Is Cloud Gaming the Future

[Sponsor] Don’t let bad code get merged without reviewing (hopefully not by merge cop!). Checkout out Code Rabbit at https://trm.sh/coderabbit [Description] Should you own your hardware, or is renting compute the future? This week on The Standup, we dig into cloud gaming, GeForce Now, latency, GPUs, data centers, and whether “cost per effective flop hour” actually matters [Sources] https://x.com/romero/status/2071594758548426923 https://x.com/lauriewired/status/2070898032762323262 https://www.youtube.com/⁨@lauriewired⁩ (https://studio.youtube.com/channel/UCJXa3_WNNmIpewOtCHf3B0g) https://futo.org/ https://x.com/GamersNexus/status/2071324899939848360 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/27ILu_7plKM [Hosts/Guests] Prime: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/theprimeagen Teej: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/teej-dv Trash: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/trash Casey: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/cmuratori [Partners] Linear: https://trm.sh/linear Sentry: https://trm.sh/sentry [Socials] x.com/thestanduppod instagram.com/thestanduppod tiktok.com/@thestanduppod facebook.com/profile.php?id=61573286173150 [Other Places to find us] Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/01A062kejnXFkJE01bjN5J RSS: thestanduppod.com/feed.xml Clips: @TheStandupPodClips Website: thestanduppod.com

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I had to switch to Starlink for all those that are curious.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  And so I'm in Starlink land.

• 0:05Speaker 02

  Thank you Elon.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  And so that means I'll drop, I'll drop every now and then, so sorry, everybody.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  I thought Starlink was good.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  Starlink is good, but every now and then I just, I get a couple dropped frames, so I don't really know when it's gonna happen or how it's gonna happen, just at some point it just goes, "Okay, I'm gonna drop for a second."

• 0:23Speaker 01

  That's where, okay, well so Starlink is satellites prime.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  So what's happening, what's happening there is, that's when the dinosaur laser fight happens. Cause remember, there's in space, there's constant dinosaur laser fights in the upper, you know, when you're in outer space, and so there's like, they just have to deal with that, and you lose some packets.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 0:43Speaker 03

  How else do you think we got the bones down here, Trash? They die and they fall down.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  They die and they fall down.

• 0:49Speaker 03

  And then we find them later and put them in a museum. Duh.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Uh, anyways, I'm sorry.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  This all makes sense. Now, now that you say it that way, this somehow makes sense.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  It all makes sense. It's all just one big circle.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  See, before that didn't make any sense. Now it just makes sense.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  This is, because I do my own research, so I've got, I know this stuff, right? A lot of people don't know about the dinosaur laser fights in space.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  It's true. I did, I mean, I personally didn't know about it. Alright, we should probably get started, uh, you know, because it is time to get started. So before we actually get started, get started, we gotta talk about this right here. Now you guys can't really see my screen because I, or maybe you can, I can't tell.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  So tiny.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Okay, anyways, it is a comment from our last video, and it goes along the lines of this. "Wow, this was so unexpected. Thank you Casey for the shout out. You really did do better than my simple Instagram photo. The spike of random orders from out of state made me think they were fraudulent. Ha ha ha. Was so confused until someone notified me of this podcast. Thanks for all the support. Orders will ship next week. P.S. I don't think it's pretentious, just really good." Cause I asked if the snack was pretentious or not.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  You did.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Because I gotta know, like, do I get to look down on people or not? I just need to know this. Uh, anyways Casey, just FYI, nobody during Trash's entire snack time ever was like, "Oh my gosh, you caused orders." But you Casey, you will.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  We don't know that. We don't know that.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  We know.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  We don't know that.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  That's true. You don't know how many people are but... Yeah.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  Is cuz of Trash, okay?

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, you don't know that.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  We know at least one order. It wasn't to the levels of making them think it was fraudulent, but...

• 2:37Speaker 00

  All I know is that when Casey says something, we get comments in the section, okay? We get comments being like, "Hey, we thought fraud was happening, but it turns out it was just Casey."

• 2:49Speaker 01

  That's right. Or maybe Casey caused the fraud. We don't know.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Alright, did anybody... Oh, I actually have a quick poll. So what was the name of the snack again? What was the name of the beef jerky?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  It was Kobo, K-H-O-B-O. And I like the spicy one. I don't know if Trash was saying that maybe he's too sensitive to spicy, so maybe he would go original, but I go spicy cuz that's the way I roll.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Super spicy.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  I think spicy would taste... I think spicy would taste better as well, so it's just like, if you can handle spice, go spice. If you can't, you can't.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I believe. I believe in that. Look at all these engineers sitting at their neat little desks. It takes dirty work to keep a codebase clean. Every day, sickos are out there committing unrevealed code, and when that happens, Linters won't save you. You need someone like me.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Feature-free scrumbag!

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Who you calling scrumbag?

• 3:49Speaker 00

  What's this slop you're trying to push? Unnecessary comments? Global state? Nested ternaries?

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Oh, my bad. I didn't even read the code yet.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  You disgust me. Step away from the keyboard.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  Just let me explain.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Instead of mouse? He's merging a prod! You have the right to remain silent. Anything you push to GitHub, Canon will be used against you. You have the right to a debugger, but if you cannot afford one, a public stack trace will be made available to you.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  And one more code criminal off the streets is where they belong. HR.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Look, I didn't... I know I didn't review any of the code, but I was gonna have CodeRabbit review it from the start. With one-click fixes and style enforcement, I don't need Merge Cop. I would never merge unrevealed code, but a first pass with CodeRabbit always makes things go faster. Actually, you can try it too at coderabbit.ai. Next week on Merge Cop. The Diffler's out there, and I'm gonna be the one to deprecate him.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  Did anyone, by the way, did anybody from chat, did anybody out there order some delicious? My internet's kind of wonky right now, so I can't tell if anything's working, but did anybody from chat right now order some of these? Of these, because I actually want to know. The spice must flow, the spice must flow.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Yes, the spice must flow.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Through the anus?

• 5:11Speaker 00

  The sock.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Sorry, I'm sorry.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  Okay, that's...

• 5:17Speaker 03

  You're not sorry, Trash.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  That is the next book in the Dune series.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  I did order a combo. Nice. Okay, we did get somebody doing it.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Okay, awesome.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  That's what happens though.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Dune?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Everyone on Arrakis has terrible diarrhea, like 24/7.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  I always wonder that when I watch like the hot ones.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Blue eyes and blue poop. Like, it's just blue poop, liquidy blue poop.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  I'm sure in one of the books, he talked about it.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Because doesn't it turn your eyes blue in Dune?

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's like the classic sign that you're spice addicted. That you're trapped on Arrakis.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Spoiler alert.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  People on Arrakis can't avoid it, right? Because it's just in the air, basically. They don't have to take it, right? They just, it just infects them.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  They naturally have it.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  I've only seen the fight scenes in that movie.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Okay, well, there's a lot to, there's a lot more to the book than the movie.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Look at their eyes, bro.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  They have...

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Trash, look at their eyes.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Then you should see the blue eyes, Trash. Trash didn't notice.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  I don't remember.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Trash, their eyes are up here, okay? Trash, their eyes are up here.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Okay, got it, got it. I'm not a big Chalamet guy. I don't know, I don't know.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  I didn't particularly like the movie. I saw the first one, I was like, meh. But then watch the Lynch version.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  So then naturally, I watched the fight scene.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  All right, TJ, you have this thing that just simply says, "Explain CMF."

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Well, I didn't want to do any spoilers. You can't put spoilers in your blockers.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Okay, well, you didn't put the proper labeling. Like, everybody else had a label of blocker, so I didn't even know what this was, because it doesn't have the word blocker on it.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  It's a blocker.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh. Okay, well, here, let me help you.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Trash, you're way ahead of, Trash, what do you think it's gonna be then? Trash, you're two out of three already, correct.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  My first guess was chocolate.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  We don't have chocolate market fit, but we are working on that.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Chocolate market fit.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Crypto, I don't know.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  Crypto market fit, guys. We got a new coin, the stand-up coin.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  I like it.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  It's not a rug pull.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Pump it, pump it.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  Yet.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Uh, no, so when I was in San Francisco, the real ones say SF for short.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  I thought it was the bay. I thought they called it the bay.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  They call it the city. They don't call it the bay.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  It stands for San Francisco. It's like the OC. The OC.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  They call it the city.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  SF, right.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Don't say San Fran though. Don't say San Fran.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Oh, they hate that. I love saying San Fran. That's my favorite of them all.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  I'm gonna start saying that more often then. That's good to know. Um, so I was there recently and met some fans of the podcast and they told us that, hey, this podcast, it found content market fit. And so I just wanted to share that I really liked that acronym. And that I enjoyed, uh, hearing that we, we really know our audience and we know what they like hearing. So that was fun. That's all. That's it. It was just, I wanted to give a shout out to them. So thanks for bringing the content market fit. It was at a, a thing just before compile, Cursers, uh, conference.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  I should have went to compile. I'm kind of.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  How is CMF?

• 8:25Speaker 02

  I know, I should have.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Is, is that, how is that pronounced? Is it CMUf? Would you say this, this podcast has CMUf?

• 8:32Speaker 03

  Do people shorten DMF into a sound?

• 8:34Speaker 00

  On this podcast ever again.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  I'm gonna say this, this podcast kind of has CMUf.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  No.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Based on what the people from SF said.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Muff, oh no.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  We are not seeing muff on this podcast.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Okay. How about kumpf? Does the podcast have some?

