00:00SPEAKER- It's time for the quarterly dusting.
00:02SPEAKER- Wait, you only dust every quarter?
00:04SPEAKERI've certainly never drugged my computer
00:06SPEAKERinto the PC World office to shoot a video
00:09SPEAKERand then put it up on the table and Adam went,
00:12SPEAKER"What the hell is wrong with your computer?"
00:15SPEAKER- And then suddenly you were shooting
00:16SPEAKERa very different kind of video.
00:18SPEAKER- Look, I was having some crashing problems.
00:20SPEAKERIt wasn't the dust's fault,
00:21SPEAKERbut I figured I should leave it there just in case.
00:24SPEAKERBut I have to dust way more than once.
00:26SPEAKERBefore I moved to California,
00:27SPEAKERI'd never lived someplace with hardwood
00:29SPEAKERand I'd never lived someplace
00:31SPEAKERthat doesn't have central air,
00:35SPEAKERthat has some sort of centralized filter
00:36SPEAKERthat sucks a bunch of dust and particulate out of your air.
00:39SPEAKER- Oh, that's why it's so damn dusty around here.
00:41SPEAKER- Yeah, well, plus we live places where there's a lot of cars
00:43SPEAKERso urban places are dustier 'cause of all the car sweat,
00:46SPEAKERwhich is, I'm sure, great for us too.
00:48SPEAKER- And we live close to the water.
00:50SPEAKERI don't know if that air circulation
00:51SPEAKERwould make it more or less dusty.
00:52SPEAKER- Well, the fog, it turns out, picks up a lot of particulate
00:55SPEAKERand then when the fog lands on things and condenses it,
00:57SPEAKERyeah, that's mostly outside though.
00:59SPEAKER- That's an ugly word, particulate.
01:01SPEAKER- Particulate's bad, it turns out, usually.
01:03SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, I don't like it.
01:04SPEAKERAlso, it really says everything
01:06SPEAKERabout why you and I do this podcast,
01:08SPEAKERthat when I talked about dusting quarterly,
01:10SPEAKERyou went straight to computers, you didn't even--
01:12SPEAKER- Oh, I knew it, look.
01:13SPEAKER- Didn't even pause to consider
01:15SPEAKERI was talking about household work.
01:17SPEAKER- I've lived here for long enough to know,
01:18SPEAKERand I know you well enough to know
01:19SPEAKERthat there's no way you only dust your apartment
01:22SPEAKERonce a quarter.
01:23SPEAKER- No, I cannot stand it.
01:23SPEAKERIdeally, once a week.
01:25SPEAKER- Yeah, it is, one of the great things about having kids
01:28SPEAKERis that now that's the kid's job.
01:30SPEAKERShe has to go around and dust stuff.
01:31SPEAKERSo that means all, well, okay,
01:34SPEAKERso the thing that became clear with this new regime
01:37SPEAKERis that we're three different heights, right?
01:39SPEAKERLike, I'm tall, my wife's the mid-size,
01:41SPEAKERand my daughter's the short one,
01:43SPEAKERand all anybody ever dusts is stuff
01:45SPEAKERat their eye level and below.
01:49SPEAKER- Sure, the internationally recognized standard for dusting.
01:52SPEAKER- Yeah, so like, when you look at the top shelf
01:54SPEAKERin our dining, you know, we have the shelves up
01:55SPEAKERagainst the dining room wall,
01:56SPEAKERthere's like some stuff up at the top.
01:58SPEAKERIt's not good up there.
02:00SPEAKERIt's, that's a, I have to get up there on the step ladder
02:02SPEAKERand get in that.
02:03SPEAKER- I get it, you know, even I have a bit of an out of sight,
02:06SPEAKERout of mind rule about dusting.
02:08SPEAKERThe top of the microwave, which is on like a shelving unit,
02:10SPEAKERdoesn't get dusted very often, let's say.
02:13SPEAKER- Our microwave is above the stove.
02:15SPEAKERIt's one of those ones that hangs up on the wall
02:17SPEAKERabove the stove, and it is a real double whammy of horrors
02:22SPEAKER'cause it gets like grease splatter from the stove,
02:25SPEAKERfrom the range top, like the smoky grease that just sticks
02:29SPEAKERand gets on cabinets and stuff.
02:31SPEAKER- Sticky, greasy dust, just ugh.
02:33SPEAKER- Yeah, then the dust gets in there
02:34SPEAKERand it's like a horrible amalgam of, of, anyway.
