Luke talks RAM Pricing, Tech Youtube and LTT Developer hiring process

Thanks to this week's sponsor: Code Rabbit https://coderabbit.link/primeagen-vscode If you're tired of developers just replying with LGTM, then you NEED Code Rabbit. An actually useful application of AI where it can use your own rules, lints and more to provide instant feedback in your editor OR a review on Github. This week we’re joined by Luke to break down why RAM prices are exploding, how AI and hyperscalers are reshaping the hardware market, and why consumers are getting left behind. We dig into DDR5, HBM, data centers, enterprise priorities, and what all of this means for your next PC upgrade—plus a few dumb jokes and hard truths along the way.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Today, we have a very special episode of the stand-up. We have with us Luke from Linus Tech Tips. Say hi. Alright, there he is, right there.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  I thought it was Luke Tech Tips. Was I right?

• 0:12Speaker 00

  To not be confused with LTT, he has LTT. This is LTT, not LTT.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Okay, different LTT, got it.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Different LTT.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Okay, that makes sense. Thank you.

• 0:19Speaker 02

  There's some other guy who no one knows who's like a co-host or something on that. The main channel, I think. I don't know. But Luke's the main dude.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Luke's does the heavy lifting. Alright, thanks for the intro interruption.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Uh, anyways, I'm sorry. Also with us is Teach and KT Nier Tori.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  I interrupt things.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you. Yep. TJ, you're wearing a sweater that can no longer be bought. It must be very exclusive. Arch, by the way.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Arch forever!

• 0:50Speaker 00

  TJ already has children, so it's okay. Um, alright. Well anyways, today we're gonna be talking about RAM-

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Guys, the order you have to- Can I just say though? You have to get married and have kids before you install, otherwise it's GG, boys. Your line, your family line is finished. Okay. Your ancestors are disappointed. They hunted and gathered for nothing. You ended the line just because of your operating system. Wait till you have kids before you start Arch. Thanks.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  It's true.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  That's just the PSA for today.

• 1:15Speaker 00

  That's a good PSA. Honestly, I think more people need to hear that. Um, alright, so, uh, today, we're gonna be talking about RAM prices, get some thoughts, where we think it's going, along with probably SSDs and some other things. Is there any other unknown cost coming in? And then after that, I'm gonna probably ask Luke a little bit about running Linus Tech Tips, what it's like, hiring people, all the good stuff. Uh, what does he kind of experience in today's age of AI and such, especially in the YouTube scene? Uh, just because it's a much different set of technology and how you develop stuff and kind of the software you run for. Uh, very curious about all that stuff. So let's start off, obviously, with the maiden flagship topic, which is RAM prices. I don't know about you, but the moment I heard that AI loves RAM, the first thing I did is went out and bought MU,

• 1:59Speaker 00

  uh, which is a stock, Micron, which exclusively does, uh, RAM. And guess what? It was my best investment I have ever made in my entire lifetime.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Well done.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  There must be something there. If the stock market says there's something there, there must be a "there" there. And so-

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Number go up.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  The number does go up. Now, there's only one person in this call that I know for a fact can not only build the PC, but also knows how to order a GPU from the internet, which is an impossible task these days. I have no idea how to order a GPU. So I figured that we'd bring Luke on and he could kind of give us some of his thoughts about this whole RAM price debacle and where he kind of thinks it going, where he thinks it's kind of going. And maybe inform us, uh, uneducated non-GPU buyers about the hardware market.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  The permanent underclass.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  Permanent underclass right here.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Sure, yeah. I, um, I'm not surprised by certain moves like, uh, like Micron's Crucial's, uh, so Crucial is owned by Micron, uh, Crucial stepped out of the RAM market. That was not too surprising. I think they've honestly wanted to do that for a long time. If you look at how honestly, somewhat specifically DDR5 was even designed, it was not designed from a consumer standpoint. It was designed from a enterprise standpoint. The goal has been enterprise for a long time. This is mostly a convenient and high-profit exit from the consumer space for Crucial. Um, and I don't personally suspect that prices are going to come down

• 3:32Speaker 03

  from supply being super high for a pretty considerable amount of time. It takes a really long time to get fabs online. Um, and they are also going to resist the fall of the price because they want it to be high. Some of the like most collusion in effectively like any market anywhere has been in RAM. Uh, these companies love working together to price fix. They love working together to, um, keep prices not too high to not increase fab capacity too much. That's another thing that they do to, um... I don't know if you can say artificially or not. There you go. Nice.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  I'm listening. I'm listening.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  This is super well documented. If you're, if you're interested in it, um, if there's been a lot of legal suits over it. Um, it's, it's not even a secret at this point, let alone an open secret. So you can, it's, yeah, you can dive into it if you're interested.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Commish, you gotta listen to me.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  Oh no, not one more comment from you. I'm done rebasing your mistakes. You're on junior CSS duty until further notice.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  Commish, you can't do this to me.

• 4:34Speaker 04

  Keep talking and you'll be doing stored procedures for a month. Now get out of here. Take him with you.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Fun fact, CSS is actually touring complete.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Larry, Gary, Tango, Mary. I'm just pulling your request. It looks good to me. You're clear to ship.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  You're welcome. Next.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  It's an awfully big PR. For an intern? Well, I just bumped some dependencies. It's nothing major.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  Hey, can I get a quick stamp on this?

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, don't worry about it. Quick approval. Oh, not on my watch. I'm on your dip. Like a penis on a slide. Not this again. It's literally just a hexco change. Just approve it. Just approve it. Squish. Perch resisting review. Oh, I know you're the tip where I've seen five coding, but that ain't it. Merge cop, no!

• 5:43Speaker 00

  I hate Merge Cop. He always makes reviewing take forever. We have Code Rabbit. Oh, come on. I wasn't even merging the prod. It was a hexco change. We have Code Rabbit. We don't need real people reviewing such simple changes. Code Rabbit can do it for us. Our engineers' time is better spent solving problems for customers.

• 6:02Speaker 05

  You can try it too at coderabbit.ai. Next week on Merge Cop.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Now my plan to merge a dip so big.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Dipper and I always knew it.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  They have also worked together to, yeah, not increase fab capacity. Now, right now, there is enough demand that, yeah, they're looking into fabs. There's partnerships from, from at least one brand to work with a much smaller fab company to try to increase their capacity and throughput. There's one happening in Taiwan.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  But it's going to take a while for us to really see the benefits of that. I think the thing that might happen first, and I could be wrong here, is a

• 6:47Speaker 03

  slowing down of investment in

• 6:51Speaker 03

  in data centers and the need for RAM. I don't see that coming anytime soon. I don't personally necessarily see a like massive market crash that some people are predicting for AI happening super soon. Due to a lot of the companies that are really driving this forward being hugely profitable regardless of AI.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  But, yeah, I guess that's my like, my quick thoughts.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Quick question. You said that DDR5 was designed more for enterprise, less for consumer. I have no idea what that could possibly mean. Can you say a little bit more about that for me? Like, what, does it have like parental controls or what? Like?

• 7:34Speaker 00

  I also, just to be fair, I think DDR stands for Dance Dance Revolution. So like, that's how much I know about RAM. So I'm like, I'm very far behind.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Number five. Sick. I thought they'd have more additions out by now, but that makes sense.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  It's a very popular game.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  It is, it is disappointing that they don't have more Dance Dance Revolution additions. No, there's a, there's a really good video from, sorry, from Wendell from Level One Tex. If you check out his YouTube channel and scroll down a bit, because it's not very new. Where is it? Hold on. Oh, it's not that old either. It's, it's called "Your DDR5 Memory Could Be At Risk: All About DDR5." 20 minutes long, deep diving, what the heck is going on with DDR5? I think it's interesting that he has that video about issues that we're fighting, especially in the consumer space, but definitely in the enterprise space with DDR5. And also, Litus Torvold was on our channel not that long ago,

• 8:31Speaker 03

  and he was mentioning that he thinks a lot of the problems that users have with Windows is actually users with bad RAM, which was very interesting. And part of these two discussions, in my opinion, merged together because of one of the points that come from it being designed enterprise-first is it's not really designed for what most of us have in our desktop chassis, which is honestly not a ton of airflow, especially compared to a server environment where you don't care about fan noise, you don't care about much, to be honest. You just want the performance and ideally low power draw, but that's often an afterthought.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  So a lot of desktop DDR5 is overheating or having various other problems. And Wendell and some of the Level 1 Tech's forum crew and whatnot have designed these like... I don't know if you were into desktops back in the DDR3 Corsair Dominator era, where they had those metal fan brackets, where you'd have those little tiny fans that would go over your RAM? Well, those might actually matter now.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  And the community's making 3D-printed shrouds for their RAM so that they can then mount like small, I think it's 80mm, but it's been a while since I've looked into this, little tiny fans and point them directly at the RAM up close to get more airflow on there, and then they're getting less errors, less problems. Because if...

• 10:07Speaker 03

  If it's doing error correction like on the actual stick before it gets to the CPU, all that type of stuff and it's overheating, that's not going to perform as well and you might have more issues is my like fairly not amazing understanding of what's going on there.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  So, hold on, I just want to rewind that for a second. You were telling me that some of the Windows issues I have is not due to Windows.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Before you say that though, it's the stand up. Can you say we're going to circle back on that? That's a little bit more work appropriate. We don't rewind here.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Please, I don't want to boil the ocean right now, okay?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Okay, thank you.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  But, okay, because I, I can't, my, uh, my ability to maximize Windows decided that no longer work anymore. And so that's my life as a Windows user right now is the ability to only have Windows one size. Uh, so that's RAM?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's all, that's all RAM. That's all RAM.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  What?

