316: I Don't Like the Sparkle

Sounds like you've got the old NTFS dirty bit over there. Look, the number of times Windows crashes and I reboot and I reboot into Linux, I'm like, what the hell's going on? My stuff isn't working. And then I look at all my mounts and all my NTFS mounts are dirty and thus unwritable. And that causes unpredictable things for things like my Steam library is three. That's how many times it's happened in the last week.

The last thing you want is an unclean Windows install. I mean, the unclean Windows install, we're referencing... Last week's episode of Dual Boot Diaries, I guess, which I which I listened to very excitedly that at some point you mentioned me and said I must be yelling at my radio. But in fact, I was not. I was excitedly listening to what you were talking about because there were like three different things in there. I was like, oh, I know how to fix that. I can.

hit him up, but that NTFS dirty bit thing, A sucks. Yeah. B can be fixed with a single command. Oh, can you fix it without having to boot back into Windows? All it is is a flag being set on the NTFS volume that says this was not mounted. This was not unmounted or shut down properly. Like, don't remount it because it might be fucked up. You literally can run one command to just clear that flag and then it's fine.

Oh, my God. That would have fixed all your problems. You just needed to boot into something that you could run. Well, OK, so that the dirty bit wasn't what caused me to reinstall Windows. The thing that caused me to reinstall Windows was that I messed up the boot partition and I didn't. rather than just fixing it the easy way by booting into the Windows installer.

And doing that, which I did the second time it broke. Yeah, so that was another. I guess I didn't know you can use the installer for this, but you can also just make a Windows recovery USB stick that will do stuff like that for you. So that was another.

Again, I wasn't yelling at the radio. I was like excitedly going, oh, I need to tell him about a thing. I forget how you do it. You can Google this, but there is a way to create a Windows recovery USB from within Windows. And then you just boot off of that in the future when you have boot problems in Windows and it will fix those.

Honestly, the automatic startup repair thing has never once worked for me in the last, since they implemented it like 15 years ago, 20 years ago. But you can do it manually. Like you can just wipe that partition entirely and then. create a new MBR or new UEFI boot thing. And then it's like, it's doable. Yeah. This is from our people on our Linux channel. Like the purpose of that thing is to fix broken windows bootloader. Yeah. So I would recommend go making one of those. I like it.

Yeah, there's something else, but I've forgotten what it was. I had to get up this morning just before we started this podcast because I have had an outstanding project that I haven't done yet. That is. And I had to walk into the room with the thermostat and manually reach out to it with my hand and turn the knob. Welcome to living like us commoners. I don't know how I'm going to deal with this. I got it. Look, I got to install a couple of Docker containers.

And then I got to flash some firmware. It's all pretty rote, pretty straightforward. That's modern living. Just got to install a couple of Docker, set up a couple of Docker containers to run your thermostat. it it's look it's not a large house i realize that it's like no more than maybe 15 steps to the thermostat from anywhere in the house but when i'm sitting here at my desk and i have to get up and i mean i guess i have wireless headphones so i don't have to take my headphones off even anymore

Seems pretty lazy when I think about it, really. Nope. Look, I'm sitting here thinking about buying a Switch 2 controller and selecting for controllers by which ones will wake up the system from the couch, because not all of them do that still. I like those 8BitDo ones.

Yeah, those are shake to wake, which I'm not sure how I feel about. Shake to wake the controller? No, you know, to wake the system. So, so the, is it a bit dough or a bit do? Adam says do. Yes, that's where I, that I. A decade of verbal muscle memory was called into question when I heard him saying it recently, but it sounded like he had that on good authority, so I'm inclined to think he's right.

I believe he's had meetings with them before. Yeah, so I think that's probably actually the case. But anyway, the recent 8BitDo controllers with a firmware update will wake the Switch 2, but not with a button. You pick the controller up and shake it.

Which offends my digital input sensibilities. My ultimate Bluetooth controller, which is the controller I've used for the Switch 1 and Switch 2, is plugged in. It has a little dock, and the dock has... one of their 2.4 gigahertz dongles in into the switch no it's into the bottom of the dock right but i mean we're talking about the switch not plugging into the switch and now the switch too i also use it for the steam deck honestly maybe that's different it might be different using that dongle

So yeah, when you use the dongle, it shows up as a wired controller. So you just press the center button like anything else. That would be the difference. Oh, I didn't know you could use a 2.4 gigahertz for that. Uh-huh. It's great.

I think the shake to wake was strictly over Bluetooth. Like if you connect it as a Bluetooth controller, as if it's a pro controller or something, why would that work when the button doesn't though? That's ridiculous. I have no idea. It's the weirdest thing. Apparently even the switch one pro controller will not wake the switch to. Yeah, I knew that. Speaking of not getting up to do things, this is important functionality. I've thought about moving my Switch 2 dock.

to the other side of the room i think we talked about this on the podcast a few weeks ago oh yes yes the subterranean hdmi the discord had a lot of ideas they were like yeah just run the discord around underneath i mean the htmi around underneath get a one-way fiber htmi you can poke a tiny hole through

and uh put the ends on when you get when you get set up and then uh you're good to go and i was like that does sound pretty good and then i looked at what those fiber hd my cables cost and i was like i don't have them pay that much so yeah well i mean i got i got one for pretty cheap like 50 bucks the problem is it doesn't work Yeah, that seems bad. I was actually just Googling about this the other day because I am back to wanting to play PC games in the living room again recently. And.

Every single fiber HDMI cable you can find out there is just nothing but people going, and I had the same experience. I bought two of them, and they both had the same thing. Like, oh, this works, but it drops connection every three minutes. Like, I lose picture for, nope.

five to ten seconds while it tries to re-handshake every couple of minutes, and it's just so close to being there, but it's not quite there. Let me share the good word about moonlight and sunshine. Yeah. I just need to get something that can run moonlight properly. My TV sure ain't cutting it. Welcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Brad. It's that time of month again. Is it? Well, I mean, no, we don't.

I didn't have anything to say. I don't have a pithy rejoinder for this one. It's that time of month when stuff is happening. Yeah, stuff and things have happened. We're going to talk about them. All times of month, actually. Yeah. We have, I don't know, it's not exactly a news roundup. It's kind of a deeper dive into some things we've talked about a little bit before, some new things. So we're doing a threefer here.

