314: We Hope, We Wish, We Ask, We Request

Brad, it's time again. Oh, I feel like that could be interpreted in a lot of different ways. In this case, I've hit, I guess, one to two million clicks on my mouse. since the last time this happened and it's time to replace the switches in my mouse again.

That feels like a since we started this podcast thing that you replace the switches in your mouse. So maybe you're clicking. Have you considered you're clicking too much? So technically, I think I replaced the switches in my first Logitech Pro mouse. and then i got one of the super light models because i wanted the less weight on the mouse yes we went through that whole phase of like carving parts of your mouse housing a way to make it lighter yeah

Bays. Get those flick headshots. Bays. Anyway, so I was looking and I was like, I could just buy a new mouse because I have some Amazon credit for some stuff that I returned and they're on sale right now because it's, you know, tis the season.

And so the one with the replaced switches are my drawer. I guess I actually probably still have some spare switches around if I think about it, because I think I had to buy five to get the switches shipped. So maybe I should just pop it open and switch the new switches out because I'm getting the double clicks on this on the super light.

Yeah. Not that often. It's just often enough that I'm like, oh yeah, it's that thing again. I mean, it could be, it could be that my fingers have gotten twitchy. It could be that I'm just riding on a hair trigger man everywhere I go. Yeah. ready for headshots at any moment you just ready quick flicks quick flicks and blast and that's what i do is this going to involve soldering to put these in it does involve soldering yeah that sucks well i mean i guess we're not quite at the point where

They're designing mice around user replaceable switches yet. So one of the things as I was looking at switches that are available, because the thing that's happened in the five or six years since I did this last, I guess, five years. is that there are a buttload more mouse switches designed specifically for gaming mice now. So you can get some real hair trigger, like you can't rest your fingers on the buttons when you're not, when you're not, you know, when you don't want to be blasting.

I don't think that's probably right for me because I realized I do like to rest my mouse, my fingers on the mouse, just a little bit, just grazing. Yeah, I get it. But I might, one of the things I realized is you can actually buy. the entire daughter board that the switches mount onto now so you don't because like when i did it last time the mouse switches have three pins they're through hole mounts so you have to desolder and suck out the solder from each of those holes

And it's a little bit tricky just because getting one off, no problem. Getting two off, relatively straightforward. Getting three off, kind of a nightmare. It's like you get one loose and wiggle it. And then the other, then it chills, but it sets back up. Anyway, so I don't know what I'm going to do. That's the TLDR. But I guess I could go ahead and use these red kale switches that I have around. Wait, did you say red kale? Yeah.

K-A-I-L-H. Okay. Much like we have cherry keyboard switches, I thought you were going to suggest that we have like vegetable derived mouse switch names. no it's the same companies that make uh make keyboard switches make um the micro switches that go in mice that makes sense um but there's a like i said there's like

YouTube channels full of people talking about the different click sounds and all that business. And then I guess while I'm out in there, I might as well carve out a few more grams of plastic. You know, why not? What is a good mouse weight to you? Because I think mine. I looked up the specs after the last time we talked about light mice. Yeah, you got a chunky boy. Mine's like 105, 110 grams or something like that. Mine's 58. Man. Yeah, it's like nothing in your hand. It's like nothing at all.

I, you know, most of the things that require headshots, I play on a console anyway, so kind of whatever. That's true. Could I interest you in some optical mechanical mouse switches? I'm curious about this because, well, I guess you have to have a mouse that supports this because I don't think it works with a normal.

I don't think you could retrofit. We were talking about this before we started, and I thought I remembered. I have a Logitech G502X light speed. Okay. Which the X is the successor to the regular G502, and it had just come out when I bought it. almost two years ago okay i thought i remembered and i looked it up and sure enough breakthrough hybrid optical mechanical switches achieve higher levels of speed and reliability through optical actuation while mechanical actuation maintains the crisp

tactile feedback that players demand. I mean, are they literally, I mean, are they saying exactly what that sounds like, that the mechanical part is just there to make them feel like classic mechanical switches and that all of the actual... signal stuff is being handled optically that's what it sounds like to me well so on on the non-electrical switches that i'm aware of they all have stuff in the systems that they give you a tactile feel even like on a hall effect

keyboards or mechanical magnetic switches or whatever obviously you need that but i guess the reason i ask that is does that mean is if and when the mechanical part degrades it's not going to affect the actual signal getting through it's just going to change the feel of it I think everything dies eventually, Brad. Yeah, maybe so. I don't know. This is apparently like the first mouse they shipped with those switches in it, so I guess time will tell. Yeah, I mean...

My guess is for a while there, Logitech was shipping these Omron switches that had a fairly high failure rate after like a couple million clicks. And I think part of that is accentuated by. any pressure you put on the switch while you're just using the mouse if you're just idly like tapping your fingers on the top that can that can extend the wear yeah

I don't know. I wonder if that mouse is legal for Counter-Strike. You know, Counter-Strike, they have new rules about which keyboard. You can't use those Hall Effect, those magnetic keyboards with Counter-Strike. Yeah, did you not know this? You mean competitive Counter-Strike? No, they ban you from the game. Even retail just sitting in your house on your purchased copy of Counter-Strike 2?

Valve bans Razer and Wooting's new keyboard features in Counter-Strike 2. It's time to turn off Snap Tap or Snappy Tappy. What? Yeah. I don't want any part of this. According to The Verge, Counter-Strike players are banned from using keyboard features to automate perfect counter-strafes. So it lets you do a back and forward simultaneous opposing cardinal directions feature. So that you can stop your forward momentum immediately when you stop.

And they're just detecting that somehow. I assume that it's mechanically detectable. Yeah, that's that's wild. But before we get out of here, can I just bellyache about one other thing really quick? Speaking of double inputs. I upgraded my Windows 11 to 24H2 recently. Oh, wow. Living in the last year.

That's right. To be clear, 24H2, not 25, which just came out. They're both bad, but just different scales. Yeah, but I felt like bad with a year of post-release fixes and updates might be a little less bad than brand new bad. It's just piling more crap into the, like they got a five pound bag and they're filling it with 13 pounds of AI crap. Well, guess what happened promptly after I updated to 24 H2. Now I cannot verify causation here. Oh boy.

I know correlation is not causation, but shortly after I did that update, I started getting a bunch of double inputs on my keyboard. And at first I'm on a mechanical and I was like, oh, it's probably a switch giving out because at first it was one key. I replaced that switch and it stopped. And then a bunch of other keys also started giving double inputs randomly, but then they would stop. And now it hasn't happened in like a week on any key.

That sounds like. And I just blame Windows because that seems like a safe default these days. Double trouble, double trouble, double taps for double trouble. It's twice the fun, twice the flavor, twice the party in your. keyboard socket i guess i don't know man i might be done with computers no i'm not let's be real

Welcome to Brad and Will Made a TechPod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Brad, we got a... Well, I'm glad you're not done with the computers because it would make this podcast a little weird one. You know, there's probably other stuff we could do, but you're not wrong. Here's Brad. This week, Brad's like... This makes me think of that old giant bomb year-end thing you did about the day the computers died, the video games died. Yeah, the day the video games, yes.

and and like what would you do with your time if you didn't have a server to futz with you'd just like be overclocking the toaster oven genuinely can't answer that question. Yeah, you'd get a hot water kettle and you'd be like, I think I can integrate a timer with this. Did we talk about that on this podcast at some point? Did I pose the thought experiment on here or maybe it was a different?

one of the 20 other podcasts I'm on recently where I was saying like, I think it was here where have you ever thought about what you would have done 200 years ago, 300 years ago, any time before computing and games and all the things you like, like what would have been your thing instead?

Oh, I would have definitely hunted humans for support. Okay. We definitely did talk about that on this podcast because I think you gave the same answer, but I mean, specifically when I think about that to myself, the crux of my. issue there is what would i automate what would i script like what logic-based thing would i get to have fun doing you know like i don't i like things like text expansion and serial automation stuff like you know what i mean did you like

Like there was nothing that there's nothing. Well, maybe like some mechanical things probably would kind of scratch that ish. Right. Did you ever watch the old Disney Swiss Family Robinson from the 60s? The one that is just to be clear. super racially problematic in multiple ways i did not uh wow this was a formative a formative piece of media for me because it's the thing that this was family robinson treehouse at disney world in disneyland in the old days i think now it's it's

Pirates of the Caribbean. I don't know what it is now. It's something else. Um, it's Tarzan probably, but it was, it was a, basically the it's, it's the, the story of Swiss family Robinson Disney fide in like, With like all the actors from like the shaggy dog and a bunch of other like classic live action Disney movies from the fifties and sixties. The gist is though they Gilligan's Island, the whole thing up. So they have this big giant tree that they live in.

and they build like a fabulous fabulous tree house that has like water wheels and automation and monkey butlers and the whole deal i think disney world has like a recreation of that to some degree yeah they've made it they've made it into something else now but it used to be swiss family because nobody has you know modern children have no connection with this with the works of robert louis stevenson wait is it louis stevenson who writes robinson no he wrote treasure island it's uh

Maybe it is him actually. Uh, Johan David this. Oh, well, there you go. I don't know. Perfect. Anyway. Yeah. So. I think you would probably build a bunch of Rube Goldberg machines that do your daily chores for you. That sounds like the closest approximation. As much as I like scripting things and writing light amounts of code and stuff, like just that kind of logic game.