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Worse.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  That?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  What do you think? What do you think, guys? I would say this podcast has some kumpf. It's got a bit of kumpf to it.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  That's a good list of words I don't like. Thank you for that, but I guess it's a little bit kumpf.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  Bleep all those in post, please.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  I don't know, then I guess we just have CMF, guys.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  We just have CMF.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Which sounds like some kind of disease you talk to your doctor about, or maybe, maybe a treatment for a disease? Like, ask your doctor if CMF is right for you.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  I just feel like that is some, uh, statistics function that's, that people use. Like, hey, have you checked the CMF on this?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  Cause it's like, you know, it just feels like a word that could be-

• 9:23Speaker 03

  It's statistically significant.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, cause I know there is some, there is something that is close sounding to that, which is the distribution- Cumulative, something, something.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Or like the clouty Morwitz for, function or formula or something, like it's not, it's some mathematical, like-

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  I kind of liked more as the disease one, where it comes on with an ad for something like, "Are you or other podcast hosts that you know lacking CMF? Are they having a hard time?"

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Do you have low CMF? Do you have low CMF?

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Oh, low CMF.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  Right, we recommend having a host who doesn't know how to start the episode. That's been our experience.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  Well, I had to get the blockers out of the way. I didn't want to start today's episode without, without the blockers, you know?

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Good point, good point.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  Okay. Alright, are you guys ready? Are you guys gonna keep on complaining about the situation going on?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Probably keep on complaining seems likely.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Alright.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Wow, okay, well, let us start the podcast today, shall we?

• 10:26Speaker 03

  Let's.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  Alright, okay, I just wanted to make sure I'm setting up the right thing to, uh, to Riverside, just so that way you can also get this, because what happened if I wasn't setting that up? You know, if I had programmed to fall, if I had like just my desk, you would get that, and that would be bad. Alright.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  I like that, this time you interrupted yourself on the intro. That's pretty nice. I don't even have to do anything today.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Oh, you know what we're talking about today.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Alright, so, standard trash day. Alright, here we go. Trash, ready to be surprised again?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Alright, alright, welcome to the most attended stand-up in the world, right? That's right, all the interns of the world are now here, we're ready for the stand-up, and today we are gonna be talking about a topic that made Jonathan Blow go sigh. That is what we're talking about today.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  I was not expecting.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  Yes. It got a thousand likes just saying that word. I've never seen it before in my lifetime. Also, is this a complete sentence? Do you end with a period? Because I don't think there's an implied "you" there. Anyways, nonetheless.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  I always end with a period.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  This is what we are talking about today. Should you own hardware? Is renting hardware really the future? Let me read the tweet in completion and then we can discuss. "You'll get mad at me for saying this, but cloud gaming is so obviously more economically efficient than physical hardware, I think it's going to be the default soon. Your home console, PC, is idle 90% of the day." Meanwhile, by the way, clearly doesn't know about agents running in the little hands. Meanwhile, data centers target at, what, 5%? Maybe worse, 10% idle? Every second a cloud gamer isn't gaming, that hardware is being used for someone else, training, etc. I think there should be a new measurement, something like cost per effective flop hour that takes into account the TCO plus effective utilization.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  If a gamer spends $500 on a GPU, uses it for three years, but it's only fully active 5% of that period, the cost per relative flop hour is crazy high. Meanwhile, a $50,000 data center GPU might have a lower cost per flop hour just because of the effective utilization is 90-plus percent." And then there's this lovely graph right here, which effectively just shows the different frame rates and effective, from processing to pixel, from click to pixel latency. So somewhere between 50 milliseconds all the way up to 200-plus milliseconds on a UHD laptop PC with less than 30 frames per second.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  That is what we're talking about. I think this is kind of a neat topic, because right before I quit my previous job, the one that Trash Still works at right now, Netflix, I think is what it's called. I was working on cloud gaming and latency was something that was very interesting, because I figured that I would feel every single drop of latency as I was playing. And then I realized, I'm old and it doesn't actually feel the same as I thought it was going to feel. And I was able to play a lot of the games and I was actually shocked at how smooth it really did feel in practice and all that. So this is quite the interesting bit of topic for me. But, that is me, that is me saying a lot of words. I'll open up the floor to somebody, because I'm sure we have a lot of strong opinions about this. I have a lot of ideas, but I don't want to just control it all yet.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  I have an opinion.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  I think you were controlling it just fine if you want to go a little bit, but.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  I want to hear Trash's.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I want to hear Trash's opinion.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  So I tried GFN yesterday because I never really tried it and I was just curious like what the latency would feel like.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Uh, GFN, is that also like a market fit? Is that gaming market fit?

• 13:50Speaker 02

  It's GeForce Now, I think that's.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  The thing that's been talked about in this, in that, in the picture you just showed.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the top two bars are like the GFN latency or whatever. So I was like, okay. Um, so I was like someone who like used to take gaming very seriously. I was very curious like what the latency would feel like.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Actually, the only one with professional gaming experience on this podcast, right?

• 14:09Speaker 02

  As an ex-professional gamer, this is my opinion.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  That's good. That's a good point, Trash.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  So I tried two different kinds of games. I tried an FPS game, Counter-Strike, because latency matters a lot. And then I tried a casual game, like I think I tried Genshin Impact, which is like an RPG or something.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Gotcha game.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, Trash isn't super familiar. He hasn't spent like $10,000 on it.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  I don't know what the game's called.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  For sure. It's like Gen.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  Genshin, Genshin.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  It could be anything.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it looked like Japanese art.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  We all know you have a favorite character. Okay, we all know you have a favorite character.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I played a game that anime lovers like, I don't know, it's kind of weird.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Is Ether or Lumine, Lumin your favorite character, Trash?

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Is that based on a manja? I don't even know what their names are.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  A manja.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Wait, what? Oh, oh, yeah, manja. I love reading manja.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Manja, I'm sorry, manja, yeah.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, the backwards comics.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  I like where Jesus was born.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Jesus was born in a manja.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  In a manja.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Jesus was born in a manga. Oh, my God, that's amazing.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Ah, Jesus in the manger. I can't do a Boston accent.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  But, but so what was your experience like, Trash? I'm very interested to hear.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  I think, so my, my stance is going to be less about should I own hardware or rent hardware and more of. Like what the target audience would probably be or what the audience would probably be. I feel like for serious gamers that play FPS or fighting games or anything competitive, I don't think cloud gaming, at least at the moment, is at that, at that point or where it needs to be. Yeah, basically for casuals, as someone said, it's for casuals. So when I was playing the FPS game Counter-Strike, the sensitivity configuration was just like so off. I'm used to using my DPI button on my mouse because I'll like often switch it depending on like what situation I am. That that didn't have any response. Yeah, real gaming. And then I went to the actual menu, changed mouse sensitivity, absolutely nothing.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Then not to mention, I'm playing in a Chrome browser. So I couldn't tell if it was like the hardware itself, like the streaming was choppy or if it was just my browser chopping, being choppy. But I was getting stutters everywhere. Um, so for like those kinds of games, it didn't feel good. And I don't see like if I had like a low budget computer, if it was running on Chrome, I can imagine it's probably going to be even worse because I was running this on a pretty strong machine. But for games like Genshin Impact, more of like the chill casual laid back games, I can see it being super viable. But, uh, yeah.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  More money to spend on characters, right?

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. See, but you know what I was really confused about? The GFN thing? I thought it was like a Netflix to where all the games came in a catalog. I actually have to buy the game and then just leverage their hardware to play the game.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  Well, so you don't own the game physically and you don't own the hardware?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  So it goes in your Steam library. You would buy it, add it to your Steam library and then it would just like connect your Steam library and then you can do it. So I didn't buy any games. I was super shocked. But there's a lot of free games you can play. So that's where like Genshin and CS2 came into play. Um, but the user experience was just so confusing. Like I was, like, I didn't even know what I was doing. It was like, do you want the game? I was like, yes. And then I was on a Mac, so I went to, it took me to the Steam client. And it was like, you need to install it. So then I hit install. Then it was like, you're on Mac. And I was like, what am I supposed to do? I was like, I wanted to install it on your machine. You're supposed to let me play. And I went through that for like 30 minutes to the point where I like, I opened up ChatGPT. I was like, I don't know what to do. And it was like, oh, so then they'll walk me through. And I was like, I can't, I was just so confused because again, my mental model was a Netflix kind of thing.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  It's like, oh, I want to play Cyberpunk. Let's click that. And I was like, I'm not paying that much money for that. Screw that. But if I was for casual gaming, I would love to play Cyberpunk and I'm not gonna buy a crazy expensive video card to play it. So like in that situation, I think it makes sense. But I don't, I don't, I don't know. As like a competitive gamer, I don't think it's like right for me.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  You didn't even play StarCraft?

• 17:56Speaker 02

  That was an option. I didn't. I didn't have time. But I think the FPS StarCraft, or StarCraft Counter-Strike would have been a better kind of gauge on like if it felt realistic to me. It felt like super kind of laggy, like the input ANC was kinda, mm. So, for those reasons, I'm out.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Star Tank!

• 18:18Speaker 01

  I'm out.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  But I'm gonna try. I'm gonna play Genshin Impact now that I have it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna play a little bit of it.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  You know, I'm gonna play those casual games.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  Oh no, Trash, don't do it buddy, don't do it. Based on your Pokemon card collection behind you, Genshin Impact will not be the right fit for you.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  If someone was watching me play, he's like, what is it? TJ, okay, Genshin Impact content is gonna fit right into his wallet.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  I've been wanting to play it for a while, so you know, I'm in it now. Anyways.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  We're gonna get in trouble. We're gonna get a call from your wife being like, what happened to Trash? This is your guys' fault. He was, he said he was doing research for the podcast. Why do I have a $25,000 bill?

