300: Never Stop Talking

you know that saying the lord giveth and the lord taketh away yeah it has to yeah yeah yeah it's like when i gained uh when my wife lost weight i gained weight that's how that works right yeah took it from her and gave it to you yeah Uh, maybe a couple of days after we got that new refrigerator installed last week. Your garage fridge. Yeah. I mean, it's a kitchen fridge in our case, but it's garage ready just in case. Okay.

the dishwasher started emitting some rather concerning sounds. Hold on. Didn't you have a period of time like last year when the dishwasher didn't work at all? This dishwasher is less than two years old. That seems bad. Oh, yeah. So you call your landlord? Not yet. It's still working. It was just going to let it rot. No, I mean, I don't know. I don't know how dire the situation is. It's definitely a new sound. Yeah, it could indicate an issue with the pump motor from what I've looked at.

Yeah, but so far it has come and gone enough that I'm not 100% sure that's what it is. Like we just ran another cycle right before this podcast and it was mostly quiet. Have you cleaned the filter? Yeah, we clean the filter regularly. I ask that because sometimes like.

When our dishwasher started making noise, when I was on a trip one time, I asked my wife if she'd clean the filter and she was like, what? There's a filter. What filter? Yeah. And I was like, oh, sweet Jesus. I'm the one who does that, I guess. It's not that dire, but I did look up like LG dishwasher buzzing sound and found.

a whole lot of people talking about the pump motor going out on those things like pretty quickly. So I had this experience with my Bosch dishwasher. Let's see. We bought the Bosch dishwasher right around the time my daughter was born. So that would have been like 2013. Yeah, that's a while. And it started making a bad noise when she was still in bottles. So that would have been when she was less than two, probably. Okay. And the warranty had expired a year into that.

So it was about six months after the warranty expired and I called the people that sold it to us and they were like, well, you didn't buy the extended warranty. I was like, nope, you're right. I didn't buy the extended warranty. And so then I called an appliance repair guy who came out and was like, oh yeah, no, just buy a new dishwasher. Wow. And I was like, well, why? He's like, dishwashers are an enormous pain in the ass to work on. And I said, oh, okay. And he said, but.

Like if you want to do it, it's either this or that. And both the parts are right next to each other. You got to disassemble the entire thing to get to them. And one part is $10 and the other one's 250. And the only way to tell which one it is. is if you take it all the way apart and then put it all the way back together with one part but not the other one and i was like okay this sounds bad

So I went on Amazon and the $250 part was only $125 and the $25 part was only $15. And I was like, well, worst case, if it doesn't work, I'll rip it back out, take those parts out and send them back to Amazon. So it's an experiment. And what have I lost a couple hours of work? It was a two day process to get that thing out, get it drained. I mean, getting it drained, getting out wasn't actually that hard getting. the thing taken apart and flipped over enough that I could take it apart

Like it was the most difficult to disassemble thing I have ever taken apart, including like arcade cabinets and pinball machines and all sorts of heavy, bulky, awful things. Endless numbers of PCs, of course. Yeah, PCs is a piece of cake. That's like Lego. But yeah, it was. it was uh it was a huge pain in the ass by the time i got it apart i was like i'm just putting both of these parts in i don't care which one it is because i'm putting it back together and it better work by god

I took it up. I put it back together. It worked. I plugged it back in and it's been fine for the last 10 years. Wow. No kidding. That was a Bosch. That was a Bosch. Well, well done. I suppose. Look.

After your controversial statements about ice makers and in-fridge water dispensing last week, there was an extended conversation about whether dishwashers were a luxury that was followed up by words from the dishwasher lobby, which is...

Dishwashers save water and energy because they're much more efficient than washing dishes by hand. It's true. So, yeah. Or at least so I'm told. I've always wondered exactly on what scales they're measuring. I mean, the water use makes sense, but the energy use, I'm not so. Clear on big dishwashers paid off the right people at energy star. That's all I'm saying. Clearly. I mean, I guess unless they're talking about energy used to purify the water or to, you know.

Treat the water that you're using to wash your dishes with maybe because otherwise I'm not sure where the energy comes in to the washing dishes by hand process. I mean, there's an energy cost to making water safe to go in the pipes for potable use. Right. So, yeah, that's probably it. But the upshot is dishwashers rock. I'm sorry about your dishwasher. Well, make your landlord get a new one. Don't do your own research this time. Yeah. Okay.

Don't let him make it. Don't let him, don't let him let it sit this time. Like, like the last time. Cause it was like a year before he fixed it. The last time I can't go back to washing dishes by hand, man. I just, no, no. If you, if you do that. Just get a big stack of paper plates and dump them at his door every day. Okay, here we go. Be like, hey, here's your plates. Yep. Can I use your dishwasher? Now that's renting.

Welcome to the 301st spectacular episode of Brad and Will made a tech bot. I'm Will. You're blowing kayfabe. I am Brad. What? This is the 301st episode. Episode 300, the 301st episode spectacular. 300th is what it says on the tin. But I'm just saying it's the 301st episode because we had episode zero. Episode zero doesn't count because it's not a written zero is not a real number.

Well, it's a real number. It's a real number. It's not a don't. OK, don't bring your pseudo math science in here. This isn't the Department of Health and Human Services. We believe in math. Let's not engage the either a couple of men. I don't know if mathematician is the right word, but there are definitely a couple of people on the discord who are like deep into the world of mathematics. And I do not want to engage a discussion about real numbers and so forth. So, so.

What I want to know is I think we actually have a couple of episodes in there. I think we have a couple of unnumbered episodes in there, too, that we did like bonuses and stuff. Are you sure? Oh, this is probably actually the three and third or three and fourth episode. Those do not get. counted though i believe by who uh by symbol cast or by us yeah i'm looking at one right now i put those i put those in there as special episodes special ep oh okay they're called

The most recent one being October 30th, 2022, entitled Don't Pull the Frenulin. I think that's a patron episode. That's a patron episode. That was a long time ago. That was when I had COVID. Yeah, I'm triple checking here just for housekeeping reasons. I want to make absolutely sure. But as far as I can tell, the Simplecast does not put an episode number on those.

OK, so if I loaded up a feed reader, it would tell me how many episodes are in the feed. I'm comparing here. So, yes, the 300 number is accurate. I can confirm right now that this is, in fact, not counting. Episode zero, the origin story episode. A real episode of the podcast. But you're right. That was a real 47-minute episode where we talked about our first PCs and stuff, first PC builds. Yeah. But other than that, this is, in fact, the 300th episode by official reckoning.

It's been a long time, Brad, since we sat down at your kitchen table with a Zoom H5. Inexplicably, I don't know why it's called an H5 since it has six audio inputs on it. They also start counting from zero. Yeah, I guess. I think that's probably it. Holy crap. I didn't know that was funny, but all right. That is, to be clear, that is absolutely not the same people that make Zoom the software, right? No, different company. Yeah, different companies.

Yeah, so we sat down with a pair of headsets and a Zoom H5n and recorded an episode. I guess it was the one that was the TV episode, right? It was like the screens episode. I'm looking at how it looks like that we ran that as episode six. Like, I don't know why we did that, but apparently the first episode we ever recorded, we held for like a month and a half.

Well, so we recorded a bunch of episodes before we posted anything because we kind of wanted to get the rhythm. Yeah. And I think also because you were having to drive up here, weren't we doing like two episodes at a time? We would do two at a time and do it every other week. Yeah.

Um, so anyway, yeah, it's been six years, man. It is. Yeah. Short, uh, a month, I think like a month will be by calendar reckoning six years. Yeah. Yeah. But as the podcast flies, 300 episodes is six years. Pretty much. I mean, if we ever took weeks off, if we took two, if we took the traditional United States two weeks a month off, two weeks a year off.

300 episodes would be exactly six years. Yeah, we've kind of never taken a break or taken this podcast off other than those weeks where one of us is unavailable and we have to run an old episode, which has not been that many. I think we've only done a couple of those. Yeah, I can tell you right now when you had COVID.

I think when I had COVID, you might've gotten a guest when I had COVID though. I think I see maybe four of those three or four. We've only done that three or four times. That's not too many, Brad. No, no, it's not.

Um, yeah, you know, it's the, it's the hallmark of every great podcast is extreme consistency. Yes. Quantity over quality. Just, just, you know, we're here every week, whether you want us or not talking about nonsense. Doesn't that that's that's the podcasting motto. It doesn't matter what you've got to say. Just keep saying it. Just never stop talking. Never stop. Never stopping. No, I so.

OK, so a couple of things have changed, obviously, since we sat down at the dining room table and recorded. Yeah, I think that, you know, that would be that would be true of any random six year span. Some more than others. I'm going to say this particular six year span. Let's say quite a lot. Yeah, it's I mean, look at the time. So I think we're going to go through a lot of the stuff. We're going to talk about stuff that's changed.