I would need some equivalent. I would. Yeah. You'd build a machine that harvests the leeches from the swamp. Yeah. There you go. On that note, we've harvested some news leeches this week and we're putting them into the podcast swamp. I don't know. That's a bad metaphor. But this metaphor going the whole show, there's a bunch of stuff happening. We wanted to talk about it. So.

I don't know if for folks who haven't been paying attention to the price of PC hardware right now, RAM prices have doubled or more in the last, let's say, month right now. Yeah, it's getting bad out there. Yeah, prices have gone up. They doubled. in the last month or so. It's, there's a, well, okay, so I'm going to hit you with what we got. We got four stories, I think. We've got RAM and maybe SSD prices are going up. We've got.

microsoft's agentic ai plans for windows oh boy we've got uh nest google abandons the first two generations of nest thermostat but luckily hackers are coming to the rescue and this is the biggest surprise of all of them Nintendo once again is breaking third-party docs, but this time it's for the Switch too.

There's some nuance there, but we'll get into it. Yeah. So what do you want to start with the RAM and SSD prices? I feel like this is pretty straightforward. Yes. Yeah. So then and then just for housekeeping, we are going to end on our traditional some some tech. We're thankful. Oh, yeah, of course. Since American Thanksgiving is coming up after this episode posts. Yeah. Okay. So.

DDR5 prices up at least 100%, sometimes as much as 170%, depending on which kits you're buying. Yeah, that does seem to be retail kits. I looked at Gamers Nexus has a big video up about this. I read an article on PC Magazine. Not PC World. Wow. Is PC Magazine like PC World's mortal enemy? I've always wondered. We don't talk about PC Magazine. PC Mag, PC World.

Pretty similar names, pretty similar mission statements, I assume. Look, when I was at Maximum PC, they were all the enemy. That's all I know. Yes. I'll go. I look in my heart. We don't need to talk about it. Look, dude, I. I worked for a major video game, a gaming outlet where one year Sun Tzu was quoted. Oh, well, like I'm not joking. Sun Tzu got quoted before E3 one year at GameSpot.

I, I, how much the other outlets were the enemy. Did you not take, did you take it? I took a class in college where I went to Sun Tzu was one of the things that they taught. And the professor on the first day described it as. the military guide for fail uh noble fail sons ah so they didn't so they wouldn't get killed by their own armies because like a full third of that book is stuff like hey

Maybe consider getting tense for your guys and like keeping them fed and with good boots is a good way to keep them from, you know, deserting you. There is a very profound school of leadership thought that the rank and file eat before the leadership. Yeah. For good reason. And this is sadly a lot of current leadership in the business world, let's say, has maybe failed to remember that lesson. Look, you know what? Maybe they will. Maybe the consequences.

of that position will redound upon them at some point it seems like we're firmly in the fucking round phase here yeah anyway anyway i've i have sometimes wondered if pc magazine is like the shelbyville to pc world's springfield i think i think um I don't know what it was like in the olden days when print magazines were vying for space on newsstands.

But there's definitely a little bit of a rivalry there anyway. Anyway, sorry about the digression. But yes, I read this this piece on PC magazine. Like the stuff we're talking about is. largely retail kits. We're not talking about necessarily like the actual ICs from the small number of companies that make them in the supply chain. So Steve said those prices are going up too in the Gamers Nexus video. Oh yeah, no, I'm sure that's the root. What I mean is when we're quoting numbers like...

170 percent that's that's largely outlets looking at retail kits and what they cost this time last year versus now like this you know the specific 64 gigabyte corsair kit was this last year and now it is two and a half times more type stuff Yeah, it's wild. So why is it happening? There's a lot of thought about this. The big, big indicator seems to be that the growth in data centers and ai data centers specifically which require a lot of both video ram and ddr ram for the systems are

basically buying up the entire world supply of DRAM. There's only three companies that make DRAM, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron.

And I mean, right. And when I say make DRAM, I mean, make the chips that you see soldered onto your RAM sticks. And like that, that's, that's pretty much the long and short of it. Is it like, there's usually a, there's usually a. four or five year cycle when a new type of ram is announced and rolls out where it starts out really expensive and then it gets very inexpensive and then as supply starts as they stop production supply starts to wind down

Then the price goes back up again. And that's been very predictable over the last, you know, since DDR became a thing 10, 15 years ago. Yeah. Why do you think that is? I mean, there's three companies making memory ICs, like we said. There are basically two companies that still make hard drives. There are.

effectively two x86 cpu companies there's only now recently three companies that make viable gpus like is this just a problem of like both complexity and like difficult to scale business models that like it's just natural that not many companies are going to be able to get into that well it's space fabs are expensive yeah i mean memory fabs are less expensive than like a cutting edge you know four nanometer fab

but they're still expensive. Um, I don't actually know. It's one of the things I, I, one of the questions I talked to Steve the other day, cause he was on a full nerd and we were talking about this off camera and, and like, None of us, nobody, I don't have a good idea of why only three companies make RAM. It could be because it's a real commodity market. And like, you know, you may not.

like want to compete in that space with these enormous gigantic companies established players already have like economies of scale going and it's probably hard to break in well and they have supply chains they have deals they have all the stuff going so yeah um Is there anything you can do about the price of RAM going up? Not really. Yeah. You're kind of hosed. Sorry. I used maybe. Yeah, that's true. I think used RAM is one of the safer components probably.

What I've seen looking around at the stuff, it's not just that the prices are going way up. It's also sounds like, I mean, this naturally follows from what we're talking about, but supply is probably going to start getting shorter. So it's also just going to get harder to find stuff.

Well, and then the other thing that's happening in the U.S. is we're in the finding out phase of our tariff fucking around now where people have stockpiled inventory at the start of this year before the tariffs hit to last through the holidays.

and now they're unloading that stuff at the pre-tariff prices and we're going to start seeing tariffs hit anything coming into the country after the first year probably I can't verify this, but some folks on our Discord were also talking about this the other day and said that apparently these companies cut production in the last year or two.

So that's a normal thing. That's a normal part of the whole deal. Right. I don't mean it. I don't mean that in a bad way, but like they had overproduced and so they. But it just happens to be a matter of bad timing that they they had made too much. So then they cut production and now this demand is spiking.

on the tail end of them having lowered their production rates well and one of the things steve talked about in the gamers nexus video which is worth watching if you haven't seen it yet um is that this whole cycle was kind of fucked up because it started in the pandemic And DDR5 rollout was pretty...

pretty choppy to begin with yeah and and and because that rollout happened during the pandemic everybody's trying to build pcs there was a lot of demand for ddr4 but not as much for ddr5 and like like it's just been a weird cycle so yeah There's probably going to be knock-on effects that hit VRAM prices as well, which means video cards are going to be harder to get access to. I think AMD said that this week, that the rising costs of RAM are going to have to be reflected in graphics card prices.

There's rumors that Nvidia is holding super cards until the volatility settles out. Interesting. Because like the old rumor was that we would see something at CES from them and that that I. I think is probably unlikely now, but who knows?

And then the other question is, is it going to impact NAND prices, which will have a knock-on on the SSD prices as well, because you use a lot of SSDs in data centers these days. So I don't think that's a question anymore, because the Fizen CEO this past week... It was about a week and a half ago. They make controllers for SSDs. Fizen makes very widespread, widely used controllers that go on NVMe drives. Not all of them. I think some of the players make their own controllers.

See a lot of flies and controllers on like Corsair ships those on their assisties. Yeah. Like the Silicon power, like some of the kind of off-brand type ones. He straight up said in an earnings call to investors that. that this is happening. This is starting to hit. Recently, all the NAND companies started to increase their selling price almost up to 50% or 75%. Demand has turned very strong in quarter four.

He goes on to liken this to, I mean, here's the quote, we believe cloud AI, edge AI is going to need more storage and hard drive displacement is happening. So NAND supply will be tight for many, many years. So I guess the TLDR is if you see a deal that looks decent, I don't think they're going to be good deals on RAM, but if you need storage, if you need.

like now you buy buy now i mean yes buy an ssd now if you need one one of the things that elena talks about at pc world a lot is especially this time of year you have an extended return window for stuff so if you buy it and don't open it If you see a good deal, you buy it, you don't open it. You can return it up until January 31st for most retailers. And that's a valid way to go. I have, you know what?

shouldn't say this out loud i'm increasing my competition but i have been meaning for a long time to buy like not a top of the line nvb drive but like a decent one and just stick it in an external enclosure it's really convenient to have it turns out it'd be super useful to have for like imaging your Windows drive onto temporarily just for backup purposes, stuff like that.

I have one with a Ventoy partition that's bootable and like, yeah, super nice. Stuff like that. And like four terabyte drives for now until this starts to go into effect have been getting surprisingly cheap. Like four terabyte drives are. increasingly pushing the $200 barrier downward. And so I think I might try to grab a four terabyte drive and an enclosure ASAP before this really becomes a problem.

to give a sense of what we're talking about here a 6 000 mega transfer per second 32 gig ddr5 kit from g skill or crucial are $259 and $300, respectively, on Amazon. Yeah, that's bonkers, dude. I have basically that. I have a 6,000 G-Skill 64 gig kit that I got.

When did I build that PC two and a half years ago? You had a 64 gig kit. This is a 32 gig kit. Just to be clear. What? Yeah. The 64 gig kits are 400 plus last time I looked. Holy shit, man. I think that thing was like, eh, mine might've been around like 200, but that was like.

two and a half years ago almost here's a crucial ddr5 6000 mega transfer kit for $500 like part of the reason I went to 64 gig rather than 32 on this build was because the price was not that different like it was certainly it was more but it was like I think it was under $200 at the time for 64 gig I was just like, why not? I might as well just future proof. And now I'm extremely glad I did. There's a DDR5-48 mega transfer kit for 400 bucks. 64 gigs.