• 19:02Speaker 00

  That's legit, I said to my wife last night. From the kick, or from the receipt app and be like, hey, got receipts? I got receipts. What have you done to my husband?

• 19:11Speaker 02

  So my wife came into my office last night because my son was watching me play Genshin Impact. She's like, what are you doing? Because it was like right before bedtime. I was like, she's like, what are you playing? I'm like, I'm doing research for the podcast. I'm like, naming my character, dashing around and fighting things. I'm like, you won't understand.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Very important work.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  No, no, I'm doing research!

• 19:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Feed egg. The podcast, the thing that I do during the day when I'm supposed to be working for Netflix.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Uh, I have it marked off in my calendar. Thank you very much. And I have a personal agent now, by the way.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Oh, you have a personal agent? Really?

• 19:48Speaker 02

  I do. Mm-hmm. Goes my Google Calendar, my Slack messages, my Jira tickets. Boom.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  All using just that one password?

• 19:55Speaker 03

  We're gonna have to talk about that, Trey.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  It knows the one password.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  Actually, it's really easy to use one of these agents when you have one password.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, you, it doesn't need to set up auth or anything. You just put in the agents M D file and you say, hey, navigate to the website.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  I have it typed in the bar now.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  No matter which site, this is the password.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  It's true though.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  Think of how many tokens you save by only having to set one password.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  I put it in a markdown file so it remembers all the time.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  He doesn't even need M C P or anything. He just has one password. It's amazing.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  All right. Anyways, okay, back to the cloud gaming. So, uh, I actually, I think I, I know I have at least one short from two, twenty thirteen or twenty twenty-three. And I've said this for a while, that I think that the future is going to be this, whether we like it or not, that we're going to have hardware as the rentable unit. I just wasn't prepared that it was going to probably be A I that caused this to become the economically viable way for you to be able to use hardware. I just wasn't prepared for that being the thing that was the catalyst. I always thought it was going to be something to do with battery life, where when your phone's off and it has nothing to do with, like, there's, there's not even an operating system. It just receives, for, like, it's just such a thin thing. It just, like, pipes frames directly into a buffer and that's all you use.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  I just figured that's what we were going to be getting, but I was a little bit shocked by this being, uh, that, uh, cloud gaming to this level was going to be the one that is going to be where we start at. I don't know. I wasn't, I was not prepared for that, but I, okay, so I was talking to my son last night. And I was explaining to him why Bamboo, the printing place, is, why they're bad. And he didn't really get it because he's just like, well, who cares if they look at what we're printing? And I'm like, well, you like to print, like, little guns and stuff, right? And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, well, what happened if they decide one day that you're not allowed to print little guns? He's like, well, but they can. It's my printer. And I'm like, well, that's, that's how. It's not your printer because they have to approve what you can and can't print. So therefore it's not yours, even though you purchased it, it's not yours. And then I could just see him kind of like start slowly working the things out.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  I didn't know that. What the hell is going on here? Hey, you could see it kind of started happening where he's just about to be like, that took our jobs. And so he's getting very, it was very exciting to watch. Uh, but I just theoretically from a pure, like my own emotional, not from a theoretical stance, but from a principle stance, I hate this future. I hate the idea of renting everything. I don't want to rent everything. I don't want that at all, ever for any reason. Put my stance out there.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  Quick aside, cause Trash, Trash doesn't know about the Bamboo thing. I think you want to give him a quick rundown on that.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  So there's a, there's an extreme, like the printer, like to be all completely fair. Uh, I've used both, um, uh, Prusa and, uh, Bamboo. And I will have to say that as far as Prusa, Prusa goes, I would prefer Prusa, the people. But Bamboo is such an amazingly simple printer. And it is so good and it has like, it's just a 3D printer in which they call it like the iPhone of printing. I'm not sure if that's actually true because I hate iPhones. So it doesn't really, it doesn't really track with me, but you set it up.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  Trash is interested now.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  I know Trash is like, oh yeah. It's a, it's an iPhone product. And what it, what it does is you just like press a button and then an hour and a half later, it's like, hey, I'm good to go. You can just start printing and then they have just like a lot of really good integrations with the web. You can just go on and start pressing stuff and just start printing. Like you don't, it's just really simple to use. But the problem with it is that you can't actually print anything without going off and sending it off to a server and all that. I think the general rule is, is that, oh, we don't want people 3D printing guns, right? Like that's the dangerous future. So therefore we need to control everything you're able to do. Uh, we need to be able to inspect everything that you're actually doing. So that way we are a nice, safe future and nobody can ever possibly get hurt. And so, uh, there's ways around it.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  You can get around this with doing some, I think, I forget the exact slicer. And the funny part is that Dolphin, their slicer, which is the program that puts everything together to be put onto the 3D printer is actually a. forked from Prusa, if I'm not mistaken. And so it's like they're not only using Prusa's stuff, but they're then putting it behind this kind of like wall of control. Uh, and so that's kind of this big debate that's going on, which is, do you actually own your own printer? If you can't determine what you're printing. If you have to get a yes from Daddy Prusa, or not Daddy Prusa, but Daddy Bamboo, then do you really actually own it?

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, and there's a lot of laws coming down and people trying to, uh, trying to push more and more into this whole 3D printing space. And so anyways, I really enjoyed, I, I've, I've enjoyed the use of bamboo. It's very, very nice, but just talking to my son about this, which is, um, which was very interesting because he's never thought about the idea that you don't own things. And then we started talking about, uh, Switch games, like we bought Final Fantasy. And Final Fantasy, you get, you get the little red card now for the Switch 2. You don't actually get the game anymore. You get a little red card that contains a little chip. And then if you want to play, you have to put it in and then Nintendo, the online place goes, okay, yes, you are allowed to play. And then you can download it. And so this is kind of what that GeForce Now slash this hardware thing is, is that

• 25:06Speaker 00

  you have to get approved by Jeff Bezos to be able to play, or Jensen, Jensen has to approve of who you are to be able to play on their device. So theoretically, I do not like this one bit.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  I guess I would ask the question, like, there's, there's way too many, like, issues kind of wrapped up in this thing. Because there's sort of, there's the question of whether cloud gaming makes sense on some level. There's the question of like ownership versus renting and so on. And so I guess like, because you just teed up the ownership part of things. I think I'd just like to add something to that. Which is that it really doesn't have much to do with ownership or renting or any of those things. What, what really we're talking about here is just what's normally called digital sovereignty. The idea that you have control over your own sort of digital domain, like you would if, you know,

• 26:01Speaker 01

  same way that we think about if I buy a house, like in law, there's something often referred to as castle doctrine, for example, which is this idea that like, the, the state in general needs sort of like extraordinary circumstances in order to like intrude upon your home. Like this is why we have things like they have to have a warrant. They can't just, you know, walk into your house and start looking around and so on.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  And so I guess I would say like all of the things that you were talking about prime are really part of a larger issue which just has to do with who is in control of what you can do with your computer. And it's almost something you can separate from renting versus owning because we could imagine a future in which I rented my computer hardware but had complete control over what I did with it as long as I was paying for it. And we could also imagine a future in which I literally purchased the device and own it and no one can take it away from me, but I can't do anything with it without the government's permission or without a corporation's permission, right?

• 27:06Speaker 01

  And so I just want to kind of underscore the point that digital sovereignty is a separate idea. It's an idea about what rights, what like sort of, I'm not going to use the word inalienable, but like what sort of rights you have in the digital domain that it requires extraordinary effort for people to deprive you of. Like you have to go to a court of law or you have to do something to take those rights away. And along the same lines about what you're talking about with your son, I think the reason it's so important to keep those kinds of things in mind is because most people don't realize when they have lost their digital rights until it becomes obvious to them by bumping up against that situation, right?

• 27:51Speaker 01

  So much like your son never really considered the fact that not truly having digital sovereignty over his printer or your printer or whatever means that he can no longer print the things that he wants to print if someone says no, most people just haven't internalized that fact. And I think it would be worth people internalizing that fact because that is kind of the way that a lot of your computing is today without you knowing it. Like you don't probably have any digital sovereignty over your email right now, most people out there. It's unlikely. Someone wants to take your email away from you, they just can't. True. A corporation could take it away from you, the government could take it away from you trivially. It just really wouldn't require very much, very much work because you haven't really been promised anything.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  You're just using a service at the discretion of like, you know, the terms of service from, and some corporations doing that, right? Similarly, reading it, like reading that email, anyone can really do that. Whoever the people are listed in the terms of service that they can share your email with, they just can, right? And so people are unfortunately in a lot of situations.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Acting with the belief that a lot of things that they use as if they were theirs were theirs, and they're not. Like, they don't actually have that digital sovereignty. And so that, I think, is an absolutely huge issue. I wish it got more attention. I would point you to some organizations that do work in that domain. For example, there's one called FUTO, F-U-T-O, that I try to point people to, whose entire, like, they're basically just an organization that tries to fund projects that give you your digital sovereignty back. Like, trying to give you software that you can have where you control the data, or hardware

• 29:34Speaker 01

  that you can buy where you control the hardware, right? And I would like people to have more awareness of that. So that's my little, like, you know, public service announcement, which is really just echoing the things you're saying, Prime, but I'm just trying to put it in terms that I think people should think about broadly, if that makes sense.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  That's Rossman, right, is with FUTO?