02:38SPEAKERSo as the person who invented, I believe,
02:41SPEAKERthe hey, if you take a Swiffer and tape it over the fan
02:44SPEAKERand takes on your computer, the inside of your case
02:46SPEAKERwill be a lot less dusty, maybe 20 years ago now.
02:50SPEAKER- Wait.
02:50SPEAKER- Yes?
02:51SPEAKER- Did you actually propagate that idea at a time
02:53SPEAKERwhen nobody else was saying that?
02:54SPEAKER- I put that in a magazine and it became very popular.
02:57SPEAKER- Wait, really?
02:58SPEAKER- Yeah.
02:58SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
02:59SPEAKER- Swiffers came out, they just introduced Swiffers,
03:01SPEAKERI was like, oh shit, yeah.
03:03SPEAKER'Cause I had been using dryer filters before that,
03:05SPEAKERbut they're not as good.
03:07SPEAKERThe Swiffer is incredible for pulling dust out of the air.
03:10SPEAKERThe modern cases have fans and filters and the whole thing,
03:12SPEAKERand so that's less of an issue.
03:14SPEAKERBut back then--
03:15SPEAKER- This was pre, built-in filter on your fan intake?
03:18SPEAKER- This would have been in an early 2000s maximum PC,
03:21SPEAKERmaybe even a late '90s one when I was still a freelancer.
03:23SPEAKERI put it in the doctor column, if I recall.
03:25SPEAKERI haven't done the science.
03:26SPEAKERI don't know that that was the first recommendation for that,
03:28SPEAKERbut it was the first time I had ever heard of it.
03:31SPEAKERAnd I came up with it and people at the office were like,
03:33SPEAKERwhat are you doing?
03:34SPEAKERAnd I said, well, I put it there,
03:35SPEAKERand then the dust doesn't go in the computer,
03:36SPEAKERand they're like, wait, what?
03:38SPEAKER- You know, even with modern filters,
03:39SPEAKERstill a little bit of dust in there.
03:40SPEAKER- Use a little bit better Swiffer.
03:42SPEAKERSo how's your dusting going, is I guess the question?
03:45SPEAKER- It's been, I would say the NAS
03:46SPEAKERhas been running continuously since September.
03:49SPEAKER- Yeah.
03:50SPEAKER- Without being touched.
03:51SPEAKER- I bet that's pretty NAS-y.
03:52SPEAKER- Probably, probably.
03:54SPEAKER- Did you dust it?
03:55SPEAKER- Well, I'm gonna pull it out.
03:56SPEAKEROh, dude, getting that thing out is a production.
04:00SPEAKER- Oh, is it wedged in the corner
04:01SPEAKERbetween your desk and the shelves or something?
04:03SPEAKER- It is wedged as tightly into a tiny space
04:06SPEAKERthat is exactly the size of that full ATX case
04:08SPEAKERas humanly possible.
04:09SPEAKERAnd I have to move this full upright keyboard
04:11SPEAKERout of the way, I have to move furniture to get the NAS out.
04:15SPEAKER- Once upon a time, I had a computer,
04:18SPEAKERthere was a period of time when people were making,
04:20SPEAKERI think Zalman maybe, made a case
04:22SPEAKERthat had like two cases in one big square.
04:26SPEAKERAnd you could put like one computer on one side,
04:27SPEAKERone computer on the other.
04:28SPEAKERI was like, I'm gonna put my server in one side
04:31SPEAKERand put my desktop in the other,
04:32SPEAKERand then it's just one big case.
04:34SPEAKERAnd I had that for about 45 minutes.
04:37SPEAKER'Cause like once I built everything up in there
04:39SPEAKERand I put it back in the corner and I was like,
04:41SPEAKERoh crap, I didn't get a cable in.
04:43SPEAKERI had to take it all the way back out.
04:44SPEAKERAnd it weighed about 80 pounds.
04:46SPEAKER- Oh, it's a nightmare, don't get me wrong.
04:48SPEAKER- Yeah, no, I took it back to the office
04:51SPEAKERand went back to my old cases
04:52SPEAKERas soon as I pulled it out from back in the wall.
04:55SPEAKERFeel your pain.
04:56SPEAKER- It's always the trade-off, hiding things,
04:58SPEAKERmaking them tidy versus maintenance.
05:00SPEAKERIt's like the more tidy it is, the harder to maintain.
05:03SPEAKER- So I'll say I bought that plug-in canned air thing,
05:06SPEAKERlike the plug-in blower,
05:08SPEAKERand it's been maybe the best thing I've ever bought.