Like it's, I guess it's bad. It's just to be clear. It's real bad. It's rough. I mean, there are, um, there are 24 gig dims now though, right? Well, those, those 48 gig kits are, they're weird. No, they do something. I can't remember. I feel like one of the folks from Patriot told me. Or is that a single stick?

i can't be right no it's 224 gig sticks but they run hot because of something that they do to make them work off off the normal two eight bit bus or something i don't i don't understand exactly what it is but they they were i mean they sell them they stand by them but they were like if you're concerned about heat then maybe don't get those

Well, that's concerning. I had not heard that before. Also, those are $467. So you're not saving any money. No, but I was going to say there's at least a middle ground between 32 and 64 now if you need more memory. Look, just run Linux and 32 gigs is fine. It's all you need. Yeah, sure. That's the thing. Can I read one other quote from this earnings call before we move on? This is an amazing quote. I love the CEO of Fizen. We hope we wish we ask we request.

If the NAND company is enjoying a good gross margin, 50-60%, good. Don't try to go to 80%. This definitely will kill a lot of the industry. Yeah. It's good shit. So let's see, just to be clear, in the last 10 years, we've gone through a couple of video card boom and busts. We had a whole period of time where you couldn't buy anything from a webcam to a CPU.

And now we've messed up Ram. So good job guys. Like that was, that was my thing coming into this podcast was like, we just have a few years without some insane supply chain disruption that makes, makes building PCs like out of the.

grasp of normal people so speaking of things that are going to make pcs uh use a whole buttload more memory and also suck more uh ignite microsoft's developer conference this week in san francisco which I got to before we get into this, actually, I'm going to complain about something else. Oh, so I have about a 25 minute drive to the PC world offices.

those are their offices are on second street down by where the old cnet slash game spot slash cbsi offices were and like where ign was back when they had i guess they're still there i don't know but It's usually like 25 minutes and it's about 20 minutes to get to the ballpark and then you turn left and drive two and a half blocks.

And I did that the other day on Tuesday when build started. And then it took me another 25 minutes to drive the two and a half blocks because I think that the build, either everybody who was coming to build was taking Waymo's or.

They gave out Waymo credit or something. So people were going on rides because what would happen was at every light, a bunch of Waymos would just spill onto Second Street and fill all the available space on the street. And there'd be nowhere to go in the light change. So you just sit there through like. Four, five, six lights. It was absolute like I don't generally get angry in the car, but I was getting fairly upset. And I was like thinking about asking Siri how to firebomb a Waymo.

So anyway, Ignite was in town this week. That sounds very believably like something that would happen when a bunch of Microsoft developers are in town. I can tell you from experience, I assume you, well, you don't live in the city, so you may not have experienced this.

everybody who comes through town wants to try Waymo. Oh yeah. Like everybody I know who has come through town since Waymo became a thing, like really wants to ride in a Waymo. Like I haven't ridden in one yet. Really? Oh, I've been in several of them, but like it was old hat for me because like.

I was seeing them on the street for like months or a year before I ever sat in one. Like, yeah, because I go on walks around here all the time and they were just like driverless cars were just everywhere constantly. So by the time I ever had occasion to get in one, they were just like I was kind of.

I was used to it, but like every time somebody comes through town, they have to try a Waymo. Like people are obsessed with it. Have you seen the Zoox ones? The little ones? Yes. Those things, those things swarm around the Costco downtown. And I don't know why that's the only area that I ever see them. And you're talking about the.

symmetrical ones like the kind of bus looking things that don't really have an identifiable like front end and back end it it looks like it looks like the tram that you ride from terminal to terminal at the airport almost without rails it looks like the most i don't know like demolition man ask like yeah 90s sci-fi future car i have ever seen because again it barely looks like a car in terms of its shape imagine you make a scooter like if you made imagine you made a four-seat scooter

And I think the seats face each other on the inside, right? I believe that's the case. So you like people who are scratching their heads just go to and believe I'm saying this. Go type Zooks into Google. Zooks with an X. Z-O-O-X. Z-O-O-X and you will find a picture of what we're talking about. It is like a symmetrical looking little people mover thing. Yeah, they're weird. Anyway, so.

okay so dystopian hellscape continues because uh microsoft at ignite decided that they uh they wanted to push their new vision for windows which is they want to bring agentic ai to windows they want windows to be the platform on which you run agentic ai they want it to be an agentic os in fact yeah and and for folks who don't know

The idea of agentic AI is that instead of having one big giant monolithic model that relies to you somewhere between 40 and 60% of the time, you're going to replace that one big monolithic model. like ChatGPT with a whole bunch of smaller models that are specialized. And then you're going to have one model that recognize tasks and can identify them and dole them out to the specialized models autonomously.

something, something models for your models. Yeah. But, but I mean, and the idea is that the lies aren't going to compound themselves. It's all going to be better somehow, even though we're building everything on this flawed, fundamentally flawed technology. Yeah.

I mean, the lead on this story going around was, hey, they're shoving AI agents into the taskbar. Yeah. And file manager. Don't forget file manager. And file manager. But specifically, I mean, you know, the taskbar, I feel like, is still emblematic of the whole Windows experience.

It's the one that they ruined by putting Bing search in it. Sure. Yeah. But I mean, I mean, like quite literally, it is the anchor of your screen when you're using Windows, like visually, perceptually. Also, you know, the start button was the.

focal point of their marketing when Windows 95 came out. It's kind of like the taskbar and the start button have been the Windows thing since day one. It's true. For them to say, hey, we're putting AI agent icons right there in the taskbar is a bit chilling. Well, let me tell you, this integration isn't about adding agents. It's about making them part of the OS experience, Brad.

This is from Pravan Davuluri, who's the chief of Windows, and it's from a Verge interview. So basically what they want you to do is to tell your PC to do something. It'll go do it without input from you. And they built this model context protocol, the MCP. This is what happens when children know memes, but had never watched Tron to understand that the MCP is not to be emulated. Sure.

Works in a sandbox for now. So it basically has its own little section of the OS and you can revert stuff. And if it does something weird, you can go back. But the TLDRs, it'll integrate with the search and the taskbar, and then you'll tell it to do something. It'll go do that in the background. You can talk to Copilot and give it instructions, right? Like, hey, Copilot, I want you to go.

collect a bunch of logos for these five services, right? And get them with transparent backgrounds and put them in a zip file for me. And then theoretically, it'll do that. I could not be more skeptical. Because everything I've seen of the agentic AI stuff has been underwhelming to terrible. And Microsoft's implementation of Copilot. Well, we'll talk about that in a minute, but.

Anyway, it's opt in. It also had an incredible disclaimer that said, yo, this might install malware. Cool. So use with caution. I mean, that really gets to the heart of my whole problem with this thing. And it's not it's not even a matter of skepticism for me. Yeah. My problem is that I want nothing to do with a non-deterministic computing task. Yeah. I want nothing to do with a computing task that you can do multiple times that can produce different outputs every time you do it.

Yeah. And that is just completely in conflict with the way that LLMs work. I assume this is all related to LLMs. I mean, it's all based on probability, right? Yeah. So like you get different outputs each time. Like I just like, like that's just kind of the beginning and the end of it to me, you know, as mentioned at the top of the show, I love automating things and I'm going to be real. There are a million things you can do to fuck yourself.

when you automate things through a bash script or, or code or whatever, but a, at least you did it to yourself. B, at least it's going to fuck you the same way every time. You know what I mean? Like the computer, it's kind of, that is kind of the thing that is both the, Best and worst thing about computers is that they do exactly what you tell them to do, particularly when at a low level, you know, if you're writing code or whatever. I mean, that's the whole point of doing.

That's why we use computers. So it says, I found the actual warning that they gave. Let me see. It is, oh. Agentic apps like Copilot can request and get access to six commonly used folders in your user profile when running in the agent workspace documents, downloads, desktop, music, pictures, and video. And then it says this one.

only enable this feature if you understand the security implications nope which like i do understand the security implications which is why i'm not enabling this feature it can also search your um well i guess we'll talk about this in a sec but it can also search what's on your screen i believe that might be a separate thing as part of the co-pilot i mean that's that's recall basically i'm not saying

I'm not saying this is literally the recall feature, but that's what recall did as well, right? Yeah. Well, the new implementation is different than recall in that you have to give it permission every single time you press the button.

Yeah, so it can create agent accounts that provide agents with their own separate account on your device when acting on your behalf. They can create an agent workspace where they work in parallel with a human user, allowing runtime isolation and scoped authorization. But then they also can access your the important directories on your on your desktop. Anyway, thank you. Oh, thank you. This is a hard pass for me. I didn't even know about the built in security warnings. I mean, like I seriously.

Even without that, I was not interested in this. But if the people who make the software say, hey, there just know the risks of using this new feature, like. Who would do that? So in order to get access to this, you have to be running, I think, 25H2 or 25, 24H2, and you have to opt in right now. Yeah, I guess it is worth noting that it is opt-in for now. Who knows if that will change?

Cause I did say we talked about windows a little bit on the next lander podcast this week. And like, I did say like, it's relatively easy to avoid the bullshit and windows 11 for the time being. Like if I don't open Edge and click the Copilot button, I don't see AI stuff in Windows 11. And with that aside, most of Windows 11's bullshit is pretty similar to Windows 10's bullshit. A lot of it is. There's a lot more upsells.