We're going to talk more about DDR prices because some new stuff has come to light and some new things are happening and none of it's good for people who like to build computers. I know we just talked about this recently, although then it was a little more on a focus on the impending storage. pricing crisis that seems to be coming and not the current DDR crisis, but some shit has gone down in the last day that was so extreme that we kind of couldn't not talk about it some more.

Well, and I think that there's some more. I mean, we talked about the downstream stuff before. We talked about, well, we'll get into it. We're also going to talk about why the Steam Machine, Valve's new standalone console. Steam Deck without a screen, basically, doesn't have HDMI 2.1. Yeah, Ars Technica has done some good reporting and talking to Valve there. And the answer may surprise you.

And then I also want to talk about a thing that has bothered me recently. Well, there's been a lot of AI encroaching in places that are a pain in the ass to turn off. Specifically, I use Firefox. I've used Firefox for a long time. I've given Firefox money in the Mozilla money in the past. Really? They came to me and asked for money recently. As the basically the same day I went through a really involved process to turn off all of the AI crap that they've added to Firefox.

And I didn't give them money. I'm not going to give them money while they're adding AI stuff. And I sent them a note that said that. So I would encourage you to do the same if you feel that way. You're not the only Firefox user I know who has gone through this same process in the last few days of jumping through some hoops to pull that shit out of there.

And then the other side of this is that Sean Hollister at The Verge has been writing about Google's AI news bot. So this is the thing that creates the headlines in news, has been munging up people's headlines. uh by making ai summaries of the stories into the headlights we'll talk about it anyway let's let's get to the start kick off with the with the fun stuff the ddr prices yes fun

Hashtag fun. I got to tell you, man, I am coming here fresh off of it. This is early Friday morning that we were recording this. I'm coming in here fresh off of having watched Gamers Nexus's new video, which just went up early this morning. Yeah, Steve has feelings about this. In which, man. Steve is on one in that video like I have not seen before. He is seriously at his most CNBC like Jim Cramer rant is that I have ever seen. Like he is really just going at it.

The difference is that Steve understands the things he's talking about, and I don't think Jim Cramer ever has. To be clear, I am very specifically talking about the presentation style, not the content, because I would not credit Jim Cramer. In terms of expertise in any way, but it was very much the ranting about the merger of government and industry and the screwing over, if not full on destruction of the American consumer. Yeah.

So the thing we talked about this a little bit a couple weeks ago when it first started coming to light and prices started going up. But. There's a global RAM shortage caused by the rise of AI data. So the incredible amount of AI data center growth that's happening right now. Yeah. Can I real quick jump in here? I know AI is.

A, definitely culpable for a lot of the stuff and B, also kind of the most obvious target. But we should probably be clear here, even if the AI bubble bursts tomorrow, data centers are not going away. data centers run all of the services that everybody in the world uses constantly now. So like, this seems like it's going to be some degree of problem, whether or not the AI business sticks around in some ongoing fashion.

there's a large difference in scale though we should yeah yeah this is a this is a wendell topic over level one text yes but the construction of ai data centers requires a ton more power um and because of the way those

uh especially the ones that the the ones that they're using to train models work they need an incredible amount of ram compared to like a normal data center that's a bunch of servers that are sliced up into virtual servers basically that's fair even even when you see people out there talking about specking out

home ai workstations for for training workloads and so forth you see them talking about buying 128 gig of ram 256 gig of ram yeah and and the the big those big racks i can't remember what the big racks that nvidia cells have but i i want to say with something like four terabytes of ram for a for a you know for a full height data center rack right um so the thing about ram

And I apologize because I've talked about this multiple places and I'm not sure I remember how much we got into it here. But the thing about RAM is there's three companies that make RAM. SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron. Like the manufacturer, the actual... RAM chips, the DR5, 6, whatever RAM chips. And that supply that they can make is relatively constrained once they get up to the maximum production for any particular type of RAM.

So that market has traditionally been really, really stable outside of natural disasters and stuff like that. So the prices follow a pretty fixed curve, kind of in the same way that the console business has early peaks at the start of the generation.

and then kind of tails off until the next generation of hardware comes out, right? And it's a similar kind of shaped curve for RAM pricing. Typically, a new generation of RAM comes out, it's really expensive, it supplies low at the beginning, production ramps up.

We get a wide proliferation of products, and then the prices go down until they stop manufacturing, and then it starts to go back up again because the supply dwindles. Yeah, and we should mention a corollary to this. We talked about this some when Adam was on about your…

visits the intel fab recently fabrication capacity is not something that you just spin up more of on a lark no like it is you know it's it is extraordinarily expensive and slow to uh to ramp up more production so it's not like these companies can just be like hey let's Throw another couple of production lines on so we can keep supplying the consumer DDR5 market like that's not going to happen. Well, in these, it's worth saying these aren't.

These aren't cutting edge fabs, right? It's not like Intel's 18A process in Arizona. It's not like TSMC's four nanometer process we've talked about. where they're using like bleeding edge technology and they're doing, you know, incredibly small process size, right? It's more mainstream than that. But these companies are traditionally very conservative.

They don't adjust to market conditions. Their production schedules are done well in advance. They sell a lot of their product in contracts years in advance. So like NVIDIA or Lenovo or Dell or HP. will buy x amount of ram from micron or samsung or sk hynix or someone and uh they they buy that in bulk and they buy that in contracts years in advance right so that that amount of that production is already claimed and gone right they can't

like they have to make that or else they're going to be in default to their contracts and they have problems uh then there's then there's stuff like data centers right so that sells in a different channel and the data center people say okay we're building a 100 megawatt data center we need you know 400 exabytes of memory or whatever right so when can you supply that and how can you get it to us and we want it packaged like this and blah blah

And then the Slack traditionally has gone to consumer market, the stuff that you buy at Best Buy and Micro Center and Newegg and Amazon and places like that. And that's often sold through to people like Patriot and Crucial was one of those Corsair sells RAM, like all these companies, G-Skill, all of these companies that sell enthusiast RAM, or whether it's enthusiast or just plain green sticks.

