's exactly how it works.
The only other thing I'll get into right now is I've become a little bit fascinated with the... the court reporter that takes the written record of what everybody says. Yes, somebody has to sit there and I assume, I assume, like, I mean, this is absolutely the case in the U.S. I assume most legal systems around the world have an equivalent of this. More to the point, I don't think anybody has moved to just pure audio recording.
I think there's probably good reasons for that, but I'm not a lawyer. Yes, I am coming to believe that is absolutely the case, that you do want a human filtering the record of everything that's being said in there because, like, microphones are not super always reliable. Other noises might happen at the time something is said and then it's inaudible and that's going to be useless.
You need a human with an actual brain to parse what's being said. To say, hey, stop and say that again, please. Which happens quite a bit. And somebody who's just filtering the record to make sure it's intelligible to other human beings. I've always been interested in the input method with the stock stenographers because it's cording, right? Sorry, it's what? They cord the keys each. Maybe we're on the same page here because I kind of watched the...
I watch the fingers of the reporter occasionally because I'm very curious about how it works. And I don't know what cording means exactly, but they do sort of look like they are just pressing every finger at once constantly. It's chording. It means exactly that. It's like playing a chord on a piano where you press two keys instead of one. Okay, so is it a lot of modifiers and so forth? I don't... Well, so...
So, here we go. The Wikipedia article says multiple keys are pressed. The extendo keyboard has far fewer keys than a conventional alphanumeric keyboard. multiple keys are pressed simultaneously, which is known as cording or stroking to spell out whole syllables, words, or phrases with a single hand motion. Okay. Which is why you can do real-time transcription or live closed captioning, stuff like that.
but the keyboard doesn't contain all the letters, so you do combinations that are substituted for missing letters, and there are different schools of thoughts about how to record various sounds. It's interesting because this is the primary... um this is the this is the like like the the modern 104 key keyboard and all of its variations
and QWERTY in the US, and AZERTY, and all the other different keyboards, like, those became relatively standardized based on your language. The Steno thing is the only other, like, text input device. that I know of that's super common these days. Like there was a moment where like T9 and phone keyboards got kind of weird. Yeah. But for the most part, it's steno and typing and that's pretty much it. Oh yeah. Okay. So you've sent me a picture of the layout.
of the stenotype machine, and it's just letters, it's just characters. Like, I was wondering if the different keys might actually correspond to, like, at least a few of them might correspond to specific, like, conjunctions and articles, you know, like the and and and stuff like that, but it looks like it's just letters and you're just shorthanding. Well, so it's roughly phonetic is the idea. So like the... Like the K is used for the hard C and the S is used for the soft C and stuff like that.
Yeah. And so what you were describing earlier, does that mean there is not like one industry standard shorthand format that people use? I wonder if different stenographers kind of develop their own. There are schools of stenography, so there's different ideas about how you should do this. The Wikipedia article says they're known as theories. That's not the word I heard.
It's kind of like a typed shorthand. Do you know what shorthand is? Are you old enough that you know that? I remember hearing about it when I was young, but I'd never seen what it looks like exactly. In the 60s and 50s and 40s, if you went to secretarial school... Oh, sure. Then you would learn to type and you would learn to take shorthand. And shorthand was a kind of an abbreviated version of...
It's a way to take notes very quickly so that you can write as fast as people can talk. Also very personalized in a lot of cases. People would make swirls and stuff like that that would mean specific sounds. But it's, again, a phonetic thing. So you're recording the phonemes rather than the actual words. Yeah, so beyond the actual art of stenography, because you can go look up on Wikipedia, you can see stenotypes from probably, what, 100 years ago. They're all mostly made out of wood and metal.
Yeah, they look like Morse code. dupers, but with 10 keys instead of one. But beyond the actual process of stenography itself, I've been curious about how it's evolved and where the... like where the tech angle is now. In this case, it looks like just watching the reporter work. It looks like it just goes USB into a laptop now. The actual work is, of course, the typing is being done on the stenotype, but then every time something has to be read back, they have to go to the laptop.
Yeah, I wonder... Are they just reading their shorthand and translating it on the fly as they speak, or I wonder if there's any automatic conversion of the shorthand that happens on the laptop? I mean, I know you can't answer that, but I wonder if to some degree the shorthand is getting turned into legible words.
on the laptop. It's interesting that you ask this because while we had to take a quick break and I did some light research, there's stuff called Plover, a software called Plover that's part of the Open Steno project. Huh. Of course, of course there is an open...