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Louis Rossman actually works with FUTO, for example.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  Okay, that's what I thought, right. I thought that was the same one, but I didn't want to get those confused.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, the keyboard. I just remember reviewing the keyboard. I used it for a couple weeks.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Louis Rossman is, you know, he's separate. He does his own thing, right? But he kind of got together with them because they have common interests, right? His big thing was right to repair, which is right in line with that, right? And this right to repair is this idea that if you buy a piece of hardware, you should be able to repair it yourself if you want to. You should be able to order replacement parts for it. You should be able to fix it. And there are so many good reasons for this. People, like, they always do try to sort of create these arguments for why that shouldn't be the case, and I very rarely find those arguments compelling at all.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  What is an argument? I'm just curious if you have an argument offhand that, like, a common one that would... I'm confused why there's even an argument against, like, why you should be able to fix something.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  So the arguments typically that I have heard go along the lines, there's two, two separate lines. One of them is like very equivalent to the like butt child pornography line that you always hear whenever they're trying to take away something completely unrelated from you. And that is the butt safety. It's like, we can't allow people to repair things themselves because there are these safety concerns with either repairing them or not, you know, having those go back on the market after someone's repaired them, not knowing whether it was repaired by someone or repaired by, you know, the, an official licensed repair shop for the thing. So safety is often cited as a concern.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  I essentially never have found that as a compelling argument. And the reason for that is because I have had, like, if you've ever brought your car to a dealership officially licensed by the people who make your car, you will know that it is equally likely that you will get people who have absolutely no idea how to service that car as if you took it to a random, you know, shop down the street.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  More likely.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Right?

• 32:04Speaker 03

  I actually like the random shop down the street. Typically, I find that they actually do a really good job.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  And so the, and so the, the argument that somehow that the safety is increased seems to me like a, a, it's a hypothetical. It's them saying, well, maybe this would cause, but my experience in the real world says, well, having things controlled by a central source doesn't seem to increase the safety very much in my experience, right? So I don't find that very compelling.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  The other thing, Ford, is they're saying, well, someone might repair it and then sell it to you like it's the original. And you're like, oh, so commit fraud. We already have the law for that one. That's called fraud. Like, you can't just say, it's an iPhone with 32 gigs of RAM. Well, I switched it out to be four.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  You're like, that's illegal. That's, we already have the law for that, guys. We just say that's called fraud and it's not okay.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Also, mind you, right to repair, as far as I know, does not have any kind of... Provision in it that suggests you can't have such a thing as like a tamper-proof seal, meaning right to repair advocates generally don't try to advocate for preventing like the ability to know that this thing was repaired, right? They just want to be able to repair it. And so a manufacturer could, you know, an argument back to the manufacturer would be like, fine, put a little seal on that thing so everyone can see if this thing has ever been, you know, accessed or changed, go right ahead, right? That is not right to repair because they're saying like, I want you to repair my own hardware. I want to run a shop that repairs hardware for people and we're not trying to lie to

• 33:46Speaker 01

  anybody, right? And so that's one. Another one that I've heard before is like that somehow repairability is just like not possible anyway, right? And this is like the iPhone, like we can't have a replaceable battery because we need the thing to be waterproof or whatever else it is, right? And those arguments don't tend to work very well with right to repair because you're kind of like, well, a lot of times right to repair advocates also aren't advocating that you have to change the way you do your hardware design. They're just saying, to whatever extent this device could be repaired, we should have access to the same materials that you have to repair it or stuff like that, right? The same schematics, there shouldn't be software lockout, those sorts of things.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  So I've never really heard a fairly, like a really coherent argument that I could like buy into about why right to repair is bad. But then again, it's not my domain. Like in fact, I would, we should have Lewis Rossman on this podcast sometime. I would love to have him.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  Open invitation, by the way, if anyone has.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  We've already, I've already emailed him and he already says he would be on to, he'd be down to come join, jump on.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  That'd be great. I love it. I met him down at Futo. I went, I was at a Futo event, I met him, he's a great guy. I would love to have him on the podcast if he's interested. And he could, he could probably say like what some of the other, because he's heard them all.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  The steel manning of the other side.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  He's heard them all. He's heard every, I mean, I'm sure he's heard ones that are so ridiculous that we would laugh at them. And then he's, he's also heard whatever the best ones are, right? And so, you know.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  I would actually, yes, I would actually, I actually am very, very curious, what are the arguments? Because I can't think of one that even makes it like in, in real, like other than the waterproof one, okay, maybe you can, you can sell it to me that you have to do something super magical, but I still can't foresee why that would be the case. Like if you put, if you already did it once, why can't it happen again? Like, well, what kind of magic happens to where it can only, it's a one-time deal?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Well, also, it's not really related. Usually, those things are like, "Okay, then this is a hard device to repair." No one's telling you, "You can't make it a hard device." We're just saying that whatever repairability it could have, you have to let third parties do it, right? And so, you know, that's just sort of a separate issue to me. And like I said, Rossman would be the best person to talk about this because he's heard it all. He's been in the legislative sessions and stuff like that, where he's tried to advocate for bills for right to repair. He's heard everything, and he would be the best person to talk about that. So, yeah, that would be a great... I'd love to have that as a future episode. I think that would be fantastic, if we could.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  We'll set that up.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  So, separate from digital sovereignty, I think there's another... There's sort of the other part of it. I mean, do we want to just talk about, like, computer hardware for gaming versus cloud? I mean, is that... I don't know if that's...

• 36:27Speaker 00

  Yes, I mean, that's...

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Because that's where it... Okay.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  I think that that is a more fun one, because I also have a lot of thoughts on that one as well. And so, it's fun, too. Plus, because it's like, is it actually really possible? Is this technically possible?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  So, I guess, a couple of things about that. The first thing that I would say is, I don't actually know... So, the tweet that you read at the beginning is from Lori Wired, right?

• 36:53Speaker 00

  The one I read at the beginning is John. He said, "Sigh."

• 36:58Speaker 02

  He also said, "Ha ha, no."

• 37:00Speaker 00

  He also said, "Ha ha, no." That also happened, too.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Right, yes. What I was gonna say about that is, I just kind of wanted to draw a little distinction here, because I've definitely had this experience before, which is, there's a difference between when someone makes, like, an offhand tweet about something, and when they, like, actually take a position on something. And I only want to bring that up because, like, I don't actually know which one Lori Wired was doing here. And I don't have a ton of knowledge about, like, her content generally, but I've seen, like, her video on Tail Slayer, and I thought it was, like, very well researched. So, I don't get the...

• 37:47Speaker 03

  She makes awesome videos.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  Yes, she's like one of the best tech YouTubers out there. For sure.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, she's really good.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  So, the only thing I would say is... This was not a video by her where she like spent a ton of time deciding exactly what she thought about it and all that sort of stuff and then like made this very long argument for this is the future for all these reasons or whatever. This is her posting a thing that she was thinking about probably, right? And like that screenshot, I mean, that screenshot's from like 2021 or something like that's a five-year-old screenshot and it's it's a completely data-free screenshot. It's from it's from Nvidia's like marketing stuff. So so like, I just, I just want to say like, I don't really know. I don't know where she would fall down on this issue exactly, like where she would go

• 38:36Speaker 01

  if she actually was like, I'm all in on this and I want to like make the complete thing. This would probably not be the image she would tweet if she were doing that either. So since I'm someone who's definitely posted things before where I just like had an offhand thought about something and then suddenly like everyone is talking about that thing because it happens to hit a nerve or whatever.

• 38:55Speaker 00

  I can think of one.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  I just want to make draw that distinction, right? Like, I just want to draw that distinction. Maybe she's 100% in on cloud gaming or maybe this was just something she randomly like happened to be thinking about for five minutes and it's and you don't know which one of those two things it is, right? That's that's the only thing I wanted to say about that.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  And that she you guys should go watch her videos because they're really cool and very informative and well researched. Everything I've seen has been great from her.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  There you go. So so that said, I do think it's kind of weird. I do think it's kind of weird to to not have more. This is the reason I'm saying all that is because the things that that are being talked about, right? Like the cost benefit analysis and the utilization level and the degree to which networking is able to do low latency in certain places and things like that. All of that was true when say like Lori Wired's own company, which is Google, launched Stadia, right? And it did not work. They they shut it down.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  So what you would expect here if this were a position someone was actually going to take in detail would be an explanation of why all previous cloud gaming things have failed as businesses, right?

• 40:19Speaker 00

  Not all of them.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  But go on.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  Oh, go on. Obviously Netflix has one. GeForce Now is still up and running. It's been running since Stadia. But I think that it is definitely-

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Those are not businesses, correct? Like GeForce Now is not a profit center and neither is Netflix Gaming if I'm not mistaken.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  Netflix Gaming, I am positive that Netflix would not create an entire vertical just to think it's not worth anything. I assume that the goal is that gaming is one of the single most interacted with pieces of content on earth. And being able to capture some value of that will make a direct impact on the bottom line as time goes forward. And so this is a goal of making money. And this is-

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Well, it's a goal of making money. I'm just saying, like, there has never been, to the best of my knowledge, even those ones you listed are not actually successful. Meaning, they do not end up being things where if this was a business, it would be able to sustain itself. They are generally sustained by corporations that don't need those businesses to actually be profitable. But I could be wrong about that.