It's all sold through to these relatively smaller companies that do direct to consumer business. Now, what's happened is the increase in data center RAM requirements have gone up to the point. that instead of just selling that RAM through HP and Dell and Supermicro and all the companies that do rack sales, now the data center people are just buying the RAM allocations up.

directly and companies like nvidia are saying hey we we aren't going to sell ram for you on these on these processes anymore if you want the ram you have to get it directly from the manufacturer interesting yeah who handles the assembly though because it still needs to go on some kind of video nvidia says hey get us the thing we'll put on the boards and you have to really you have to source it yeah that's crazy yeah um so and what's happened is the

amount of investment in data centers right now like open ai is talking about building a trillion dollars worth of data centers yeah where they're going to get the money for that who knows if you want to know more about that read ed zitron's newsletter he talks about the fact that they're blowing through they've blown through venture capital they you know they're now at a scale that the investment banks won't fool with them anymore because they're there they have so much money in the pipe

And they're onto sovereign wealth funds. And after they run out of sovereign wealth funds, it remains to be seen where the money comes from. That's when society finishes eating itself, quite frankly. People will get into that later. So, anyway. Like the scale at which they're building data centers right now is such that power companies in parts of the country are saying, hey, you can't build any more data centers here. We can't continue to service these without degrading.

the experience, the service for the humans that use our product, right? So Pennsylvania's power company, West Pennsylvania or East Pennsylvania's power company said no more data centers. You can't build any more here. And we're seeing this enormous rollout and it's absorbed so much of the RAM capacity that the consumer space is getting squeezed. And as a result, RAM prices have more than doubled. Like at this point.

I think when I looked the other day, a 64 gig set of DDR5-6000. So like not JEDEC spec, but basic, like your basic enthusiast RAM. cost 400 bucks. Yeah, 6000 is what I put in this machine two and a half years ago, so it's like hardly it's not even close to bleeding edge. It's basically the, hey, here's what Intel and AMD recommend for your enthusiast CPUs. And a year ago, that cost $125, $150.

Like literally the reason I put 64 in this machine and not 32 is that at the time the price difference was like not nothing, but it was pretty minuscule. It was like you said, it was well under $200, like 150, 160. 190 for the very fast for the nice stuff with lights yeah 64 gig and that's yeah a thing of the past yeah 32 gig sorry

32 gig kits now are costing $400, not 64 gig kits. 64 gig kits are much more expensive. You're seeing a bunch of headlines now. I mean, these are somewhat sensationalized headlines, but it's like, oh, 64 gig of RAM now costs more than a PlayStation 5. Stuff like that. or a PlayStation 5 Pro. I don't think that's that far off. Yeah, a 64 gig kit of G-Skill 6000 megatransfer RAM.

That's Expo and XMP is $619 on Amazon today. Fucking crazy. That's like more than many graphics cards were. All the graphics cards, as we've said before, are also affected by this because they have RAM on them. It's to this. It's well, the RAM that's used for graphics card is less affected because it is a different kind of RAM. Yeah. Although AMD just announced there. It's not a lot of big bump, but they are bumping the cost of their 9070 cards.

I think everything we're going to see bumps that uses RAM, including SSDs and hard drives. Everything that uses RAM is going to get more expensive. So the other thing about this is... the other thing that's happened is this makes the cost of ddr4 hasn't gone up yet so those am4 systems that are hanging on like you can build an am4 system that has a video card and 32 gigs of ram for less than what 64 gigs of ddr5 costs right now interesting like it is it is wild like what speed of ddr4

It's going to be like 3,200 or 3,500 or something. I'm not sure what was the high end that DDR4 topped out at stably before we moved on to DDR5. I think they were getting close to 4,000. I think the fastest I ran was 3,600. Yeah, I think.

stable that's probably about right but yeah you can get a a trident g-skill trident z kit ddr4 for 204 bucks right now that's even gone up a little bit in the last week for what capacity 32 gigs okay like that's i mean it sucks that this is necessary but that if you badly need to build a computer right now that's not the worst option yeah 32 gigs is i mean look that is a bad option i don't know like what i do

I think we're going to see people making tough choices like when this happened in the 90s. So in 93, I think, or 94, there was a huge earthquake in Taiwan that knocked a lot of the memory capacity off. Yeah. And as a result, you started seeing people doing crazy stuff like IBM started building machines with eight RAM slots. So if you wanted an eight megabyte system, you had eight one megabyte chips in there.

And a lot of vendors were doing that because it was easier to get those, those one megabyte chips were inexpensive. Whereas the, the, the four megabyte dim or Sims, I guess back then were crazy, crazy expensive. So. It's a weird, it's going to be weird for a little bit. Yeah, I mean, the difference here is that, I mean, you've seen this in other areas, you know, there were floods that took out hard drive capacity in Thailand.

In the past, the difference is that those were all unpredictable natural events. All of this is self-inflicted. This is all by choice, especially the actual news item today, which we need to get to.

Yeah, so the reason we're talking about this today is on Wednesday of this week, Micron, who owns Crucial, the RAM, I think probably biggest consumer RAM vendor. Are they? Probably out there. They're up there. Again, Micron is one of the three suppliers, manufacturers of memory, and Crucial is their kind of house brand. It was their consumer-facing label for not just RAM, but SSDs, which we'll get to.

yeah and they've been around for 20 plus years at this point um crucial micron's just shutting down crucial because they'd rather sell direct to ai they'd rather use that inventory to sell to ai uh data centers yeah yep that's that is the long and the short of it

Technically, that doesn't mean they wouldn't still keep supplying ICs to the G-Skills and Corsairs of the world, but practically it probably does mean that because, well, why would they be doing this if they were still willing to supply? to any consumer business in the first place so my understanding of the way this market works is is that it's more complicated than that it's not um it's that production is bought years in advance like people are buying wafers of ram chips

years in advance to the point that like Dell and Lenovo and HP probably aren't going to be super affected by these price changes for quite a while. I mean, don't worry. They're going to raise the prices to meet market conditions. because they can but um you know the allotments for those big companies that are buying millions and millions and millions of terabytes of ram every year

are set well in advance. And it's part of the non-slack space that the RAM manufacturers have that they have to produce and they know what they're selling it at and yada yada, right? It's the... It's the stuff that normally would go to the consumers, the G-Skills and the Patriots and the Crucials and all those companies that is skin squeezed, right?