Yeah, like we looked back at our list of 300 episodes and talked about, like, should we rank our favorite episodes? Should we rank our favorite titles? Should we just retrospect in some way? But instead of talking about our show. Which feels weird and navel gazing even for us. I mean, I would have done it if I we just I think we didn't quite land on the right angle. Look.

I mean, the 318th episode is just around the corner. So if people want a 318th episode spectacular, then they can start nominating their favorite episodes. And we will like, honestly, 300 episodes is enough. that I didn't want to have to go back through 300 episodes to pick my favorites. Yeah. Yep. Because it's too hard. Really. They're all my favorites at the end of the day.

So instead, we're going to talk about things that have changed in the last six years since we started this podcast. Yeah. Like in 2019, you couldn't buy a lot of PC hardware because all the crypto people were buying up video cards to mine Ethereum. I'd remember that. Yeah. Now it's all the AI people buying up video cards to mine AI tokens. Yeah. I mean, I think we should probably say at the top here, we're not going to make a bullet point out of COVID necessarily.

I mean, obviously that is like the biggest change that has happened in the last six years. There's a bullet point in there for CRISPR and mRNA vaccines. What I mean is like, I think that change is too pervasive. That is too like all encompassing. Oh, that's quite true. Globally. To say, oh, that's just another change that happened. I mean, like that kind of. Yeah, completely up in society for two to five years, depending on how you look at it.

Like that changed everything for a period of time and still continues to make ripples there. So like a lot of the stuff we'll talk about here might be related to the COVID experience. We did have a bullet point on here for pandemic and the decline of Western civilization. Yeah, I'm not sure.

how much time we want to spend on that one uh well okay here's here's one now we have person flavored oreos okay that is a change that has happened yes like it used to be Like we hadn't reached the stage in late stage cat. Like I liked, I liked to, I have in my head, I've never really talked about this, but in my head, I index the, the state of where we are in terms of late stage capitalism with.

how big the Oreo section is at my grocery store. Okay. That's probably a good and barometer. And like, you know, we had like the, the independence day Oreos a few years ago. which were, you know, normal Oreos, but with Pop Rocks in there. That was pretty good. Wait, were those good? I thought those sounded awful. Yeah, those were pretty good. No, no, they were good.

Or is there chocolate? It's like chocolate and sort of quasi vanilla filling, though. I can't imagine mixing fruit into that. They're not fruit flavored pop rocks. It's just texture. Oh, interesting. So it's like it's just indeterminate sweet. And and like things are happening on your tongue when your tongue hits the goo. It was it was I'm going to tell you pretty good experience. Things are happening on your tongue when your tongue hits the goo. That's correct.

yeah so but recently yes now now we have selena gomez flavored oreos and also post malone flavored oreos which i don't understand why i don't think so man yeah i mean some are some of these products are more appealing than others i guess yeah um

I never would have guessed that Google was going to destroy its dominant web ad business to chase AI. Is that how you would? OK, I want to hear this argument. Would you say that's that's how this has gone down? Well, so there's a lot of traffic. There's, you know, in the old days. People made content on the web and they made it freely available and they let Google make a full copy of their of their web content so that they could then so that Google would then index that.

And when people search about things that might be relevant to that web content, they would send those searchers to their pages and you'd click on a link in your Google results and. uh the person on the other end of that transaction would get a little bit of ad revenue or an opportunity to sign them up for some some subscription service or uh you know uh the the cgi bin counter at the bottom of their blog would go up by one and they would be like

Hell yeah. One more person read something I wrote. That's awesome. Man, not too long ago, I went and read about what CGI bin actually was and how it worked. I have no idea what it was. And it made me really sad that I missed that era of web development and web hosting. Oh, you could have been right there. You were primed.

Like the stuff they were doing back then in the nineties is the stuff I would have cared about. Like that's where you could basically write any program in any language and just kind of run it in the course of your page running and have it dump the results into the page. That sounds like a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, but also pretty good. So anyway, now, instead of sending people to Google pages, to the search results page.

Google just takes the top results and kind of summarizes them with its shitty AI. It sure does. And puts it right at the top of the page above any of the results where nobody, no normal people look at it because they're like, you know what I really love? letting computers think for me more. And the web traffic is declining precipitously across a lot of publishers to the point that we're going to see a lot more subscription offerings for the people who actually like to read stuff on the internet.

that hasn't been munged up and baby birded into the content form at the top of a search results page. I mean, it turns out a lot of people seem to in fact like for computers to do the thinking for them. I mean, I think a lot of people don't like to think is the fundamentals. Maybe that's the grim way to think about this. Way too accurate. That is way too true. Thinking is hard, Brad. It sure is.

So, yeah, so I didn't I didn't expect them to do that. I wouldn't if you had said in 2019 when we started this podcast that Google was going to completely destroy web ads, I'd be like, no, no way. I mean, are we there yet? They're working on it. You think.

Trending that way for sure. Is it inevitable? I don't think it's inevitable. I mean, depends on when the AI crash happens, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's probably inevitable at this point. It feels like probably there's just so much. I mean, I know VC is propping it up. But there has to be so, so much VC still being pumped into it. At this point, it's not even VC. It's like it's like banks and and like. Sure.

government funds, right? Investments generally, let's say not even just venture capital. giant companies trillion dollar companies are propping it up at this point so what did i did i see nvidia is responsible for eight percent of something i don't it can't be market capitalization i don't know what what number i was going around i saw that nvidia claims eight percent of The thing I saw the other day is that the...

The GDP of the country, like the biggest contributor to that in the last quarter was data center building and AI data center building, which is like more than home building and business stuff and a bunch of other things. Right.

So, I mean, when you talk about when you talk about that collapse being inevitable, you might well be right. But there's so much money still being pumped into it that it seems like it's probably a ways off. I mean, eventually the money will stop. I feel like GPT five rolling out and hey. Did you ever think we were talking about a thing called GPT? No. GPT five rolling out and being worse than the previous ones.

has has not been good for ai futures it seems like is it worse by some objective measure people are generally It's, you know, it's the normal thing where people cherry pick examples of things that are that it's really spectacularly bad at like.

Drawing a map of the United States and putting the state names in places. I do. I'll check in on like the Twitter for you feed just every so often. I don't know why I do that to myself, but just to see what people in that world are saying. And yeah, I did. I feel like I did see some. Pretty underwhelming takes on, or underwhelmed takes, I should say, on that thing when it landed. One thing I got the sense of was that they tuned it so it maybe doesn't kiss the user's ass nearly as much.

I bet that change is going to get rolled back, though, because it seems like people don't like that much. My understanding is they already have rolled it back or as I understood it. I feel like the ass kissing is a feature, not a bug. I would 100% is. Yeah.

Real quick before we move on, I think I've advocated this before. Do you use a custom? Well, you don't use Google at all anymore, right? No, I use Google. I use the UDF14 thing or whatever it is. UDM, I think it is. UDM, yeah. Okay, we do the exact same thing. I have an extension that makes that my default search in Firefox, actually. OK, I just I just went and made a custom search engine in.

uh, in Chrome, which also I still need to get off of Chrome. I don't know why I'm still on Chrome. Yeah. It's not a switch. Not using, I'll tell you the browser switch was easy. So it, since we did this podcast, I switched from using Chrome to Firefox. Okay. Yeah. There you go.

Yeah, it wasn't that hard, it turns out. I still use Chrome for like video calls, voice conferencing and stuff like that because Chrome handles that stuff better generally. That might be the thing to do. And in fact, like I'm probably delusional if I think I can completely uninstall Chrome because you're going to have to have it for something at some point.

It only works with Chrome. I think you could do Chromium or one of the other Chromium offshoots, probably. You're probably right. Anyway, real quick thing I was going to say, I won't walk through all the steps here, but if you you probably go search if you still use Google. You can go search for how to get Google results without the AI summary at the top. Yeah. It's just adding a switch to the search string or not a switch like an argument.

It's just a question mark UDM equals 14, I think is all you just put on. Or in this case, if you've already got another argument before that is ampersand, but it's literally just ampersand UDM equals 14 on your Google search string.

And you will get classic Google search results without AI crap. There are also extensions for both Chrome and Firefox that do this and make it very easy to set up so you don't have to fool with anything if you're worried about it. I don't think there's a downside to using those.

Should we talk about AI? Because I feel like all the scammy Valley bros moving from blockchain to AI was not something I would have predicted. Okay, so September 2019 is when we posted the first episode. But crypto, like... Crypto mining was in absolutely full swing by that point, right? Well, so Bitcoin was already done on PCs and they were using dedicated mining bricks by then. Like, well, before the...