• 41:30Speaker 00

  I'm sure in the GeForce one, I would assume that's correct based on what GeForce Now is doing. But for the Netflix one, I actually assume the opposite.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  You think that they are making more- that, excuse me, that they are attributing more subscriber revenue and retention to Netflix gaming than it costs them?

• 41:50Speaker 00

  I would assume that as far as like, because they're obviously still in the very, they're in the very baby phases of everything. And so they're in the high research, high amount of employees side of things. So I would assume that that cost is negative. But they have it mapped out and they're like, this is going to be this good. Like, this is a fight worth fighting for. But you also got to remember, like, the fundamental premise is so much different. When you play GeForce Now or you play Stadia, it was like, yo, let's play Apex. It's like, that's crazy to slice out. But what's like the other one, it's like, hey, let's play Tetris. Let's play these party games. Let's play couch games. Like, things that don't require- A world-class GPU to have a good experience. It's like, hey, these are things that you can bring a bunch of people together to have fun without the universe.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  And I think the economics of that is just vastly different than the GeForce Now's, the Stadia's. And so I just wanted to make that quick distinction that I think the economics of it is fundamentally different.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Well, again, so the reason that I asked for this is because I would like to see someone actually lay out the actual case, right? Because as far as I know about Netflix, I thought their uptake on actually streaming games was basically minimal, like hardly anyone was using it. Because remember, Netflix gaming is two things. One is local gaming, where you get on your phone and you actually just play the local version of the game, but you get it for free with your... So that doesn't count.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  So we're talking about just the one where you play on your television using your phone as the controller currently?

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  I don't think people are doing that. I mean, maybe a few people are, but I don't think their uptake has been very good on

• 43:23Speaker 00

  I don't know if there's any public information about the usage numbers or anything. And all of my information is two-plus-years-old right at the very onset of it all, so I would be very... I'm very out of the loop of what is currently happening.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Don't look at me either.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Trash, can you spill on your secret?

• 43:37Speaker 03

  I'm not saying anything.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Why don't you just say the numbers, Trash?

• 43:39Speaker 02

  I am...

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, Trash, why don't you just say something that'll get you in big trouble so this episode can go viral? That'd be sick, bro.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  I am staying out of this conversation.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  And so the only one that I know of that actually has any uptake at all, that's A, still around, and B, nominally has paying customers, depending on how you want to look at it, is GeForce Now. And of course, that's by the company that literally makes the video cards and has to maintain these data centers for other reasons as well, right? So like, I'm totally willing to be presented the case of like, here's why Stadia didn't work, here's why like these other cloud... There is many of them. There's been OnLive, there's been tons of cloud gaming services. None of them could seem to stand up and become profitable on their own on a five-year even horizon. Why? Because none of the same...

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Like, everything was the same. Network latency has not gone down dramatically since 2020, like in any particular sense. The situation with the data centers having a more favorable sort of utilization level...

• 44:49Speaker 01

  That has not changed at all, right? And so you, you know, maybe you're making an argument that like, well, because consumers are going to soon be priced out of the market for hardware, this has to end up succeeding. That's maybe a valid argument, but it's not a real argument from the form, this was actually an efficient thing to do, or that the public wanted it, right? And so I would have expected to see, if someone was taking a serious position in this, more, more information about what actually is going to be different. And I do think like Gamers Nexus kind of had the best follow-up tweet to this one in terms of like, maybe putting their finger a little bit on why the data utilized, why,

• 45:34Speaker 01

  you know, an executive sees data, like, an executive sees like GPU utilization and goes, oh, there's money to be made here because this is an efficiency thing. They all start these services because there's been so many of them throughout time and they don't get uptake. And people don't seem to realize that looking at those efficiency metrics doesn't tell you what the public actually wants in this thing. Correct. Right? And so I think Gamers Nexus had a great response. I mean, I like Gamers Nexus, they're very feisty. And basically, the reply was, I'll read it. It says, "I mean, yeah, that's literally just how businesses work, though. If a taxi company in New York City buys a car, it's probably using it constantly. If you buy a car for normal commuting reasons, it sits for more than half the day.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  The difference is the taxi company isn't actively scheming to figure out how to convert all car drivers into taxi users while depriving them of supply. Although, maybe you could say eventually something else of a company like Uber or Waymore, or Waymore or something would do that. It isn't revolutionary that the goal of a business is to have its expensive equipment constantly generating money. It's not unique to GPUs or data centers. If I buy a paint roller to paint the walls of my house, it's going to sit on a shelf for possibly a decade before I use it again. A painting company will use the paint roller all day. But that doesn't mean we should come up with a new metric like cost per effective gallon hour of paint or whatever. It's not that complex. Businesses try to use their GPUs to generate money. Consumers use their GPUs to play video games, have fun, and escape our fucked reality." And I'm like...

• 47:03Speaker 01

  It's a semi-data-free response to a fairly data-free post, so I'm not suggesting that anyone is winning an argument here on details, but I feel like it kind of nailed the sentiment. It was like, yeah, who cares? Efficiency, or utilization, or cost per hour of utilization, isn't how people are making these buying decisions, right?

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Correct. It's a meaningless metric to an individual.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  It's a meaningless metric to an individual, and while it does tell you something about the amount of extra money that a consumer might have to pay to own a thing versus to rent it from somebody, there are all these, like, there is a priced-in premium that every person kind of instinctively knows that they are willing to spend when they buy something, and the reason they're willing to do that is because of that control and that convenience, and also, that status symbol sometimes. I mean, what is the effective, like, what is the utilization or the effective cost of RGB lighting and a glass all-around case and

• 48:13Speaker 01

  an LCD screen on your CPU that says the temperature? These things are worthless for the actual metrics, right?

• 48:21Speaker 03

  Casey, the GPU runs faster when it looks good. It knows, dude. Casey, haven't you been listening? AI is alive. AI runs on GPUs. If you look good, you feel good, you play good, you play good, okay? That's how it goes, okay?

• 48:37Speaker 00

  I'm fully on TJ's team. You look good, you play good, you feel good. Everybody knows this.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Exactly. Why does someone buy a GTI instead of a Volkswagen Golf, right? Why? There's no reason for it. We look at the actual, like, expense to the person. The car accomplishes exactly the same thing. We all know the speed limit is 60 miles an hour. You can't really go any faster anyway. What, like, say all the stuff you want. So many people buy CTIs, right? Those things look cool. And so I think the thing you have to remember here is like, it's not, that is not the equation. That is not people, it's already a frivolous thing, right? It's already a thing that you're not doing to survive. No one literally needs to play Fortnite to, to exist in the world. So you're already talking about, well, okay, some people do.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Thank you. So you're already talking about something that people, they're doing it because it derives them some sort of pleasure or meaning or something. They're doing it as an optional activity. And so I think all that stuff has to be considered and you can't just look at utilization and say, well, you know, this eventually should cost the least and therefore economics says this is what everyone will do. It's like, I, I.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  We'd all be eating and drinking Soylent for all of our meals if that was the case. Unfortunately, that only happens in San Fran.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  So, so I would say that I'm totally willing to have the argument made to me that somehow that has changed or whatever it is, but I just, I want to see a very coherent argument laid out. Like here's why these other services failed. Here's why it won't fail in the future. Here's what's different about consumer sentiment here, you know, this, this, this, and this, or whatever. I'd just like to see that.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  I, I, I feel like I do can make at least a somewhat of an argument in favor of what Laurie was saying, even not necessarily, I think the efficiency part is a really kind of silly way to approach it because I don't think anybody generally speaking cares about efficiency. They don't think about things of efficiency, even approaching your like your, the stroking of the paintbrush one. The thing is even with paint rollers, like yes, we leave them for 10 years and come back to them, then realize they're broken, have to throw them away and get a new one. So it's like, we actually pay for cost of storage without actually even a second use on them.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  But, but the reality, the, I think the thing that's important is that users will buy what is cheap that gives them the same value. And I think that's the argument she was trying to make.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Which is you theoretically on most games for most people could get a very, you know, good experience. Yes, people that play the competitive side of things or all that, they are, they're going to want their own local versions. They're going to want to pay more because they want to be able to save the few milliseconds. But for me and the boys going on Fortnite and getting just, you know, just absolutely stomped by some 13 year olds, like that's not, we don't need high end hardware to get stomped by 13, like that, nothing's changing. The equation's all the same for us. And so I think there's a large amount of people that. Would fall into this category if it's super convenient to the point where they because they don't have a philosophical argument against not owning something. They don't have a

• 51:42Speaker 00

  they don't care about having the RGB lighting. They just simply want to play the game and they don't they don't care. I don't know what that percentage of people is, but I think that that argument makes a lot of sense and at some point, I would assume that economically that would work out.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I just want to see it. Like, I want to see like, what is the argument for why it didn't already? Because everything else Cloud has, and this one hasn't. So why? Right? Like-

• 52:08Speaker 00

  And that's why the whole Soylent one I wanted to throw on there. Soylent is the reason I don't like those two arguments. Because theoretically, if you're playing Diablo, your experience on Cloud gaming versus not is the same. I know, I know nobody's actually playing Diablo, but I Path of Exile, like, you're generally speaking, is that you're getting the same experience both ways. It's not like you're going, oh, I have to drink Soylent to save money. You're like, oh, no, I get to play the game I want to play. And my reflexes are now 200 plus milliseconds, so I actually can't even tell which way it's actually happening. So therefore, this experience is good enough for me. So it's like, I'm not drinking Soylent. I'm still eating the steak. I just get the steak cheaper, is I think what the argument is. I'm just trying to still end the argument.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, and like I said, I'm not really trying to even refute the argument. I'm not even trying to argue it. I'm trying to say, I'm not really seeing a presentation, like, that's all been true for at least five years, arguably 10? And so where are, why did all these services that tried to happen during that time, why did they fail? Right? And so I just kind of want it like, I don't even necessarily disagree with the arguments on some kind of factual basis. I just, I

• 53:19Speaker 01

  you can, you can't really state a bunch of things that conflict with reality and then go, but, you know, but here they are, right? So like, we know that reality is it didn't work. What's the reasoning? And there may be some very good reasons that like, could be fixed. And then it's like, okay, so this is why it's going to work this time. And I'd be like, okay, yeah, sure, that that sounds good. Or I might be like, I don't really buy that. That that sounds hand wavy, right? And so, so I just want to see the argument. I want to see the actual argument. Like, what is the real argument? Not just like, well, it probably is good enough. And let me add some things to that, though. I think that you might be overstating the case a little bit there in terms of the experience though, Prime, because there's two things

• 53:57Speaker 00

  Okay, hand me.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  That I think are worth noting. One is that I do, at least for me, I don't think my reaction time is particularly good. Like, if I was to play a first-person shooter, I'm not going to win, or anything like that.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't really even play them that often.