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Probably not RAM.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  This is crazy. I thought, again, I thought I was a good programmer.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Windows is just bad, okay?

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Okay, okay, fair.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  There's only so much we could do. Yeah.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  All right.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  I do like that though. I, I like, I like Microsoft coming out and saying, actually, what you guys need is little fans on your RAM. That's going to fix the Windows.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  That's not getting back to Microsoft.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I think it's more like crashes, blue screens, um, application crashes, application errors. If you look into stuff in a Vlog and there's like things going wrong, uh, it might be related to that, but it shouldn't be like a, a random function not working like be all the full screen Windows.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  That obviously ran.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Have you asked Cortana and/or Copilot to fullscreen it? It might work that way instead.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  I actually haven't, but I am very curious about doing it. I did.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Please record it. Please record it. I need to see, I need to see the results.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Yesterday, I actually did give my first AI swing of like a, of, of an application and, uh, I noticed that Gemini has been added to all Google Chromes and, uh, Windows. So I was like, oh my gosh, uh, I can't log into Frame I O. And so I want to delete this site's cookies. So I clicked on Gemini and said, delete this site's cookies. And it said, I can't do that. And that was like my, that's been my only experience so far, which is very disappointing.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  I just wanted the cookies gone, so then I had to go and ask Gemini on, uh, on, what's it called? On Google to give me the answer.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  It truly is a futuristic AI then, though, because it's like, it is denying your requests. That's what the end game is for AI, right? So they've, they achieved it. They achieved, yeah, more accurate for AI.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  Uh, so we are like, uh, we're year one effectively into the, the great ramming. Uh, I'm not.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  That's a gr- oh my God, that's a great title.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  Thank you. I just made that up right now, but anyways, the great ramming is happening right now. How long do you think this can go before RAM prices level out? Because I was looking at it and MU and Western Digital, which is SSDs, they are up 300% in their stock price. So like, people are obviously pricing in what they think this, you know, this value is going to be. And it, it has not looked like it's slowing down at all on the stock market. Is this reflective of what RAM prices will be? Are we going to see a 3X cost? Aren't they already pretty much at that?

• 13:25Speaker 03

  As per usual, this is not financial advice, but man, uh, is the stock market predictive of anything these days? Uh, I mean, you had, you had a good guess with, with investing in MU early, which is why you own the office building you're sitting in right now.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  Thank you, thank you.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  But, but it's like.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  He's leasing, okay, Luke? Don't, don't let him get out of it.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  I'm smart with my money, okay? I lease.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Commercial real estate is terrible.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, I don't know. I, I mean, I think, I think the demand and price is going to be high for a long time. I think that's one of the main things that I meant with my like little intro thing there. Um, is that I, I don't think it's just going to randomly come down. Um, I think for the last few years, we've been seeing a general all computer hardware shift towards enterprise. And when you do that and, and consumer becomes more and more of an afterthought, uh, consumer gear is going to be more price performance expensive for what you're getting. Uh, we saw Intel recently talk about this where they're like, Intel just openly was like, you know what? We've been giving the consumer market like too much attention. We're going to focus more on hyperscalers.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Uh, we're, we're not interested in that anymore. You're seeing crucial step out of the market. You're seeing Nvidia like. Almost like begrudgingly still talk about GeForce cards. There's like, these, these companies are, are seeing the bag that is, um, working with enterprise. It was actually, I mean, even for me, like being in the hardware space predominantly, it was, it was fascinating not that long ago to find out that like, a lot of these water cooling companies that I thought of as these like scrappy little consumer water cooling brands, sold the vast majority of their revenue of products through enterprise doing water cooling for servers and data centers.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  Um, it's, it's an interesting world and there's a lot more money in it than like, um, you know, uh, us, us like waiting for deals on frigging Newegg or whatever. Uh, it's, it's, yeah, it's a, it's a totally different thing. When you're, when you're willing to buy like just some incredible amount of, uh, of, of money worth of like, if, I don't know, some of these reservations for even during coin mining. So some of these massive operations were buying pallets and pallets and pallets of GPUs. And if they had issues with them, kind of like almost chugging it off. Um, whereas consumers like, you know, if you have an issue with it, there's a, there's a Reddit thread with 7,000 upvotes and you're screaming from the mountains and

• 15:57Speaker 03

  all this kind of stuff. Like why, why deal with us annoying low people who lack money, uh, when you can deal with the, the hyperscaler boys with all of the money and, and less of the problems. Yeah.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  You know, it's funny you should say that because if you have looked at OpenAI's kind of Ouroboros investing, uh, Nvidia has promised they're going to pay them a progressive amount up to one or a hundred billion dollars. And OpenAI's apparently one of their agreements, I was really trying to confuse, trying to find out the exact number. And the only number I found was they're going to pay them back 10 gigawatts worth of purchases. And I was like, I don't know what that number means because typically I use USD. I'm not used to whatever this AI money currency is, but a gigawatt, apparently, again, this is chat GPT, I'd ask like, what the hell's a gigawatt? What the hell's a gigawatt? And it said one nuclear power plant worth of energy. So I was just like, oh my gosh, that's how much they're gonna. Going to be buying is 10 nuclear power plants. And then I was like, did they make this deal elsewhere?

• 16:54Speaker 00

  And then apparently with Oracle, their 300 billion will also result in six gigawatts of data center or six nuclear, and then I said, no, like 16 nuclear power, like that's first off, that sounds like a metal band. Second off, the United States has 39 total. Like that's half, that's like 50% of the entire power grid worth of

• 17:12Speaker 00

  new nuclear power plants. And I'm probably not even saying nuclear correct.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  So it's nuclear. Nuclear.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  It's nuclear.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Nuclear.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Nuclear.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Nuclear.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Nuclear.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Nuclear.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  There's a lot of.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Nuclear, yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  I don't know if you want me to inject some random technical stuff in here or not.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  Yes, please. Yes.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Certainly can. Okay, so

• 17:34Speaker 02

  I don't study any of this stuff. Like hardware is definitely not my monkeys and not my zoo. I just look at it and go like, look, the worse the hardware is, the better is for people like me who like to talk about programming performance. Cause it just means you have to be better, right? So I'm fine with like, great. If there's a, if you have to start programming for a 10 year old laptop, I'm happy about that. But.

• 17:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  So a typical data center, my understanding is that you're in the like 100 to 200 megawatt range for the data center. Like, like a typical modern data center, that's what you would be looking at for the total number of megawatts. Whereas AI data centers are like 10x that for power consumption. So when they're building those, they're looking at things like gigawatt or, you know, mul- mul- like up to over one gigawatt worth of inflow of power to this data center, right? That's how much it consumes. So when they talk about gigawatts, they're literally talking about like, okay, 10 gigawatts might be five data centers or something like that. Five new data center build outs worth or something like this, right?

• 18:40Speaker 02

  If I'm just like ballparking those numbers based on what I've seen. So when you think about that, when they're guaranteeing that kind of purchase, I mean, that's an ungodly number of GPUs, right? You know, think, think literally five data centers or something or more worth of these racks upon racks of Nvidia Rubin, like, you know, slotted things or whatever, you know, they're on at that point. And so that's just, I mean, I don't know, we'd have to go break out a calculator to even try to figure out what kind of a outlay that is for Nvidia, but it's massive, right? Like, it's a massive amount. Um, tying that back, though, to the thing we're actually talking about, which is memory.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  My understanding was that OpenAI actually signed some kind of nutso deal where they were gonna buy up to 900,000 wafers a month of DDR memory.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  What's a wafer and how much memory is on a wafer?

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Uh, that's, okay, so again, not my monkeys, not my zoo. I'm doing my best.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  It's classified, Brian. It's classified.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  And, and.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  You can't, though.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  It is. If you actually want to know the, the yield per wafer, like, they have the number of, like, bits per wafer. These are things you pay analyst firms to get, and they, they are constantly moving around because people are trying to increase their yield and so on. A wafer is a piece of silicon. It's circular. You've seen them.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  Is that the circular one that we talk about?

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  So they're just buying circles?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  What do you do with a circle?

• 20:19Speaker 03

  You're buying the output of the circles.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Okay. I was about to say, I don't know how to take a circle and turn it into a stick. Like, that's very difficult.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Casey, I've never seen a GPU that's round, so I don't know if I believe this.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  There are some. Uh, the, the, uh, there's people who make wafer, who make wafer scale, they're kind of prototypes, but they make wafer scale AI accelerators, and they are circular.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  That's pretty cool.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. But that's just nutso stuff. I mean, I don't know.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  They're designed after Sam Altman's orb.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  So it's like, it's circular.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  You can only do it after scan.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  I think technically, uh, technically, Prime, you're more right, you were trying to make a joke, but you're more right than you think you are. I believe the OpenAI deal is literally for uncut wafers. They have been patterned, but they are uncut, and they are going to be, like, controlling where that gets shipped to and how it ends up getting stacked and packaged. Was, like, the last time I read it, they were uncut, patterned wafers, not cut and packaged, which is very unusual. I could be wrong, but that's my recollection.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  No, it sounds like you're right. I didn't actually realize.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  I believe I am, yeah. Yeah.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm thinking about a Sam Altman as Scarface right now. Yup. Okay, listen to your board, like, just uncut wafers all over his desk. Yeah.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Um, so, again, to give a really bad explanation, because I'm the wrong guy to give this explanation, you really want to get, like, you know, uh, Dev Patel, or, or what's the guy's name for, uh, Dylan Patel, Dylan Patel from, um, Semi Analysis or something, you want to get him, he would know, right?