By the time the 1080 came out in 2016 or 2017, the Bitcoin mining on PCs was essentially done. But the gold rush had been around for years at this point, right? Yeah, but Ethereum mining was super hot. And you would buy a GPU and... burn it out basically in mine, you know, 5X or 10X, the amount of Ethereum that the GPU cost you and the power, presumably. But I mean, I feel like some of the people doing that stuff maybe didn't.

fully appreciate the problem the the real thing that it did was it drove up the prices of gpus we went from having a 600 1080 ti or 700 1080 ti to uh you know 2 000 40 90. uh, and, and even higher for the five series cards. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I mean, the way you phrased it in the notes here is that all these scammy Valley bros.

Have moved from crypto mining to AI at this point. Well, just to be clear, the difference is. So there are people doing fundamental research in AI and machine learning that are doing really neat stuff. Like. I generally think that like. Using machine learning to process data at large scale is an incredibly powerful technology. Or even in the micro for end user applications, stuff like DLSS we talk about all the time. There's all kinds of like data stream processing applications. Transcription.

and image analysis for radiology and stuff like that. There's a bunch of really useful technologies. The generative AI stuff, I think, is generally pretty garbage and is... And there's been a fair amount of research that shows it's actually making people stupider. So, you know, maybe this problem will solve itself over the next few years.

So, yeah, that's that's that. We had a brief stop at with pictures of monkeys that cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah. So detour through NFTs somewhere in there. Yeah. But here we are. And now now it's all AI all the time, I think. I think for me, the scammy stuff is the Ed Zitron over at Better Offline. The Better Offline podcast talks about this stuff a lot. It's the businesses that are being built on top of other people's AI models.

that are assuming the cost of those ai models is going to go down instead of up and um because they're expecting to see the same kind of scaling that we saw with like online storage and you know the cost of hosting a web server and stuff like that like if you look at the cost of hosting a web server in 1996 when you had to run on a sun microsystems machine because that was the only hardware that ran a web stack to now

I guess it was probably 94. But anyway, the costs for AI token generation are not going to go down in the same way. And it's really, really apparent that that's the case. large swaths of the industry are still acting like it is anyway but you fake it till you make it or just you know piss away an incredible amount of money and then we're gonna have we're gonna have enormous data centers filled with compute

And absolutely nothing to run on those machines. Yep. So come up with a business that can use that. Yeah. Make a billion dollars. Or good for those of us who just like to buy random hardware that used to be in the data center to put in a server in your house to have fun with. Yeah, but no, for real, if you have an idea for a business that'll use a shitload of compute, call me. I'm available.

Probably we should touch on this one. This is kind of related to what we were just talking about. You can kind of get hardware again. At MSRP? Well, yes and no. Not, not, not GPUs. It seems like everything else pretty much is though, right? Like CPUs, motherboards, stuff like that. Like RAM is generally, it's not.

getting super inflated the way the GPUs are these days, right? It depends. It's up and down. It's been almost two years since I built this machine, so I haven't looked at prices in a while or tracked them. So I'm looking at 5090 prices at Micro Center in Santa Clara right now. I can't close the little pop-up that tells me there's a sixth store in Santa Clara. But a 5090 is an overclocked one is in stock at $21.99. The MSRP for that card is $24.99 because it's an overclocked one.

Yeah, like like they're more let's say they're more available. Some of these are really expensive. I think the stuff like the 9070 XT and 9070 are probably. the more mid-range parts are probably closer to reality yeah like here's a power color 97 dxt which is a top of the line amd card for 6.99 which is 100 bucks off of their msrp okay Like I'm looking at a 9800 X3D that's 449 right now, which is I think below MSRP. Yeah. Oh yeah. Things are better. I mean, you can get hardware.

Yeah, they got way worse in the pandemic. But like you said, even like graphics cards were getting real bad even before that because of the crypto mining rate. Yeah, everything was bad during the pandemic, like a 989800 X3D on the CPU front. packaged inbox 429 50 bucks off the msrp of 479 so yeah hardware is gettable that's exciting that's that's a positive change it's kind of the first time that's happened in six years

So 10 years almost at this point, I guess. It seems like it's starting to normalize finally. I mean, and just as that was happening, we introduced a whole shitload of tariffs that made everything really complex and wide. Let's just make it all artificially expensive now. Have fun, Europe and Asia.

for no reason at all. You put this one down. I like this one a lot. People went from loving streaming services to hating them. Yeah, it kind of feels like we're there, right? Yeah. I think back to 2019, I still had a Netflix subscription and some of the others. I think we were probably approaching the point by then where people were starting to see some of the shine come off. The prices were starting to go up. Content was getting a little more...

exclusive and hard to come by. Well, the prices, the prices didn't start going. I mean, Netflix was jacked up their prices a couple of times, but they were also dumping a lot more original content in. So it kind of felt okay. I'm trying to think. I mean, this is kind of splitting hairs. I mean, you know, we have set this arbitrary beginning point for this thing of 2019. So, like, I don't remember exactly when this happened, but, like, the big bellwether for me was, remember, the giant...

content deal Netflix had with Disney for a long time. And then when that went away, I think that was, for me, that was the, that was the big first canary in the coal mine of like, Oh, wait a minute. You're not going to be able to just have one of these services for nine bucks a month and get everything you want, are you?

So oddly, Disney Plus launched on November 12th, 2019, which was just a few months after that Disney Netflix content deal evaporated. So it was right around that point. Weird. Yeah. For me, the mark is when Disney, like those services started seeing enormous growth during the pandemic when we were all locked up at home and had nothing to do but watch TV and play video games. And then.

They made projections based on the growth that happened during that time. And then they didn't hit their projections. So their solution was we should just charge more for these services. And let's see how high we can get the prices before people start canceling. So they tried to boil some frogs. And I think, I mean, Disney Plus is going to be OK. I think probably Netflix will be OK.

Peacock and Paramount Plus, man. I don't know about you all. Yeah. Criterion is the real winner here. That's the one that I kind of always have. It turns out. Sure. Paramount Plus has defied the odds. My former employer. I'm still I'm still a little bit bitter that I lost my comps Paramount Plus subscription finally. So we turn stuff on and off. There's new season of Wednesday. So I'm paying for Netflix this month and Big Brother's on. So we're paying for Paramount Plus.

So, you know, that's where does anybody else offer the service like Apple does? I don't know if they have a name for it where they let you opt in and out of or turn on and off subscriptions entirely from the same Apple interface. I think you can do that. You can. That's part of the Google.

phone ecosystem too okay you pay a little bit of a premium for that yeah i mean i think that's probably worth it for the convenience especially now that people are in a world where they are toggling things on and off a lot like you're talking about i think if you actually do it then it makes a lot of sense

If you don't, then you're just paying Apple 30% more for the convenience of not doing a thing that you thought you were going to do. Yeah, the worst one for me on streaming services, worse than the siloing of content across two dozen different services and worse than the prices going up. And this is where I feel like they have maybe overstretched, or at least for me, is how rotten with ads everything is getting.

Oh, yeah. Like streaming services were supposed to be the thing where you paid directly so you didn't have to watch ads. Yeah. And now they are fucking everywhere. Like, look, Brad, we have the no ad tier and then we've added an ad, an ad supported experience. that's uh 20 less that's going to wear your ass out with ads yep yeah yep uh let me tell you a pie hole helps with a lot of that yeah um

Also, sometimes pie hole messes up the ability to play back content on entire platforms. So, you know, good with the bad breaks, YouTube history and stuff like that. Yeah. Out of the box. Anyway, I feel like the streaming service dream is dead. Now it just sucks the way the cable subscriptions used to suck. Well, we've gone back to a time where.

Cable sucked for a whole multitude of reasons, but the big issue was you had to bundle all of the... If I didn't care about the travel channel, I still had to pay... Some chunk of my subscription went to the travel channel every month. when disney's combining hulu and disney plus into one app and it's all one subscription then suddenly i'm in the situation where i'm paying for a bunch of crap on hulu that i don't want or care about in order to get you know whatever

Disney thing is out now. I don't even know. Can we talk about CRISPR? I think CRISPR is maybe the big science story of this time of this last six years. Sure. CRISPR is the ability to manipulate DNA directly. Okay. That's about all I know about it. So you're going to have to fill in from here. I mean, that's the important thing. We talked about it with Kishore on a science roundup one year at length. But yeah, the idea is.

It's a programmatic way to build strands of DNA and proteins from that, which is like, that's magical. So. and and that and mrna vaccines which came online uh with our pandemic crush to get vaccines out for covid both are technologies that can reshape public health around the world if properly invested in yeah

Let's hope that. Hey, guess what? We're not going to properly invest in Brad. Yeah. I don't even know how to. Yeah. We elected the stupidest people on earth. Sorry. Yeah. Okay. That's probably it for that. Yeah.