The stuff that's on contract is going to be sold at contract for the rate that the contracts were established at. If you hadn't done your 2026 and 2027 memory allocations yet when the prices started going up, then you are really, really turbo fucked now. Cool. And I also think, like, while the big guys are probably going to be fine because they're buying an enormous volume, I think the folks like Framework and System76 and all the kind of smaller, Razer, all of the smaller enthusiast computing.

uh, places are going to probably have problems. So, uh, cause their prices are going to go up to market price and, and, and that that's rough. Um, yeah. So I should, I should just mention real quick here. I mean, All of this discussion has been focused on RAM because that's where the price inflation is currently happening. We did mention a couple weeks ago that SSDs are headed in the same direction. Ruchel, not a small player in the consumer SSD space.

No, Crucial is a fairly big SSD vendor as well. Like the Crucial, I think P1 is the classic mid-tier, like pretty good bang for the buck SSD that has been around for several years now. Like they're not, you know, they're not. you know, they're not SK Hynix and Samsung and Western Digital Black level of like gamer performance, but they are like the Crucial has been a good solid mid-tier like run your Windows install SSD option for a while now. So that going away as well is also pretty harmful.

I'll actually go one step above that. The Crucial T700, which was one of the early Gen 5 PCIe NVMEs, was one of the top performers. It was up there with the very fastest. Like it's, they have, yeah, it's a, it's a huge loss. Yeah. I mean, they cater to multiple tiers of the storage market as well. Like it was bad. And I think.

the so there's two things that worry me about this one is the obvious the short-term impacts on people who need to buy ram because ram is a thing that dies occasionally you have to buy new stuff so I hope for your sake that you stockpiled a set of DDR5 sticks a few years ago and you're good to go.

I think I have a couple of sticks that I probably could RMA that are a little hinky that I'm probably going to hit the button on that I wasn't going to bother with before because they were 32 gigs or 16 gigs or something. Sure. The other thing is.

Big giant companies like Micron deciding to exit the consumer space is a grim portent for the future, I think. I think, you know... we've often said oh nvidia makes 10 9 of its revenue whatever from selling consumer gpus but each of the wafers that they cut into 35 40 gpus could make

12 or 15 data center chips that are way more profitable right and those those are made up numbers i'm not i'm just saying like each each wafer that they're running through tsmc's four nanometer process is something that could be data center chips

And every time they sell consumer chips instead, they're leaving that money on they're leaving money on the table. Yeah. I mean, if you read the wording of the micron press release, they don't say that the data center market is more profitable or lucrative or whatever. They use the term fastest growing. Yeah.

So it doesn't matter if even consumer revenue is increasing year over year. Data center revenue is increasing faster. Got all the money. Yes, it's the classic chasing growth forever like this. This really gets into the angle that this Gamers Nexus video takes, and I recommend you watch it. It is.

It is that channel at its most political that I have ever seen, like by far, because he leads with. Yeah, he leads with the and I am not surprised this is the case, but I never thought to look into it before. The number of government grants and tax breaks that micron has gotten. over in recent years are in the numerous numbers of billions, both state and local tax breaks, CHIPS Act grants. They are taking enormous amounts of public money. Yep.

and using it to completely fuck the people giving them the money well and and it's not just the consumer it's not just the enthusiast computing market which is relatively small right it's also this is also going to trickle down into everybody who has to buy a computer or a phone or any kind of device that is as thinking sand right um which which is like Computers getting more expensive is bad for the overall economy because a lot of the work that we do is based around computers.

The RAM vendors have gotten in trouble in the past for colluding and fixing prices and all that stuff and have been fined pretty mightily by the EU and the U.S. I actually got I got money from a Corsair class action settlement over price fixing many years ago. So that's. Okay, yes, that's not unheard of. I would argue that that took place in a very different world than we are now entering. Well, that's true. Which is also a point made in that video, which is that...

Micron sure did give money to the Trump ballroom and inaugural committee, for example, and there sure was a smiling handshake photo of Micron CEO and Howard Lutnick on Twitter the day this move was announced. Look, you bring your gold bar into the Oval Office and everything's nice and legal now. That's just the way it works. It's hard not to get angry watching the headlines laid out.

You know, six point whatever billion from the Chips Act, two billion in state tax breaks to this new fab facility. I mean, like it is it really smacks of classic socializing of production and privatization of profits. Yeah. Which. Look, man, I don't want to get too political here, but you know the domino meme? No, it's the little one to the big one. Crucial exits, the consumer memory markets. Pretty small domino, let's be real.

Yeah, but like this shit really, this is just another yet another feature of the endless affordability crisis right now. Like at some point, too many examples, too many like this is just societal death by a thousand cuts like this, the kind of thing that really.

Starts to shake faith in the system generally when enough of these happen. Well, it turns out corruption. Look, I learned about corruption from the Clone Wars, right? When Ahsoka went to the Mandalore to teach the Mandalorians about corruption. It's a real good episode of a children's TV show. And small domino, crucial exits the market. Large domino society is overthrown. I don't know. I've been yelling on the full nerd about buying seeds a lot lately.

Seeds are always fungible, man. Somebody next year, two years from now, somebody's gonna be like, man, I really miss having turnips. Buddy, I got you. Here's some turnip seeds. Go plant some turnips. Yeah, now give me your gold bars. Whatever, man. The public has been funding vaccine research and medical research that then... The public has been funding fossil fuel companies, Brad. That then entirely turns privatized the second it brings money in for fucking decades. Yep.