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, we're, we're more on the consumer side of things, like, I don't get way into this too often. I do know that, like, the, the difficult part is making the wafer. Um, like, there's, there's somebody online who made their own stick of, of computer memory, um, using, using chips they got from, you know, somebody else. Um, so it's not, like, it's not crazy surprising that they bought just the wafers, I just thought they would, you know, cut to the chase and get them to actually hand them over, like, functioning sticks, but, um...

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Well, they're not sticks is the problem, right? Because they are using HBM, so...

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Oh, right, yeah, I mean, fair enough.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  What happens, yeah, so like...

• 22:34Speaker 00

  HBM for us normies.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Okay, so, uh, phew.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  This is again, way out, way out of my league, but...

• 22:42Speaker 00

  You and I both have to guess what HBM stands for.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what it is, what it is, is like, if you think about normally how memory works, right, it's, it's on a stick, and you basically have these, the, the individual DRAM chips that have been fabricated are, like, on a line of the chip, and then the, the, like, you know, the connection is the, you know, the little pins it slots in, and that's how it's talking to CPU. So if you think about it, you've got, like, essentially, the CPU is on a package, the DDR is on a package, on a little thing, you've got those connections, they go through the PCB, right, your motherboard, and there's, like, some small number of connections connecting them, right? So, that, there's, like, traces on the PCB that are going to drive over to those, like, you know, places you slot them in.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  So GDDR, right, which is the graphics, graphics DDR, not the kind you slot into your thing, right, so the kind that goes on a, on a, on a GPU, is a little bit different. That one is like welded right on, like, it's like soldered onto the motherboard and directly connected and the rea, and closer, and the reason for that is they, it's basically the same kind of memory for all intents and purposes, as far as I know, but the signaling is much, much faster. So they, they drive the data rate up, the, the band, total bandwidth, they drive up by increasing the speed at which it can transfer things back and forth. And

• 24:13Speaker 02

  so it has like basically higher quality signal, physical signaling to get things back and forth. But otherwise, same basic idea as the kind you would slot into your motherboard. Otherwise, not a huge difference beyond that.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  Some people are asking for visual representation. If you, if you look up, if you, if you wiki, I don't know if I can share my screen on this thing, but if you wiki high bandwidth memory, there is a very good photo, if you scroll down to the interface section, that shows how it's like 3D stacked as well. So you can have-

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Well, this, well, we haven't gotten HBM yet.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  HBM is totally different than both of these, totally different than these two things. So HBM is completely different from those two things, completely different. It's the same sort of memory, like, it's still, the idea is still that there's a capacitor and a transistor per cell of memory, like, so the actual thing you're fabbing is somewhat similar. But it's very different in two very important ways. One, like Luke just said, it's stacked. And in order to stack it, it needs to be manufactured with this sort of different kind of connectivity. It's got these things called TSVs, or through silicon vias, they're like these connections that go through the stacks, so that you can kind

• 25:30Speaker 02

  of like have each stack is talking to the next stack, it like, and they tunnel through, right? So it's wider, right? It's a wider, it's like the actual physical footprint for the same amount of memory is a little bit bigger because it's got to have space for this. The normal DRAM can be, doesn't have to have those, right? Those TSVs. So that's a thing. But the much bigger thing, I mean, although that's, that's obviously a slight difference there. The much bigger thing is the stacking and packaging is just a way harder problem. So first you have to be able to stack them and this reduces yield apparently. I don't know the reasons why, but like-

• 26:13Speaker 00

  Again, can you explain yield? I, I forget, just like a quick like one liner, why do you not like-

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Percentage of stuff coming out based on what you put in.

• 26:23Speaker 00

  Like you just think if some of it's bad, it just comes out like broken. So they're just like this wafer is broken, bro.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  Or different levels of quality.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Computer chip's small, hard to make. We mess up times, sometimes bad, that's-

• 26:38Speaker 00

  Okay, okay, okay. That's what I needed, that's what I needed, okay, thank you.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  The answer is, I don't know. Normally when we talk about yield, I understood it fairly well from the old like, what's the yield on a wafer? Cause you figure you make a wafer, there are defects on the wafer. So you, you know, you imagine you're patterning this thing and you've got defects. Some of the defects are maybe could be, you know, some kind of impurity or something went wrong. Or maybe when you're patterning, the light just hit something or there was one little speck of dust in there or whatever. So you have certain things that didn't quite work as well as they should on this wafer. And so some number of the things that you put on the wafer aren't, are just going to fail. And so normally when you talk about yield, you talk about like, all right, if there's N number of defects on a wafer,

• 27:25Speaker 02

  we expect those to fall fairly randomly. Sometimes they're, they're distributed differently, like more towards the outside than the center because of the way the reticles work or all these other sorts of things, who knows? But, so you only get a certain number of those chips, right? So only a certain number of them will work or a certain number of them will perform better than others for certain reasons, all those sorts of things. And all that goes into what you call your yield, right? And binning. So binning is right, the process where you say like, some of these chips work better than others for whatever reasons, run at higher clock rates, things like that. Others are like, they literally don't work. There's a defect on them, we can't get it working at all. And yet, others are designed to like, have certain things constructively turned off.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Think GPU where it's like, okay, there's this many processing units on the GPU, and they're designed to have some of those fail and be turned off, right? So it's like, okay, this just has less cores now and it gets slotted as a different thing. Blah, blah, blah. That's the normal way that like, I have heard yield talked about. For this, apparently, when you, you have to like, grind down the silicon and like, stack it on top of each other and all the, and I guess, there's a separate yield loss that happens. It has nothing to do with whether the original chips were working or not, maybe. But then there's also the fact that, I got the sense when I tried to look at this stuff, because I knew we were doing this podcast, so I was like,

• 28:51Speaker 02

  let me go see, like, what, what are they talking about with some of these memory things? And I wasn't really able to understand it, because I wasn't sure if what they were talking about was yield loss from, we stack these wafers on top of each other and that process produces problems? Or if what they were talking about is, we can't test the memory prior to the stacking for some reason, let's say. I'm making that up, I don't know. And so when we stack eight things on top of each other, we just multiplied our total failure rate by eight, because if one of them's bad, they're all bad, right? Because the vias won't work, or who knows what. So I don't know which of those they're talking about,

• 29:31Speaker 02

  but what I've seen put out for numbers is when you're making one of these HBM modules, your, your yield rate is awful compared to normal. They said three times as much wafer space is required for the same amount of HBM memory as for regular DDR5, or something like that. So, the same number of bits stored, if you're storing them in HBM, you required three times the input wafer size and patterning to get that out. And that's a huge yield, like, that's massive, right? I mean, just think about that number. It means you're doing all the same work, but you end up with three times more chips for DDR5,

• 30:14Speaker 02

  if you were producing DDR5, as if you did HBM. Make sense?

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Okay. That does make sense.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  Makes sense. So that sucks, right? That that is really, really bad. And it means that the price of those things has to be much higher because you're doing a ton more work for each one. You're doing three times more work to get the same amount of bit storage. So if you want a gigabyte of HBM versus a gigabyte of just the random GDR or DDR that we're sticking in the computer.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  M.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  It's it's right.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  Last thing.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Just M, okay.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Just to finish this ridiculous tangent on how it works. So the thing about HBM is what I tried to get to at the the beginning before we went into that yield thing. Is it doesn't go outside the chip. It's not connected to the chip in this sort of way that we think of, like with GDDR that's like slot on the PCB. Or DRAM, which is slotted in. It's on the package. So the way that it works is you literally, you know, you think about, I don't know if you guys have ever seen like die shots of something like a modern AMD processor where there's chiplets. There's like little chiplets in there. So it's like you delid the processor, there's like two, you know, CPU dies and something on there, right?

• 31:28Speaker 02

  That's how HBM works. It's on the package. So the CPU and the memory are all together in one module. They're not, they don't, they're not things you plug in or put on a PCB. Does that make sense?

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Is this, uh, yeah, like? This could be way off, but some of the stuff with like Mac minis and all these, some of the new Mac stuff where they have like the unified memory. Which is why a bunch of people are using them for running local LLM stuff because they have this higher bandwidth connection to CPU that actually lets you run like local models at reasonable speeds. Is is this related at all? I don't know.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  I'm just asking. I am not sure. I I want to say that there may be, I thought there was a, uh.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  I'm not, I'm not sure. I don't want to say because I'm not sure about that. I know that there's, uh, there are some like A series, uh, chips, I think. That use on chip memory, which is very different and super duper, duper fast, way faster than even HBM. Um, but that's a different thing, which we could go into later, but it's not relevant to a DRAM shortage at all. Yeah.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're they're expanding cash in in a lot of ways, but like you said, that's not really related.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a different type of it's a completely different. It's it's SRAM. It's not even the same kind of.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  Can I can I ask a dumb question?