05:10SPEAKER- Oh, that's great.
05:11SPEAKER- 'Cause when I go out,
05:12SPEAKERwhen like my vacuum filter is clogged up and crappy,
05:16SPEAKERI just go out in the backyard,
05:17SPEAKERput on a breath mask and let it rip.
05:19SPEAKERJust blow that thing out.
05:20SPEAKER- Those things are so boringly great
05:23SPEAKERthat like it's made discussing the actual dusting
05:25SPEAKERvery mundane because what is there to say?
05:26SPEAKERI take the cases out on the back porch now
05:28SPEAKERand blow them out for 10 minutes
05:29SPEAKERand that's all there is to discuss.
05:32SPEAKER- Mine has a light on the front, which I quite like.
05:34SPEAKERThat was a good, that was, I didn't mean to buy that,
05:36SPEAKERbut I'm glad I did.
05:38SPEAKERI also have to say we got a new vacuum cleaner this year
05:42SPEAKER'cause our old vacuum cleaner, the battery was dead in.
05:45SPEAKERIt also has a light, speaking of dust,
05:48SPEAKERand when you're vacuuming the hardwood floors
05:51SPEAKERand there's the low level light shining,
05:53SPEAKERyou can see everything.
05:54SPEAKER- Oh no.
05:55SPEAKER- It makes it, it's really good.
05:57SPEAKER- There's about a 10 minute window every day,
05:59SPEAKERlate in the day when the sunlight hits just the right angle,
06:01SPEAKERthen you can see all of the hair and dust
06:03SPEAKERand crud on the hardwood.
06:05SPEAKERAnd it's like better off not knowing.
06:08SPEAKER- Well, look, I like to use the light
06:10SPEAKERso that the dust sees what's coming before I destroy it.
06:13SPEAKERYou know, it gets sucked up in there
06:14SPEAKERand then, well, you know, it's gone.
06:17SPEAKERAnyway.
06:18SPEAKER- It's the promise of modern technology,
06:19SPEAKERstrike fear in the heart of dust.
06:21SPEAKER- I was gonna say, my vacuum is a transformer.
06:26SPEAKER- Okay.
06:27SPEAKER- It's a three-way Miele
06:28SPEAKERand it can be like a handheld dust buster dealy.
06:32SPEAKERLike that's pretty standard
06:33SPEAKERif you're used to your Dyson stick facts or whatever.
06:35SPEAKERBut you also can jam the heavy part down into the beater
06:39SPEAKERand it'll sit up vertically and just stand.
06:41SPEAKERIt doesn't have to be hung from the wall or anything.
06:43SPEAKEROr you can put the heavy part on the end
06:46SPEAKERand have it be like a normal stick back.
06:48SPEAKER- So it's a triple changer is what you're saying?
06:49SPEAKER- Yeah, look, it's like a third gen transformer.
06:53SPEAKERIt's like, it's not like you can buy four others
06:55SPEAKERand make a super duper big vacuum,
06:57SPEAKERbut you can transform it three ways.
07:02SPEAKER- Now I'm picturing the devastator of vacuum cleaners
07:05SPEAKERand we should probably just start this podcast.
07:07SPEAKER(upbeat music)
07:13SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)
07:35SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
07:37SPEAKERI'm Will.
07:38SPEAKER- I'm Brad.
07:39SPEAKERI am not going to be able to like go
07:40SPEAKERof the image of a gestalt vacuum cleaner contraption.
07:43SPEAKERI want nothing more.
07:45SPEAKER- Yeah, very long time.
07:46SPEAKERIn fact, could we just do that
07:47SPEAKERwith all household electronics?
07:48SPEAKERCould we just make, buy five of them
07:51SPEAKERand plug them in the right way
07:52SPEAKERand they become a giant robot?
07:53SPEAKER- How, how, like what's,
07:56SPEAKERthere's so many ways that could go bad though.
07:58SPEAKERI want the Predacon, like the Constructicon,
08:01SPEAKERthe Devastator was pretty good,
08:02SPEAKERbut the Predacon, that was big and orange.
08:05SPEAKERIt was, it was a chonky boy.
08:07SPEAKER- Was that the Predacon?
08:09SPEAKER- I think they were like, no, no, those were insecticons.
08:12SPEAKERThe Predacons were like,
08:14SPEAKERit was like a rhinoceros and a panther, I think.
08:16SPEAKER- Sure.
08:17SPEAKER- I can't remember the other ones, maybe an elephant.
08:19SPEAKER- I believe that.