• 54:16Speaker 03

  You and me both, Casey.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  Yes, I'm not, I'm not competitive.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  If my monitor's running at 60 Hz versus 30, it feels way better mouse response. If it's running at 120 versus 60, it feels way better mouse response, right? It just feels way better. Like, it moves so much faster to me perceptively when I move the mouse. It's like, oh, wow, like, that feels amazing. And I notice, even though it has nothing to do with my reaction time, which is probably fairly poor at this point, might have always been poor, right? Like, I don't even know that I had good reaction time when I was younger.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  So, there's, I do think that latency, when it gets down low enough, has a certain feel to it that's rather remarkable and that you do absolutely notice.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  I'm curious if you're describing visual, like, the visual feel of frames versus the actual latency that you're seeing. Like, I do think that there's something there, because when you're moving your mouse and it's running at 60, you can see, it does visually look different than if you're running it at 120, but is that a latency problem? Or is that a visual problem and the cues coming to you feel natural? Like, could we simulate dropping two frames in that? And would you go, oh, I can't really tell the difference?

• 55:32Speaker 00

  But it still visually looks so good, right? Like, if you could, if you could somehow just like, you know, you're just buffering those two frames. You put them in a buffer, you put two blank, you know, so everything's just two frames behind or three frames behind. Would you actually feel like...

• 55:43Speaker 01

  So not dropping, just lagging, like, two frames of lag?

• 55:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, intentionally putting everything behind, you know, two frames on 120 Hz. Like, would you, would you actually experience that? Or is the visual smoothness of it the thing that's cueing your brain going, oh, this is so much better? Because I can tell a strong difference between those, but I think it's the visual feel of it, not the actual... Click to latency feel.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Well, it's both, right? And it's not click, it's continuous motion, right? Like, click latency is harder to perceive at a lot of times, largely because... Well, okay, there's a couple of things. So first of all, one reason why some of these arguments can even be made at all today versus, say, in 1985, when they wouldn't have flown at all, is because nowadays, there's so much extra latency stacked on top, that you can sort of say like, "Well, if, you know, if we're only adding an extra 8 milliseconds, or an extra 10 milliseconds, who cares?", right? And previously, when it was like, if you hit the button, it was like, literally a 60th of a second before you saw the result in like, an arcade monitor or something like that.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  Beautiful days.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Then, suddenly, it's like, "Well, wow, that was like, 50% of the, you know, less responsive, all of a sudden", and you really do notice it, right? And so, I'm totally willing to believe that like, "Well, we can get away with adding this extra latency because we've let things get so bad." That, to me, also is not a very good argument, though, because what we should be doing is making those things better. You should be taking the frame delays out of the frickin' TVs, which they have been, you know, ironically, GeForce themselves did that really nice sort of new sync model for, you know, for the strobing. I don't know if you guys saw this, it doesn't matter.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  But, we should be taking it out of like, the sort of... We should be trying to keep the graph card pipeline as short as possible. We should be trying to, you know, get the latency of the USB processing down as low... Like, it should... We should get it to where it like, responds in a few milliseconds, rather than what it's currently doing, right? And inside the game itself, like, animation delay and all this stuff, like, all that stuff's bad, in my opinion, and we should be working on it. So, saying we're gonna take advantage of all of that, and lock that in, is just like, "Yeah, the experience should be like, playing Red Dead Redemption 2, where you push the stick, and like, 7 minutes later, the guy decides to start running." That doesn't... That's not a good outcome. Like, taking advantage of the fact that people are delivering bad experiences now is not a good reason to lock that in. So there's that.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  The other thing that I would say is I would have concerns about video quality. So a lot of people, myself included, already are not pretty, very happy with the video quality that we're getting in games due to like temporal anti-aliasing, or DLSS upscaling, or things like this. And that's like best case. That's like when you are, you know, running the thing locally. So now we're talking about running this thing in the cloud, compressing it with a video codec, right? And then sending it down and decompressing it. So now we're taking another image quality hit, right? Right off the bat. From that, that also doesn't sound great to me. And so there's, I think there's a lot of like, there's a lot of like, taking advantage

• 58:55Speaker 01

  of things already being bad and saying, "Well, rather than talking about the future being, we're gonna make these things better. We're gonna have more powerful hardware that can actually render at 4K. And we're not gonna upscale, we're not gonna do all this temporalize, we're gonna have like, better game experiences." We're like, "No. What we're gonna do is say, 'The current thing is the best we'll ever do,' and then we're gonna degrade that by putting it over a network." That's not the future to me. That sounds like the past. That's like, "What we're going to do is accept failure and double down on the failure," right? And that, to me, also sucks. That's not the future. That's people talking about the past like it's the future, because it's more efficient. And I don't like that. Like, what is the thing? I'll quote Jensen Huang back to himself, right?

• 59:39Speaker 01

  It's like, you, what does he say? Like, "You weren't talking to someone who woke up a loser." "I wasn't born a loser." Like, you remember, do you remember this clip from him, right?

• 59:48Speaker 00

  I don't.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 59:49Speaker 04

  The premise that even if we competed in China, that we're gonna lose that market anyways, you're not talking to somebody who woke up a loser. And that loser attitude, that loser premise, makes no sense to me. We are not, we're not a car. We are not a car. It, the fact that I can buy a car, this car brand one day and use another car brand another day, easy. Computing is not like that. There's a reason why the X86 still exists. There's a reason why ARM is so sticky. These ecosystems, these ecosystems are hard to replace. It costs an enormous amount of time and energy and most people don't want to do it.

• 1:00:31Speaker 04

  And so it's, it's our job to continue to nurture that ecosystem, to keep advancing the technology. So that we could compete in the marketplace. Conceding a marketplace based on the premise you described, I simply can't acknowledge that. It makes no sense. Because I don't think United States is a loser.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  I don't want us to, to feel like we're losers. I don't want to just accept that we're losers. I don't like that as the future shouldn't be about going, we'll, we'll continue to be losers and like it. I don't like that. It sounds, it sounds bad to me. It sounds defeatist. So.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's something Prime said that I didn't like. He was like, well, I'm old and my reaction time is like 200 milliseconds. Well, now it's even twice that because now you have the delay and all this and now it just looks even worse. So that's just not even fun to begin with. I know. It's okay. This is why I'm talking about it now.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Oh, good. Yeah. You can say all the things we didn't like about it.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  But the other argument I think is, I don't even think that people really care.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Just decide not to be a loser anymore.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it. Yeah, baby.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Get, get used to the leather jacket.

• 1:01:31Speaker 03

  It's a good prop show today. It's a very good prop show today.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  Honestly, I don't even think people care about great graphics. If you think about like the games that are popping off right now, like that Mechachameleon game where you just like paint a dude like in a room. Have you guys seen that game where you just literally?

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  I've been told I need to play this.

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  I want to play it so bad.

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  We should play it. Us together.

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude, we should play. But we think about like all these power games, like there's that game Minecraft, literally Minecraft's the ugliest game I've ever seen in my life. Yeah. Slay the Spider, like they're not all like high quality things. Like the thing from like my experience of trying GFM last night. I think they're failing because the user experience is just so dog shit. Like for me to just like even get a game up and running.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  That could be.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  Was just so confusing. Like, I don't, I don't know. Like I couldn't imagine. Any, any like casual person being able to figure it out. It was like to the point where I had to use chat GPT like I said before, right?

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  That.

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was kind of the thing where I feel like it's interesting because along with your point there, Trash, I feel like. The, for people who are really serious about playing games, they're always gonna want the most serious best option they can get. So then those people are gonna want to have it insofar as they're able to afford it, like the best local version of something that they can have with the least latency with the most frame rate and the, you know, best everything local, right? So it's like, okay, so that makes sense. And then like casual people wanna play usually like casual games, like if I imagine like what, I don't know, like just a random person you'd pick off the street would wanna play. But those games don't.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, of course, everyone wants to play the game because it's awesome. Um, but they're, they don't, they don't need to rent hardware because it's like your phone can play the game, bro. Like it's a game that literally you can already play locally. So it's weird because it kind of feels like if I think of who's my target market for the kind of thing that I'm trying to do, it's like this weird in between of like people who wanna play games that they can't. Like you still have to buy a computer to play GeForce now, you know, it's like still have to have a computer, some computer. It is not like.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  And internet, need internet too.