• 32:49Speaker 03

  Yes, please.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  I have been asking dumb questions the entire time because this stuff, like I said, not my monkeys, not my zoo. And you look into it and you're like, Jesus Christ. Like, it's just like this huge morass of stuff where you're like, oh, God. Okay.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  So me, the consumer, I don't just want a wafer. I want it like nicely packaged and then have like little LEDs on top of it. And then I want NZXT or someone.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  You do not want LEDs. You're not an LED. Come on.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Dude, I have LEDs right now, baby, with my with my little ram. It's just like, you know, the whole nine yards, right? And that's me as a consumer. So why in the world, as a producer, would I ever sell to consumers ever for any reason? If Samuel Jipity Altman is just like, give me the circles. I don't even want like, I don't even want you to put LEDs on them. I just want I just want the circles.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  That's that's that's the shirt. You just described the shirt. Yes.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what's happening, right? You nailed it, Prime.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  Good job.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Done. Episode's over. We can all go home.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  So we're like literally never gonna get them back.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  Was the the consumer, specifically consumer side of Micron. And they were just like, yeah, screw it. Why do I want to deal with you guys? I can just sell to the to the hyperscalers. There is, if you look at the amount of companies that are actually making wafers versus the amount of companies that are selling in in, you know, the most consumer side of things, the sticks of RAM. There's an incredible amount of companies selling sticks of RAM. There are very, very, very few actually making wafers. The the hard part is the the making of the wafers, not the making of the sticks. Or in the in the HBM sense, it continues to be hard the whole way through.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  We're specifically talking in this case about about the sticks. You were talking about putting LEDs. You're not putting LEDs on HBM. So I'm talking about sticks.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  They're missing out. They're missing out. Data centers would be so thick.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  Some things that like, you know, probably coolers that go on top of of HBM or something like that. But that's probably what you might see, but.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  When Razer gets into the HBM market.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  I'm imagining like when I get my chat GPT subscription, there's an additional tier and I get like a live video feed into the data center and I have like my rack. And it has my cool LEDs on it for an additional price like they're missing out on these secondary effects that they could be selling, you know?

• 35:20Speaker 03

  I like that, yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  So that means the, you know, the AI future always shows these data centers that are like glowing with bright lights. So Sam's not going for that style of LED future. He's going for like the dark scary one.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay. And we don't need light where we're going. Okay. That's pretty interesting. So does this, is there, is there any computer part that's protected from this AI revolution? Like, is there anything that's going to remain normal priced? Or am I just screwed? Cause I have to buy a new computer here soon. Um, I don't. I should probably buy it sooner than later as it seems like, but also is there like anything that's going to be cheap or is it all, is it all gone?

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, one kind of sort of nice thing is that the whole RAM situation is sort of creating this nice bottleneck. So it's unclear, like it's unclear how much CPU prices would be affected long-term because TSMC, so TSMC. Okay. So there is a way in which the production capacity for things like CPUs is implicated by this. But I don't fully know how, to what extent. So when you do these HBM modules, the stack, that stack that we were talking about.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  The bottom of that stack is not memory. So the things that are like up the whole way, that's memory. But the bottom is actually a logic die. So it's kind of like one logic layer and then a bunch of like memory cell layers. And that bottom die supposedly is actually like an advanced process, logic process. So my understanding is that TSMC actually is going to be fabbing a lot of like for HBM4 or something, they're actually going to be fabbing the bottom layer. So it's like TSMC fabs the bottom layer of the stack, SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung,

• 37:24Speaker 02

  if their stuff ever works, will be fabbing the other layers. And then they get like packaged together and then stuck on the, you know, chip, the wafer, the C O W O S packaging thing, or whatever they're going to be using at that point. And so I suppose that could have some negative consequences in that that adds more stress to the TSMC side, but I don't know like to what extent that competes with things like, you know, the logic dies for CPUs and stuff. So it seems like if you're sitting around waiting for memory all the time because your memory supply constrained, then that would mean that like the fab processes that are used for CPU and GPU dies that aren't the parts that aren't the memory, that part seems

• 38:08Speaker 02

  like it wouldn't necessarily go up, right? Because they're, they just have extra capacity at that point because you can't make new accelerators without the memory and you need a lot of that memory and they just don't have the fab because, but so that could be, someone out there has done that analysis, but again, it's probably something you have to pay for the research.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a lot of analysts. I think like theoretically, pretty much everything could be impacted to a certain degree, like if we're, if we're building all this stuff, basically everything in a consumer computer, those brands, a lot of them, not all of them, are also in the hyperscaler space, but the amount of impact on like a company that makes, you know, server chassis and desktop computer cases is going to be effectively nothing because you can scale it up no problem. And there's a lot of potential manufacturing in that space, so it's just kind of whatever. The amount of things impacted is going to be like a computer fan, for example, they might have lots of fans, but who cares?

• 39:09Speaker 03

  You can make tons of fans all the time, basically everywhere. There's, there's, there's not really going to be any actual real impact there. So it'll, it'll probably stay mostly with.

• 39:21Speaker 03

  You know, the things on or attached to or very close to the board. Which is mostly impact that we've already seen, but I do agree. I think it's bottlenecked.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Casey, so are you saying? Since we have to pay a lot of money for memory and our CPUs are just gonna be waiting all the time, JavaScript is so back? Is that like, CPU doesn't even matter, we're just waiting around? We're just waiting around. It doesn't even matter how long it takes anymore. It's just chilling out in memory.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Or other way around, you'll only be able to, like, new machines will only have 512 megabytes of memory. Cause that's all you'll be able to afford. Like, each year, the memory will go down and down and down. Until eventually, you're running like, the Commodore 64 is like roughly what you get. You have 64K. That's all, you know, you plebs can afford.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  I've trained for these days.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Normies are not allowed to use graphical browsers anymore.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  You don't get a gigabyte of memory. What are you talking? What are you, you think you're, you know, some kind of, uh, president of something? You don't get a gigabyte?

• 40:21Speaker 03

  Maybe, uh, maybe Bill Gates's old fake quote was actually right, but it wasn't right because it's most of what we need. It'll be right because it's most of what we can actually get.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, that's what you get.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  I like this.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  The full circle. 640K will be enough for anybody, because it is all you will get.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  Alright, so the follow-up question.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  You'll own almost nothing and be happy.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  Alright, so the follow-up question I think is, uh, is pretty interesting because, uh, Google Stadia, obviously, they, they killed Google Stadia. Netflix actually went into this whole idea of doing, um, games on the server and they're, they're doing it quite successfully. A lot of these places, it kind of seems like we're moving more and more to the server. Does this mean that within the next five years? We could see something along the lines where consumers are getting so priced out that it's better just to rent? Your workstation, it's better just to rent your time on some sort of server computer? Cause I know there's a lot of this being pushed with like VS Code and GitHub and everything where you can just, you rent out your development environment as opposed to you actually owning your development environment.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  You're just like, I can program anywhere now on any, you know, I just need a terminal. And boom, you're up and running. And so, um, is this like a future that we're kind of forcing people into being like, oh, you want a computer? Brother, that's $20,000. Like, you, you better just go rent one for life.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  I think there's some desire there from a variety of companies, but I think when we're looking at at least some of the comms that I'm seeing from these like RAM wafer companies and stuff like that is that they they want to scale up because of this, like they would like both markets.

• 42:01Speaker 03

  But I don't know. I mean, there's a there's a Twitch chatter mentioning Chinese manufacturers covering to the the memory market like there. We might also start seeing competition like that. I wouldn't be too surprised if the gap between what the enterprise has available to them and what the consumers have available to them, or at least what the consumers reasonably have available to them, continues widening. For for a while there, the unless you're looking at like, what was that, the name of that CPU, like Knights cable or whatever. Unless you're looking at like the extreme end of of server specific compute hardware. Consumers are pretty interested in that stuff for a long time.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  And now we have GPUs that are just mind-blowingly expensive and CPUs that are mind-blowingly expensive on the extreme high end. That just in a lot of cases, while those things are relevant, isn't going to be super necessary on the consumer side of things. So, yeah, I don't think that's necessarily going to happen because there will always be a section of the market where someone could make money selling to those people. And I think the the Chinese who are both getting into CPU, not both, but all getting into CPU, memory, GPU, all that type of stuff. They might come for that market, someone else might, not sure. But yeah, I don't I don't think that's going to happen.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  CXMT is supposedly not far behind modern memory standards like right now. And so they're kind of predicted to be able to ship at least like DDR4.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  Style memory, right? Or something like this. So they're they're not. Chinese memory manufacturers aren't like way behind.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  So it's very possible that, especially if you start talking about, well, you know, no one can afford DDR5. So, you know, maybe you could ship a cheaper thing or a less good thing and that would be fine, right?

• 43:56Speaker 03

  And maybe you're not able to buy as high performing computers or relatively as now or whatever. But maybe Casey's stuff gets more popular and programming goes more or more, you know, efficiency and performance and stuff like that. We start making Roller Coaster Tycoon again.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, there we go.