Yes, go on. Well, so the interesting thing about all of this is that the Steno rose out to create a hardware... hardware that was capable of writing shorthand right um so shorthand was a phonetic basic it was like i said when i when i first started working there was a daily conversation where somebody would like
all of the PAs would gather around and they'd be like, hey, who here knows shorthand? Can you look at this and tell me, can anybody tell what I wrote down here? Because they can't remember. And then you have to get the notes out. The minutes? Yeah, the minutes or whatever. and everybody would gather around, everybody would look at it, and then I would be like, no, I didn't learn shorthand because it's the 90s.
and they'd look at me like I was out of my mind, and then, you know, you'd move on. So, okay, so Stenos came out of that. Stenos came out of a way to phonetically write quicker. The California Steno Association. California Court Reporters Association says that people can go up to 375 words per minute. Wow. With steno machines, fast people.
Wow. You're tested at up to 225 words per minute and have to have really high accuracy. Yeah, sure. Of course, there would be qualifications for getting jobs like this. I didn't even think about that. But of course, they need to prove a minimum competency, right? They have different types, too. There's literary, jury charge, testimony, and other things as well. This is intense.
They also use Steno machines for live closed captioning, I assume prior to the rise. I bet that we're doing more of that with machines now because the AI captioning seems pretty good these days. Oh, interesting, especially back in the 90s when you would watch closed captioning. Yeah, there's always that delay.
Well, often they just didn't close caption live stuff at all in the 90s. Like the 2000s, you'd start seeing sports sporting events captioned in Super Bowl and stuff like that. Right, but A, it would always lag behind. Yeah. behind the broadcast and it would have a weird cadence to it that actually...
In retrospect, it very much seemed like somebody typing it out. Yeah, somebody keeping it going. So there's a couple of open source projects around this because like many things like this, stenography machines used to be really expensive because... There wasn't a huge market for them because you buy one in your lifetime and it lasts a really long time.
The Open Steno project has free open source software and hardware for stenography, and their hardware steno machine looks like a split 20-key keyboard. Yeah, I've seen that. Stenographers are really hardcore. They don't have the letters marked on the keys ever. Nope. and Plover is the software that they wrote that translates the open source... cording into steno cording into words on the fly. Okay. And you can apparently do your own...
you can do your own business. So you can set it up with your own macros and stuff like that for things that you do quickly. Yeah, Plover, it says. This Plover rhymes with Plover. So wouldn't that be Pleaver? Maybe? I don't know. Anyway, I did look around a little bit. Okay, I'm not going to buy one of these, but I did look, and I found some stenotype machines that look pretty similar to the one I saw in the courtroom for like $300 now.
Yeah, I bet if we go to the, I bet I've seen these at the electronics free market and I just didn't realize what they were. Also that. But it seems like if you really wanted to get into stenography, you could probably just buy a machine for relatively cheap at this point. I mean, also, I bet that the rise of the DIY keyboard stuff has made these, because they're just ortholinear ones with weird keycaps. Yeah.
um it's interesting that they went ortholinear i guess like if you think about it you're a stenographer your entire life is in your hands so if you're not good and fast And if you injure your hands, you're going to be unemployable. Gosh, yeah. So it makes sense that they would be ortholinear before we were, because all the...
Key jumping is what jacks us up, right? To say nothing of just RSI, like on the job, let alone something happening outside of work. Yeah, 375 words a minute. That's crazy. That's impressive, you know? People talk pretty fast sometimes. It's funny because we were talking about this at PC World the other day. It's amazing how fractally complicated almost everything that's a part of society is like like i had no i had no idea that stenography was like core stenographer machines were a were a
downstream evolution of handwritten shorthand. But it makes perfect sense. It sure does. Anyway. There's tech all around us. There is everywhere we go. Speaking of tech all around us, A couple of months ago on the Q&A episode, somebody had gotten a letter that said, hey, I got an email from Google that said my Nest thermostat is being end of life this year.
uh what should i buy to replace that and i said oh man that really sucks i have a nest thermostat mine's pretty old too good thing mine's not getting end of life this year and then last week i got an email that said hey Your Nest thermostat is getting end of life this year. Yikes. What does that mean in practical terms? Does it become literally inert? Like you can't do anything with it? Or does it just stop getting support?