Yeah, you might be right. I mean, I got similar splash screen stuff in Windows 10 from time to time. Hey, have you backed up your computer lately, Brad? Maybe the frequency is higher now in 11. You might be right about that. You should consider backing up so your data is safe. It's very important. The point I'm trying to make, though, is that currently it is a difference of degree. Fair. But this is a difference in kind if they start pushing this stuff very aggressively, where, again, like.

So far, Windows 11 has just been a mildly shittier 10. Yeah. But if this stuff starts showing up in places that are hard to avoid, then it becomes a much different conversation about like, OK, maybe I actually don't want to use this OS anymore. Past history makes me think that this is the precursor. That Windows 12 is that they're testing this stuff now and that Windows 12 is when these chickens come home to roost. That's the terrifying. I'll put it this way.

Previously, my biggest fear about Windows 12 is based on like leaked mockups and stuff is that they were going to make the taskbar permanently floating. I actually don't mind that. I do that on Linux. Which I want fucking nothing to do with. But I have a little bit of space above my way bar on Linux. What are those pixels doing, man? They look cool. Why?

Why do I want empty space under my taskbar when I could get more web page in that space instead? Look, I have 4,000 pixels. Never enough. Never enough. Okay. Anyway. Yeah. Anyway, I bring that up to say that like if this.

If this becomes a like core pillar of Windows 12, that is far more terrifying to me than a floating taskbar. Yeah, that's also bad. OK, so the other thing I wanted to talk about with the Microsoft stuff is that The Verge also did. I think it's paywalled, actually, but they did a great article.

about that that was titled talking to copilot makes a computer feel incompetent and uh the the author of that went through and tried all the stuff that microsoft has been running these ads that are that are like the basic gist of the ads is hey you can talk to copilot now and then it shows them doing a bunch of really useful features and uh then they tried to do that the stuff that was in the ad

And none of it worked at all. There's a lot of it that's tied to Copilot Vision, which is where it can look at your screen and use that as input for Copilot. But it was stuff like, hey, here's a picture of some caves. Can you tell me where this picture was taken?

And it consistently wasn't able to do that. And it seemed like it was actually basing the information not on image recognition, but on cues that were in the file name or obviously if there were like GPS coordinates embedded in the in the tags. For the photo, use those as well. But also, if you change the file name of a picture of some caves in Mexico or Belize to New Jersey, it would be like, oh, yeah, I think these caves are in New Jersey.

Basically, they derided it as simultaneously pandering and incredibly inaccurate to the point that they made them lose faith in their computer. Yeah. I thought it was pretty grim. I fully understand. Yeah. I think, wasn't there a bit in that write-up? I don't, I can't find it right now, but like, weren't they saying this thing kind of was like glazing them a little bit? Well, I mean, that's a defining characteristic of AI.

Well, it doesn't have to be. It is now, though. Oh, I know it is now. We've seen in the past when OpenAI pulled that back in ChatGPT5 and the user base revolted because it wasn't making them feel good enough about themselves. Anyway. and they don't i just searched for glazing and they didn't use glazing because they're not gen z but they did not use that term uh shout out to antonio g de benedetto it's this is a good article worth reading

You know what is sad is that I can't think of a better way than glazing to express that concept now, which I think probably means I spend too much time online. It's exactly right. Like aggrandizing them, I guess, is the term I'm looking for. I don't know.

Anyway. Oh, the other thing about the ask copilot thing is they took, they did take the lesson from the recall fiasco and you have to opt. You have to give it consent to look at your screen every single time it does. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I mean, that's better, but. Um, similar problems, what I said before, like I'm, I'm never going to trust the results of this thing. Like when I search for information, I like to rely on my own human intuition about what is good and bad information.

Well, if I, if I have to second guess the results I'm getting out of this thing, then what good is it? Cause I'm basically still doing the work anyway. It's funny because like there was a, on the AI front. There was an article today about the CEO of Kraft and who's embroiled in a lawsuit with the founders of the Subnautica thing of the Subnautica too. Dude, that stuff is crazy. And apparently he was the CEO of this enormous publisher was asking.

ChatGPT for legal advice on how to get out of paying this payout that they owed the founders of the and now are being sued over. It's wild. I wonder how they obtained that. Just regular discovery, I guess. Yeah, probably. I think actually he, I think he told them at some point. Yeah, man. Yeah. Anyway, that's good. That's good stuff. One last question before we move on. Yes.

How much of the employee base, or at least the decision-making base at Microsoft, do you think is true believers in this technology? And how much is this just them trying to justify the already massive investments they have made in AI to date? I would bet that there is enormous buy-in from the C-suite and the further down the chain you get, the less enthusiastic people are for it. Sure. Well, I, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if over time they are.

selecting for new new hiring candidates that are on board but i mean i don't know anybody everybody i know who's engaged with this stuff outside of a few people who do like web front-end work and stuff like that that's relatively straightforward no one is enthusiastic about it. Everyone is, everyone is, this just creates more work for me. This makes stuff take more time. I end up fixing more mistakes than saving time. And, and like, I don't know.

I really don't know anybody who actually is doing work who who uses more than like generative fill, generative fill, audio transcription, stuff like that. Tools that actually make. do well and create good results people engage with and use. And the generative stuff, nobody I know uses anymore.

Let me put it this way. Anybody who comes up to me and is like, oh, yeah, I really love gender. I use it all the time at work. I'm immediately suspect. So, yeah, I started to say same, but I have never had that experience. So that's a hypothetical. Yeah.

I, it's just, I, I just, I've been beating, I feel like I've been beating this drum on, on the PC world on the full nerd lately, but I can't remember the last time Microsoft had a product that I looked at and it was like, oh man, I'm really, that's something that. that actually solves a problem i have that's actually does a thing that i want and like i get that from apple i get that from logitech right i get that from from uh from

I get it from all sorts of other places, but I don't get it from Microsoft and haven't in so long. I can't remember the last time I was excited to buy a Microsoft product. It might have been that Xbox, that $90 wireless headset that they made. that let you connect to discord on your phone and, and the game on the headset. That thing was pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, the, the Xbox has done some things right on in the console space better than anybody else, but really it's not lately.

No, no, it's been a while. I'm talking platform level stuff like smart delivery. What does smart delivery do? It's the thing where it just downloads the best, most appropriate version of the game based on whichever device you're downloading it to. Oh, yeah, that's nice. Like Switch 2 and PS5 still don't do that.

Yeah, no, no. Like you routinely see people say like, oh, I remember when they announced smart delivery and I was like, why are you even announcing this? Of course, why wouldn't you do it? Why would you do it any other way? And then it turned out that five years later, they're still the only ones that have done that. So like.

Yeah, they do smart things at the Xbox platform level. That's about that's I will give them credit for some of that stuff. But yeah, on the rest of it, it seems like they're market leaders and being in second place in whatever category they're in. So anyway.

Speaking of giant companies that do things that suck, Google abandoned the first and second generation Nest thermostats a couple weeks ago on October 25th. That sucks. Do you have one of those? I do indeed. It's screwed into my wall. I've been using it for about 10 years. Man. So the idea of end of life in a thermostat.

I mean, like before smart things existed, the thermos, you would have thermostats that were decades old and still working. I mean, a thermostat fundamentally is a piece of metal that bends when there's temperature changes. Right. There's not a lot of there's not a lot to render a thermostat inoperable until now. Well, OK, so I will say it is really nice to either.

Like when we're sitting in here recording and the heat comes on and I'm getting sweated out of my office, it's nice to be able to turn the heat off, right? Without having to get up and stop recording. When it's cold in the morning and I don't want to get my tootsies out onto the cold floor, it's nice to heat up the house a little bit. I like it. I absolutely get the benefits. But it was a fairly expensive piece of kit when I bought it. It was like 300 bucks, I think, 10 years ago.

250 bucks 10 years ago. The justification they gave for killing it is that the hardware that those thermostats are running on. is basically outside the scope of current linux kernels so they'd have to backport a bunch of security stuff and like i get it like that that is actually a fairly valid i mean It sucks. Like, don't get me wrong, this sucks, but that is somewhat a thing outside of their control. Also, it's a device that lives inside my firewall.

So I'm a little bit less concerned. Yeah, I don't know. I still think that good practicing, good internetwork security is still advisable. But, you know, the right solution for this. The fundamental problem with this is that these thermostats don't work local only. They require the external service to have any kind of connection to another service. Also, sorry, that would be intra-network security, I believe, right? Yes. Yeah. Anyway, go on.

Um, so, you know, if they had, if they had said, okay, we're going to do one final firmware, it'll let it connect to stuff locally, but not remote. It'd be totally fine. Cause like, realistically, I want to talk to a home assistant and that's all that matters to me. Um, they didn't do that.

So they killed it. They just shot off the surfaces, which means that everybody who has one of these first or second gen Nest thermostats, just to be clear, they're the ones with the twisty screen no longer connects to the internet, which is a bummer.

Real quick, before we move on to the solution, I just have one question. Do you think, is there a legal CYA component to them not opening it up in the way you suggested and just saying, hey, we've now unlocked it and you can just use it in a local only mode? Is there like...

If they were to do that and some... Somebody burned their house down? Well, okay, yes. Actually, in this case where heat and cold are involved, I guess there's even more risk. But if there were some nest worm that got out there in the wake of them opening the platform up, do you think it's just like... From a legal standpoint, it's better for them to cover their asses and shut off support rather than open the possibility that somebody could get hacked and have their...