What else we got? You know, getting back to streaming services and Google and I mean, it's kind of ties into a lot of. A lot of stuff we already talked about here, and also this kind of something that. kind of hasn't changed or I guess what I'll just read the, I'll read what I wrote here and you can tell me how well this fits here. Nobody has displaced the platforms that were already big in 2019. Oh, you mean like, uh,

Like every platforms, anything and everything from, you know, like the, the eight or 10 platforms that most people think of as the internet, you know, everything from YouTube, YouTube, Amazon, uh, yeah, Facebook. Um, To a lesser extent, Twitter. I mean, TikTok might be the one example. I know it existed before 2019, but I don't think it really got truly huge until after. I think TikTok was more for the kids prior to the pandemic. Yeah.

Yeah, and also TikTok was kind of sliding into a new niche or slot. It's not like nobody was out there doing short form video the way they were, right? Like Vine, I think, was already dead. Vine was dead. I can't remember what the other one was. I don't think anybody had really done the infinite scroll short video thing the way they had done. So they didn't they didn't so much displace somebody as just kind of come in and define a new category. But like.

Generally, all the big social media and video and social sites that were huge in 2019 are still the same huge ones now. Yeah, I would say Twitter's declined pretty significantly. Yes, of course, of course. And Facebook, honestly, has declined as well. The thing that's happened to me is I don't know where the kids are now, right? Like the young people are on YouTube.

And then it seems like they go someplace or maybe they just go outside and touch grass and don't get on the Internet as much. I don't know about that. Maybe they're just on TikTok. I think that's my impression is that it's still. Well, what category or what age range are we talking about here?

i'm thinking like teenage yeah like teenage to college post-college like the kind of the kind of like perpetual age bracket that defines what's like cool you mean you did i look brad you know what i think age bracket defines what's cool

What age bracket? I just turned 50 this year. So I think it's 50 year olds to find what's cool, Brad. Interesting that you would think that. Let me let me I'm wearing a pair of shorts and tall socks with sandals and I'm bringing it back. What a remarkable coincidence. It's shocking, right? Ten years ago, I would have said it was 40 year olds, but I guess I was wrong.

So when you said like kids are on YouTube, you're talking to like young kids. I think I think YouTube is very popular for school, a primary middle school. Yeah, right. And and there's it seems like. Judging from content trends that I'm aware of, there's definitely YouTube consumption all the way through. For an entire generation, YouTube is video for them. They don't watch TV. They don't really watch movies as much.

They consume stuff through YouTube and they sit down and watch a Mark Rober or a Mr. Beast video like you would watch an episode of Halt and Catch Fire. Well, that's terrifying. I mean, Mark Rober is OK. OK. Yeah, I don't. Wait, do I know who that is? I started to say I don't, but he's the former JPL guy who builds like, yes, the thing that he did that's the most wholesome is probably the squirrel, the squirrel obstacle course. Yeah, he's fine. Yeah, he's fine.

He's a little bro these days. He's been hanging out with Mr. Beast. It's not great. Anyway, I hear Miss Rachel is cool. Miss Rachel's cool. Yeah. i don't have a kid that age blue is great i who knew i was going to be watching bluey on my own without a bluey age child i have bluey merch no shaman never already guessed that yeah

Um, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I just, I was thinking through the, I hate to say graveyard, but that's kind of what it is of like attempted social media sites. I mean, like cohost is a big one. Cohost wasn't a big one. That was the problem. No, no, no. I mean, it's a big example.

It's a big example of a site. I mean, big in our circles. Yeah. But it's a prominent example of a site that tried to do social media better is what I'm saying. They had a different, arguably better idea about how to do social media and came in and tried it. Unfortunately, it didn't work. There have been some attempts here and there to build a different Mastodon. That's been around for a long time, though. But it's also so decentralized.

not-for-profit that it's almost in a different category i mean like blue sky is clearly the biggest of those yeah attempts to dethrone one of the main platforms but they seem to have stalled out pretty significantly i think that's um i think that's a perception i like it's it's like early twitter was it's fits and starts yeah right you know really what i'm getting at here though is just like among the major players they're all still on top you know nobody has come along and

bumped any of them out of the category that they occupy i i think for me it's almost more that there's just a general decline right i i feel like my perception is that social media's influence is waning really and I mean, that's probably a good thing, but I had not gotten that vibe. I will certainly hear the argument, though. Well, I feel like Facebook, which was the dominant thing, you know, for 10, 12 years.

is has become the place that our parents and grandparents go to hang out that's definitely true the the kids the kids don't have facebook account like despite facebook trying to make facebook messenger the de facto communication platform for children so it can hook them young. The kids want nothing to do with it. And same thing for Instagram.

I mean, the sad reality, though, is that not everybody has to be on social media for it to have a profoundly deleterious effect on society. Let's say when the people running the country are incredibly too online. It has some negative downstream consequences. All I'm saying is when I told my kid, you know, she turns 13 next year, she could get an Instagram account if she wanted. She looked at me like I just offered her a couple of cigarettes. Wow. Yeah.

Wait, hang on. In a good way? Like she wants to smoke? No, there's a lot. No, no. She does not want to smoke. There's a lot of... The kids are aware that exposing yourself to that kind of content a lot has... There's a reason the youngs tell the olds to go out and touch grass when we're being extremely online. Maybe the youth will save us. Maybe. I think they've been saying that since...

Since the boomers were young, though, Brad, so I don't know if it's going to actually happen. Yes. Do you want to talk about this iPhone tracking thing? Just because I think it ties into social media pretty directly while we're still here that that big change happened. Yeah. So in 2021, Apple added and put an iOS update out that added a toggle that said, hey, this app wants to track you. Do you want to allow that?

And everybody clicked no because nobody wants to be tracked, it turns out, when presented in a clear, clear language. And that combined with the GPRS, GP, what's the EU? GDPR. GDPR, there you go. And the CDPR, which is the California version of that law, means that advertisers were less able to build profiles of you as an advertising customer or exploitee. And as a result, the custom ad business on Facebook and Google kind of started showing the first seams that it's ever had.

Now, I hadn't thought to ask this before, seeing as that is a pillar of Google's core business, as you just mentioned, can I assume that they never instituted anything similar on Android? Not the that's a good question. I don't use Android. I don't think they did until it was probably too late that it didn't matter. Yeah. I also think this is probably why they're leaning so hard into AI and why they've let the search results become crap over the last five years.

They Google Google. Okay. Yeah. And I'm sure this, I mean, this like it didn't destroy Facebook's business, but it was incredibly disruptive to it. Right. It was, it was. uh facebook my understanding is that internally at facebook and this is from reading reports you know sourced from tech reports of people who work there is that they viewed it as a facebook viewed it as a declaration of war from apple on facebook all right yeah

So, you know, good for us, bad for Facebook. That's probably okay. Hey, Facebook, Delinda asked. Okay. What does Delenda-esque mean, Brad? I believe that translates to Facebook must be destroyed. Ah, okay. That was a big Latin rally. I think that's Latin, right? Yeah. So there was a big rallying cry that Mark Zuckerberg was said to have used. Maybe not about Apple, but about some of their that came out in some profile of him.

five six seven years ago or something like that was a that was a rallying cry he liked to use about their competitors internally great good very good seems like a charming guy anyway uh maybe some some slightly less depressing

Yeah. More tangible hardware related stuff. You, you have written here. OLED finally got cheap. Yes. I guess that's true. Like it got affordable. I would say, I don't know if I'd say cheap. It was like. Well, you can get pretty cheap. LG has pretty entry-level OLED TVs now. You wouldn't want to buy them if you play games on them because they tend to lack the features that you want for playing games.

like high refresh and a lot of the hdmi 2.1 type stuff but like you can get a if you just want a basic 60 hertz tv to watch movies and stuff on you're right you can get an oled tv for like reasonably inexpensive this point at this point I'm looking at, I guess these are portables. I'm looking at real OLED monitors for like 450 bucks right now. Okay. You can get a 27 inch Odyssey OLED G6 from Samsung. Or 50, huh?

which is a really 240 hertz free sync not g-sync gaming monitor for 600 bucks new wait where did the 450 come in that was a that was a lg ultra gear monitor pc yeah because i have 27 inch yeah i've been keeping my eye on oled monitors because i really want one uh although i'm pretty skittish about burn in still i'm having used one for quite a bit burn in is a concern

I didn't have any problems. It's a 1440p monitor, not a 4K, obviously. I'm still happy at 1440p, 27-inch. I don't know about you. I think that's a sweet spot for me for pixel density and screen size. Here's an AOC Agon Pro 27-inch WQHD, which is 1440p, I think. Okay. Monitor for 450 from Newegg. Man, AOC made our first meter monitor ever in 1993.

Yeah. She's great in Congress too. We was a big fan. Something nostalgic about, um, yeah, but like, you know, you can get, you can get a led TVs that are, that are competitive with LCD prices at this point, you know, here's a 32 inch OLED. From MSI, the Mag 321 Up X. It's another 1440p one, I think. That's, oh no, that's 4K for $699.

yeah okay so like six seven hundred is kind of where most prices were last i checked which is still a little too spendy for me but but that's a 32 inch 4k not a 1440p sure you know sure like they're getting there it's cheaper I think I think like sub 400 is where I like a monitor to be. I mean, look, I keep monitors for a really long time. My my 4K monitor that died a few weeks ago is is 12, 10 years old at this point.