So, yeah, it just becomes a dumb thermostat at that point, and it's not connected to the internet, so I can't change it from my phone or with my smart home stuff, presumably. So they are. They are cutting off significant features, then? Yeah, they're killing significant features. They're also... But if you walk up to the thing in the hallway and turn the knob, then it'll continue to work.
I don't actually use a ton of integration with the Home Assistant and the Smart Thermostat, just because the Nest has generally been pretty good about... turning on when we want it on and turning off when we want it off and with the exception of when we're recording podcasts in the morning early and it usually turns the heater on to warm up the house before we get going.
It's generally been pretty good. That said, I've started hunting for new thermostats and like the two kind of leading contenders in the smart home community stuff. Generally, when I'm looking for new Internet of Shit stuff to put into my network, I go to the Home Assistant community forums and kind of do a quick search to see what people are recommending in that category.
And that's mainly because the main criteria I have is that I want good home assistance support. And if it has that, I can figure out the rest of it. Sure. I don't want something that's going to require an internet connection this time. If I buy one that just connects to Home Assistant, it'll keep working forever. And if I buy one that requires some internet bullshit, then it'll stop working when they decide to support that bullshit.
There are two kind of leading recommendations, Echobee and Honeywell. Honeywell, of course, has been making thermostats for a bazillion years. Echobee is kind of upstart, and they make things that look more modern and appley, for lack of a better term. The downside of the Echobee one is that they used to have a developer program that would give you an API key that let you integrate directly with the thermostat.
And now you have to go through their HomeKit integration to connect your thermostat, which is probably fine. Yeah, I don't know. That's already starting to sound a little more closed ecosystem than you might want if the goal is for this to remain open forever. Well, let me tell you the problem with the Honeywell, which is that it uses Z-Wave, so it would be the only Z-Wave device on my network. What if you...
Just found an open source project where you could make your own. Is there an open source thermostat project? Maybe. I typed open source thermostat. In fact, apparently I googled this a month ago and had forgotten about it because I was thinking about this exact same issue. Oh my god. Maybe you brought it up at some point. Estia Pi appears to be. If you don't have rude access to your thermostat, someone else does, is the tagline. I don't...
What are your thoughts on, I'm scrolling, I'm not able to figure this out, but I think I'm guessing it's like probably Pi Zero or compute unit based. My guess is Pi Zero does have a nice box. You can 3D print when they have plans for 3D printing a case for it. Mm-hmm. I'm kind of anti-plugging open source and Internet of Things things. I want my thermostat to be UL certified, I think. Yeah, that's fair, actually, when temperature control is part of it.
Yeah, I did a, I did a, I did a, um, I have a, uh, sprinkler controller that's open source. This is the open sprinkler project, I think. Okay. And that seems fine because the worst thing that happens then is I flood my backyard. Yeah. Still not great, but at least it's not catastrophic home damage, hopefully. There you go. So, just to be clear, there is one Honeywell that is Wi-Fi. The newer ones are Wi-Fi.
it's unclear how well those are supported. And I got to find out if I can do those without mediating through the, through the network. Yeah. Okay. How about this ESP 32 thermostat? What do we got? I haven't seen that. Let's see a picture. Smart thermostat. No, this is just a GitHub repo. Smart thermostat, open source, ESP32-based thermostat that has some useful intelligence is the tagline here. Oh, some useful intelligence. Looks like this is still being...
Yeah, this is still the latest update March 10th. This is definitely still going. Smeisner. um yeah like i i'm not a versus i want like so here's the thing I'm not the only person who uses the stuff in my house. So I have to have something that when I replace something with something that's some Internet of Things bullshit, I have to replace it in such a way that it looks like a normal human device and it's not like something that...
The home assistant yellow is fine because it's hidden in the bottom of the closet and nobody normal ever has to look at that thing. Yeah. But a clear plastic box isn't going to fly in the... the situation that we're in. Yeah, there are some screenshots of the interface of this ESP32-based thermostat, and it definitely has not had a nice UI pass on it yet. Yeah. I mean, it is a UI, but it's very much like a functional programmer UI.