• 1:03:49Speaker 03

  And internet.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  Good internet.

• 1:03:50Speaker 03

  Right. So it's, it's not like you just, you know, magically have a way to play it and they send you a box and then you pay the $10 a month or whatever to them. You still have to have a computer and everything else. And it's like, who is buying the computer but isn't met by their current like thing, right? Either they're a serious gamer, they spend a bunch of money on their setup or they're like casual. And like the only games I play anymore, I literally, the only game I play is Slade is Fire 2. I can't like, I, I don't, I don't, it can run on probably anything. I don't know. It seems like it should be to run on like any computer that I pull out in this room, you know what I mean? So it's like, I don't really, I don't get who it's for

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  in that sense. Like I don't get who they're trying to target and that seems to me to be one of the big failures is like, I'm trying to imagine the ideal person that's gonna do this and I don't get it.

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, imagine your friend coming over and they're like, dude, I'm gonna buy the shittiest PC so I could play on GFN.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  It's like, I don't think that ever existed.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Well, and to that, to that point, Tej, I also think like, if you look at, you know, the types of people who are selling hardware right now, I mean, I think like, Apple Computer, right? Is the primary vendor of a lot of these devices, like an iPhone.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  They are shipping absolutely incredible hardware in those devices. I mean,

• 1:05:15Speaker 03

  Right. Unbelievable.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  I mean, the GPU capabilities of something like an iPhone are just kind of incredible when you think about, you know, this tiny little thing, right? With like, with passive cooling and all this stuff.

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  You charge it in once a day? Unbelievable.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and so like, you know, they, they don't have a lot of incentive to start shipping way worse hardware all of a sudden. Because their whole business model is that the new phone has to be more powerful than the old phone so that she'll buy it, right?

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  And so like, it's like, the kinds of people who are like, "Yeah, I'm casual. Like, I'm just playing, you know, I'm just playing Candy Crush or whatever." It's like, what do they need this service for? They've got their phone, they're done, right? They just, the iPhone will take care of it.

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  They're maxed out.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  I don't see Apple shipping a dog of an A-series chip anytime soon. Like, they seem pretty, pretty on the ball. And like you said, the chips they're already shipping are more than capable of playing casual games. So,

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  It, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of space there. That there's not a big in-between between the, the person who actually does know that 240 Hz is giving them better headshot rates. Uh, and the person who's like, "I don't know, man, I just match three all day." Like, there's not a huge gap there to fill, I don't think.

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm actually, I'm actually curious about the actual, the TAM there, okay? Do they actually have, do they have CMF? Do they have contact market fit?

• 1:06:44Speaker 03

  He puts on the Jensen jacket.

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, he puts on the Jensen jacket and he's locked in. He's already in business maxed.

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  I'm business maxed out of my mind. Where's my shot at?

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  But anyways, that seems to be the thing that I don't, the, the like, actual target market is the thing I don't really get. I do think it is, there's like, a chance, uh, which I think, you know, some of the stuff Ron was alluding to at the beginning, of maybe we're gonna see people who, more people get priced out of the high-end, serious things for gaming due to...

• 1:07:17Speaker 03

  Sammy Altman buying up data centers left and right and so then maybe, you know, maybe we're not able to just people can't build newer computers or whatever, you know what I'm saying? There's literally like we're kind of getting priced out as like, you know, the plebs. So in that sense, like I could see, I could see that happening and then people turning to cloud game, but then it still seems like people would want to switch back to local if the, you know, if the market ever cools down and they say, okay, cool. We put in as many data centers as we have power plants. Like we're going to take a break for a few years. Like while we're waiting for this, uh, and then like I could buy RAM again.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  While we're waiting for fusion to take off?

• 1:08:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Right. They're like, we're gonna let Fable figure out nuclear fusion. Give us a few weeks. The latest models, it's gonna solve it and then we'll have unlimited energy for all of you.

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  Uh, I'm, I'm actually curious because I, I don't know when it happens, but how much more pressure can actually happen on hardware? Like I, I don't know what the numbers are. Like are computers really going to become like good gaming computers can become $10,000? Like is that a, is that an actual future that we're approaching? Because if that's the case, I could see these type of services obviously becoming much, much more popular.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  I think it's a kind of an interesting, it's an interesting question. Because in principle, there's nothing really stopping expansion of supply. Like, like there's nothing in principle stopping it. A, I think the biggest hurdle right now is actually, I, I would almost classify it as a disbelief that this condition will continue anyway. Meaning like TSMC is not going to, you know, massively expand their capacity if they don't believe that this is a sustained desire for silicon, right?

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  If they believe that the build out might be limited because otherwise they burn a crap ton of cap because these standing up new, uh, chip facilities, right? Is incredibly expensive.

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. SK Hynix and Samsung just did a what? $800 billion? Buy like they're gonna do an $800 build in South Korea starting like nowish?

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  I mean, I have not followed the memory side of this, so I'm not sure, but certainly. Right. I mean, it's incredibly expensive, right? And so it's kind of this, it's just a situation where in principle, the supply could be increased quite a bit. In practice, it will be limited to basically forecasts of what is sustainable. Right? And so I don't know, like, I don't know what insiders are really predicting will be done. Memory is obviously the current crunch, but you know, the crunches kind of move around as different things become bottlenecks, right?

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  So, yeah, and I mean, even if they decided to that, hey, we think, well, one, it's really hard to predict what OpenAI is going to be buying in five years from now, which might be how long it takes to build a plant.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Or pretending they're buying.

• 1:10:34Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, yeah, right. Yes. Great point. How much they say they're going to buy, how much they're actually going to buy, predicting both of those things. But also, it's like, I feel like sometimes software developers forget that like, hey, guys, there's like a physical world. They gotta like, build a building to start selling the thing. They don't just like, upload it on a website and put it behind a Stripe link and say like, hey, look, you can start buying more RAM today. Like, they actually have to go build a whole place to build the RAM.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Download moreram.com seems to think differently.

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  Well, I know, I've lost a lot of money on that side. They keep saying it's in the mail. I'm gonna get, it's gonna get here soon.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  Well, we talked about the HBM stuff before, and obviously, like, that is like, all these things create like, a, basically a bubble in the supply chain, right? Because HBM has lower yield for a bunch of reasons. It requires this sort of logic die at the bottom, which now is, comes from TSMC. So now you've got like, this sort of co-packaging thing that has to happen, and all this other nonsense. So, you know, supply chain's working that stuff out, and also needing to sort of have a model for like, How much capacity they will need and when and how, for how long that capacity, you know, like, RAM has to occur and all this stuff. Yeah, it's just like, we don't really know. But it's entirely possible that five years from now, you know, we'll be sitting here going like, "Oh, RAM's cheap again."

• 1:12:01Speaker 00

  Have you, guys, have you considered the fact that you're completely discounting that crypto is gonna come and even eat more RAM and computing here soon?

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Why would crypto eat RAM?

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  Does crypto still work?

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  Uh, because, I don't know, crypto's crazy, right? I don't know what's going on. I don't know what the hell's going on in the world. I just know that they're gonna be like, "We need to run computers on an append-only database." And so like, they're gonna need stuff. They're gonna need a lot of RAM out there, right?

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  How much is Bitcoin now?

• 1:12:26Speaker 03

  Prime, I thought for sure you were gonna say, "Have we considered the distinct lack and like, supply tightening on RGB markets? And maybe that's why we're not getting cheaper computers." It's that we can't get the fast enough RAM because it doesn't have the RGB, and we're just waiting for them to manufacture enough of them. That's kind of where I was thinking, like, we were getting blocked on.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  True. It's like, look, look, we could build a lot of very low-cost gaming computers right now if we just could eliminate the problems with cryo-sheet supply. Cryo-sheets and liquid metal, like, we can't get enough of it.

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  We're so close, but it's crazy.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  That's the only problem. Yeah.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  That's like the meme of like, "Could someone who knows economics help me with my budget? $2,000 for mortgage, $1,000 for food, $800 on activities, $12,000 for RGB."

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  Like, what went wrong?

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Anyway.

• 1:13:31Speaker 00

  Trash literally has that as a budget with Pokemon.

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  Actually, true. Actually.

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  I don't have no budget.

• 1:13:39Speaker 03

  That's actually the issue, yeah.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  I think like, um... Wrapping all of that, like the digital sovereignty thing, I think is the more important thing. It's what we talked about less, but I think that's the most important aspect of all of this that hopefully people will think about more as part of this, certainly. But just to wrap this part up, I would just say in closing, yeah, like I'm totally willing to believe that somehow there's an argument for how this is actually going to work, quote unquote, this time. But that argument needs to include, for me, explanations of why it failed all the other times. And, and you know, and maybe one of those explanations is to Trash's point, that the things always just sucked. Like, maybe Google Stadia just really sucked to use. I don't know.

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I didn't use it.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  So, yeah, us and everyone else.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  Turns out I'm not allowed in this category.

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  That was actually the key problem.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  So, you know, I just, I feel like that should be forthcoming. So like, like, I'd like to see anyone who wants to take an actual, you know, stance on this will, this is the future. Like, this is coming in five years, we're all gonna be gaming on the cloud. I just wanna see the explanation for why we weren't, why we're not already gaming on the cloud. Like, what, what was the problem with all of these previous attempts that prevented them from being successful? Because no one shuts down a business that's running great, right? They shut down businesses where they look and they go like, how much did you lose last quarter? Why are we still funding your, you know, eventual profitability in this division? Go away, right? So I just wanna kinda see that explanation so that I can understand it, right? So I can understand where they're coming from. And it can't just

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  be the GPU utilization numbers say this will be more cost effective. It's like, that's been true for a while.