Okay. So I feel, you know, I feel like if I get 10 years out of something, I'll spend a grand on it. I'm sorry. Could you repeat that? My 4K monitor that died a few weeks ago. The thing before that. Do you, I believe you said you keep monitors for a long time. yeah look i don't want to you have a different criteria for a long time there like you're digging you're like i look when my 4k monitor died i had to go out to the garage and grab a 24 08.

Slightly newer than your old 2204s, I think. It was the 2005. Yeah, 2205. Sorry. I think it was bought in 2006, to be fair. Dell's name scheme at that time was size year. Yeah, you know, I only kept those monitors for 14 years. So if you're saying you keep yours for 10, I wasn't really that far outside the range. The difference is.

i buy good ones when i buy them dude those monitors were like top of the line when i bought them how about what was the resolution again i mean they were 16 1680 by 1050 but like yeah that was a 600 monitor in 2006 but they weren't widescreen yeah they were 16 by 10 okay okay okay okay they're fine they were a little small i mean that thing was like that was fucking mind-blowing to play world of warcraft on when i got it i'll tell you that's true that's true um

And they were almost 1080p. I mean, they were not 1080p, but they were almost 1080 lines. So, yeah, you could you could do OK. Anyway, these these these monitors that I've got now that were the new monitors are now five years old. Yeah. So you're halfway there. I'm not quite into new monitor territory yet, but these things are not, they don't have quite the luster they used to. Are they 1080p's? No, no, they're, they're 1440. They're 1440, 27 inch.

They're not high refresh rate though, right? You missed that. They're 144. 144, okay. Yeah, like they've got all the basics you would want. I mean, they're okay, but their HDR is shit and their contrast is also terrible because they're IPS. I will say the hardest part of going back, I've got to pick a new monitor. I haven't had time to deal with it lately.

But the hardest part of this is the 60 hertz panel just feels archaic at this point. Yep. I can't do it like I even even less than or I'm sorry, even more than for games. It's actually just straight up gooey. Just moving the cursor feels really chunky. I need a high refresh in my operating system shell. It's very stupid. The text doesn't update fast enough. Just like moving windows and the mouse cursor around and scrolling web pages needs to be smooth or I lose my mind at this point.

I have written here after OLED finally got cheap, I have written in micro OLED still perpetually five years away. Always five years off. Maybe we'll get there. We saw OLED. They were selling OLED TVs that they had. They had them on display that were real products you could buy at CES this year. They're just in the micro, micro, micro lead.

yeah they're just too small i mean they a the picture quality isn't great right now and b they were they're in the this is a bespoke basically not quite handmade but might as well be product that they're selling for incredibly high prices still so Give it another five years. Yeah. Yes. Like Samsung has some for sale, but they'd start at 89 inches. Yeah.

Uh, and, and they start at like, when you click buy now, they're all like call for price type shit. It's going to be a hundred thousand dollars probably. Yeah. So maybe my, my, I'd have to double check, but if I remember micro lead does not have the burn in issues of OLED. No, they shouldn't. So.

I wrote down electric cars are made by more than just Tesla, which wasn't actually true in 2019, but was a perception. Sure. But also, I think the real thing is in the late 20 teens. Tesla's were reviewing incredibly well because it was a lot of time that people did electric car reviews. It was the first time they'd driven an electric car. And now.

We're seeing cars shipped by other manufacturers that are better in pretty much every way than the first wave of electrics from Tesla. Yeah. And there's a whole host of like electric car. follow on companies like Rivian, Lucid and all these others that are available now and seem to be quite good.

And there's infrastructure. I think that's the real one for me. Like they can make EVs all day long, but if there are not enough charging stations and such out there to support them, who cares? I will say, yeah. Like the difference between driving to L.A. a couple of weeks ago and the difference to driving to L.A. the first time we did in 2022 or 2021 is that in 2021, if we missed a charge stop or if there was a charger that was full, we had to wait.

or if the charger was broken we could be really hosed and now every single time we stopped we have an nacs tesla charger adapter for our car now and every time we stopped we could have If the chargers we wanted to go to were full, we could have just driven across the street to the supercharger and plugged in and been fine. Right. And it completely changes the stress of the drive.

Right. Like Vinny just got that Ionic and I was asking him, he drove to Pennsylvania, I think, in it recently. And like he actually said that there were more or better chargers available in rural areas than there were in urban. Yeah, because it's easier to build them out there. Yeah, that makes sense. But I know my worry is that like they might not be everywhere. You might have to go like a pretty long stretch between chargers, but it sounds like that's.

not starting to not be the case my understanding is that the proximity to a substation is actually the cheapest is the thing that makes it cheaper okay because which is why they're often near walmart and and stuff like that

Um, and there's Walmart's everywhere. And there's Walmart's everywhere. It turns out like there's so many electrify Americas and Walmart parking lots as you drive around the country. Now it's kind of surprising. Yeah. I mean, I think that's really the change here is that like EVs are happening. Like it's as, as a.

as a broad societal trend, they are becoming viable and, and increasingly common. Yeah. And that's really interesting. Well, and, and like it's a, it's, it's, it's real value in a lot of ways, right? Like I, the electricity i would have paid like we still have free electrify america but i think it would have been about 35 each way to charge when we were when we were driving back from la driving to la and like i mean i can't

It's 400 miles. I can't beat that on on gas. There's no way. Yeah. So anyway. All right. I think we're down to it here. All the ones we've got left are PC hardware and gaming related. OK.

I liked the way you phrased this originally, which you'd not put in the notes, but AMD and Intel kind of swapped places, although I don't think that's actually true from a numerical perspective. Like market share wise, I assume Intel is probably still bigger. Well, when did Raptor Lake come out? Right. Two years ago. Oh, Raptor Lake. Raptor Lake was August. It was 2022. Yeah. Raptor Lake refresh was two years ago. So so 13th gen was three years ago. So Alder Lake.

it was before that and then uh let's see the first the one before that was the first kind of uh hybrid architecture right from intel From Intel. That's I think was Alder Lake the first hybrid. And I think I think Alder Lake was the first hybrid. And Tiger Lake. God, it's the fact that they do code names for the core types. and the chip and the package and mobile and server and the micro architecture is bananas. But OK, so in 2020.

We were September 2020 is when Tiger Lake launched, which was 11th gen Intel core mobile only processors, I guess. Yeah, really confusing. Tiger Tiger was some kind of like weird bridge generation, I think. I don't think it was, it was not a Skylake design. Like it was the, Oh, I think 10th, 10th gen was the last of the like endless Skylake revision. Rocket Lake was the desktop version of that, of that generation. Right.

And that was 11th gen core desktop microprocessors. Anyway, to focus this here, the way you put it here is AMD's Ryzen bet paid off in that time because actually it's... It's hard to remember now, but when we launched this podcast, Zen two was like brand new. Yeah. And, and was still like, it's funny. We talked about this in the phone heard a couple of weeks ago, but, but Zen one was rough, right? Yes.

it had memory problems like there was promise there if you had applications that used a lot of cores it was incredibly valuable but if you didn't it was probably it wasn't a safe bet it was a fiddly architecture that was tough to build it was tough to work with you had to kind of know what you were doing to get it, to get it, to do the things that you wanted to do well. Um, and I feel like in the time, in the intervening time through Zen four, uh, through, through AM four and AM five.

Their gamble on the disaggregated architecture has really paid off. Yeah, for sure. My memory of Zen 2 is that it basically worked. I'm sure I think it's had some issues, but compared to Zen 1, it basically worked, but it was maybe not especially competitive on a performance. But then Zen 3 was the one that came along and people were like, oh, wow, AMD is serious. They're doing this. So Zen 2 had some real bangers. That was with the Ryzen 3000 series.

Um, and those were, those were real good. Zen two is what's in the steam deck, right? Zen two has some real legs. And I think the Zen two's biggest thing was just, they were those when the core counts were really starting to go up. Right. Yeah. It's when Threadripper started to really stretch its legs, too. And then Zen 3 was when it was just like, oh, wow, you can get a really competitive 16 core CPU from them now. And it's actually quite good.