• 44:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:14Speaker 00

  It really is actually like the most.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  Your desktop is just like gone or consumer compute, I should say.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, it's actually really this, this whole kind of crunch on everything and not being able to buy the next greatest MacBook, MacBook Pro every single six months from the Silicon Valley. It is actually kind of a positive thing because people might actually start experiencing the, the crap they make on devices that aren't the premium of the premium. But follow up question, which is, will, when do you think, or do you think this is going to hit phones soon? Because I kind of realized like people buy phones fairly frequently in America. Like at what point does Verizon say, yeah, sorry, we're not giving you a phone with a two year contract anymore. It's just like too damn expensive now. Like is there, is there a world where this is coming soon? Because I assume all those parts are equally susceptible to whatever is happening, the ramening.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  It would make sense that it would. I haven't really seen it happen yet. You've seen it a lot of other worlds. I don't know if that's because like they have contracts far enough out that it hasn't really impacted their, their available stock at this time. So I don't know when that would happen, but it did. Yeah, it would absolutely make sense to me that it would.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  There's also like supposedly, and this is kind of, I don't know to what extent they're talking about this, but I guess the AI build out doesn't only affect DRAM. It also affects like NAND flash storage and things like this. Like apparently like, you know, these machines that they're prepping, I don't know what a typical AI data center machine looks like, but it's not like, oh, it. Just has high bandwidth memory. It also has DDR5, regular. And it also has NAND flash, like SSD. So they're taking capacity for all of those things. And I think the memory side is what we talk about probably most because that HBM stuff has such the bad yield stuff and all that.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Probably like that hit first, but the other the other sort of storage technologies are also just facing limited supply for the same reason. Like AI just wants to buy a lot of it. And there weren't enough people, there wasn't enough slack like to pick that up. So I would imagine that phones will have all of these same problems. Like they'll in a year or two, when they're pre, you know, when their allotments have run out. They will be like, oh crap, like the flash storage is more expensive. The memory is more expensive. About the only thing that won't get more expensive probably is that SRAM part that's on chip memory like in a in a bionic, like in a Apple A series chip or whatever, right?

• 46:56Speaker 02

  But they, you know, that's just part of their memory architecture. Still have the other parts, so they're still gonna have problems with that.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  The Western Digital, which does a lot of, I assume that NAND flash, they're also up just an absurd amount in the last six months. They're up 300 plus percent. Just today, they're up over 10% like they're obvious. They're actually, they actually have risen faster than Micron as far as.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  That was because of the podcast, by the way.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Huh?

• 47:20Speaker 02

  That's because of the podcast, by the way.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  I know, I know. We got some, we got some motion. All right. Well, I mean, I, this could be a good time to kind of jump off some of the hardware stuff unless if Luke, you have anything else you want to talk about? Cause I, I do have some questions about YouTube and tech and all that kind of stuff for you as well.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Can I make two stupid jokes before we go to the next one? Cause I had some, but I just didn't get a chance to put them in. People were saying smart things. When we were talking about yield, I really wanted to ask Luke what his thoughts were about roundabouts.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  That's pretty good.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  You have to.

• 47:53Speaker 03

  Oh, roundabout. I like roundabouts.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Okay, cool.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  That didn't, that didn't go as well as I thought it was gonna go.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  You don't have to.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Yield that. You have to yield at them instead of stop. That's.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  I mean, if you're just confident enough, you don't.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  No, I like, I love roundabouts personally. That's a great point.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  Self-driving cars, baby. They just all, they just do the thing. It's fine.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  You know, in my experience, people stop for me.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  Sounds done.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  That's just because you put the LTT thing on the side and it's coming through.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  I wasn't gonna be able to focus for the rest of the episode, okay? It was just in my head, the roundabout joke mostly, so you had to be there. Yeah.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  The joke's killing.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  To be there. Well, it looks like we all got to be there. That was very fantastic. Thanks.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Prime, ask your next question. That'd be sweet.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  All right, all right. We should shift a little bit of gears and talk more about kind of a LTT because you, you guys obviously have uh, some developers on board and all that and you're doing, I assume the tech and the things that you're building is much different experience than say something like Netflix where they've just been working on one product and ancillary products for 20 years or Google 20 years, right? Like all these companies have been just working on the thing they're doing. Well, Google kills a bunch of projects too, but imagine a company that doesn't kill a bunch of things. They've been doing one thing and that's it. Uh, I kind of like, even though AI has had a, uh, there's a lot of negative impacts to things. How has it impacted kind of this hiring, what work looks like? Do you guys feel like you're doing more things? Like the positives, the negatives? I'm, I'm curious.

• 49:21Speaker 03

  I don't feel like it's changed like,

• 49:25Speaker 03

  I don't know. Hiring has gotten really weird. Um, hiring has gotten extremely strange. Uh, I mean, being like as public as we are, I guess. Um, the hiring has always been a little bit odd. Uh, I've, I've always been fairly open to hiring remote devs. Um, so even like, I don't know, six years ago, putting up a position for a remote dev would get 2,000 applicants. Uh, and, and a lot of them are, you know, um.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  People who are not prepared and are just like, I want to put in an application, I'll mop your floors, I don't care blah blah blah. It's like, okay, but I actually just need a experienced developer, I'm sorry. I don't know.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  The camera pans around and there's like 13 people mopping this one tiny piece of floor. It's like, guys, we don't need anymore.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  So you can sift through a lot of them pretty fast, but like it's, it has really taken like, I think especially over the last year. The influx of what are like, obviously just garbage, like crapped out, AI written, AI submitted. Applications has gotten crazy. And then sifting through that, it was already difficult because we had so many applicants for certain, certain positions. If it's like hyper local and specialized, it's, we don't get that many. Canada doesn't have all that many people. And then this area is quite expensive to live in, so it's, it's a little bit, you know, if it's, if it's a local position, it's not that much. If it's global, it's, it's a ton.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  But yeah, sifting through them, trying to find the stuff that's actually real has gotten more difficult. And the temptation to like counter sorts basically by, okay, well, you're spamming me with AI applications. Let me sort through it with AI is high. But then the error rate there would suck if you lose someone who's really good because they got AI sifted out. That would be very unfortunate. So there's some tension there. We have a coding test that we do for incoming applicants of, of every type of developer that we've hired, which is a decent range. We've had to make different ones, but they're made in-house.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  And we've ran that coding tests in a bunch of different models to try to see what that output looks like. And we try to kind of detect how hard someone leaned on it. I don't personally care, like. If you look at the coding test and you get AI assistance and you make the best result out of everyone. I think you made the best result out of everyone. It doesn't really matter to me too much, but there is a little bit of sussing that I want to do to figure out like, did you just take its output and just slap it in and not even in in Teja's situation, review it properly? Did you just, did you just throw it through?

• 52:20Speaker 03

  And if that's true, then you know, I'm not that interested because the even if it did, even if it did one shot super effectively,

• 52:29Speaker 03

  I'm concerned about your ability to maintain things and keep them good over time. So yeah, hiring is definitely changed. It was difficult and now it's way harder.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  So I I've been reliably informed by Sam Altman that the problems of AI will in fact be solved by AI. And so you're telling me that you you aren't solving your AI problems with AI?

• 52:55Speaker 03

  No, yeah, not so much. Not right now. You know, we'll see if that happens eventually, but I kind of doubt it. There's there's there like, there's the basically inherent error rate and for certain things that's frustrating to deal with.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  All right. So I actually do want to ask a real question here, which is that, okay, so I think

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Wait, what were all, wait, what were all the other questions?

• 53:14Speaker 03

  Eight questions.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, those are all fake.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  You didn't care about the answers to those.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  To get riled up and go on an epic 10 minute rant.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  Get wrecked, by the way. Okay, so the, I think the obvious elephant now in the room, and I'm sure a lot of people would appreciate this in the audience, which is, okay, I am stuck in effectively elo hell, right? Like you're playing League of Legends, except for it's with your career and you're a junior. And you're trying to figure out how to get out of elo hell because everybody is just dogpiling in and quitting mid game. So how do I stand out, at least in your process without giving away too many, because then the AI will be like, got it. But like, how would you make yourself stand out in a sense that when reviewing, you go, oh, this is actually really good?

• 54:02Speaker 03

  Um, the application, I guess, is how I'll take this instead of the code.

• 54:07Speaker 00

  I assume the application is the beginning of Elo Hell, right? That's the bronze level right there.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's how I took that.

• 54:12Speaker 02

  Would it be possible, just for those of us who don't, who aren't that familiar with it also, what exactly, like, what kind of people are you trying to hire exactly? These are programming, these are primarily programmers and programmers for what kind of stuff?

• 54:25Speaker 03

  A pretty, a fairly surprising to most people, variety of things. So we have multiple websites. Um, so we have fullplane.com, which is the, the, the first, like, thing that we made, which is a, uh, like Patreon-esque, but video-first, um, you know, creator support platform, uh, where people can upload videos, have their own channel and get direct funding from fans. We also have lttlabs.com, which is where a lot of our, I don't even know if I can say a lot, some of our testing data from our local, uh, testing lab gets put up on there and you can do comparison runs and, and all these other types of things, which is kind of neat. Uh, then we have, somebody in chat pointed out, LTT Store.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  That one's a lot more basic because it's on top of Shopify. It's not just like our own thing. Um, but then we have tied that in with like a system that we have, which is currently called Merch Messages, but it might be renamed, where if we are on a live stream and you are buying something on the store, as you're checking out, you can leave a, a message and that message will go to the stream to be, go to a stream dashboard. So it can be curated and then selected and then, um, the producer can just respond to them in line and then they'll show up in like the, the lower third banner at the bottom. Or they can curate them and then Linus or myself or whoever's hosting the stream, um, can respond to them directly through like voice.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  So we have that tie-in, we have a couple of things like that. Fullplane and the LTT Store link together for like exclusive sales and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, that's most of our web development. We also have internal tools development, um, which ranges through a bunch of things. We've done a bunch of, uh, you know, Internal development on top of Snibit or inventory stuff. We, we wrote a GUI for Whisper back in the day because our editors didn't like doing command line stuff. We helped automate things around the office, just little things like that. And then the lab itself also has a pile of developers that work on like data ingest,