08:20SPEAKER- Several animals that I did not think of as murderous
08:22SPEAKERand then a couple of giant cats,
08:24SPEAKERwhich clearly were murderous.
08:25SPEAKER- Ah, you know, anything can be murderous
08:27SPEAKERif you're enough of an evil robot.
08:29SPEAKER- The Insecticons were solid though.
08:31SPEAKERWhat are we talking about this week, Brad?
08:32SPEAKERWhat do we got on the, on the podcast?
08:34SPEAKER- On the docket this week, a twofer.
08:37SPEAKER- Oh, I love a twofer.
08:38SPEAKER- I think is how you would put it.
08:39SPEAKER- I do like a twofer.
08:41SPEAKER- We've been, we've been, you know, ongoing brainstorming
08:44SPEAKERaround show topics, show formats, stuff like that.
08:48SPEAKERAs we said before, we like the topic episodes.
08:51SPEAKER- Yeah.
08:51SPEAKER- But there are a lot of topics that we'll kick around.
08:53SPEAKERIn fact, I kind of wish we had a list
08:55SPEAKERof every time we've done this over the last four,
08:58SPEAKERoh my God, almost five years.
08:59SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a lot that we get to and we're like,
09:02SPEAKERoh, this isn't, we can't do a full 45 minutes
09:04SPEAKERor an hour on this.
09:05SPEAKER- Yeah, but a number of times we've kind of had a topic
09:07SPEAKERthat's like, man, that would be a good 15, 20,
09:09SPEAKER30 minutes maybe, but that's not gonna support
09:11SPEAKERa whole episode.
09:12SPEAKER- Yeah.
09:13SPEAKER- A lot of those.
09:14SPEAKER- Yeah.
09:15SPEAKER- Anyway.
09:16SPEAKER- So we have two today.
09:16SPEAKER- Yeah, I think we might start doing a little bit more
09:18SPEAKERof this kind of like split episode,
09:19SPEAKERlike two topics of that nature that can be discussed
09:23SPEAKERpretty thoroughly in like 20 minutes.
09:24SPEAKER- So this week, this week I've been making a new benchmark,
09:30SPEAKERworking on a project for PC World.
09:31SPEAKERAnd one of the things that we're working on
09:34SPEAKERis performance for game developers.
09:38SPEAKERSo things that you use a computer for
09:41SPEAKERthat take a lot of time.
09:42SPEAKERAs I was working on this, it made me realize
09:44SPEAKERthat building benchmarks, you know, in the past
09:47SPEAKERwhen I built a benchmark, it's usually taken something
09:49SPEAKERthat's found, like a video game, and then figuring out
09:52SPEAKERhow to make a repeatable benchmark out of that.
09:54SPEAKERIn this case, I'm actually setting up the environment
09:58SPEAKERand stuff like that that I wanna test.
09:59SPEAKERAnd it made me realize it's kind of an inherently
10:01SPEAKERpolitical experience, and we'll talk about it.
10:03SPEAKER- Interesting, it's not the term I was expecting to hear,
10:06SPEAKERbut I'm curious to hear more.
10:08SPEAKERAnd then we're going to do a kind of an, I guess,
10:11SPEAKERan update on matter and thread, the nascent kind of
10:16SPEAKERuniversal home automation standard.
10:18SPEAKER- Long time listeners should get out there,
10:20SPEAKERprint out of the Garnet trough of despair.
10:27SPEAKERWhat is it?
10:28SPEAKER- Yes.
10:29SPEAKER- I can't remember what that's called now.
10:30SPEAKERI can't believe I'm blanking.
10:31SPEAKER- Trough of despair, I believe is the name.
10:33SPEAKER- Well, the trough of despair is where we're at,
10:34SPEAKERbut they call it the product hype cycle.
10:36SPEAKER- Oh, the Gartner?
10:38SPEAKER- Gartner product hype cycle, yes.
10:40SPEAKER- Yes, that one.
10:40SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm going to point at the trough of despair
10:43SPEAKERas we talk about this, but it's going to be okay.
10:45SPEAKERDon't worry.
10:46SPEAKER- Yeah, you know, we talked about home automation
10:48SPEAKERoff and on on this podcast.
10:50SPEAKERAnd I think it was the FOSS pod with Paulus
10:52SPEAKERfrom Home Assistant where we really kind of went
10:54SPEAKERsomewhat in depth on thread and matter,
10:56SPEAKERwhich was supposed to like unify all of the warring kingdoms
10:59SPEAKERof different home automation standards.