House burned down by a virus. I mean, I think probably our EULA that we signed when we signed up for that thing said they're all like whatever they do to it with software is they're indemnified from. You've already surrendered all your rights probably. But but also. My guess is it's just cheaper to not have to maintain it. Oh, definitely. There's definitely that. Yeah. So, um, so there's multiple ways to solve this problem. Of course.

If you were affected, then they would give you like $20 off of a new $300 thermostat or $150 thermostat, which was nice, I guess. There's also a couple of other solutions. So there's a bunch of routes for those first and second gen thermostats. And one of them, there's one project called No Longer Evil. That's a great name. Yeah, right?

it redirects the thermostat software from talking to google servers just to a reverse engineered api that they are hosting or alternately you can self-host it on your own land and the self-hosting consists of like three docker containers

It looked relatively light. I haven't gone through the process of setting it up on mine yet. He listed his experimental and says, don't use this if it's the only thing you have to heat your house and you live someplace that the weather will kill you, which is good advice. So I might go buy a $10 thermostat at the hardware store and keep that on hand just in case. There's no home assistant tie-in for that right now, but I'm sure that will come soon.

My guess is that given the way Home Assistant works, especially if you're hosting it on a Pi, probably somebody will put an HACS add-on in that runs the self-hosting and the... uh and and hooks it into ha before too long because it's this is all like there was a bug bounty there was a bounty for this uh that person this person claimed the bounty um and released the the self-hosting

code shortly thereafter quick digression is it is it easy to swap a thermostat i guess it is like i for some reason i never For some reason, I never considered that they would be $10 at a hardware store. I always assumed they would be like maybe a hundred bucks and like a little more involved and not just like a, like maybe a Home Depot purchase rather than a hardware store purchase. But I guess like you said, it is just, it is just a small mechanical.

Doohickey, right? I haven't bought a thermostat in 20 years, 15 years. But when I bought the Nest, it was on a wall at Home Depot with a whole buttload of other thermostats. For whatever reason, I'm sorry, I will let you move on. But for whatever reason, customizing the thermostat is like...

one of my top items if I were to own a house. You want one of the round Honeywell ones from the 50s? I think would be fun. I don't know what I would do with it. Just the idea that you can install your own thermostat, whatever that may be, is just like... It speaks to my need to customize and perfect in a way that I think few other things do. I know.

My daughter is very excited about the idea of getting another smart thermostat because right now our solve when we're laying in bed and it's too cold is to text her and be like, hey, go turn the thermostat on. You always wanted to be able to adjust the thermostat. Now you can go turn the knob. Okay, so the other one is a hardware solution where they replace the PCB. They set dot homes, S-E-T-T dot homes.

sells a 150 pcb that works with existing hardware so basically you pop out the existing board they have a new board that you put in place interesting that um connects to home assistant and a bunch of other stuff just using i think mqtt Okay. And you keep the screen, you keep the knob, you keep the bracket. The only thing that you change is the main board. Are the screen and the knob nice enough to be worth this much trouble?

The knob's pretty nice. It's got real good knob feel. Look, you cannot overstate the importance of good knob feel. In fact... Actually, I don't like the new Nest because at least the new cheap Nest just has a touch interface. Oh, so you like you'd like capacitively grab the outside edge of it and pretend that you're turning it, which feels icky. Does yours have infinite?

knob oh yeah like if there's no all the way around it just turns and turns and turns and man that sounds great spin for and it clicks too this is remember this is back from when nest was still a tony fidel joint so this is The person who brought you the original click wheel on the on the iPod. Oh, no shit. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. The click wheel of thermostats. That's great. Yeah, it's fantastic. Now, the screen's really small. The screen's like.

an inch and a half by an inch and a half or something because it's also from back in the day when lcds were still kind of expensive um but but it's all disguised so you don't realize that the screen's small because it's like in the center in a circular thing and it works reasonably well uh they'll give you a 20 bucks off on set.homes if you send them your old board back so they can because i assume what they're doing is flashing uh firmware on it and then sending them back out

or doing something else. I don't know exactly what's going on, but there's something happening that they're using the old boards for. Is there a scene for, well, whatever, this is probably an episode or half an episode at some point. Like, I wonder what the fully open... thermostats oh we've talked about that before there's a bunch of them yeah that's right well so there's also honeywell and ecobee also sell

varying prices of connected thermostats that will live entirely within your land and connect to home assistant smart things and all the other stuff in the ecosystem that's the type of thing i would get before you spend 150 bucks on this set.homes pcb is worth noting that Like right now on Amazon for $100, you can get an Ecobee smart thermostat that works with Home Assistant and all the other stuff doesn't require external.

Yeah, that's exactly why I was asking if the screen and knob were worth this mod because it seems like a lot of money and work to resuscitate an old device if you could get just a new and open one. Well, so the reason... a lot of times you build your thermostat into specific places and if you have a round spot for it and you don't want to have to redo replace that with a big square thing and have to repaint and stuff it might actually be worth 150 bucks to not have to

So that's pretty much it. I thought it was interesting that like I expected this to happen. I didn't expect it to happen quite so quickly. I'm going to, as soon as the no longer evil gets a home assistant integration, I'm probably going to set it up and see how it works. And probably with, I, I, I think I'm going to order one of those cheapy goobies to have on hand and if, and either return it if I don't need it or, uh, you know, whatever, replace it, use it to replace the nest if I do.

What else we got? We got Nintendo. Nintendo once again is breaking third party docs. Yeah. Did this happen on the switch one? Yeah, they did on the switch one too. I guess it did. It did not with mine. I don't know. We talked about it ages ago. there were like two waves of it right there was the first ones where they had the um there were a handful that always worked and then there were a bunch of what were essentially like

HDMI and power dongles for laptops that worked for a little bit and then they stopped working. Yes, that's right, because I guess Nintendo was doing, as Nintendo will, some amount of weird non-standard stuff with the video signal and possibly also the power draw.

the switch one the switch one the power draw was just that they only did they only supported 29 watt usbd right so like there were 50 million other different draws that they could have done but that was the only one that you could charge at full speed i can't remember the specifics but the video out was not just standard hdmi it was some form of displayport conversion or something as well there was shenaniganry yeah uh anyway i we we covered this years ago like three

four years ago on this podcast. I had, I had a ginky covert dock, which I still use. It's basically, it's a little charge brick with the flip out plug. That just looks like your standard kind of iPad charger, but it has HDMI and USB-C on it. And that thing never stopped working. I've used it as recently as a month ago on the Switch one.

How does it work on Switch 2? Oh, you don't have a Switch 2. I don't know. I really need to buy a Switch 2. I just keep putting it off. I mean, hey, this was just around the corner, Brad. I mean, Metroid's coming out. Now I have to get one because I really want to play Metroid. Kirby Air Riders maybe is not quite the impetus. I am the end of an era. I used my last of the switch, my switch online membership coupon codes to get Metroid prime. Ah, I hope it'll be worth it. You too. Anyway.

System software 21.0.0 came out for the Switch 2 and started making compatibility with some people's Switch 2 docks, third-party docks. They're up to 21.0.0. So something I think I came to realize in the course of reading about this is apparently they're using the same version numbers across switch one and two. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. So they both are getting the same version updates at the same time now, which is an interesting strategy, but.

It's not all docks. Apparently there's quite a few. Like I saw, there's an Avermedia third-party dock. And be clear, when I say dock, it typically at this point means like a little dongle, a little three-inch USB-C cable to a little breakout. box looking thing it's kind of for people who like are traveling and want to be able to plug in this switch to a tv or something right that's the use case for this it's um i mean a second switch shoe dock is not cheap it's 125 bucks but

For me, it's less about the cost and more about the portability because who wants to fly with the full-size Switch 2 dock? Like, that's not going to happen. Anyway, this affected some brands but not others. And I had actually not seen this until right before this podcast. Apparently, Nintendo gave Kotaku a statement that they are not going out of their way to do this intentionally. Because that was the big panic moment when this happened was, oh, God, are they going to...

Are they just going to try to play whack-a-mole this whole generation and constantly break compatibility with non-standard unlicensed accessories? It does not seem to be the case, at least according to them. Okay. And I saw... You know, a lot of these have names you have never heard of. Jimdo is one of the main affected brands I saw. I think Jimdo is one of the places that made the.

htcp stripper that we used to use for the playstation 3. that is entirely possible uh i'm on their support site and it's mostly in japanese but not entirely Anyway, they were one of the main brands I saw that was affected by this. They have already put out a firmware that they say addresses this problem. Okay. So it doesn't seem like... This struck terror into my heart because I love that CovertDoc.

And I have not seen Genki talk about a Switch 2 version yet. Yeah, because the weird thing is when you plug a Switch 2 into Switch 1 power, it just is like, yo, you can't do this. Yeah, yeah, that's not going to work. And, you know, in the absence of a ginky made doc, because I trust them because their switch one doc works very well for me. I was figuring I'd have to get one of these other kind of no, no name ones or made by some company you've never heard of. Oh, sorry.

Well, as I was going to say, it worried me that this was going to be a thing that Nintendo just started disallowing. And that does not seem to be the case. I mean, it's kind of annoying that they put industry standard ports onto a device and then. treat them in a non-industry standard way consistently and didn't learn their lesson last go round. I don't think there was a lesson for them to learn. The lesson is, hey, we don't give a shit.

We make bajillions of dollars on this thing. We have the fastest selling console of all time. Is it the Switch 2? Yes, by far. Wow, really? Yes, the Switch 2 is by far the fastest selling console of all time. Jesus, I didn't know that. They sold over 10 million units in like four months.