But just to be clear, Steam Deck, PS5, Xbox Series, all are Zen 2 micro architecture chips. So, yeah, it makes sense. And in that, and then the intervening time, obviously we've had the whole Raptor Lake fiasco with Intel. Yeah. And like Alder Lake pretty good. Like I, excuse me, I have a 12th gen in my, in my NAS and my home server. Well, 12, 600 K, which has been perfectly fine. Like that.

has run well there's only there's only the 13th 14th gen voltage problems that intel like really face planted well but but actually you have to remember they had those 13th and 14th gen voltage problems because they had to keep releasing the same chips juiced higher and higher because they they had problems getting their disaggregated architecture out which like hey making switching switching

Doing that big of an architecture change is hard. I mean, there's a reason nobody was handing hardware of the year to Zen 1 and Zen 2 parts. But but yeah, so I like I think it's really interesting. Intel's on the ropes. AMD is rising their their early investment in taking this hit when they didn't have a whole lot to lose.

uh has worked out for him and and that's interesting you know a friend friend of the show gordon mong always used to say nobody ever got fired for buying intel except for now we i said that on the podcast a few weeks ago on the tech on the full nerd a few weeks ago

And somebody sent me a message. I'm not going to say who it was because they did not. They sent me a DM and they were like, yeah, it turns out somebody tried to equip one of our data centers with a bunch of Intel parts and we had to have a conversation with them. because it didn't make a lot of sense right now and i was like oh wow you might get fired for buying intel finally yeah i mean like the thread ripper and epic stuff yeah has gotten huge in that space for sure well um

Yeah, the like having both bad power consumption and bad performance is not a great place to be. Yeah. Or stability issues or whatever. I mean, Intel's problems are well documented, but I hope I hope they get it together because we've said it a million times like.

Nowhere do I want to see healthy competition more than in the CPU space. Well, and just to be clear, it's funny, there was a conversation about this in the discord earlier today, but like the, the Raptor Lake problems weren't impactful. Like. the problems with raptor lake and with intel burning up 13th and 14th gen processors aren't the problems that intel's facing now right those are those are a drop in the bucket it's like it's like

The equivalent is if Chevrolet has a problem with Corvettes, it doesn't affect pickup trucks and sedans, right? I think you could probably say that Raptor Lake issue was a symptom of the broader problem. 100%.

I mean, the problem is that fab technology hit a wall. Intel has built its entire business on the process technology shrinking every two to five years, and they're not in that situation anymore, right? And they didn't they weren't able to adjust fast enough. And also, as they're trying to switch their fab business from, hey, we only build Intel processors on Intel fabs to.

hey, we're going to build world-class boundaries that anybody can access, their tooling and their backend and all the work that has to happen in order for that to happen. Intel has never been on the industry standard tooling for that stuff. so if you want to build a processor in intel's fabs you have to use intel's tooling and samsung and apple and nvidia and all the other companies that build chips aren't going to do that and intel was slow making that adjustment so anyway

I mean, we're seeing we're seeing the fruit of that come around with really kick ass parts like Lunar Lake, which just shipped last year. But but and just to be clear. The underlying like the Foveros layer on that, I think, which is the kind of glue that holds all the chiplets on the on the disaggregated chip is is Intel technology, but all the other chips on that.

on that processor are built by TSMC. Maybe not all. I think maybe some of those might be fab. Pretty sure it's all of them. Definitely at least a good chunk of them are. Yeah. I mean, you know, and then like. In 2019, for example, the idea of Intel having to go to a major competitor to fabricate parts of their flagship CPUs was unthinkable, right? Yeah, that was wild. I just saw a headline today that, I mean, this is just like another milestone in the 18A.

You want to call it not. 18A is Intel's new next gen process. It's the thing that's going to save Intel. It's building the factory in Phoenix right now. It's the thing they are betting the entire company on is their big. big new competitive CPU process. But anyway, they showed off, um, it was just like a reference arm chip that they fabbed on it, but they're out there basically saying like, Hey, here's finished Silicon that we have fabbed on 18 a, like this is working like we're doing it. So.

Yeah. I mean, another milestone milestone on the road to 18 products getting to market. It seems like I was going to say the other thing about all of this that kind of sucks for Intel, I feel bad for Intel sometimes is that. Building this kind of next generation, like cutting edge process technology fab is so expensive and takes so long that, you know, we're, we're.

It's not surprising that they're having stock and market problems when they tried to do five of these in five years. Right. It almost feels like that process is like not compatible with. the way the market works there's a reason a lot of the other i mean there's not a lot of other companies that do this kind of fabrication tsmc is the big one samsung also does some stuff but not at this level and the the like

I assume that there's government money involved with some of this stuff. So I don't know for sure. Yeah. All right. Last few here real fast. VR is on life support, you say. Well, so one of the things we talked about early on on this podcast.

was that oculus had facebook through oculus had set some weird expectations for what vr games should be because they were subsidizing you know what were essentially like triple a or b games to be built with like really high quality assets and really high spend that never had any chance of making their money back and the crows have come home to roost and people are expecting facebook isn't subsidizing games like that anymore

There aren't those big double A games and the people that were interested in those games have evaporated. It seems like it's maybe taken down the PSVR market with it as well. PlayStation VR 2 seems like an abject disaster by all.

indications yeah because like the the installed base of headsets versus the amount of money you can make expecting to sell a game into those platforms is really really grim if you're a game developer And I don't like the only things that are successful are, you know, the same five applications we've been talking about for 10 years now, like Beat Saber and.

And games that you can just keep dumping content in that's relatively inexpensive to make. So, you know, just to contrast with six years ago, I think people were still fairly bullish or at least like optimistic to curious about where VR was going.

I think we were looking down the barrel of new consoles and thinking maybe this was going to be a shot in the arm. It was unclear if the Oculus headsets were going to work on Microsoft hardware, given that Microsoft had some investment and some relations.

there uh the the we didn't know what was going to happen with the with the oculus with the facebook platform honestly and since then we've seen microsoft just kill windows mixed reality wholesale that's gone now if you're on a current version of windows just fyi i've still got that headset in the closet i should probably just like you wasted at this point right well i mean give it to a

put it in a museum man yeah because you literally can't hook it up to a modern windows machine and use it i keep i keep thinking somebody will do something open sourcey with it yeah but i but i don't know valve released an incredible one incredible game And then, you know, we have not, we'll get something else from them in 10 years, maybe. Maybe. And there's no, there's a handful of kind of interesting niche headsets, like big screen VR and.

And yeah, there's a bunch of companies making headsets that I've never heard of now. Yeah. So it's literally like almost not quite bespoke hardware, but it's like people that are making tens of thousands to maybe a hundred thousand units that are. just feeding into that existing market of people who are really into vr and then you also see stuff like the like the apple display the apple um vision pro thank you that are

you know, clearly first tentative steps, but are moving incredibly slowly. And the whole thing feels more abundant at this point. Maybe, maybe it'll come back, but I think if it does, it's going to be as much of a productivity tool as it is. You know, a thing that we use to play games. But speaking of games. Yes. You mentioned consoles. Yeah. We have cleared.

Since this podcast launched, we have nearly cleared one entire console generation. I think we have at this point, right? We're close. We've had new consoles from all the three big manufacturers. Cleared as in we've gotten to the end of the generation and new ones are imminent. We're kind of getting there. I mean, we're not quite there yet. Probably a year, right? We were about a year. out from the PS5 and Series X launching the Xbox when we started this podcast. Yeah.

And by all accounts, we're now probably only about a couple of years away from the next rev of those things. Announcements next year, maybe. I don't know. Whatever, whatever the Xbox ends up being. But a PlayStation six seems pretty well. Guaranteed. My understanding is that this podcast is an Xbox, Brad. Is that true? Maybe. I've heard everything is an Xbox. Yeah, that's what I got. It's wild. This console generation feels so compressed because

the machines were hard to get in the beginning. Yeah. Like there are a lot of reasons and some of those are like professional for me, but like every console that, you know, I started, I, we were on the N64 and PlayStation one when I started writing about games.

Wow. I've been through a lot of console launches, but every one of them is a lot of like going out to see stuff, you know, a lot of like, especially when we were in an office, it's a little different now that we're all remote. But like back when we were in an office, it was a big deal of like, oh man, like.

I went and saw the first Xbox 360 game today. It was full auto, by the way. Oh, wow. But it was always like one person would go take the assignment to go see the first game on a new console and then come back and everybody in the office would like. crowd around and start asking questions. They're just like, oh, what was the controller like? And, you know, blah, blah, all this stuff. It's really funny.

yeah oh go ahead i was gonna say we didn't get that with the ps5 and series x because we were all working at home so there were no preview events to go to it was like right in the middle that was like early pandemic so yeah when they would have normally done that we were all locked down still right yeah that was why so like it almost felt like a non-generation it felt like kind of a fake generation because there was none of that like pre-release build-up well it just kind of dropped

There was also a really extended period of time where they everybody was releasing all of their games on both the previous generation and the next generation that's been a huge part of it is that it felt like it took another two plus years after they came out before like exclusive games started coming out and there haven't been that The other thing is, like, development cycle is getting so long that there have not been that many games from a given developer at this point, you know? It's like...