11:01SPEAKER- I mean, I would say that there's probably an XKCD
11:03SPEAKERfor this particular example.
11:05SPEAKER- That will be referenced later, yes.
11:08SPEAKERBut I've been thinking about home automation stuff again
11:10SPEAKERas like some of my wifi and smart plugs are not the best.
11:15SPEAKERAnd I've kind of always felt a little irresponsible
11:17SPEAKERabout not putting all of those on a VLAN anyway.
11:19SPEAKERAnd I've been thinking like,
11:20SPEAKERwhat if I had just got out of the wifi automation game
11:24SPEAKERand looked at thread and matter,
11:25SPEAKERor maybe Zigbee and Z-Wave, the older standard, anyway.
11:28SPEAKERAnyway, I've done a little reading
11:31SPEAKERon how thread and matter have shaped up
11:33SPEAKERor rather have not shaped up.
11:34SPEAKER- You sweet summer child.
11:36SPEAKERYeah, so anyway, let's get into it.
11:38SPEAKERDo you want to talk about benchmarking first
11:39SPEAKERand then get to home, okay.
11:41SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause that sounds super interesting to me
11:42SPEAKERbecause like how many, I mean,
11:44SPEAKERit's such an underserved market and like how many,
11:46SPEAKERhow many benchmarks are being done
11:47SPEAKERfor game development practices out there?
11:49SPEAKEREverything, like you said,
11:50SPEAKEReverything is Cinebench or like video games.
11:52SPEAKER- Well, yeah, I mean, so Puget does,
11:54SPEAKERa Puget bench has a bunch of like workflow tasks
11:57SPEAKERthat are common for workstation users, it's really good.
12:00SPEAKERBut not a whole lot of like Unreal compiles,
12:03SPEAKERpartly because in order to get a realistic benchmark,
12:05SPEAKERyou need something that's probably a proprietary asset.
12:08SPEAKERAnd honestly, getting Unreal up and working
12:11SPEAKERin a way that it will build a level
12:14SPEAKERis fairly time consuming.
12:16SPEAKERSo I looked at UE 5.3 and said,
12:20SPEAKERhey, if we just take one of the default games
12:24SPEAKERthat they ship and then jam some landscape and geo in there,
12:28SPEAKERthat's stuff that we buy assets from the store,
12:31SPEAKERthen we can make something that is representative,
12:35SPEAKERbut doesn't take 14 hours.
12:38SPEAKERSo I've been working on this.
12:39SPEAKERIt's one of the things I've been working on
12:40SPEAKERwhen we're not doing on camera stuff at PC World
12:41SPEAKERover the last few weeks.
12:43SPEAKERAnd I shipped the first version of it
12:45SPEAKERto some testers this week, but as I was doing the final,
12:50SPEAKERso just to understand what we're talking about,
12:53SPEAKERwhen you ship a level in Unreal, at least,
12:56SPEAKERdepending on what lighting choices and stuff you use,
12:58SPEAKERthere's a whole series of things that have to be built,
13:00SPEAKERlike the nav mesh has to be built,
13:02SPEAKERand there's a bunch of computational stuff
13:04SPEAKERthat has to happen, and the lighting bakes have to happen
13:06SPEAKERif you're using pre-computed lighting,
13:08SPEAKERand your LODs for the foliage have to be baked in,
13:12SPEAKERand LODs for everything have to be baked in.
13:16SPEAKERAnd you can basically hit a button in Unreal
13:18SPEAKERafter you've opened up that level
13:20SPEAKERthat says build all levels, and then start a stopwatch,
13:23SPEAKERand time how long that takes to run.
13:26SPEAKERAnd if you're on a production game,
13:27SPEAKERlike on the game that I worked on, "The Anacrusis,"
13:30SPEAKERit's an indie game made by like 20 people at most.
13:34SPEAKERSo it was, for a GPU light bake on that,
13:37SPEAKERit was like 20 to 40 minutes, depending on the level.
13:40SPEAKERIf we're doing the same thing on the CPU light bake,
13:42SPEAKERit'd take a few hours, probably, for each level.
13:44SPEAKER- Yikes.
13:45SPEAKEROn what kind of CPU are we talking?
13:48SPEAKER- Anything for 13900K.
13:51SPEAKER- Oh, even a very good one?
13:53SPEAKER- Even a very good one.
13:54SPEAKER- I'm gonna, I apologize, I'll probably do this repeatedly.
13:57SPEAKERI'm gonna just ask you to define a couple of things
13:59SPEAKERas we go, or elaborate on things.