That's my concern. I think this Honeywell T9 is probably the way I'm going to go. It's like $200, which seems kind of expensive. I mean, thermostats used to be like $6 because it was just a piece of metal that was glued to a piece of metal that expanded at a different rate. It's all just electrical at that point, right? I don't know why, but for... Through all of my homeowner fantasies, my daydreaming about what would I do if I had a house that I could do anything I wanted to.
For some reason, installing a smart thermostat myself is like the go-to first thing I would do. I'm going to tell you it's really nice on those like cold barrier mornings when my drafty ass house is, is 60 degrees when I wake up in the morning and I roll over and I'm like, uh, And then I talk to my phone, and I'm like, hey, set the heat to 65, 70. It's real nice. Also, just outside of the practical utility, I've always been fascinated by hooking very modern tech up to extremely old tech.
At that interface point, specifically the point where a modern Wi-Fi enabled box with computing power in it touches whatever electrical leads. are built into your wall that, especially, like, in your case, have been there for, what, 60 years? 70 years. 70 years, you know what I mean? Well, no, those I re-pulled when we put out. Okay.
But the point remains, you know, it's still like, it's much older elemental technology that is more just run by electricity and heat and things like that. You know, physics, and not computing you know like i just kind of i'm fascinated by that point where the old and new sort of touch each other and work in concert like i like i see a similar thing with fewer like upgrading the head unit in a very old car you know oh yeah like i mean and you know
from like the 80s or whatever you know when they used to have just the standard like what is a single den They had a singled-in slot, and then there were vendor-specific head units. You could go to Crutchfield, and you could buy a bridge, basically, that rewired your... your wire bundle to whatever had you bought. So it's that exact same principle of taking a very old pre-computer car and sticking a modern Bluetooth
CarPlay-ish sort of head unit in it. It's just that union of old and new interfacing together is really cool to me. So I realized that I do have one criteria for this, which I'm trying not to buy things that are cloud-mediated for the Home Assistant install. So I'm trying to only buy things I can connect to directly inside the house, A, because then they're more future-proof, B,
then the response time is really fast compared to having to go up to the cloud and wait on their cloud service. Yeah. Also, I'll throw in a third advantage, much smaller, in fact, no attack surface. Yeah. So the Ecobee one using the HomeKit integration. Is local push? The Honeywell one requires cloud polling.
I think that increasingly is a deal breaker for me. Anything that requires you to have an off-site account on some off-site server to make a local device work, I think is just a non-starter for me now. Yeah, the Ecobee ones look cooler too. Which is important because of course, looking cool is the most important criterion. Well, I mean...
For something that ends up in the bottom of the closet, no. But for something that ends up in the top where I look at it all the time, it kind of matters. Oh, yeah. No, I'm not being facetious. I agree with you. Oh, yeah, yeah. It also looks like it's cheaper, which goes a long way, so there you go. Anyway, now I just need to get a house and I can join you in this smart thermostat adventure. Can we talk about DRM real quick? Sure.
So Nintendo, we talked about the Nintendo virtual carts a couple of months ago. and they made another change that they didn't really advertise along with this. I saw your thread on Blue Sky about this. This sounds like some nonsense. It's some bullshit. Like, so, okay. So, for a long time, the recommended way of not having to buy double copies of every game that you have for the Nintendo Switch, if you have two Switches, we've talked about this before,
is you set up one as the primary, which means it can be connected. It can play all the games that are on your account when they're downloaded without internet access. So like my daughter's Switch Lite is the primary switch on my account. Because it means that any account on her Switch, including her own, can play any of the games when she's in the car or wherever. It doesn't have to have internet access, right?