Yeah, we get one Insomniac game a generation now, right? That's exactly Insomniac for whatever reason was the example I was about to use. I'm thinking very Sony centrically here, but maybe that's because they still trade so heavily in console exclusives. Naughty Dog has not shipped a new game on the PS5 yet. Insomniac has just done Spider-Man 2. Well, they did Last of Us Part 2. They did PS5 editions, right? Yeah, yes. Actually, did Miles Morales come out on PS4? I think it did.

Because I got it on PS4 Pro. That's right. Okay. Yes. So anyway, point being like we were getting fewer games from a given developer than we used to. So just this generation has felt pretty weak in a lot of ways. Yeah. And yet we are well on our way to the next one already. I mean, maybe I wonder, like, to me, it seems like the PS5 has legs still.

Probably. I feel like everybody's buying games on or just playing Game Pass games on the Xbox. So we'll just keep targeting whatever hardware people have on the on that platform. I mean, I would assume I would assume the next generation, at least just using the PlayStation example, I would assume there will be another two to three.

your overlap of cross-gen games again. I mean, it kind of makes sense if you, if you think about it, like the thing, the thing it's funny, the things that this generation are missing really more than anything are just like, like who. This wasn't on the list, but AI upscaling for games has been an incredibly transformational technology.

That started out really janky and bad, and now it feels weird that the consoles don't have that. I mean, I know the PS5 Pro does, but whatever. Yes. AI upscaling and ray tracing both are like massive paradigm shifts in the way games are done. Ray tracing has taken forever to get there, but you're finally seeing like Doom, Dark Ages and some games like that that require it.

Games that actually use ray tracing for the entire lighting model is really exciting to me. Use it for them at the core of their pipeline rather than as just some like a very expensive optional toggle. Yeah. Well, making reflections look good. Yeah.

Um, I'm, yeah, I'm excited about what a next gen console can look like, but, but also because like, here's another thing that's happened in the last six years, everything comes out on every platform except for Nintendo games. Yeah, sure. Right. Sure. I guess that really hadn't gotten into full swing. There were like some gestures toward it when we started this. Sony, when Sony released God of War on the PC. Yeah.

That to me was a real like that was in 2022, I think. Yeah, that was a real wild moment for me because I was like, oh, we're going to see these games from these Sony owned studios coming out on.

other platforms i didn't know you could do that and i wonder like is mlb the show to be blamed for that not because they had to release it that was at the behest of the licensure so okay that was kind of a special situation like that only happened you know the show was developed by a sony-owned studio but it started coming out on xbox but that was because mlb wanted it to okay

But then it was, it was the more generalized like PlayStation games on PC and then Xbox games on PlayStation was really the truly insane. We're through the looking glass kind of. Yeah. I mean, like Minecraft on switch was another early one, you know, Minecraft on PlayStation. Yeah, I guess you're right. Because Microsoft bought them like ages ago. So that was an early example of here's a Microsoft-owned product on other platforms, but now it's just a free-for-all. Yeah, so that is a huge change.

I'm just waiting on Nintendo games to ship on Dreamcast. I think that's only a matter of time. We'll get there. Hey, Brad, handheld PCs, gaming. That's a thing now. Handheld gaming is, I mean, not though, like.

Those machines have been around forever. Well, yeah, on one hand, like ever since the Game Boy was out, like there's never been a point where handheld gaming was not huge, but I guess it's more like the scope of things you can do on handhelds has gotten so much crazier since we started this podcast.

well i think i think um i think if you think about it the the big shift is that like it's gone from being a weird niche thing that people who buy stuff from like shenzhen electronic markets and the vendors that work out of them Cause like you've been able to buy small windows running PCs that you can play PC games on kind of for like 20 years at this point. Right.

Sure. The big change is that Valve took that and the work they did on Linux and the work they did with Proton and emulation and bundled it all up together to make a PC console. like a console like experience for the PC that somebody who doesn't know anything about PC hardware or Linux or when PC games can buy for three or $400 and play games on. Yep. And that's pretty rad. Yeah.

Yeah, like it went from a handheld went from being the province of just Nintendo to all, you know, because it was Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, 3DS, 3DS. Like handheld has been big for pushing 40 years now, but it's just. Starting with the Switch, but especially the Steam Deck and then all the other Steam Decky type X86 things. And also like the explosion and like these sort of emulation handheld space, you know, your Anbernix and like that whole thing.

The thing you can get for 75 bucks now that plays all your old through like what GameCube games or something probably at this point. Or probably even past that. I think like I think you can probably do 360 PS3 on some of those things at this point. So we actually had Russ from retro game core on the full nerd this week to talk a little bit about what's going on with handhelds and how tariffs are affecting them and all that stuff. And.

He has reviewed a bazillion of those Anbernic, those little emulation machines and was like, yeah, you can get. Like he's like, you can run all the way up to PS2, PS3 era these days pretty reliably on, on some of it. If you get the right one, which is pretty cool. And I think the other interesting thing about them is not just the compute they're putting in them, but the range of form factors they're making. First of all, there are a bajillion of those things. Like, yeah.

You want one that looks like Game Boy Light? You got that. That's exactly it. You know, it's like you can get one that looks like a Game Boy Advance SP. You can get one with a clamshell one with two screens that you can basically use as a DS. Is there a Post Malone model? That's what I want to know. Probably. Okay.

But like they're just they're just very shamelessly kind of knocking off every handheld design ever made for very specific use cases, which is kind of awesome. They're still super nishy, but they're growing. I feel like. I feel like I'd seen a mister. I think Jeff had a mister at giant bomb before we started this podcast just a little bit before. Yes. Cause I built mine and we started this in September 19.

I built my mister basically the first full month of the pandemic. Same. April 2020 because I needed something to do. Yep. He had been messing with that stuff for a little while before that. I think I came by for a Friday show or something and he had it on the table and I was like, what is this weird little stack of hardware? This thing's cool. Yeah, like I resisted putting like FPGAs in here, but that's something else that's gotten big certainly since we started.

started this podcast although like it's been a little quiet in that space for a while i feel like we've reached a point where like the low-hanging fruit has been plucked and we're waiting on better fpgas now yeah that's basically it um The other thing I was going to say is the emulation, just emulation as a whole has gotten quite good. Actually, yes. Like you could say that about like. I'm trying to even like figure out how to define how broadly.

that applies at this point it's not just emulation of video game consoles it's like in some of these cases people would say oh that's not emulation it's translation or whatever but like graphics apis for example you know yeah like being able to run

You know, the things that are being done in spaces like, oh, taking DirectX 9, old, old DirectX 9 games and translating that to like Vulkan or whatever it is that, you know, it's like DXVK projects that let you run old games for different graphics stacks on modern hardware.

cpu instruction translation like just kind of like up and down the number of the number of ways to translate like old software into new for new runtimes is kind of crazy stuff like what apple did moving arm moving to arm processors with the m1 chips and running x86 code on those

uh proton is another you know you know great examples in cross-platform emulation and translation cross OS, cross API, cross instruction set, like people are just kind of like breaking barriers and making software run all over the place in a way that's pretty awesome.

Part of it is that the new hardware is really, really fast. But part of it is also that we've been doing this for a long time and have gotten good at it. And there's business reasons to do it now, which means real resources. The other thing I'll say is. We've talked a lot about not so much on this podcast as on the other one. We've talked a lot about open source projects and like seeing the explosion.

of support and use and usability for things like obs and audacity and home assistant and these these projects that were You know, Home Assistant was still fairly fledgling when we started this podcast. And I feel like, I mean, probably somebody who listens to the show will know better than I do at this point when I switched over. But it was it was either just before or just after we started this podcast that I switched from.

um a samsung uh you know smart home hub to a home assistant hub and the amount of compatibility and benefits and ease of use of Using that stuff once I configured it, it was enormous. So, you know, shout outs to open source. Yeah, I was trying to think of a way to list something about open source stuff in here. I think I think the way I would put it is like the ability to integrate open source programs into your daily life.

is what's changed because obviously like open source has been around as a concept for 30 something probably more years at this point but like it's only really been in the last few years that like regular people could finally start

buying a Raspberry Pi and putting some things on there to just make their lives a little better, you know, and kind of using that in place of commercial solutions. I think consumer open source has seen some real growth over the last six years is what I would probably say.

And that does lead me to, there's one last bullet point on here I have not struck through yet. Here we go. Since we started this podcast, I moved from FreeBSD to Linux on my home server slash NAS. See, it's funny. In the last year, I've moved from Windows to Linux on my laptop. I think the rise of Linux, I mean, Linux obviously had already risen, but... We were thought leaders on switching to Linux, Brad, I'm going to say. Maybe.