14:01SPEAKERWhat does the nav mesh use for me?
14:03SPEAKERIs that a navigation mesh?
14:04SPEAKERIs that for like path, pathing for AI?
14:06SPEAKER- Yeah, so it's the thing that tells,
14:08SPEAKERbasically, I'm not the person to ask about this,
14:11SPEAKERbut I'll give an answer and people will yell at me in chat
14:13SPEAKERwhen I'm wrong, or in comments when I'm wrong.
14:15SPEAKERBut it's the thing, it's the underlying piece
14:18SPEAKERof Unreal's technology that helps the AI path
14:22SPEAKERfrom node to node throughout the game.
14:23SPEAKERSo, basically, it looks at all of the places
14:27SPEAKERthat you've marked as navigable in the game,
14:28SPEAKERand all of the places you've said,
14:29SPEAKER"Hey, you can't go here," and then connects them all
14:33SPEAKERto each other as best that it can.
14:35SPEAKERAnd if it doesn't find ways for them to connect,
14:37SPEAKERit'll throw flags, and you can literally hit P,
14:40SPEAKERI think, in Unreal, and it'll turn the floor green
14:43SPEAKERwhere the AI can traverse.
14:47SPEAKERMost people build stuff on top of it.
14:48SPEAKERWe built, at the end of the course,
14:50SPEAKERwe built a whole context layer on top of that
14:52SPEAKERthat told the AI what was, how to find,
14:57SPEAKERit fed more information to the AI
14:59SPEAKERthat was needed for the game to work.
15:00SPEAKERBut first, you do the nav mesh,
15:02SPEAKERand then you do the other stuff on top of that.
15:04SPEAKER- That makes sense.
15:05SPEAKERThe other thing I was gonna ask,
15:06SPEAKERyou kind of kicked this off saying
15:07SPEAKERthat you basically started with,
15:08SPEAKERI think the way you put it was one of the default games
15:10SPEAKERthat they ship, or that UE ships.
15:13SPEAKERWhat does a quote-unquote game encompass in that context?
15:16SPEAKERIs it just a camera perspective instead of basic mechanics,
15:20SPEAKERor are there geometry that goes, or assets that go with that?
15:23SPEAKERWhat do you mean by game in the context
15:25SPEAKERof an Unreal project?
15:26SPEAKER- So basically, UE ships with,
15:30SPEAKERdepending on the version,
15:30SPEAKERyou have a bunch of different default projects.
15:32SPEAKERThere are some UE5 ships with some
15:34SPEAKERthat are architecture and live film generation projects.
15:38SPEAKERThere's several game templates, like a shooter.
15:40SPEAKERThere's shooter.exe, which is a first- or third-person shooter.
15:45SPEAKERThere's a third-person shooter.
15:46SPEAKERActually, shooter.exe is a first-person shooter.
15:49SPEAKERThere's a third-person shooter template.
15:51SPEAKERThere's a racing game template, I think.
15:54SPEAKERAnd basically, it means that there's a camera.
15:58SPEAKERThere's some sort of basic,
16:00SPEAKERthe blueprints that set up the basic menus
16:02SPEAKERin the first level of the game, or second level of the game.
16:05SPEAKERThere'll be gun mechanics.
16:08SPEAKERIn the case of the first-person shooter,
16:09SPEAKERit has enemy meshes, player mesh.
16:13SPEAKERBut then it also has the first-person arms
16:15SPEAKERthat you use to hold the gun, and stuff like that,
16:17SPEAKERand animations to basically get that going.
16:19SPEAKERSo think of it as a tutorial.
16:22SPEAKERSo basically, they have a lot of documentation
16:24SPEAKERthat's like, okay, first you're gonna start
16:26SPEAKERwith shooter.exe, and you're gonna go
16:27SPEAKERto this part of the project, and do this, and this, and this.
16:30SPEAKERAnd then you're gonna open up this in blueprints,
16:31SPEAKERand you're gonna do this, and this, and this.
16:33SPEAKERAnd it's a jumping off.
16:36SPEAKERI don't know that everybody does this.
16:38SPEAKERA lot of people start with, say, shooter.exe,
16:41SPEAKERso you're using the same basic skeleton and rigs
16:44SPEAKERfor your player characters and your bipedal,
16:47SPEAKERhumanoid characters, because then you can more easily
16:51SPEAKERuse assets off the store, and stuff like that.
16:52SPEAKERThere are a lot of assets that use those same rigs
16:54SPEAKERand skeletons, so there's real benefit
16:58SPEAKERto starting with that, is my understanding.