And then my Switch, the one that we bought originally, can only play Switch games when it's connected to the internet, which is fine, because everywhere I play Switch games, I'm connected to the internet, pretty much. You could play multiplayer games. That technically gave you a way to play multiplayer games with one downloaded copy of the Switch game, which meant when we all three have Switches, because we all bought Switches during the pandemic,
I can load up Mario Kart. My wife has a physical cartridge for Mario Kart, and my daughter has Mario Kart. We can all play together on our own devices, which was really nice because we don't have to do split-screen stuff. It feels fancy. With the virtual cart change, They still let you set a primary and a non-primary switch, but they don't let you have two copies of the same game active at the same time anymore. Which, if that was the way it was at the beginning, I would feel okay about it.
but given that's how it is at the end of this console's lifespan, changing this in the last days of the Switch 1 feels really icky to me. That's pretty rotten. If they had only rolled this change out on the Switch 2, Yeah. It's like, I mean, doing business, nobody would be happy about it, but it's at least understandable. Like, like console makers use a clean break to a new platform all the time to roll out maybe less than friendly policy changes. But yes.
rolling it into the Switch after eight years is not great. Well, but also, the Switch 2 has a new system for solving this problem, right? Because this is what game share is. Oh, right. But in that case, is it not... streaming video to the other Switches. I thought that's how it was sharing the game with other Switches, was that it was actually doing all the rendering locally and sending it over? I'm not sure. I think that's It's weird because it says you can do them over the internet too.
Which, I mean, you can stream video over the internet, I know. Right. But it's unclear to me if you get split screen or if you're getting each getting your own view at that point. Oh, sure. Yeah, because, I mean, it's not like one Switch can render three different players full screen views or anything. Yeah, but... Well, I mean, they might be able to. Who knows? They would have to do work to do that. They would have to specifically design it to reduce the requirements to do that.
Yeah, but a Mario Party is fine if Mario Party runs at 30 frames a second. Who cares? I'm thinking Mario. You couldn't have four players at full quality playing Mario Kart off of one Switch at one time is what I mean. Yeah, and it's weird because I think Mario Kart is on this list, but I don't see it listed on their game share page, so maybe it's not the new Mario Kart.
I'm fairly upset about this and I'm not buying another fucking copy of Mario Kart. This will be the fourth copy of Mario Kart 8 I bought, I think. Maybe just hold off at this point. We play Mario Kart like once or twice a week usually. It's a family activity. There's a new one coming. I guess you're probably not going to have three Switch 2s in the house anytime soon, but...
But we can game share out to the other two. That's the point, theoretically, at least. Anyway, I'm annoyed. Nintendo, I like... I didn't, I didn't, I was tempted to call people we know who work at Nintendo and be like, Hey man, this is bullshit. And I chose not to responsible me, I guess.
They probably know, too. I know they know, but I'm happy to give them more data points because he's got a bunk there. Anything else? Anything that's a good place to wrap up? That's probably a good place. I think we have... Grabbed a bunch of topics out of a bag? Yeah, sure. I'll move my fast mail check-in to the next week list if we do another one of these. Okay. Q&A, remember. Oh, yeah, Q&A next week. Brad, I got a question for you before we go on. Okay. Goodbye, Jar Jar. No.
Jar Jar's in the store, man. I saw. Should I buy Jar Jar? So it's expensive. 1500 V-Bucks, I think. I couldn't put my credit card in fast enough to buy Jar Jar last night when I saw Jar Jar was in the store. People are mad and I kind of get it because they're selling Jar Jar and Darth Jar Jar separately, not as like an alternate skin on the same purchase. It feels bad.
It's bad. And again, these are how much... I don't know what the conversion to V-Bucks is, but I mean, these are... 1,500 V-Bucks is like... Hold on. It depends on what amount of V-Bucks you buy. Yes. I'm just typing dollar conversion right now because I can never remember, and I don't want to say this wrong because people will yell at me. I guess I think it's somewhere between $10 and $20. Jar Jar was $1,800 V-Bucks? $1,500. $1,500. 10 bucks. That's the right price for a skin. Yeah.
I guess. I mean, there's probably a fair amount of work that goes into each of those models, but it's... I'm going to tell you, making the ears flap. His mouth doesn't move, though. When I sang them, I wanted to see some really horrible lip flap, and it wasn't happening. That might be a deal breaker. I was thinking about getting it. I've got 900 V-Bucks off the battle pass. There you go. You'll get another 100. I don't know what the smallest increment you can buy is.
It's like five bucks. I would maybe spend five bucks to get Jar Jar. I feel like we rolled last night with a squad full of Jarjars and one corncob, and it was pretty amazing. Okay. All right. I mean, I'm doing well, though. I'm on track to get the Palpatine and the alternate Palpatine and the General Grievous, so I'm already going to be pretty flush.