• 56:35Speaker 03

  both for handling data from, well, it's entirely for handling data from like benchmarking and testing of computer components, but then also making sure that like the website receives the right stuff and not the embargoed things and whatnot. And also making a variety of benchmarking tools, like Mark Bench is the, the name of one of the, the tools that we have, which does a bunch of automations for testing hardware. So like you, you put a new graphics card on a test bench, you run Mark Bench, Mark Bench will kind of try to verify that everything is set up correctly and then automatically go through, run all the benchmarks. It'll, it'll set up the game, make sure the settings are correct, scroll through the

• 57:17Speaker 03

  settings and take screenshots so that if something is strange, if we're looking at the results, we're like, this result seems really weird, we can go back through and check, okay, was G Sync enabled on the, on the computer? It's a fairly common, you know, when you're trying to test things, error vector, is, is this random setting in the game wrong? Like, is this a game where we had to manually select the settings and, and the person clicked beside the dropdown instead of on it, so it didn't actually select the thing that they wanted or whatever else? Because the most frustrating thing is like, okay, we have five days to like fully test this suite of new graphics cards. We're on day four, everything is done, we notice this one result is super weird.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  Why? Right. It's just like, is it that one result that's super weird or is it all the other ones are super weird and this one result is the real one? So being able to go through and figure out, like dive through all the information to figure out, make sure everything's all. All correct is super valuable. We also do some amount of like AI checking to verify results. We only use that as an early warning system. So that's running as test results are coming in based on our expectations. And that will try to tell us if it thinks something is wrong early, but that hasn't removed any human checks to verify all the data as well. So we have developers working on that too. So we have a fair bit of range of

• 58:46Speaker 03

  people that we're hiring in the development space. And you asked what stands out. For me, it's the same thing. Personally, it's the same thing that has kind of always stood out. My focal point keeps moving. Sorry about that. I changed my camera setup last night. Very smart. But it's been portfolio stuff for me always. Like my first major specifically developer hire was very, very largely off of portfolio. They had no post-secondary experience at all. They had no work experience, but their portfolio was just insane. And I gave them a way too difficult project. We've drawn this back a lot since back then, but we gave them a way too difficult take-home project and they just nailed it. My, oh man,

• 59:32Speaker 03

  I am evil for this. But my first like take-home project was make a game. And submit it. And I had some work details within that, but it was brutal. It was very brutal. And he made a it's actually really fun going through those submissions. It's very fun, but it was, if I remember correctly, it was, I attempted to tone it down so it wasn't like way too crazy.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  AAA game. One million in sales.

• 59:59Speaker 03

  I think it was supposed to be a long, oh man.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Roughly GTA six level of complexity.

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  Wanted levels in GTA, you really didn't try hard enough. Yeah, well, it's, I don't remember the exact details, but it was web-based and there was like some, some stuff that tried to keep it relatively relaxed, but my God, that was way too crazy of a scope. So that, yeah, that never happened again. But he made a competitive Droids game um and he set up a little bot that set off an alarm in his house when I joined the lobby. Um, so I like loaded the website and joined the lobby and it like went off and he ran to his computer and they like fought against me and there was chat in the sidebar. So we like talked about the game. And I was just like, this is insane. This has to be the guy. This is crazy. Um.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  I love the alarm. That is so brilliant of him to actually create a physical alarm. Like that alone is like, okay, yeah, you're hired. That was a great, that's a great move.

• 1:00:57Speaker 03

  The whole thing is just nuts. I'm like, I already knew from his portfolio that I was like very sold on this person and then that happened. I was just like, oh my God.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  You already knew and then you said, go make a game. I mean.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  I was, I, you know, I have changed. I've reformed.

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  Is he aware of this, Luke?

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  Is he about to get a new lore drop? When this thing comes out, is he gonna be like, really?

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  Do you, so I mean, strictly out of curiosity, do you pay well? Can we poach this guy? It sounds pretty good. Uh, like.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna disclose who it was.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  Damn.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  We, we're not, yeah. We try to do what we can. We're not super competitive with, it's, it's tough, man. The YouTube space is very different than like Silicon Valley.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  If, uh, if people wanna like really, really push and be in like hyper competitive environments, there's more money out there. Um.

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  I was joking.

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. It's just, I've been.

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  He's joking, but also seriously, what's his name?

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  But also if you happen to tell me who it was.

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  Mike.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  But also I have a game studio.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  I might pass him along to some people. I'm not saying.

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  He's still on our team. I'm happy about that.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  Nice. All right. So, uh, it's a question I really am actually very curious about, which is I, I don't know how to explain this. I sent a TJ a frantic message last night and I've just been feeling it for months on end about this. Which is, I feel a change coming in the specifically more in the tech YouTube space, but I don't know what that change is, but I know it's happening.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  Wait, what?

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  Well, it means like I just feel like the means in which people consume content, what their expectations of a content should look like, what like all those things coming in. I just feel like there's a change coming, but I just don't know what it is. More in the tech space, just because there's a big influx of people. Uh, you know, I think there's, who knows what's gonna happen. And so I'm, I'm actually very curious on your thoughts and really, I mean, I don't know how much of the T you could spill on LTT. But if you do, I think the second T does stand for T. But if like, what is your guys' thoughts about this next year or these next two years? Is it business as usual? Or do you think that there is like some pivots you may have to make or changes you have to make to remain more competitive?

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can talk pretty openly about that. Um, but one thing, question that I'll throw back at you real quick is that I often hear the, the, the software dev space referred to as tech YouTube. Um, because of you guys talking about being in tech. Um, for us, YouTube is usually like hardware stuff. Um, so when you're talking about the change you're feeling in tech YouTube, are you talking more on the like development side? Or the like, uh, consumer electronics and, and server stuff and whatnot side?

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  I would say either or honestly, because I think, I think there is a, just a general, uh, gonna be something that's gonna happen here in this space. That's just gonna kind of change maybe how people consume information. I'm not really sure yet.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I can talk about some of the like history of, of LTT and, and the, the change that we are still going through. Uh, which has been kind of from the beginning. So when, when Linus and I first started working together, we were part of a computer shop up in Canada called NCX. Um, we would show up to, to like a filming day. And in this, in the studio, in a corner would just be a mountain of products. Like it would, it would, the, the logistics guys would just throw them in the corner and they would literally like pile up. Sometimes up like to near the top of the windows. Like it was, it was a lot and we could just like old school Linus Tech videos. And even some of the old school NCX tech videos, um, were just like.

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  Okay, pull something out of the mountain, talk about it while taking it out of the box, end video, upload. And back then, we've kind of retroactively defined that as like product-driven video, where there was so much product, it was coming out so often, you're getting a new major graphics card launch every nine months, something like that. You could really just lean on, the products are interesting, let's talk about the products, let's show you the products, and that that is your content. Around 2015-ish, maybe, it started, we started having these conversations

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  internally about like, we kind of have to make the story now. That's when we started filming things like Scrapyard Wars, which is like a series, Scrapyard Wars is like 2013, I think, but we we kind of saw the writing on the wall a little bit early. But Scrapyard Wars is a series where you have a fixed budget and you go and you try to buy used hardware and you compete against each other to who can have the better system. And that was us trying to like, okay, let's create a story, let's create an interesting thing, instead of the interesting thing being the name and the title that is the new product that's coming. And that-

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  Was that shift driven by necessity, or was that just you guys saying, we could expand? Or were you saying like, no, we're like, the products aren't that interesting anymore, or there's too many people doing this? Like, how, why did you decide to do that?

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  That's a good question. It was definitely both. So we were detecting a, you know, a wider release cadence and kind of less interesting product releases, both of those things kind of happening at the same time. And also, you know, this is our full-time thing now. Originally, when we were part of NCX, this was, I was going to school, Linus had a job as a product manager, or a guy who buys product, I don't remember what his official title was-

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  That's a little bit more than a product manager.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  At least on tech YouTube, it is.

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  He would buy like SSDs and sell them through the store or whatever.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Got it, got it, yeah.

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  So this was our part-time thing, so there's only so much we could put into it and unboxing stuff was was, you know, approachable. Now, when we're doing this full-time, that's that was probably the main starter for for something like Scrapyard Wars was like, oh, we have time, we could do this interesting thing. And we always wanted to promote, you know, you can buy stuff used, you don't have to buy the super flashy things all the time. And it's been a little bit frustrating for us forever that like the, you know, the 5090 video is going to get all of the views and the card that people are actually buying is not going to get brand new views at all because people want to see the, we call it Lamborghini content.

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  People want to see the the big expensive Halo products. And from there, they'll go like, well, I this card is really interesting, therefore I want Nvidia. And then they'll go buy the thing that they can actually afford. So we wanted to find a way to make it more entertaining to see content that is about not just blowing your wallet on everything. So that was the main reason for that. But then the reason why we really continued doing it, not only did it get a ton of views, but was because there wasn't a lot of other content we could as easily make. GPU timelines, for example.

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  I said nine months, that was around when I first started doing content. Now it's like two years. So that has been a sliding scale the whole time. And also, it's,

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  I find the releases are getting a lot less interesting. Like when the 8800 series GPUs came out, like, oh, the like, performance expansion that happened was mind blowing. And then now it's like, well, you're paying 50% more dollar and you're getting 50% more performance. Hooray.