That is insane. Yeah, they're doing quite well. I mean, how long the tail will be is the real question. Like, will they hit a ceiling faster than they did on the Switch One? Who can say? I mean, another Animal Crossing and a good pandemic and they'll sell another 50 or 60 million.

What if they instead just put out a free update to the five-year-old Animal Crossing? I'm okay with that, too. Because that's what they're doing. I mean, it's not a big update, to be fair. Look, there were happy tears in my house when they announced that Animal Crossing update. Yeah, I can see it.

The only disappointment was that it wasn't going to be in time to get new stuff for New Year's. The thing I was going to say, I've been following a thread on Reset Era for some time. Despite not owning a Switch 2, I've been following the thread on Reset Era.

of people trying out different third-party docs because I really want a good third-party doc. Like I travel enough and work remotely enough, largely from like family places, you know, my family's house, that having a travel doc is actually kind of important. And so I was worried this was not going to be a possibility, but it seems like it will be OK. I wonder if it like because the new one has more fans and stuff in the dock, right? So that has come up.

Certainly. And I like the best I can tell that cooling is just for cooling the innards of the dock itself. Cause you tell me, I don't have a, uh, I don't have a switch too, but I can't imagine there's anything. on the back of the switch to and inside the dock that would facilitate any kind of efficient heat transfer right like it's not like there's metal plating in between the two like you need good surface contact to transfer heat well i don't even know if it has like open vents

Like, I can't imagine that that the fan in the dock is cooling anything inside the switch. But you tell me. I'm opening up my switch right now. Oh, well, while you're doing that, let me say that. Like I said, since I've been following that thread, this has been a process over time of people going like, oh, the Jimdo dock works fine at 4K60, but not 1080p 120. Oh, this other one does SDR fine, but not HDR fine.

You know, like, oh, this one's got a weird tint to it. Like the color space is wrong. Do you get the drift here? Yeah, it seems like it's a problematic category. It is something that these manufacturers have all been figuring out over time, and it seems like none of them have quite gotten the spec nailed down yet, but I'm hopeful that in the next few months, these things will just kind of work.

So I'm looking at the dock here and it looks like the fans blow air up into the intakes on the bottom of the thing. Of the switch? Of the switch. What do you mean by thing? Oh, okay. Maybe I'm wrong then. Maybe there is actual additional airflow then. Yeah, so I think it's just to make sure it gets good airflow while it's in the dock. That's a bit concerning, actually. It doesn't ever feel warm when you pull it out of the dock after playing with it for a while, though.

That feels like I mean, I know Gamers Nexus doesn't really do console hardware, but that feels like some some like tech heavy YouTube channel that's got like thermal imaging equipment should do some kind of test to see how much how crucial the cooling is.

uh, in the dock for the switch to, it's just, I mean, people like me. Yeah. For my use case specifically, somebody please do a lot of labor to answer this question for me. Uh, the YouTube. I mean, I don't want to buy a switch to, and then cook it.

A month later, when I go back home and play a bunch of Metroid there. Look, it's not like a Windows laptop where you where you put it to sleep, put in your bag and you get on the airplane, open up an hour later and your bag is warm. I suppose not. We've reached the end of the show.

Have we? Well, almost. It's time to talk about tech we're thankful for. That's right. One more segment. One more segment. You want me to start? I can kick it off. Yeah, go for it. I love tiling window managers, man. See you.

This is not a surprise for anybody who's listened to the show lately, but have you converted fully? It feels, you know how like, you know how you get a new Mac laptop, you're using Windows most of the time and you switch back and forth and one of them feels like the bad OS and one of them feels like the good OS.

Yeah, I got that. Really? Yeah. Interesting. Neary's some hot, hot biz. Are you now tiling when you are in Windows? Because you can use like fancy zones or, you know, there's keyboard shortcuts to snap Windows. Like, are you still trying to approximate the experience? What if I just didn't go into windows very much? Also an option. Yeah. Yeah. So I put, I put an area on my desktop at home. Uh, I'm, I'm absolutely besmirched.

Is it working well without a trackpad? Because I've got the sense that the gestures were probably pretty crucial for window management or maybe not. That was my concern. The thing I don't exactly have yet is hotkeys for switching workspaces. But since I have multiple monitors, I don't really use multiple workspaces as much on the desktop as I do on the laptop.

It's a nice thing about a lot of Linux software, though, like custom hotkeys are a configuration file edit away. Yeah, so I just have to figure out what the... NERI command is to switch those workplaces. Do you know how big the input.conf for MPV is for me now? Like I've added so many extra hotkeys to MPV for video navigation stuff.

Let me go see how big my Neary config file is. Cause it's getting, it's up to a 17 K now. So we're getting there. Right. But no, it's, it's for folks who don't know a tiling window manager. kind of works like the iPad OS in a lot of ways. So instead of having to place your windows on the screen, it just says, okay, they can be full width, a quarter, a third, they can be half height, they can be full height.

They can be full screen. They can be maximized. Let me try this sequentially. You tell me, is this an accurate flow? Yeah. Like boot into the shell, empty, empty desktop. You see a wallpaper.

You open a browser, it just immediately opens full screen, right? It actually opens half screen by default. Oh, really? You can set that. Well, yeah, I'm sure you can customize that. So I do everything half width by default, and then you can... super key which is your windows key plus or minus to make them wider or narrower got it or or if you did have it set where like say you open a browser

and it's full screen and then you open something else or even a second browser and then it splits it to half screen and then each one is now taking up half the screen, right? Yeah. It basically is dynamically resizing windows to make the most use of space.

Well, and then what Neary does is it just gives you infinite scroll out to the side. That's the one that doesn't use multiple desktops. It just you just scroll apps forever. Well, you can do multiple desktops, too. I assume there's some mechanism for jumping way back in the stack to a much earlier app and not have. to just manually scroll there so i find that i don't get more than five or six on a on a scroll because most of my work happens inside browser tabs honestly

So it's less of an issue. Now, the other thing that I've done is that you can set up rules for workplaces, workspaces and windows. So like any time a window opens that the app ID is, for example, steam app underscore. that automatically opens full screen on my game workspace. So I just, and it switches to it, so it focuses. So basically it solves the problem that Wayland has.

where it doesn't have a primary display equivalent and doesn't know where to launch games. And I have it set, so it does all that stuff. Like the browser automatically opens on the main monitor.

discord and slack and obs and um the apps that i use for communication and stuff all open on the top display and it ends up meaning that i don't spend as much time fiddling with where applications are on the desktop as i do on a windows machine and i never lose windows i can always hit windows key plus o to go to the overview and then see exactly what i want and click directly into it it's very good yeah pretty easy to rearrange windows i assume

Yeah, you hold control when you're pressing the Windows key and hit the either drag or you can do. buttons and it switches them it moves the window that you have focused when you when you have control pressed i'll probably give that a shot when i get back to desktop linux if i if and when that happens i still i still don't think it's for me but i will at least try it just for my edification if nothing else

It is very Brad. I get it. Yeah, kind of. But also, I don't know. I think I made this point on the Discord at one time. On some level, all of my computing life is just chasing after the high that I got looking at screens of Next Step in the 90s. That's true. Like when John Romero would post a picture of his desktop and it looked like the coolest thing I'd ever seen.

And so I'm always I'm always I like floating windows. I like I like a somewhat chaotic desktop full of windows of different sizes in odd places. Brad, it's time next April. We're going to see a next cube next year. You need to buy a next cube. Oh, we saw one at the last electronics market last year. There was one. I think it was like it was like 300 bucks, though. That was too much. That is. Think of how much how much that hardware used to cost, though.

It might have been more than that, actually. I don't know. I would buy a next cube. More than that, I'd have to think about. I don't remember if it was verified working either. It wasn't a cube also. It was the other one. Oh, was it not? Okay. It was one of the smaller workstations. That's way less interesting then. Yeah.

You want to do one? You want me to do all mine? Okay, I know we need to end this podcast. Can I ask real quick, have you done anything with Quickshell and Neary? Have you scripted any of your own desktop widgets? So I haven't done that. I'm using Natalia shell, which lives between quick shell and quick shell. If I understand it is built, everything's built on quick shell. I've adjusted some of the things that they ship, but I actually realized that that was probably a mistake. Cause then it.

prevents me from taking updates so i i basically pulled out what i'd done and saved it and i'll make it a plug-in at some point it's really easy that's to see that Like tiling window managers, I don't know, maybe, but I've said this before, the ability to effectively like script or code your own in a very easy language, your own UI elements is like maybe the most intoxicating thing I've heard about a computer interface.

in many years well and the thing the noctalia folks are building at a pretty good clip right now and have like i don't know like my the default bar which is like the taskbar equivalent i guess has like CPU utilization, CPU temperature, memory utilization, like the applications, media that's playing, the window that's currently focused.

And then like a tray equivalent that's like the applications like Slack and OBS that have tray bar icons. And then it has like a little pop down control panel thing that has like the weather and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and. uh, wallpaper selectors and which performance mode I'm on and all that kind of stuff. It's really good. It's like, it solves about 90% of my problems with Linux. So that sounds fun. It's good. Uh, I have written wireless input devices. Oh,

I, as mentioned, top of the show, I am coming up on two years with this wireless mouse, this Logitech Lightspeed, and I've just passed a year on this Keychron mechanical keyboard. Mm-hmm. I had, I had the Apple magic keyboard that I used on this PC for some time before that. Like 10 years. No, no, no, no. I've been using Apple keyboards for 10, 15 years, but that magic keyboard, like after the pandemic started, but.