• 1:15:25Speaker 00

  All right. Well,

• 1:15:26Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 1:15:27Speaker 00

  Looks like we're at this time of the year where we go, hey, thank you, everybody, for watching the stand-up. Trash, I want some last thoughts here.

• 1:15:37Speaker 00

  Or any thoughts from you?

• 1:15:38Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk about Netflix real quick and I'm gonna start off with opinions are my own. But I do think-

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  Smart, thank you Trash, that's good.

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  I do have some faith in Netflix gaming specifically because the users are there already versus like GFN or whatever you kinda have to onboard. So I do believe if Netflix can somehow make that onboarding experience to actual gaming good since we have already, or since they already have so many users already. I think that could be a big win. I think obviously the hard problem is making a good game in addition to making the cloud gaming aspect work. Uh, so if I had my horse on any, or if I was betting on any of those horses, I'd bet on them. Not just because I work there, but just because I just think the user base is there already. Are they gamers? I don't know. So that's the other aspect of it as well. But I also just don't think there's enough people in this world that wanna play games so bad

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  that they feel like they need to rent hardware. I just don't think that target market, that, that market is huge. I don't know. But, just like, does anyone have thoughts on that? Like, does anyone know anyone where they're like, man, I wish my machine was so, so much better. I guess I'll go play in the cloud because the graphics just look so much cooler or something.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  No, I don't know anyone.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  I don't know. And like, I know a lot of gamers. I know a lot of gamers.

• 1:16:55Speaker 00

  I think there exist an entire, you know, there exist entire countries where saying, "I'm gonna go drop $5,000 on a gaming rig" is very not practical and not feasible. Whereas saying, "I could go rent, you know, I could go have this experience for $20 a month on my lower end laptop" is much more approachable. But I do think that that like, that whole world of like, "Hey, I wish I could play games, but I don't have the money to be able to buy the things that I need." I think that that is real.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I also think the internet aspect eliminates a lot of these users too. You need good internet too to like, stream it back.

• 1:17:26Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  Alright?

• 1:17:27Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  Well, wait, but Prime, like, I have a question about that, though.

• 1:17:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  Like-

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  If, so nowadays, I would argue that if you're just trying to have a gaming PC, you can use it for probably five years.

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, because people still, like 2070 Supers are still like part of the specifications a lot, so.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  And five years times, I think you use the $20 a month, right? That's 1,200 bucks. That's actually not an insignificant amount of money that supposedly these people who don't have any money to consider buying a low-end gaming PC would use, right? Like it's, and I, so I mean, to Trash's point, I think like, this cost is not insignificant. If you, if that cost were $3 a month, sure, right? Or to Trash's previous point, if you're already paying for another subscription and you just get this for free, sure, right? If it's part of a value add, maybe Netflix does it, maybe Amazon does it.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  That seems a little more plausible, right?

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  Maybe Disney could do it as another example, right? But it just doesn't quite add up to me that it's like, well, this is gonna be a separate thing. Someone's gonna do it, we're gonna maintain these data centers for it or something like, and we're gonna be charging, you know, $20 a month for it or whatever that cost is. Like, I don't know, man. It's really, the numbers don't look great to me, but maybe I'm wrong about that.

• 1:19:04Speaker 00

  Alright, I could, I mean, I don't have a strong actual opinion on this.

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, me neither.

• 1:19:08Speaker 00

  I just assume these, I assume these economies do exist where people wish they had X, but they don't. I mean, you see this with cars, like people buy really expensive cars they can't afford, but they can get really ridiculous and stupid loans, and people get stupid loans to go do that because they can enjoy the car itself. So I assume this world does exist somewhere where there's people that can't afford the whole thing, but they would be willing to pay some sort of amount of money to experience high enough end, where that'd be out of reach or not so tenable.

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  I mean, just look at it this way.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  I, you know, I hate to keep dragging it out, but I hadn't thought about this point earlier. You could actually say the same thing about phones and, and actually it's pretty interesting what ended up happening there. So a lot of people don't have $1,200 to buy an iPhone, high end either. But what did they do? Well, they basically turned it into a monthly payment that you do. And you still get the phone. You get it from the provider and you pay them the monthly fee, right? That's an exactly another way that this same sort of thing could work without needing any kind of cloud gaming, right? It's like, hey, someone comes to you and says, hey, for $20 a month, you can have this cloud gaming service. It's like, if I paid my phone provider an extra $20 a month, I'd get this much higher end iPhone and I just play the games locally.

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  And like, right? It's like, so that, that money is actually fungible in an, in a like, sort of in terms of where you're putting it per month as well. So you can't just say, well, they're going to pay this, this magic money is going to come out of pocket. And just because it's only $20 a month, they'll just pay it. It's like, well, they have other options for that $20 a month. And some of them are involved getting better hardware, right? And maybe they'll just do that.

• 1:20:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  I don't know. Just, just throwing that out there too.

• 1:20:45Speaker 03

  The flip side of that too is like, at a lot of the prices, it seems like people are offering, I, I don't know for sure. I haven't dug it into the thing. But it seems like relatively low margin off of the hardware that they're getting from these, like at the data center. Like for doing $20 a month, it's not like, oh, we're going to super quickly pay back.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:09Speaker 03

  The GPUs that we bought, you know, this, that doesn't, that doesn't, even if you have multiple people using them, blah, blah, et cetera. So it's like,

• 1:21:17Speaker 03

  so then wouldn't you just start a business with better margins? You would try and do a business that like could make more money, which would be like selling to OpenAI or do you know, you know what I mean? Like it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. As opposed to like cars where like the car doesn't have like its values that it gets you from point A to point B, or that it's really cool and sometimes a combination of both, right? But you can't like, they're not gonna make a bunch of money off of the expensive car for it sitting in the lot as compared to like a GPU at a data center where they're like, "Oh, well, we could keep on making like really crappy money with this off of like low rent gaming subscription things, or we could just like put it on AWS and charge businesses

• 1:22:02Speaker 03

  money to run this and like they pay more money because it's an enterprise thing." You know what I'm saying? Like, that part of it doesn't really add up for me either where you're like, you could be making money even off of it, but like that doesn't mean that it's an efficient use of like the business resources either.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. I would also add that if you look at people who've done this before, oftentimes it didn't look like sort of what's being described. So, previous attempts like Google Stadia, they were not buying the highest end Nvidia GPUs and doing a build out of that for the data center, right? What they were doing is using effectively like what would be console hardware. They were using integrated AMD like, you know, single chip PCs if I recall. And so like again, I'd want to hear the explanation for like, why did they go that route? Because that's like, they're not even offering the premium experience. They're offering a mid-tier experience, right? So if the argument was like, "No, it's so much more efficient and

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  you can buy these high-end GPUs and they'll be, you know, like, well, they didn't do that, so they must have thought that this was the, that they needed to have it be fairly mid in order for this to make business sense." Why was that, right? And so, I don't know. Maybe the argument is like, "Well, because AI now you can rent the spare time," but you can't because AI is very specialized infrastructure. So, I don't know. I don't get it. Again, I don't want to try to make too strong a case against it. I'm just trying to bring up all these things. I'm like, I want to see the presentation where someone lays out a convincing argument that assuages all of these, you know, things that seem to come to mind. If you don't study this for a living, which I don't, show me, you know, show me the work and then I'll, maybe, maybe I'd believe it more, you know?

• 1:23:39Speaker 00

  All right. Well, we're gonna have to end it here. We're way over time, everybody. This is a, this was a yapping episode. TJ, based on the comments, people did not hear you enough. So TJ, I know it's really late.

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  Me?

• 1:23:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really late. If you'd like to make the paint joke now, you can make the joke or we could end the episode.

• 1:23:58Speaker 03

  Well, I just was pretty happy that I happen to have some

• 1:24:00Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:24:00Speaker 03

  paint, like, ready to go, sitting here, not currently being effectively used, but I'm thinking about painting this side wall.

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  I have some carpet in a roll over there. That also needs to be used.

• 1:24:15Speaker 03

  Thinking about painting this wall so I can have this camera turned a little bit more, like this.

• 1:24:20Speaker 00

  I see.

• 1:24:20Speaker 03

  Uh, but fortunately, I saved this, so it was getting zero gallons per hour of use for five years. And guess what, guys? It might come back in handy. So, take that. Actually, my wife likes it when I keep stuff stored there so that we don't throw it away. So she's happy with me. I was gonna say, "Take that, Kayleen", but she actually likes it when I don't throw stuff away, so that wouldn't have worked.

• 1:24:47Speaker 00

  Bad argument.

• 1:24:49Speaker 03

  How many dollars a month would I pay to have paint on demand instead of storing my own paint at home?

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  Uh, well, it's P-A-A-S. Paint as a service, I believe.

• 1:25:01Speaker 03

  Paint as a service.

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what they're trying to do for printers. Okay, sorry, I'm, I'm, we gotta go. We gotta go.

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, bye-bye. Bye, everybody.

• 1:25:09Speaker 03

  Bye, everyone!

• 1:25:10Speaker 00

  GG.

• 1:25:12Speaker 03

  Go check out Lori Wired, she's awesome, though.

• 1:25:14Speaker 05

  Boot up the day. Vibe caught errors on my screen. Terminal coffee. In here. Living the dream.