17:00SPEAKER- That all makes sense.
17:01SPEAKERDo you have any idea how much you would have
17:02SPEAKERto differentiate from the default project
17:04SPEAKERbefore you can ship it per the terms of service,
17:06SPEAKERor whatever, I assume you can't literally just,
17:09SPEAKERI mean, I think it would be kind of funny
17:10SPEAKERif somebody did just ship the default project.
17:13SPEAKER- So, I mean, I'm sure you can.
17:15SPEAKERThe default project, usually they don't compile
17:18SPEAKERout of the box, but when you go through the whole project,
17:23SPEAKERthe whole tutorial series, it's usually 20 hours long
17:26SPEAKERor 30 hours long, you'll end up with something
17:28SPEAKERthat you can run in an exe on your desktop.
17:32SPEAKERI don't think they would care.
17:34SPEAKERI don't know why anybody would do that.
17:35SPEAKERIt seems like kind of a waste of time.
17:36SPEAKER- Of course, it's not going to be financially lucrative.
17:39SPEAKERAgain, I think it would just kind
17:40SPEAKERof a funny meta commentary.
17:42SPEAKER- Well, but the levels are like,
17:46SPEAKERit's like a basketball gymnasium size room
17:50SPEAKERwith no roof and no wall, gray box walls, gray box floors.
17:56SPEAKERThere's a couple of physics objects.
17:57SPEAKERThere's a ramp and a thing you can stand on,
18:00SPEAKERand then a couple of pillars and some spawners
18:02SPEAKERthat just spit out enemies.
18:03SPEAKERSo it's not super exciting stuff, but it is really nice,
18:06SPEAKER'cause it turns out when you're starting a project
18:09SPEAKERfrom scratch, if you haven't done that before,
18:11SPEAKERjust getting the project up and running is pretty hard.
18:15SPEAKERIt's a challenging endeavor.
18:17SPEAKERSo starting with that bypasses a lot of that stuff
18:20SPEAKERand lets you learn about menus
18:22SPEAKERwhen you need to learn about menus
18:23SPEAKERinstead of menus as the very first thing you learn.
18:26SPEAKER- Sure.
18:27SPEAKER- So anyway, so I started with that.
18:30SPEAKERThe Shooter.exe one has a couple of levels that it ships.
18:34SPEAKERI took one of those levels
18:35SPEAKERand then imported a big giant landscape mesh
18:37SPEAKERand put a bunch of foliage on it.
18:39SPEAKERAnd I'm going to put down,
18:41SPEAKERI got to put down some buildings and stuff like that
18:44SPEAKERwith more pre-computed lighting,
18:45SPEAKERso it's a little more representative.
18:47SPEAKERAnd then I said, hey, calculate the light mass
18:49SPEAKERinside this volume, and here's the nav mesh volume,
18:53SPEAKERand here's the different areas that we need to care about,
18:56SPEAKERand hit build all to see what happened.
18:58SPEAKERAnd it worked.
19:00SPEAKERAnd then I started looking at,
19:02SPEAKERI started changing the amount of foliage,
19:04SPEAKERI started changing the amount of pre-computed lights,
19:06SPEAKERI started changing the amount of geo in the world
19:08SPEAKERto see what it did to the benchmark
19:09SPEAKERand got to a place that it was interesting and working.
19:14SPEAKERAnd then I realized that I could change
19:16SPEAKERhow long it takes to run the benchmark
19:18SPEAKERby changing the size of the light mass volume,
19:22SPEAKERthe area that it cares about getting good lighting for.
19:25SPEAKERAnd it's interesting because this process,
19:28SPEAKERthe setup process isn't super threaded,
19:30SPEAKERso it favors high clock speed, low core count CPUs.
19:35SPEAKERAnd if you make the amount,
19:37SPEAKERthe area that the light bake happens in small enough
19:40SPEAKERand not complex enough,
19:42SPEAKERthen that means you're gonna have a benchmark.
19:44SPEAKERI could make this benchmark very easily favor, say,
19:47SPEAKERa quad core that runs at higher clock speeds
19:51SPEAKERthan, say, a Threadripper that's gonna, in practice,
19:53SPEAKERbe a much better representation of this benchmark.
19:56SPEAKERAnd I started thinking about it,
19:58SPEAKERI was like, everything that you're creating content,
20:00SPEAKERif you're making a Premiere benchmark,
20:02SPEAKERthe filters that you choose to run,
20:03SPEAKERthe transitions that you choose to use, all of that,
20:05SPEAKERwhether it's GPU or CPU, are inherently political choices.