That was Bluetooth, and Bluetooth does not count here. Oh. Because fuck Bluetooth. Bluetooth is 2.4 gigahertz also, though. Well, yeah, but what I've written here is 2.4 gigahertz only. I'm talking about devices that ship their own 2.4 gigahertz dongle.

because in the case of both the Keychron keyboard and the Logitech mouse, they each have their own dongle, which I've just got plugged into extenders coming out of the back of the PC. They are incredibly responsive. Like, I cannot tell the difference from wired in terms of latency. Like they wake up immediately, even though they sleep. I charge these things like maybe at most twice a month. Yeah. Like probably more like every three, three ish weeks for like 20 minutes each.

I never turn them off. They sleep all night. They last for weeks. They wake up instantly the second I touch them. The keyboard, this is crucial. The keyboard, I can now go into the UEFI or the BIOS without having to plug in a wired keyboard. Oh, yeah, that's the reason I have a wired keyboard, which was the stealth reason that I bought this key from. Yeah, I wanted a mechanical keyboard, but also the real reason was what if I could just use this keyboard for.

Everything I do in this computer, I never have to fish out a wired keyboard again to plug in to go into the BIOS. Huge game changer. Wireless input devices, as far as I'm concerned, are... like as good as now like maybe better than like they're just default for me now the uh so i love i have the same well i have a different wireless mouse but i use the lightspeed dongle um i actually have the power play pad

which I thought was kind of gratuitous. And I think they sent one to me. I think Logitech at one point was like, hey, do you want to try this out? We're sending these out to people. I was like, yeah, sure, I'll take it whenever it sounds goofy. Man, I know they're expensive and I know they're... Like it's like 150 bucks for the pad. It works with the entire range of wireless mice that they sell, at least the gaming ones.

It is so nice to never have to think about charging my mouse. I'm not a wired keyboard still because of the UEFI thing. Okay. Then you already have a cord. So yeah, I don't, I'm not. Look, my desk has piles on it. I'm not really cord averse. Yes. That's the deal breaker for me is that I am cord free now otherwise. So I will happily plug in the mouse every two, three weeks to avoid any.

permanent cords like two or three weeks is fine for me it's the older wireless mice were like it was like four days when they first started doing the light speed sensors that's way too much um and and that's just enough that like you don't do it every day Like there's a window somewhere in there that's like, hey, every day, fine. Every other day, less good.

Every fourth day is a nightmare. Yep. But then once a month, no problem. Yeah, I'd say it's close to once a month for me. Honestly, it really I'm like shocked how long these things last. And the last thing about this, I mean, I guess not every keyboard has this, but the...

The Keychron has its 2.4 gigahertz setting that I use with PC, but it's also got a Bluetooth switch on it. And so I've got it paired with my mister for Bluetooth. And there are a bunch of cases where you need a keyboard on a mister to do something useful.

the ability to be at this PC tinkering with the mister and just flick a switch and immediately type into that thing. Like I never have to dig out a wired keyboard for basically anything now. And it's the fucking best that, that is, that is your argument in favor of, I, um, I have one of those 8-bit dough Nintendo keyboards, and it has the wired Bluetooth 2.4 gigahertz switch, and it's delightful. Yeah, it's great. Highly recommend it.

Okay, I got Lunar Lake on the list. I got a Lunar Lake laptop as a loaner from PC World to do Linux stuff on. And holy crap, it is incredible to have an x86 laptop that has like day and a half battery life. and performs like a it performs fast it feels like a fast computer i'm a huge fan love the work that they've done i'm kind of bummed that it's a a dead end it's like a one-off yeah it's kind of sad

I mean, hopefully Panther Lake at least gets close to some of that stuff. I know they're not doing like the solder on RAM and all or the, you know, part of the package RAM. Yeah, I think the on package RAM probably maybe was a good thing, was a bad thing then. And as the RAM prices go up, seems like maybe it's a good thing. So I wonder who's going to start shipping 16 gig laptops again.

But yeah, I thought it was like it's it's a combination of battery life and performance that that exactly hits the spot that I. want to live. And like, just to be clear on a laptop, I'm not doing anything heavy. I maybe do a little bit of light audio editing. I don't do, I don't do video anymore. I don't do games really.

But it's like competent enough if I switch the VRAM over, shift the VRAM a little bit of VRAM over from the 32 gigs. If I put four gigs of VRAM on it, I can even play like basic indie stuff pretty well. That's cool. So, yeah. You're basically like getting the benefits of the arm max, but on x86 now. Yeah. And that's awesome that that's happening. Cause like, it's awesome to think that all laptops might just be that way in five years or so. I mean, it's.

There's no reason they can't be at this point is my takeaway from that device. That's kind of been a revelation. It wasn't armed so much as other factors about the way those things are made. Well, yeah. focusing on every watt drawn right like you could do the same thing with x86 if you had a similar focus yeah i've seen i've seen people on our discord who talk about like going to work with their arm mac without a charger

I, so I don't, I never carry a charger to PC world. Right. Like I've still got, well, of course you're, you're only there for a few hours, right? Not a full eight. Oh, are you there? Okay. Well, that's a full day. Like, yeah, like I just I said, and they're just like, oh, I've got 40 percent battery when I leave every day. What's the point? And I'm just like, that terrifies me. But I guess I get it. Well.

Okay, so in fairness, we also have a buttload of USB chargers around, so it's not like it's a problem. But I assume at this point, we also have a buttload of USB chargers around for other people who are working in the office and are doing the same thing. Right. That's also something that's changed since our Macs first came out, the ubiquity of USB-C charging everywhere. Yeah. I mean, most of the desks in our office have a USB.

see docking thing that plugs into the monitor and keyboard and mouse that are just on the desk as we do floating desks now. Yeah. Um, I guess I'm up. Yeah. Well, you got, this is maybe a weird one, but I put video game consoles here.

Oh, you like the Steam Deck? Sure. Okay. I hope video game consoles continue to be around. For somebody who likes computers as much as I do, I play basically everything I can on a console. Yeah, it's funny. When you played ArcGraders, you played that on PC, right? I played that on PC. Shooters, you play on PC. There's some stuff where the mouse is...

kind of key and et cetera, et cetera. But I mean, there's multiple reasons there. Like, you know, it's pretty much only get to see my girlfriend at night. So it's nice to play games at night in the place where she is and not in this room where I spend the rest of my entire waking life. Yeah. For one thing, she's dancing in the doorway right now. That's nice. But something that occurred to me as I was making this list is that consoles, I mean.

Okay, like the old thing about consoles is, oh, you just press the button and go. Like there's no drivers to set up. There's no settings to worry about, et cetera, et cetera. I've come to realize that's valuable to me for a different reason than the average person who just doesn't want to deal with that stuff because I futz with computers constantly, right? Yeah. The reason it's good for me is that it helps to kind of head off my worst tendencies about...

making sure I'm like getting the exact best experience on a PC game. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like not having options sometimes is the best option of all that. That's like, like I'm never going to have to go like, look at lists of recommended settings for like,

Is the SSSAO better on this one or should I switch to this other thing? Or like, what is the performance impact? Like, and I know like GeForce, like the GeForce thing exists, whatever it's called that optimizes settings. Like I know there's stuff like that, but.

I'm always going to obsess over, I got to make sure the settings are ideal before I get in here. See, I used to be like that. Yeah. But I just stopped. I had to stop. That's another option. But look, that requires personal growth and discovery. Well. For me, it was, it was that I had been, yeah, like working in.

The space and doing benchmarks and stuff all the time cured me of that pretty quickly, I guess. Yeah, sure. I could see that. But like, I mean, I just like to plop down and know that I'm kind of getting the curated experience, I guess, is the best way to put it. That's why you need to switch to a brother.

the advent of the pro consoles has muddied that in some measure, you know, performance motor. Do you want, uh, ray tracing mode like there are games shipping with three or four different graphics modes now but even then like even with four modes which is a lot for a console game it takes about 30 seconds to pull up the digital foundry article and see what they all do and just pick one so

I hope game consoles stick around in this, in this era of the next Xbox becoming part PC and the steam machine being a PC underneath and et cetera, et cetera. I really hope I live. Like I grew up loving the form of the video game console. It's the first like product I was ever, you know, like obsessed with or that inspired me. And I really hope that that concept does not entirely go away. I think at least two of the three will remain.

Okay. Or three of the four, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. Um, my last one on the list is the pine sill. I think this was on my list last year, technically, but I have used it so much this year. Really? Yeah. Well, I got a battery pack that works with it, which was the big, the big jump for me. Yes. So I got one of those big, like 12,000, 24,000 watt hour battery or a milliwatt hour batteries. And.

It means that when I needed to pull the fan out of one of the blowups in the front yard and I needed to solder the wires back in place, I was able to just do it. Now all I need is a little thing that can shrink heat shrink tubing. that also runs off the same battery that would be dope a little hot air blower um but yeah i used it for that i used it to fix a monitor i used it to fix um like i i literally i pull it out of the drawer twice a month probably wow

I mean, we have a lot of janky, like little kid electronics, it turns out. Sure, sure. Often need wires replaced. I'm kind of jealous. I bought mine and I used it like twice ever, which is. Not a knock on the product. I just don't have a lot of use cases for soldering, it turns out. That DBX is calling you, man. Dude, if I could, I would. If I knew what to fix in there to make this thing reliable, I would do it.