We fund fossil fuel companies. We fund all sorts of stuff. Same shit. Different industry. Yeah. It's great. Good news. Yeah. Things are going great. But you know what is good? The steam machine. Yeah. You know what's not great? What's that? HDMI 2.1. Well, OK, I'd say on a technical level, HDMI 2.1 is pretty good. Maybe perhaps on a political is not the right term, but on a policy level, maybe it's not great.

yeah for people who are running linux machines building linux machines h2 2.1 a lot of the features are turned off i didn't know this a bit inaccessible yeah i didn't either so i think they announced when the steam machine was first uh delineated that it would not support hdmi 2.1 and we've talked about this in the ancient past but 2.1 is the good one for playing video games yeah it's the it's the first hdmi spec that allows 4k at 120 hertz

It's the one that introduced VRR, the variable refresh, where the display refresh syncs to the frame rate output, which is different from G-Sync and FreeSync, we should be clear. like those are what's the difference there do you know i'm actually fuzzy on that they're just different different methods of doing the same thing oh okay like g-sync was first free sync came along which is more open and kind of nominally backed by amd

HDMI 2.1 VRR is just another implementation of the same concept. And it's the one specific to the HDMI spec. Got it. Okay. So like, and we'll get to this as we talk about what the steam machine can do. There are all kinds of examples of, for example, consumer living room TVs that can do HDMI 2.1 VRR, but cannot do FreeSync. Yeah, that makes sense. I guess that seems like that's also especially even more common with receivers.

Like any receiver with 2.1 support is going to take HDMI VRR, but it will not necessarily take FreeSync. I would think you have to plug your stuff directly into the TV to get FreeSync support. There might be receivers with FreeSync support, but that sounds unlikely to me. Do people still use receivers? I do. You use an old one like me. Well, yeah, but it's not many people, but A, it's still the only way to drive big speakers unless you've got some kind of...

external amp be unless you're getting some, maybe I shouldn't say dodgy HDMI switcher. I think there are some pretty good ones out there, but it's like, it's probably the best supported way to get way more HDMI ports on your TV. Yeah, but I guess. My time of needing way more HDMI ports has maybe gone away like it's not like in the old days I used to have five different streaming boxes and a DVD player and some consoles

So you can get all the different streaming services. Now you just have all the streaming services work on everything. Yeah. Well, as somebody who has to cover every video game system, I guess I'm an outlier, but I, but I am still four on a TV is still too limiting for me. Okay. Uh,

Like six is fine. Six. I can absolutely get away. But, but also like I have a PS three hooked up in the living room because wow. What if I want to play a PS one or PS two game on the TV at some point? Like that might come in handy. I just grab it from the garage and plug it in when I want that. I was thinking about searching for my copy of Metal Gear Solid 2 over the holiday break and putting it in that PS3. Oh, yeah. I played the Dreamcast in a few weeks ago.

It's nice to have. Of course, I mean, that's where the retro tank and stuff like that comes in handy for old analog stuff. Or having an old TV, it turns out. Anyway. I digress. The Steam Machine does not support HDMI 2.1. Auto Low Latency Mode is the other big one on 2.1 for games people. That's the thing that switches the HDMI port to games mode when you have a game device plugged in. It basically tells the TV or the receiver or whatever.

else in the chain like hey turn off all of your post processing that adds latency drop to your game mode or whatever you want to call it the thing that will give the best gaming experience and then change back if you change to some other source got it Anyway, 2.1 has a lot of features that are pretty useful for playing games. I guess this is actually about a year and a half old, but the Ars Technica story...

Pointed back to this happening, I think it was in February of 2024, and then added some new stuff talking to Valve about the Steam Machine in particular. The HDMI forum apparently declared about a year and a half ago that it would not allow open source implementations of HDMI 2.1.

So fucking consortiums, man. Why, why would they do this? I don't know what their, I didn't dig too much into their rationale other than it. I assume it just has to be about control. Right. Let me, you know, they, they. They charge member companies of the forum membership fees. They charge licensing fees on HDMI hardware. Like it is, you know, it's how they make their money. Yeah, there's no, it's my best guess.

There's no public version of the 2.1 spec either. Yes, they don't publish the 2.1 spec. And so I'm maybe getting a little car before the horse here. I assume. There's nothing stopping you legally from reverse engineering 2.1 and implementing it yourself. God, we really need to watch Hilton Catch Fire. Yes, we really should. I don't even know how practical that is. It may be that the 2.1 spec is of such complexity that that's not even realistic to do. But also...

This is where you get into the policy or political aspect of this. And I don't mean government political. I mean, like inter-entity relationship political here. But even as a member company, you would not want to run afoul of the HDMI forum by going... out on your own and doing this in spite of them right like that probably gets your membership pulled or gets you penalized in some way that's unpalatable what what a load of crap though like

I mean, so I assume somebody has done a closed source blob implementation of HDMI 2.1, because I know that there's like, you know, ultra 4K Blu-ray players that are running Linux in the underside, right? But then they probably have some sort of closed. The PS5, as we know, runs FreeBSD, and that does HDMI 2.1. So clearly open source operating systems, there are ways to make it work in a way that does not run afoul of the HDMI form.

But I mean, I guess my assumption is that you can do a closed source implementation on an open system, but they're not going to let anybody open source the HDMI 2.1. implementation because they don't want it to be public so that they can't charge people. That sucks. Close source blobs of proprietary technology are pretty common, even in open source. My router, for example, runs Linux, but...

It has a proprietary driver or blob that makes it actually run at full speed, which is why you can't install other operating systems on that thing unless you want to eat like a 60% performance penalty. Boo. Close source. Anyway. Yeah, so what's the TILDR? Does that mean that there's no VRR on the Steam machine? Yes, that seems to be the case, at least out of the HDMI port. It has a DisplayPort port, too? It does have a DisplayPort port.

And DisplayPort has its own separate standard. But I think DisplayPort only does FreeSync. Like it can't do HDMI or VRR. So again, you're limited depending on what kind of TV and optional receiver you have. You might not be able to get VRR out of the Steam. I hate this. There's one interesting thing. Kyle Orland wrote this R story and he talked to Valve a little bit. Valve has actually devised a way to get 4K at 120 frames per second out of...

HDMI 2.0 output, which is what they're doing out of this thing. Okay. We should say the Steam Machine has 2.1 hardware in it. They just can't implement the 2.1 support because, again, HDMI forum policy. They're using Chroma subsampling, though, to 2.0. Sorry, this is a lot of numbers. 2.0 tops out at 4K60. Yeah. 2.0 debuted the same year as the PS4 and the Xbox One, just for reference. 2013, I think, right? Yes. Yeah.