I actually moved to Linux out of necessity. It's when I got that Alder Lake in my NAS and FreeBSD because its hardware support is not great compared to Linux because it's such a smaller project. Could not run on that Alder Lake. Oh boy, that's wild. I was like, well, my old NAS died and I got this Alder Lake to replace it. And I guess, shit, now I have to move to Linux or turn off all the E cores on this chip to make FreeBSD boot on it.

see i i switched to free sb i switched from prebsd to linux because i looked at my power bill as as pg and he was starting to raise its energy prices they're not that different I, there's no, there was no power stepping on there. There are a hundred percent. Now there is, there was, there was back then. I ran up, I ran a power D dash V back then and watched the C States. Oh boy. Up and down.

anyway yeah um but yeah i i feel like linux is like stuff like the steam deck and those amber nick machines and all the little weird handhelds that that people like us like to fool around with

have driven a lot of interest and knowledge in Linux that's starting to pay off in spades. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I will say, though, it's like I don't I don't fetishize Linux in any way. It's just the one that is popular. It's just the one that has all the support for it. So it's the thing you use because it's the thing.

that can run everything you want to do, but I'm actually, I know this is going to sound crazy, but I have started thinking more and more, and this is years away if it ever comes to pass, but more and more about what a post-Linux world might look like. Well, I mean...

There has been there's particularly been enough drama in the kernel development community over the last couple, three years that like people who know people who are way more plugged into that scene than me have started talking about like, you know, like the way that they run things over there.

They really need to adapt to the way that modern contributors want to work and make sure that they are not running people off from kernel contributions because it's not inevitable that Linux is going to be on top of that space forever. Well, yeah, I mean, and like Linus, who's still the main maintainer on the colonel, right, is not getting any younger at this point. He's not getting any younger. Be his like time off to work on his behavior seems to have had limited effect.

because he still makes headlines for being incredibly rude to people on the Colonel mailing list on a regular basis. there's two types of open source maintainers and he's the he's the kind that people don't like so yeah like i mean i don't need to get into the weeds too much because i don't keep my finger on the pulse enough to really speak too intelligently about it like they did they did adopt rust into the kernel like they are technically allowing

contributions written in rust into the kernel but also like some maintainers really don't like that and have been really shitty toward people that want to use rust and that's run some people off from wanting to help contribute to linux stuff like that you know it's like Look, we're going to see a fork where it's Linux kernel that's built entirely on Rust. Maybe. Yeah. Well, I mean, there is another there is another there's an OS called Redix out there.

Yeah. I assume red X, R E D O X. It's, it's basically the reduction oxidation. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's that oxidation reaction, you know, the thing that produces rust. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, who is the, who is the guy who is the, I hope his name is rusty. No, there's a guy who was the Linus Torvalds of that thing. Um, and I can't remember he works. He has a day job for.

somebody some somebody oh i think it might be system 76. yeah probably yeah i was gonna say working for for probably cisco or system 76. uh makers of pop os and the laptop hardware well they do desktops too but yeah let me let me confirm that uh yes that's right his name jeremy soller is his name he is oh yeah system 76 engineer but anyway

Redix is an open source Unix like written entirely in Rust, for example. So like there are other OSs out there that, you know, I don't think Linux is going anywhere tomorrow, but like I don't take it as absolutely. Set in stone that it will always be the thing out there. I think there's a really interesting like I think I think the whole Linux scene is really interesting. And and for me, I look at things like.

the way other companies interact with Linux. Like Slack ships Linux binaries now, right? Slack ships a Debian and a Red Hat version of their application, of their Electron app. You could just double click and install on Linux. Discord ships flat packs.

Right. It's, it's all of these soft, all the software that they, that 10, when we started this podcast, the answer would have probably been, yeah, just use it in the web. It's a web app. You can use it in the web, use it in your browser. Don't we don't know. We're not going to support Linux.

is now a you know hey we're supporting linux every game that ships on steam has to make a conscious decision about whether they want to support linux or not support linux either natively or through emulation and like That's wild to me that like after having tried this and failed 10 years ago now, we're in a place where there's a button on every Steam page that says, yeah, this will work fine on your Linux machine.

That's crazy. It's wild. Yes, that is. In fact, I don't have the headline in front of me. I don't I'm not sure if I've got this exactly right, but I saw that. Linux has achieved 5% market share somewhere. It might have been the Steam survey. It was SteamDB, I think. Was it the Steam survey? Steam hardware survey. Like the Linux has broken the 5% barrier of Steam users. So I'm looking. Which is not nothing.

I'm looking right now at the OS version. Windows is in the lead with 95.23%. So I don't think it's here. OS 10 is 1.88%. And Linux is 2.89%. And just to be clear, only 0.3% of that is arch Linux. So there's no, it's not like it's all steam decks. Yeah. Right. Um, so yeah, it's like arch Linux is number one. which is Steam Dex. Linux Mint 22 is number two. Ubuntu 24.04 is number three. Ubuntu Core 22 is a four. Manjaro, Endeavor, Fedora, Debian, Fedora.

in that order yeah in that order really well so manjaro would be that high manjaro has easy proton support so okay like you see things like cashy and and manjaro and endeavor Because they make easy one-click installs for all the stuff you need to make Steam good on Linux. Of course. That's interesting. Mint is by far the one just looking at like random blue sky threads that I see get recommended the most to newcomers.

mint and pop os are the ones that people generally recommend to newcomers from coming from windows yeah interesting to see that that actually has manifested in stats anyway yeah like like proliferation of linux and open source is another huge change since we started this podcast i mean obviously they were out there before but they

It feels like they have become much more mainstream. Yep. Other other fun things on the Steam hardware server. I'm looking at this. The number one VR headset is the Oculus Quest 2 with 32 percent, 33 percent of the overall market. and then the valve index is number two with 17 and then it's a bunch of like meta quest threes and three s's and riffs and uh htc vibes and windows mixed reality and stuff down the line so all right yeah well

I have struck, I've struck through our last bullet point. So I think that's literally everything that's happened in the last six years. Yeah. Did we get, did anything else come to mind while we were talking? You know, never stop talking is what we always say here at Brad and Will made a tech bod. That's right. That's the motto.

Yep. But I think that's probably brings us to the end of the show. As always, Brad and Will made a tech pod is a listener supported show. We wouldn't be here. Wouldn't if it weren't for you, the listener. So while you're yelling at your car and screaming at your friends, please tell your friends about the show. We appreciate that a lot. We sure do. But we also appreciate if you support the show financially through the magic of Patreon.

You can go to patreon.com slash techpod where for $5 a month, you can buy access to the fabulous techpod discord and also our monthly patron exclusive episode where we talk about, well. you know topics of interest that maybe aren't of interest enough to do a full episode about um i don't know what we're gonna do this month we got we got i'm going camping maybe we can talk about camping tech that sounds fun yeah i would talk about that oh wait sorry uh next week

Yeah. The important housekeeping business here. Oh, yeah. Next week. I was very excited when I realized this earlier. Next week. You mean. The episode that will be up on the 24th of August, 2025. Next week's episode that posts on the 24th of August happens to be running on the exact 30th anniversary of Windows 95. August 25th, 2025.

Uh, 24th, 24th. I thought it was 25th. Okay. 24th. Okay. Very good. Yes. So you know what we will be doing this podcast about next week. I'm going to do, I think we both should come prepared to sing Brian Eno's opening chime. Hmm. Okay. All right. I'll, I'll, I'll get some rehearsal in for that. So I was going to say, maybe I think we should maybe both install it in a VM and poke around. I have it installed in a VM, sir.

I've got Windows 98 installed, but not 95. Can I do OSR 2 or do I have to do stock? Yeah. Actually, I might. You can do whatever you want. I might actually install launch day Windows 95. Plus or without. I think I bought plus when I bought windows 95. I don't think I had plus. As I recall, I had the pinball game. Plus did. I feel like there was like one. Well, we should save this for next year. This is content for next week. Don't burn the pod.

If you have any, if you, the listener, have anything Windows 95 related you want us to know or look into or anything, please let us know on Discord before next week. Or send it to techpod at content.town and I'll look at the email before we do the episode next week. Yes, that's you.

But yeah, so thanks to everybody who supports the show. The address again is patreon.com slash techpod. Putting that in the middle of the end of the show, probably we might want to post some stuff on socials and things like that as well. So thanks to everybody who supports us. We really appreciate it. And if you can't support us financially, leave a review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever, wherever you listen to your podcast. Deezer, I guess. Deezer. We're on Deezer.

And a very special thank you goes out to our executive producer to your patrons, including Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippet, Bunny Fiend, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Cammack, and... Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Brad, 300 episodes. Well, 101 episodes. That's a lot. We've come a long way. Yeah, plus some patron episodes, plus, you know, other podcasts here and there. We've spent a lot of time talking to each other over the last six years. We sure have.

We sure have. Yeah. Yeah. But I'll do it for another 300 episodes if you're in. Yeah. Thanks, everybody, again, for listening. Thanks for supporting us for 300 episodes. We will be back next week with another edition of the TechPod. And until then. please consider the environment before printing this podcast.