But it seems like there are so many things in there that it could be that I would basically have to like rebuild the entire thing from scratch. And that's not going to happen. Yep. But anyway, pints of loans. Yeah. Yeah. I highly recommend a, um, a silicone coated USB cable to go with it. I bought one of those. I wonder if there are a lot of serious competitors to that thing. Uh, there's a bunch of knockoffs. It looks like the last time I looked.

That's kind of what I mean by serious competitor. Like I would exclude knockoffs from that and only include things that are like substantially different, but similar. Yeah. Things that are their own product and not just an imitation, I guess is what I mean. For me, like it's weird for me because I have like the full Hakko like, you know, soldering station that I just it's on my table over there.

And I pull it out occasionally if I have a big project to do, but for just the quick touch up that pine seal for $25 or whatever it costs is, is fricking magic. Yeah. It's crazy for the price, right? Yeah. Okay. Last one.

Maybe I got might have one more maybe. Okay. All right. Well, this is my last one. Okay. This is kind of a weird one, but running my own VPN and VPS. Oh yeah. I get this. Like I, I, um, I have a WireGuard endpoint in my house, which is a Raspberry Pi. So if I VPN from outside the house, I'm just connecting to that Raspberry Pi that I set up the config on myself. I've had a VPS for coming up on a year as of Black Friday.

And sometime I'm going to get around to, I've done some of the work, but I'm going to finish setting it up to be kind of a proxy in front of my house. Right. Like, so I can run a blog or game servers or whatever and obfuscate my home IP.

you know, have a little bit of separation. So you can self-host things that you probably shouldn't self-host? Well, it's not for self-hosting. It's for, well, I mean, I guess this is technically self-hosting, but it's for other things that other people would access.

Oh, like a blog or like game servers where it's other people connecting to, let's be real, this machine sitting right next to my desk that has like all my storage in it and stuff like that. Yeah. So I need a little bit of separation there. Anyway.

Wait, does it mean Brad and Brad and Will might make a Quake server sometime next year? That is the thing. It's a blog and Quake servers. That's really the only things I want to do. I don't know if I want to play with you on a zero ping Quake server, though. Well. The amount of networking study I'm going to have to do to actually finish this project is so intense that by the time it's over, I bet I could route my Quake traffic out through some.

external node out on the internet and back to my own server five feet away so that I could replicate some of the amount of latency. So you have fair lag? Yes. Just add 50 milliseconds on there. Okay. I can get behind that. Okay, I've written CF, AWS, and Cloudflare outages next to this. Oh. So I had been kind of questioning the effort I've put into all this stuff and plan to still invest in it because for a VPN...

Or even for WireGuard VPN, you can just use TailScale, for example. Like a bunch of people, a ton of people on our Discord love TailScale for reasons that seem quite understandable. Cloudflare Tunnel. pretty much does exactly what I want this VPS to do. And in fact, I got the VPS before I knew about Gladflare Tunnel. So I've like kind of repeatedly looked at this stuff and was like, it's really worth rolling my own when these like...

turnkey services exist that kind of do the same thing. And then all these outages started recently. And I'd like to be clear, these outages did not take down any of the services that I'm talking about necessarily to my knowledge, but they could or similar outages could.

And at some point I realized, you know, at some point I realized like WireGuard is running in the Linux kernel on that Raspberry Pi 4 that is my endpoint. Unless there literally is no internet access, there's no route from wherever I am remotely to my house. That will always just work. The VPS is a little bit stickier because there is a VPS provider there and they could lose their ability. They could potentially have downtime. That's not a perfect solution.

It made me feel a little bit better about all the time and work of thinking like, oh, this stuff is like, it's maybe rickety in a different way because I set it all up myself, but at least it depends on as few. corporate services that could have outages as possible. Or decide to start charging, right? So that's the one I've actually consoled myself with all this time until these outages recently. It was always like...

What if Tailscale gets bought and their business model goes to shit and suddenly they are charging five times more for the same service or Cloudflare could start charging for Cloudflare Tunnel? You never know when the profit motive is going to assert itself on these things. To be clear, VPSs are virtual private servers, right? It's just a VM sliced server. Yeah, it's just a Linux VM running in a data center somewhere that you can do whatever you want with. Yeah. With a dedicated IP.

Typically they cost like five bucks a month. Is that? Yeah. Yeah. I got, I got a very deep discount last black Friday on this thing, which I've barely used for the last year, but yes, it was like five bucks a month with that deal for like pretty good specs. I don't I don't think there's like I run. It's funny. I stay connected. I keep my phone connected to WireGuard pretty much any time I'm out of the house. I actually built a shortcut to automate it. And I do it.

So that I have pie hole everywhere I go. Which, which I, it turns out I quite like the pie hole set up the way I want it to work and it works really well. And yeah, I got no, I got no complaints. Does that hit your battery life? Not really. I haven't noticed anything. I mean, also I drive on the start and end of almost every time I leave the house. So like when I'm driving, but yes, if I, if I could wishlist an item to be thankful for this time next year.

It would be for Apple to implement a kernel-level WireGuard solution. Oh, because the one right now is slow. Well, it's not slow. It's more that it hits battery life. The WireGuard runs in user space on Apple devices. Yeah.

And so you're going to get super technical here. My understanding is that you're effectively like crossing the user space kernel barrier back and forth, like at basically every packet. I think like it is a less performant option in terms of burning more battery life than it would be.

At the kernel level, it may not be a huge difference. I'm not sure, but I have not noticed. And I like I said, I leave it on pretty much all the time. Yeah, I have seen people talk about WireGuard kind of burning their phone battery pretty fast. i i also have the pro max so i have a yeah like it's like 36 hours of battery when it but it was new so look man obsessive optimizer here okay yeah i'm better i'm aware

Um, I also, this is a tease for an upcoming PC world video, but I tested a bunch of external USB capture cards, the USB C USB 3.2 ones. Okay. Um, I partly because I want to, I'm thinking about changing my stream machine from like a full tower into like a small form factor that I can just set on a shelf. But also partly because I was kind of curious to see how they are in a world where USB 3.2 is like.

a pretty good chunk of a PCI express lane. And the answer is that they're quite good. The video is interesting. We talk a lot about it a lot, but I'm, I am kind of all in on USB capture or uh from for most stuff actually because a the internal cards often don't work in linux and b the the the performance is roughly equivalent and it doesn't take up pci express lanes yeah that's pretty appealing

Yeah. As somebody who burns a PCIe slot on a capture card that won't work in Linux if I ever switched. Even Elgato. Yeah, it's Nalgato. They have zero Linux support. The Avermedia ones that I tested, two Avermedia ones that work because they're just basically PCI Express to USB bridges. Yeah, I read that, but I don't want to buy another card if I can help it. Yeah.

If you look out to start supporting Linux, I doubt it. Nope. I wouldn't hold my breath. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, so that's it. That's what, that's the stuff I'm thankful for. That's the stuff you're thankful for. Some hot news.

I kind of want to go. Nobody's at the house right now. I could pull the thermostat off and just update it, but that seems highly risky, especially tomorrow morning when it's 50 degrees in here and there's condensation on the walls. I'm like, oh, God, I wish we had heat.

it has turned very cold in the last couple days yeah san francisco cold like it's it's it's funny my daughter was making fun of somebody the other day who's walking down the street with like a scarf and a big puffy jacket and a hat on Cause she was wearing a t-shirt cause she doesn't get cold cause she's 12. And I was like, look, if you only ever lived here, she's like, I only ever lived here. And I was like, well, okay, if you only ever lived here, the wind and the cold and the high humidity.

make it feel so much colder than it actually is. I would rather be in Tennessee with an inch of snow on the ground than like February here where the winds blend 40 miles an hour off the ocean and it's cold as hell. Anyway. That's as good a place as any to wrap it up, I guess. Thanks, as always, for listening to the show. We are listener supported. That means we wouldn't be here without you, the listener. True.

If you would like to find out how to support the show, you can go to patreon.com slash tech pod. Again, that's patreon.com slash tech pod, where for five bucks a month, you get access to the discord. which is full of beautiful nerds. I think I talked about it last week, but I'm still blown away that we had an incredibly in-depth conversation from people who work in chip design and fab management about how different processes work. And it was like...

five pages of people just talk and shop about stuff that I was intensely into. It's very good. A lot of expertise in the community. A lot of people last week talking about the valve stuff. And. The takes were much less nuclear than on the rest of the public web. So if you want a place to talk to people that are going to react normally about stuff and not just start screaming like your average YouTuber, highly recommended.

And you also get access to the patron exclusive episodes where every month we talk about kind of just topics of interest. Sometimes they're too short for a full episode. Sometimes it's stuff we're working on. Sometimes. Sometimes we just get in here on low carbon dioxide days, lock ourselves in the office and shoot the shit for a while. I've taken to I've taken opening the windows in here and like I get a good cross breeze going across the house before I podcast lately. Yeah, I think it helps.

I have a forced air fan in the window that I can flip on before and after. But anyway, so that'll do it for us this week. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thanks for supporting the show. A very special thank you to our executive producer, to your patrons, including Jason Lee. Thank you also so much. Thank you.

We will be back next week with another edition of the TechPod. I hope everybody in the United States has a happy and safe Thanksgiving. If you're going to fry your turkey, remember to turn that burner off before you drop the bird in. That's that's my that's my frying having fried two turkeys lifetime and never doing that again. Oh, a measure. Make sure that the turkey fits in the amount of oil you have before you heat up the oil.

and turn off the fire before you dunk the bird in the in the flaming fuel in the boiling hot fuel man that's intense yeah can i can i send off the podcast this week yeah go for it printing the turkey.