Grounded into the historical context. Yeah, so 4K60 is the best that can do. Valve is upping that to 120 by effectively reducing the color depth. somewhat substantially. I don't know how much from this write-up. They said it might impact text rendering for games with a lot of text. Yeah, apparently I guess that was the Arting's assessment of this, not of Valve's technique, but just generally how Chroma subsampling affects.

color depth and kind of visual perception. I always, I had to go do a quick refresher on this because I always forget, you know, chroma is color, luma is brightness. Those are the two main components of a video signal, right? Yeah. And I always forget, I mean, this is just a feature of rods and cones in your eye, right? That basically the human eye is more sensitive to brightness than it is to color variation. Mm-hmm.

And so you can't mess with the brightness, but you can reduce the color in certain ways without people noticing too much. Well, this is why there's like five different versions of HDR specs as well, right? Is because they choose to compress different things. And different levels of promo sampling, you know, 444, 422, etc. Yeah.

I don't know what the numbers are here, but apparently Valve is basically compressing the chroma of part of the signal to such an extent that they can double the frame rate, which seems pretty impressive. It's wild to me that HDMI isn't doing that.

like they're not even letting AMD do a driver for this when AMD is a member of the forum. So that's where that news that I mentioned from about a year and a half ago came from was that they kind of handed their verdict down to AMD that no, you can't implement this in your open source driver. I hate this. Yeah, it's a bummer. It's a real shit fest of close standards. It's an absolute turd sandwich. Yes, it's a real bummer.

So I guess use DisplayPort and buy TVs with DisplayPort is the answer. This is kind of getting into a different domain here, but it kind of reminds me of the situation around video codec licensing. And how it is. Yeah. You know, and how overly restrictive licensing can actually end up shooting yourself in the foot and maybe even killing your valuable standard because look at what happened in the.

Remember talking to Jean-Baptiste at VLC at Video Land? Oh yeah. Remember how much he hated H.265 and VP9? Yep. You know how you're hearing a whole lot about EV1 everywhere because it doesn't have licensing fees attached to it? Really weird. Yeah. I mean, that's purely a software example here, though, where where unfortunately here we've got 20 years of legacy HDMI ports out there. Like, I don't think.

When you've got a physical standard that has proliferated to this extent, I don't think we're going to see HDMI go away anytime soon, but this still sucks. So the big question I have is if you use the display, like this, this are Kyle's, our story says.

you can use the DisplayPort 1.4 out port and convert it to HDMI using a dongle, which makes me wonder if that's going to have the desired outcome. I don't think so. I try to do a little digging on this. I've experienced this in the past with my PyKVM. DisplayPort built into its spec has something called DisplayPort dual mode. You'll see it denoted as DP++ a lot. I think they even have a little graphic designed logo around this. Of course they do.

What that is, is DisplayPort's version of outputting an HDMI signal. So if you buy, you can buy passive. In fact, I did this. You can buy like a passive DisplayPort to HDMI cable. In my case, I got the PyKVM. and hooked it into my NAS, which is a full-size motherboard. My KVM takes HDMI capture in, and my motherboard has both DisplayPort and HDMI out, so of course I just grabbed any old HDMI cable and went HDMI to HDMI.

I gave him had a terrible problem. Every time I would reboot the machine, it would lose the handshake. The video signal wouldn't come back. Just all kinds of, you know, the most infuriating. Why is this video signal not working type nonsense on a Lark? Because they're cheap. I just bought a $10.

DisplayPort to HDMI cable because I went and read about that DisplayPort dual mode thing and I was like, oh, DisplayPort supports HDMI. I should see if this works. Instantly worked perfectly and has never stopped working. Wow. going DP to HDMI worked better than going pure HDMI. Like, DisplayPort was putting out cleaner, more usable HDMI than HDMI was. Anyway, that's a long-winded preamble for saying, I don't know what...

DP dual mode would do with HDMI 2.1. I can't imagine they are implementing those features over DisplayPort. That's probably not the case. It's going to be 4K60 probably, right? Or it maybe would do 120, but I doubt it does things like VRR and ALM and such. Anyway, this is just a real bummer of like Valve is literally shipping hardware.

That can do this better standard and they are just prevented from doing it because of which operating system they choose to run on their hardware, which happens to be the open operating system or one of them. Maybe going from analog was a mistake. Yep. I can't I can't disagree. Remember, I think we've said this before. Remember when the video signal was stupid? Yeah. Remember when it was just a dumb signal with no encoding in it? It was just electrical pulses. Without any.

processors on display controllers on either end, processing encryption and handshaking and authentication. They had pins for the luminance for each of the individual colors, and then they had a chroma pin, and you were good. That's all you needed. It was perfect. Can't disagree.

Maybe it'll change in the future. I don't know, but it doesn't sound like the forum is likely to bend on this anytime soon. Well, you know what is likely to bend? Well, no, they're not going to bend anytime soon on this either.

uh, AI encroaching into more things. Um, The Google News, I don't know. Do you use Google News? I use Google News all the time. No, when you put this in the notes, I had to look up what Google News even is as a product. I'm not entirely sure. That's not the successor to Google Reader, is it? Well, I mean, that's probably what Google would have said, but no Google news is news.google.com is their news search engine. Oh, I see. Okay.

it also feeds the results on that it's where all the amp stories go so like if you're a publisher and you may have worked with google to do a a pre-formatted google version of your post that they host so it's real fast um they Also in the app, in the Google app on your phone, they do a programmatic news feed that's quite good, really useful. It's tuned to your interests. I get gaming and tech and all the things that I'm interested in.

And they're one of the few places that separates tech in a way that makes sense. So they, like the entrepreneurial tech, they delineate like fundraising and. like AI startups and all that nonsense is a separate category from like enthusiast tech, the stuff that I actually care about. So it's really useful. It's a really useful service to me. I use it all the time and they've started.

doing these AI summaries of the headlines. I'm gonna see if I can find one here on the feed. So here we go. Normally, a headline is just the headline that the publisher posts. So on the benefit, like here's one from Hackaday that's.

on the benefits of filling 3D prints with spray foam. And then there's a picture of a 3D print that's been cut open and it's clearly filled with spray foam. Oh, get it. That makes sense. Now, this next article is from Tom's Hardware. And instead of having a headline, it has...