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  If even.

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So it's like, it's it's not nearly as interesting. So now we have to try to, yeah, create stories, do weird projects, do stuff like that. And the competitiveness of it.

• 1:08:40Speaker 03

  Maybe a bit. Linus notoriously doesn't watch YouTube of almost any form.

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  So like seeing what other people are doing and then doing that is not so much of a thing. He'll read comments on videos, but doesn't really watch them, which has gotten him in trouble a couple of times.

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  It's, I mean, I've watched a lot of YouTube, but yeah, I don't think like what other creators in the tech space are doing has really driven a lot of, a lot of what we do. There are plans for the future. We want to resurrect some channels that we have our hiatus. We want to start making more videos again. But a lot of it's like, man, if the products aren't there, we're going to have to make something. That just is what it is. And if you're trying to release, like if we want to get back to say six videos a week, for example, which is what we did for a decade.

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  The vast majority of those are going to have to be not, you know, new product review. Maybe it's product focused, but not new product review type videos because there just isn't enough interesting stuff.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  Very good. I was just thinking about it.

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  Waiting for a response. Did he like the answer? Did he hate it? I don't know. I can't tell.

• 1:09:58Speaker 02

  The mustache did not move. It stayed completely stationary.

• 1:10:03Speaker 00

  I identified with Linus quite a bit because I too notoriously have been known for not watching YouTube. It is a thing that I.

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  And I like watching YouTube. I can relate a lot to you, Luke. I can relate a lot.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. TJ is my Luke.

• 1:10:20Speaker 00

  The important one in the group too. So, okay, okay, that's, that's interesting.

• 1:10:27Speaker 00

  I'm just, I was just curious about it just because. There's so much content now that's getting pumped out. And things are even like, you know, the so much gippity content that's getting put out right now. That's even getting millions of views, which is crazy that people are just watching these kind of. These, I mean, I guess, again, I don't watch YouTube. So what am I saying? Why am I even saying it's crazy, right? Good for them. They're getting all that kind of stuff. But I wonder like how that changes people, their perception, how like they're going to interact with videos. Does it need to be a nonstop flow of factoids? Is it gonna be, how does it optimize? What is it gonna be like? Is you're gonna see something? I don't know. It's just, I was just very curious about how you guys are gonna approach that, especially more in. You're not tech YouTube, obviously. You're hardware YouTube. Tech YouTube. You guys might define tech differently, but.

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  I think we're tech YouTube. No, it's, I mean, it's interesting, right? Like YouTube, in my opinion, is trending towards extremes. We've talked about this a little bit publicly where we, we feel like. YouTube channels like the Mr. Beast of the world are doing super well. The NFL channel on YouTube, those types of things are doing extremely well. And then smaller, more specified niche channels are also doing really well because. And this does kind of make sense to me because if you think about what viewers would go for. They're either going for the most like kind of brain turn off. Absorb fun thing content, or they want to like learn about something and really, really dive into something.

• 1:11:54Speaker 03

  And we've traditionally kind of floated in the middle, which on YouTube was pretty good for a long time.

• 1:12:04Speaker 03

  And it's getting a little bit less good now. So that's kind of informing some of our choices. Like I mentioned, we're looking into resurrecting some channels.

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  And there is some planning going on of like trying to have. Channels that are more. Uh, more specialized. LTT has always been a generalist channel.

• 1:12:26Speaker 03

  Lightest will review a phone and then he'll make a seven gamers, one CPU computer. Like it's, it's a huge range of stuff, right? And that's just less rewarded in the current YouTube ecosystem. We're also finding that channel momentum is less important now than it's like almost ever been. Which is a very weird space, a very uncertain space to be in. Where like back in the day, if you did, like we would go to CES, Consumer Electronics Show, we'd release thirty videos. And they would all do a little bit worse than normal because we're just flooding the channel. And the impact of that would be lower views for a while. And we'd see our view curve kind of go up over time because we're kind of recovering that, um, that kind of base.

• 1:13:11Speaker 03

  And these days that doesn't happen, which is good and also really terrifying. It's, it's good because if you release one bad video, it's not going to negatively affect your, your future videos as much. But it's really bad because the predictability of how well your videos are going to perform. Thus your ability to, you know, um,

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  Have sponsors and, and all these other types of things, be confident in your like product, which is your ability to release videos.

• 1:13:40Speaker 03

  Is going to go down and makes monetization less reliable. It makes big companies like ours a little bit more sketched out because, you know, we have a hundred and twenty mouths to feed. So, um, if, if the, if the ad rep or whatever slips because we have a few videos in a row that don't do super well. That can impact us a lot, which is again, one of those reasons why I want to get back to more video releases. Because, uh, you know, if you release once every two weeks and it really doesn't hit and it performs really, really terribly. That impact on you is going to be really high. If you're releasing it all the time, it can hopefully come out in the wash. But it's difficult to release that much content effectively. We have a, we have a big team of editors. We have a big team of writers, but, um,

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  We get away from product review focused content, the content is harder to make. You have to dive deeper into things. You have to come up with better ideas. You have to come up with ideas that take a lot of work, et cetera.

• 1:14:38Speaker 03

  So it's, yeah, we're trying to scale towards that, but it's a, it's a tough problem. YouTube's always been that way, though. The, the landscape is constantly changing, what the algorithm favors is constantly changing. And, and if you want to survive, you have to kind of ride that wave. So it is what it is.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is interesting. Yeah, I think like you just sort of see now on the like, uh, the momentum for a channel doesn't matter as much. Like sometimes you just put out a really good video and it just does really well. And it's like, which is awesome. And like you're saying terrifying because you're like, okay, well, it's really hard to predict what next week videos are gonna do. Right in terms of like, what's gonna happen next, but it is fun because it does feel a lot of times like when you know a video is gonna be good. It does like hit well, which is fun, uh, which makes the game pretty, pretty fun to do. I don't know what I prime, I feel like yesterday, though, I'll just say as well, you were just reading too much anthropic blogs, bro.

• 1:15:35Speaker 00

  Dude, I read through the Dario. Oh my gosh, I guess I'm, I'm, I'm a big time mirror. And so, uh, if I hang out with people that are really sad, I feel more sad. And if I hang out with people that are more like happy, I, I become more happy. I like hanging out TJ, he's always smiling and it makes me always smile too. Uh, it's also why I like hanging out with Twitch chat. They, uh, they tend to be a lot of KWCs.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  The look on Luke's face right there, oh my God.

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  And so, uh, it's very, very exciting. I'm just a simple farmer, right? But, uh, but I started reading Dario's blog and it's just, I'm sitting there thinking, man, like, also it's just like, I just got blackpilled so hard for like 30 minutes of my life there. And I was just like, dang, man, this Dario guy, he walked, I just, now I have a whole new opinion about everything. Uh, but nonetheless.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  I sent him a happy message afterwards and he was right back, boys.

• 1:16:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was right back. I just needed a just a little bit of a little upgrade. Anyways, yeah, sorry. The AI stuff got me down hard last night, but now I'm back, we're so back.

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  To jump back to the spiky views topic for a second, for a second. This section of our channel, I, I, I find very interesting. If you, if you go to our channel, go to videos, scroll down a little bit and you see the, the steam machine won't cost what you think video from two months ago.

• 1:16:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Speaker 03

  That got 2.8 million views. The next video got 547,000. So like boom, slammed down. And then the next one got 848. The next one got 5.3 million. Next one got 1.6. Next one got 900,000. It's just like, whoa, like it really, really depends on just how the audience resonated with that video. Um, and there is, there is some informing of the algorithm for your channel and what type of content you make and what, who they might first cede it to and all that type of stuff. Like there is some influence there. So there's no momentum. Um, but dang, yeah, it's a, it's really, it's a, it's a very different world these days.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  I think they picked the wrong year to release the Steam Machine. If they want to put any RAM in it, I think is like to tie it back to our original topic. It's gonna have like 256K. It's gonna be like, here's the, here's the Steam Machine, guys. $500, there's no memory.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  Bring your own RAM edition.

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  They already have their allotment.

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  Maybe they have, yeah.

• 1:17:56Speaker 03

  Who knows? I had no idea, but I've really been hoping that's true because I wanted to do well. I think like,

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  Yes, me too.

• 1:18:01Speaker 03

  I suspect everyone in here is at least a little bit Linux build. Um, and it would be, it would be nice to have like a, a quite mainstream product like that. I think Steam Deck has done like

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  a measurable good for the like year of the Linux desktop movement.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  Yes, it produced PewDiePie, which PewDiePie produced a Linux video and that.

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  That's huge. That was massive.

• 1:18:26Speaker 02

  Glorious SSH!

• 1:18:30Speaker 03

  But, uh, yeah, I mean, I think Steam Machine can only move that forward. So hopefully it's good. Hopefully it's affordable. We'll see.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  We're actually doing a conference this year about your, the Linux desktop. I can't say anymore live because there's some details still getting closed, but it's pretty exciting.

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  Cool. Nice.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:49Speaker 00

  Alright.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  Right, Brian, we're gonna, that's why I'm wearing this.

• 1:18:52Speaker 00

  I don't wanna, I don't wanna say anything more. We're gonna, you gotta be quiet.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  No, I'm hoping that you leak and then I can, I can yell at you.