Look, I'm, I'm too, like we could log off this podcast and spend like 20 minutes and I could get, I could get sheave. I can fully unlock my sheave. Yeah. I'm on the cusp. Nice. Right there. Yep. I'm getting there anyway. Time well spent and really just excellent use of our free time. It's a disaster of a game. It's a, look, I like, I, I've said it before. I think Fortnite, I would feel worse about Fortnite destroying video games.
if it weren't for that it's a pretty good game that's pretty fun they do a nice job managing the the whole thing like managing that kind of live service game i've played a lot of these and The ones that do it badly, you know, and this one they do quite a good job with, I think. So shout-outs to Fortnite, I guess.
I just, I think when you, we were playing with my daughter the other day and when you were explaining how Fortnite used to be a punchline because nobody knew what the game was and Epic had been working on it for a hundred years. My daughter didn't, she was like, was that thing that Uncle Brad said true? And I was like, yeah. Yeah, that's how we felt about Fortnite before it came out. Interesting.
She didn't really react in the moment. She thought you were messing with her. Really? Yeah. No kidding. She's like, this is the biggest game in the world. How is it possible that, yeah. Just to fill in the detail, the story I told was that... I remember meeting with Epic when they brought that game around on preview tour well before it came out. Because, yes, Fortnite had become a punchline on our podcast because they had been working on it for so long without putting anything out.
When they brought it around, it was just that building, crafting survival game, and that was it. And it was like, oh, I guess that's finally coming out, and the world will forget about it in two weeks and move on. Did you ever actually play that? Yeah, no, we played it. They brought it, and we played it. We might have done a video on Giant Bomb of that preview tour. Let me look that up actually really quick. I'm very curious to know. Talk amongst yourself. I...
Yeah, so I have access to Save the World, and I think I played once maybe with you guys. But I don't think we did a video. I can't remember. Was that before... It came out before PUBG, right? The Save the World thing. Yes. Actually, it was around the same time. Okay, so we did an Unfinished, which was our, hey, we play games with developers before they're out who bring them around to the office. in July 2017. So didn't PUBG come out before that?
Yeah, PUBG came out in April. Yeah, so I think Fortnite Save the World came out after PUBG, but then they got that Battle Royale mode in there real quick. They have 102 Fortnite videos. I guess that's a lot of Abby's. Yes, but I remember that did not sit super well with me at the time. How kind of. Shamelessly they just picked up Battle Royale from PUBG and shoved it into the game.
Oh, you mean the thing that they lifted Disney Infinity, what was that thing? Disney Infinity. That was their Skylanders take with the plastic figures. Look at the art style of that Skylanders game. Of course. Anyway, whatever. The shamelessness with which they shoved a Battle Royale mode into PUBG, or into Fortnite rather, would only foreshadow the utter shamelessness that that game would descend into in every respect. Is Fortnite a game? That was the joke. That was good. Anyway. Yes.
Yeah, so she thought you were messing with her, so I set her straight. That's funny. Nothing but serious business here. If you thought we were messing with you, consider signing up for the Patreon. You can go to patreon.com slash techpod. You can follow the Patreon. You can support the show. We don't take ads, so we appreciate everybody's support a lot. Um, and it's five bucks a month to get access to the patron exclusive episodes, which are.
shockingly similar to these episodes we've done while you've been on jury duty um we also uh you look you also get access to the discord which is full of wonderful people when you join They play a video that folks in the community made of my foo show had... reciting the lines from arriving at city 17 and half-life 2 which I assume anybody under the age of like 35 isn't going to have any idea what's going on with that. And I also, I don't know exactly how I feel about Becoming TechPod's brain.
Yeah. You know, here we are. Yep. It's a well done video though. It's a really good video. I recorded voice lines for it, so I guess I'm complicit. But yeah, that'll do it for us this week. Thanks to all of our supporters. But a very special thank you to our executive producer, to your supporters, including... Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippitt, Bunny Fiend for FIA President,
Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kamek, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Thank you all so much. Yes, thank you. FIA president is an F1 racing thing also. Ah, okay. I learned that as a result of reading the notes at the end of the episode. Oh, okay. We like to learn things here. Yeah, it's what we're here for. Thank you all so much for supporting the show, and we will be back next week. As always, please consider the environment before printing this podcast.