Gaming-focused Linux distro Bezite reported over a petabyte of ISO downloads in one month, equating to roughly 150,000 downloads. This surge, dot, dot, dot, see more. And when you click see more, it continues this long ass not headline. Right. I mean, is it formatted like a headline? So on these, instead of the headline being on the bottom, which is where they usually are below the image, usually it's like an eyebrow with the publication, then a picture.

Then a headline. And that's it. That's all you get. Maybe a heart. On these, there's this little blurb that's like the TLDR for the article. So you don't even have to click through. And then there's the headline. Then there's the picture. Then there's the headline. I mean, this is really just the eventual conclusion of a set of media platforms and a societal inclinations who never read past the headline, right? I mean, like they're just serving the market. Perhaps you're not wrong.

But at the bottom of the little AI description on these, it always says generated with AI, which can make mistakes. Now, a friend of the show, Sean Hollister over at The Verge has been writing about this because they have their headlines have been having mistakes. And he wrote an article called Google's AI News Bot is still confused, but no longer replacing our headlines. They had a.

They had a problem where an article on PC Gamer, the headline replacement was Baldur's Gate 3 players exploit children. Right? The story was Baldur's Gate 3 players discovered an exploit using Polymorph and Dominate that impacts children models or something in the game. Okay. But the thing is, the AI didn't know what the exploit... Didn't know that exploit meant, in this context, a way to do something with the game that the vendor didn't intend, not, hey, we're exploiting children.

Their bot was sending pre-built DIY builds and linking to stories on other topics entirely for their thing. And now it seems to be doing better. But also this is a terrible feature and Google should stop doing it because it's really bad. I mean, I assume I don't know a ton about AMP, but I assumed it has to be built into that. Yeah.

The AMP participants are very able to specify exactly what their aggregated headline should be, right? Well, no, not anymore, I think. That's the problem. Well, no, what I mean is that functionality existed, right? Like Google has to be doing that. And it's not like... It's not like the people who supply news to Google don't have a way of saying this is exactly what our headline should be. Oh, 100%. That's what I mean. The bad news is so you can turn off sources. You can give feedback on this.

You can't actually, as far as I can tell, say, hey, I don't want any more of these fucking AI summaries. Are they denoted very clearly as such? Kind of. It has a little disclaimer at the bottom. The format is different, which I recognize. I assume most people probably don't.

Does it have the AI sparkle? That's the real question. And this is really just a way for me to sidebar here. How did we land on this little sparkly graphic as the. It's magic. Is that like, but I feel like I'm starting to see that on things that aren't. very self-evidently AI related. I think I saw it on toothpaste the other day. Like I feel like that is just starting to appear everywhere now, which is, which.

As bad as it is, there are AI features everywhere you have to dodge and watch out for. At least they had that little graphic on them, but now that's infecting everything. So it's going to be even harder to tell what's AI. So there is no Sparkle. And some of these are actually aggregates about...

the same story on multiple sites so like this bazaite article that i read a minute ago is on tom's hardware zdnet and windows central and fudzilla and a bunch of other places so it's like a they're making like a landing page for the story about bzite download surging which is like maybe kind of useful but also it's a bad this is a bad implementation they need to fix this yep

Agreed. I have developed a Pavlovian aversion to that little sparkle graphic. I don't know about you. I don't. I don't like the sparkle. So speaking of places that the sparkle shows up on Hackaday on let's see. flamedfury.com, which is someone's personal blog, like some programmers blog had a fantastic post at the end of October called disable AI and Firefox.

This must be why this has been going around. Like I said, I've heard from other people I know who use Firefox. Yeah. Well, so Firefox has been kind of quietly encroaching AI into the browser experience. There was a thing in the sidebar that nobody uses. that you could add your favorite chatbot the other day, whether it's Gemini or ChatGPT or Copilot, or there was one or two others.

They also have had this thing where you can long kind of click a link and it pops up a little AI generated preview of what's at the other end of that link. It's all completely useless garbage. You can turn...

You could turn off these features individually, but it was a little bit challenging and it wasn't immediately apparent where you could do them. And some of them, when you turn them off, you can't turn them back on again, which is, I think, a really interesting choice, like that AI links preview.

Once you click the button on that on the version of Firefox, I have the option to turn it back on just disappears from the control panel. You have to do it in the config flags. Anyway, this blog, Flame Fury, we'll put the link in the show notes. has a list of all of the about config flags that you can just turn off to turn off all of this stuff. It took me about five minutes. It's fabulous, highly recommended.

Firefox. My Firefox feels faster. I haven't actually done benchmarks or testing, but like what a load of crap. Please don't do this anymore, Firefox. You just did it all manually through the Firefox config. Because I've heard, I think there are people putting out scripts to do this now. Yeah, I'm always a little hinky on that. I'm not going to read the script to figure out what it does. I guess for something, it's like 12 options here, I think, for this.

Yes. For something that's as simple, it's faster for me to just fix it manually than to read the script and make sure the script doesn't do anything devious. Yeah, like I am a little, I'm a little, I'm more than a little wary of kind of like shortcut.

scripts that purport to do things like this for you i mean 95 of them are fine to be clear but there isn't way too easily a vector for bad behavior to trust all of them blindly so yeah so This seems like an incredible misread of the Firefox audience by Mozilla. It seems crazy to me. Do they not understand that people who use Firefox are very frequently doing so ideologically because they don't want to use Google-based or bigger corporate browsers with more of the shit in there?

well i think there's two things right one is that mozilla has traditionally gotten most of its revenue from google right yes is that still the case i know that that came up because the word going around, surely Google's never said this out loud, but the word going around was that that was really just a...

protective play on Google's part against any kind of antitrust from the government that would be basically a way for them to say, hey, look, we support other browsers. Like, please don't take Chrome from us. But now that we're not in a world where that matters anymore, are they even still giving the money?

well so as part of the monopoly lawsuit i think there was a there was a um that was a that was part of the question we google hasn't pulled the money from those as far as we know yet okay um the the It's traditionally been cheaper for them to fund Mozilla so that there's real browser competition, Chromium competition, than it is to not fund Mozilla. But anyway, we'll see.