• 1:18:59Speaker 00

  You'll be like, gosh dang it, why did you say this explicit thing right here that I'm now repeating? I'm not gonna do it. Um, alright. Well, Luke, thanks for joining us on this. This was an awesome stand-up, learned a lot. Very curious about the behind the scenes, especially with Linus Tech Tips. I also think it's pretty cool to hear that, uh, what we've kind of been preaching for a very, very long time on this channel, which is like building and actually creating things and learning how to have fun with tech, really goes a long way, because obviously the first hire, that man must have had a lot of fun with tech. To be able to be like, I'm gonna hook up an alarm, I'm gonna put in live chat, I'm gonna play like, thinking through things and having a good time just goes to show how valuable it has been and probably will continue to be.

• 1:19:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Heck yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:19:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, really appreciate it. Thank you, Casey, for joining us as always, and Tej, I love the sweater.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  Chat, don't let Dario get you down.

• 1:19:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, don't let Dario get you down.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  Don't let the AI think for you and have Dario get his earworms deep into your brain. Use the tools to keep on bettering your own life. Don't let Dario make you believe that you have to be a little Matrix guy hooked up to Claude, and that's the only way to live your life. Don't do that.

• 1:20:07Speaker 00

  It's true, it's true. Also, you can't be hooked up to Claude like C-L-A-W-D, because then you'll get copyright striked or trademark infringed, but you have to be hooked up to the other, the other Claude.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  How dare someone using a likeness of a name for an AI company? Sorry. It still is tilting me that they were like, you used a name like our name. I'm like, bro, you guys stole the internet. Like, relax. I don't have the name Claude, guys. It wasn't even spelled the same. Whatever. Sorry.

• 1:20:37Speaker 00

  Oh, it's beautiful. Alright, well, we do really appreciate you. We really, uh, uh, we really appreciate what Linus Tech Tips does, and so thank you very much for coming on, and we should, by the way, next stand-up, we should talk about, we should talk about trademark, because I'm actually curious, because Microsoft, that was a real thing, that sounds the same. So there's precedent in...

• 1:20:57Speaker 03

  Soft.

• 1:20:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's precedent in the, uh, in the trademark.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  We've always had a precedent.

• 1:21:01Speaker 00

  What?

• 1:21:03Speaker 00

  Thanks DJ.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  I missed the earlier two, I had to make one more shot.

• 1:21:07Speaker 00

  Alright, so I've had a joke that's been dangling around in my head because you were talking about how like these people were like off getting wafers and how there's these three big companies really controlling the supply of it. And so then I was gonna make some sort of like jeweler joke, like are they the exact same thing? As like blood diamonds? Is that what RAM is, except for it's it's mined by these three companies and they don't let anybody else have them? Is that how price controlling works?

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  You're talking about the cartel aspect of it?

• 1:21:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, they're like full on cartels, aren't they?

• 1:21:36Speaker 02

  I mean, maybe a better example would be the Canadian maple syrup cartel, right? Where they all, they're all like, here's the price of maple syrup.

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  If you want a weird rabbit hole, look up the great Canadian maple syrup heist.

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  Yes. Highly recommended.

• 1:21:53Speaker 00

  So, so we do this thing where on a lot of the standups, we do full on presentations where one person has to come in with slides and we go really, we go really hard on the presentation. So Luke, if you are interested, you can give a presentation on the great Canadian

• 1:22:07Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  Maple syrup heist and that would go hard.

• 1:22:11Speaker 03

  I can give people some, some rabbit holes to go down. Cause I, yeah, I'm not ready on that one, but there are some, we have one of the coolest wars of all time, in my opinion. Um, Canada was at war with Denmark until like a few years ago.

• 1:22:25Speaker 00

  What?

• 1:22:25Speaker 03

  Um, oh yeah.

• 1:22:26Speaker 02

  Is this like a cold war? Like with Denmark, it's like it's richest?

• 1:22:30Speaker 03

  It was like

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  Casey, just because they don't have summer the same way as you.

• 1:22:34Speaker 03

  Uh, I think it was very special. So there's, there's an island off the coast of Canada, go away Denmark, um, which was, which was contested for a long time.

• 1:22:43Speaker 00

  Greenland.

• 1:22:44Speaker 03

  And realistically, no one actually cared about the island itself. What they cared about was the, the ocean around it effectively, the fishing rights, all the rights, whatever. Um, and That was the disputes. We were at active war. But as like a Canadian active duty military member, you could go to Denmark and tour one of their military facilities and they'd be happy to have you.

• 1:23:08Speaker 02

  Oh, sorry.

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so at the island, I might get some of this slightly wrong doing top of head, but there was like a bit of a divot in the rocks and there was a rock that could go over it. And the Canadians would put Canadian whiskey in there and plant a Canadian flag. And then every once in a while, uh, the, the people from Denmark would come by in a warship, deboard, take the Canadian flag off, put a Danish flag down, uh, and put schnapps in and take the whiskey and they'd take off. And they would, they would literally even sometimes like let us know they were coming just so we didn't like freak out.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  So you didn't have an actual war?

• 1:23:46Speaker 03

  We're chilling. If I remember correctly, there was one time where it was like supposed to kind of be theirs for a while, but someone shipwrecked on the island and we were like, yo, we're not going to like take your flag off, but can we go get the guy? And they're like, yeah, no problem. Uh, it was, it was genuinely, I actually really liked that we were at Warwick's airport. Uh, and I was sad when they ended it, but they, they did end it relatively recently.

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  Who ended up with the island?

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  I think America's buying Greenland. I think that's where the moral of this story is going.

• 1:24:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe that's it. If I remember correctly, they like split it in half or something, which is so boring.

• 1:24:21Speaker 02

  Oh, God, after all that. Okay.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  They just decided to share?

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's so lame. Uh, let's see. Yeah. It ended in June, June 14th, 2022. Uh, resolve the issue resulting in the creation of a land border on the island. Yeah. Boring.

• 1:24:39Speaker 00

  Joint custody. So who, who gets it during Christmas?

• 1:24:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  They should have just done it on different days of the week. Like, okay, Canada, you guys get weekends and holidays.

• 1:24:53Speaker 03

  That would be kind of fun. Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of random Canada facts. Like, uh, are you aware of a, let me make sure this is even true.

• 1:25:04Speaker 02

  No, don't check. Don't check. Say it first. Say it first.

• 1:25:07Speaker 03

  Okay. I'll say it first. I'll say it first. As far as my sanity goes, you know moose? Mashes and heard of the

• 1:25:14Speaker 00

  They're terrifying.

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  Predators of a moose, which you can imagine there wouldn't be that many, um, is killer ones.

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  That's orcas.

• 1:25:25Speaker 02

  Are the moose on like ice or something?

• 1:25:27Speaker 03

  My understanding as to why, and again, I didn't just look it up, so part of this is probably wrong. But I'm saying as to why is they have huge lungs and they can dive. So when they're way up north and they're going from island to island, they can swim and they'll dive to eat like, uh, vegetation.

• 1:25:43Speaker 00

  This has to be a lie. I like literally refuse.

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  And then this killer whale comes along and is just like, whoa.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  Luke, I thought you were gonna say the killer whales had really big lungs, so they just hop up on land and grab.

• 1:25:55Speaker 02

  They walk around you.

• 1:25:58Speaker 03

  Let me see, uh, there's a Forbes article. I don't want to use the AI overview. I don't want to, I don't want to feed them, um. Yeah, orcas are a predator of moose, apparently.

• 1:26:09Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  I guess it's like, they live for a long time, right? To be a big predator of moose, or meese, as they say. Like, you don't have to kill that many to be like a top predator, probably, right?

• 1:26:20Speaker 03

  There really aren't that many, yeah.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, on their Wikipedia page, uh, such as moose swimming between islands off the northwest coast of North America. Yeah. And they eat moose.

• 1:26:33Speaker 02

  That's so cool.

• 1:26:35Speaker 03

  A fun can of that. There aren't that many of them.

• 1:26:39Speaker 00

  That's pretty good. Yeah, you got a few. The capital Saskatchewan, what is it?

• 1:26:44Speaker 03

  Nobody knows.

• 1:26:46Speaker 00

  Okay. That was a friendship test. That's it. The stand-up is ending. Hey, if you enjoy watching the stand-up, you can enjoy it all you want on YouTube. There's a lot of this side banter such as this Canadian fun fact area. That will be on Spotify, because it turns out people on YouTube don't like to watch people talk about fun Canadian facts for 20 minutes. This is just life on YouTube. So, if you want the whole thing, go to Spotify.

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  We have the data.

• 1:27:13Speaker 00

  We have the data. We know for a fact.

• 1:27:14Speaker 02

  It's conclusive.

• 1:27:17Speaker 00

  So if you want to enjoy the whole episode, go to Spotify for all the extras. Uh, but the main store, of course, is always on YouTube. Thanks so much for joining us. Luke, thank you so much. Uh, is there anywhere special people can find you?

• 1:27:28Speaker 03

  Uh, the internet. Uh, no, yeah, Linus Tech Tips.

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  Great point.

• 1:27:32Speaker 03

  Um, WAN Show in general. I'm, I'm around, yeah.

• 1:27:36Speaker 00

  Alright, awesome. And of course, Tej and Casey, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you, everybody, for watching. That is the stand-up. I've never, we, I don't know, we don't really have like a sign-off line.

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  I'll try and get better jokes next time. Sorry, Chad, I, I missed a few this time.

• 1:27:52Speaker 00

  Hey, no blockers, Galactus. Love, Galactus. Bye-bye.