We'll see what happens with that. That's no way to know. I'm just, again, kind of surprised they actually made this move in the first place. Well, I was going to say the reason... I actually understand how you're Mozilla and you end up in a place where you're like, oh, yeah, we got to put AI stuff in Firefox. And this is the struggle for every startup. Everybody that's trying to raise money right now is.

if you don't have some sort of ai strategy nobody's going to write you a check sure um but even if your audience is vehemently anti-ai and that's why we see things like game studios indie game studios that are like, yeah, we're exploring AI tooling, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, when that stuff is going to be absolute poison in the market for 90% of games, 99% of games. So I don't...

Like, I understand how they get there. I think it's a horrible misread of their audience, probably given the kind of people who are likely to use Firefox. Yeah. But yeah, I think making it difficult to turn off is the real crime, honestly. Yeah.

I think having a button in the control panel that was like, hey, disable all the AI crap would go a long way. Yeah, like one easy button or just right clicking the feature itself and hitting disable or something. For sure. You know, at the same time, like.

Firefox's existing audience is not necessarily sufficient to keep Firefox going in a very healthy way. Like Firefox's market share is like... abysmally low it's like one percent it's like one to two percent on any given month it seems like well and and they've made changes recently too like i don't know if you saw but they you firefox bought pocket mozilla bought pocket a long time ago the the kind of

Like the read on a plain white page article company. Read it later company, I guess is what it is. And that the pocket metadata used to fill their blank homepage. So like. You know, they have the normal thing. They have some sponsored links. They have your links, the ones you use most commonly, and they have a Google search bar for your search of choice on their default homepage.

And it used to be all pocket links, which was kind of useful because it was like stuff that pocket filters up to the top of pocket. And it was a useful list of things. Now they're doing that all programmatically. And it's just the normal. turn of dipshit stuff with sponsored obvious scams so it's like hey kill bill is back in theaters in a new version it'll never play the same speaker johnson pleads with republicans to keep concerns private after tumultuous week

14 benefits seniors are entitled to but often forget to claim. And, like, it's a real devaluation of the brand. Like, I've turned off. I used to always use that homepage and look at the homepage because there were always interesting things there because anything that 20,000 people add to their pocket is going to be probably worth taking a look at, right?

And this stuff is just the same garbage you get on the homepage of MSN or CNN or the New York times or anything. So thumbs down. Yep. And I realize, I realize I'm complaining about here. They're doing the exact same thing that Google News does, and I'm complaining about it. I realize the hypocrisy here, but the difference is that the Google News implementation is actually really good, and this implementation is really pretty generic.

Yeah. It's impossible to be free of biases. The best you can do is be aware of. Yeah. And rationalize them. Yeah. I love rationalizing. Yes. Yes. We need more browsers in the world. I mean. Yeah, it's interesting. We talked to the guys who make Cosmic from System76 on an upcoming episode of the Dual Boy Diaries. It'll be up next week about Cosmic, which is their...

desktop environment that's about to come out of beta. And we asked them why they did it. Because there's plenty of desktop environments for Linux. And they're like, well, nobody was doing the things that we thought were important here. like building toward the future and all that and and having multiple companies multiple groups of people making things from different perspectives it turns out is incredibly valuable yeah

to the overall health of an ecosystem. So yeah, I agreed. More people making good stuff is good. Not just more browsers, but more browser rendering engines would be nice, but... I mean, we have three, right? Yeah, more or less. I mean, at least two of them are forks of each other. Yeah, but ancient forks now. Yeah, yeah. Actually, I don't know why I just went back down this rabbit hole. I have to remind myself every couple of years, which.

rendering engine was which, did you know WebKit was forked from KDE? Now that you're in the Linux land, I always forget that. I always forget that all the browser engines that run the entire web came out of freaking KDE originally. Like WebKit, WebKit forked from that. And then I'm pretty sure Google forked blink from WebKit. That was my recollection. And then that was ancient history at this point. It was like 20 years ago. And then Firefox, Firefox is.

gecko is independent or did it also come out of webkid i think firefox gecko came out of its own thing but i don't remember i think it came out of the old firefox code base it was a refactor yeah that sounds right and then there's the ladybird project which is relatively new i think they're looking to ship a browser like an alpha next year or something that's exciting which is its own fully new from the ground up web engine uh

Yeah, Gecko has been based, Gecko was a refactor of Netscape. Oh, right. Okay, of course. Yes. Yep. Anyway. Yep. Standards. There we go.

So I guess that's probably as good a place as any to wrap it up. AI still sucks for multiple reasons. Yes, the affordability crisis is only getting worse. Dude, I don't know if you watched that Gamers Nexus video, but the darkest thing... For PC enthusiasts, to be clear, there are darker, broader economic trends at work, but for people who like building gaming PCs...

The darkest thing he mentions in that video is the idea that effectively the ability to build and own your own computer is slowly but surely being taken away. Yep. And that eventually the idea is just going to be for you to rent computing time on some remote server. Yeah. And the way they do that is just by buying all the RAM, it turns out. Right. And effectively, I mean, this is whether intentionally or just as a downstream consequence of both market forces and corruption.

if it just emerges organically, the result is going to be the same of it's going to be, it's going to become more and more inaccessible to build and own your own computer. I, I've been about the darkest cyberpunk shit I could imagine in this very specific domain. I've been watching those videos of the guys that take old phones and then mill off the storage and put bigger storage on or mill off the CPU and then put faster CPUs on. Nice.

And I'm like, yeah, that's, that's where we're going. Like, get ready, get good at drag soldering, baby. Seriously. Like that is, I've made this reference before. Cause I only saw this movie recently, a couple of years ago, but like, that's the Henry Rollins character and Johnny demonic. Right.

Yeah. Like the William Gibson vision of like dude in a workshop. Yep. Except instead of working on gas engines, he's like pulling circuit boards apart and jury rigging better chips onto things. And, you know, there's, there's people out there soldering bigger SSDs onto their. MacBook Pro motherboards and stuff. It's going to get weird out there. Have you seen the guys that do the DIY home e-wasting? No. Have we talked about this already? I think we discussed this at some point recently.

So there's YouTube channels where they show you how to harvest the valuable metals out of your old e-waste so you can pull the gold and silver and whatever out. Platinum. Wild. Anyway. yeah it's a grim future but uh anyway thanks for supporting the show we appreciate y'all we sure do sorry for the bad news episode i guess yeah um

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