20:09SPEAKERAnd it determines, it would be easy to make,
20:16SPEAKERand I'm not suggesting anybody's doing this,
20:18SPEAKERI don't think anybody that's actually working
20:19SPEAKERin these spaces does do this,
20:21SPEAKERbut it requires a level of thoughtfulness
20:23SPEAKERthat I hadn't really considered before.
20:25SPEAKER- Yeah, and thoughtfulness into what can be
20:27SPEAKERa bit of a black box, you see the same thing
20:30SPEAKERwith rendering out a video project, for example, right?
20:32SPEAKERBecause you're not only rendering with a video codec,
20:36SPEAKERor compressing with a video codec,
20:37SPEAKERyou're also compressing audio,
20:38SPEAKERyou're also doing compositing
20:40SPEAKERof different elements together,
20:41SPEAKERand all of those things are using different elements
20:43SPEAKERof the hardware and different software routines
20:45SPEAKERand algorithms, and some of those, like you said,
20:47SPEAKERsame thing there, some of those things
20:49SPEAKERmight be heavily threaded, the audio encode might be single,
20:52SPEAKERin fact, most audio encoders that I've seen
20:54SPEAKERare single-threaded, that same thing
20:56SPEAKERwhere you kinda have to sit there
20:58SPEAKERand watch activity across different cores
21:00SPEAKERas you're doing things to even get a sense
21:01SPEAKERof where the bottlenecks are and how to design around that.
21:04SPEAKER- Yeah, so what ended up happening
21:05SPEAKERwas I was loading up Task Manager and Process Manager
21:09SPEAKERwhile the Unreal Engine, while this was running
21:11SPEAKERand watching what was happening when,
21:13SPEAKERand then I started thinking about, okay, I need to,
21:16SPEAKER'cause realistically, if you're doing a production game,
21:20SPEAKERthe setup period is gonna be a small fraction
21:22SPEAKERof the actual light mass,
21:24SPEAKERlike the light mass calculation stuff
21:27SPEAKERis going to be the vast majority of your time
21:30SPEAKERon this benchmark, even if you're using,
21:33SPEAKEReven if you're using the GPU light mass stuff,
21:36SPEAKERwhich is another political choice,
21:37SPEAKER'cause it's skewing in favor of people
21:39SPEAKERwho have big giant GPUs with such and such.
21:42SPEAKERIt's also saying that anybody who has a GPU
21:44SPEAKERthat has less than, I think, 12 or 16 gigs of memory
21:47SPEAKERjust can't run the benchmark,
21:49SPEAKERor we have to use one of the third-party
21:51SPEAKERlight mass calculations,
21:52SPEAKERwhich does support lower GPU RAM configurations.
21:55SPEAKERSo it's a series of really,
22:00SPEAKERit's an interesting series of choices.
22:01SPEAKERI don't know that I have,
22:04SPEAKERI don't know that we're gonna make this public.
22:05SPEAKERI don't know that I'd have to look at what I've agreed
22:07SPEAKERthrough license-wise to see if we even can.
22:09SPEAKERIt's a fair pain in the ass to set up and get running.
22:12SPEAKER- That's one of my questions,
22:13SPEAKERwas gonna be how portable this is,
22:15SPEAKERbecause the nature of benchmarking in this setting
22:17SPEAKERis you have to put it on a bunch of different machines,
22:19SPEAKERright?
22:20SPEAKER- Yeah, so that part isn't too bad.
22:22SPEAKERI intentionally built it
22:23SPEAKERwithout requiring any third-party UE plugins,
22:26SPEAKERwhich is important.
22:27SPEAKERAnd I used mostly stuff that I had licensed to
22:31SPEAKERfrom, let's see, the UE Store, the Quixel Bridge,
22:35SPEAKERstuff like that.
22:36SPEAKERSo it's like, it should be,
22:39SPEAKERI think from a content perspective,
22:40SPEAKERI'm allowed to distribute it.
22:42SPEAKERI think Shooter.exe is distributable,
22:44SPEAKERbecause most, like I said,
22:46SPEAKERa lot of people base their,
22:47SPEAKERthat's the starting point
22:48SPEAKERfor a lot of first-person shooters that use Unreal.
22:52SPEAKERIt's one of the reasons that like Unreal engine games
22:54SPEAKERoften feel like they have kind of samey physics
22:56SPEAKERis 'cause people start with like, why reinvent the,
23:01SPEAKERwhen you start with a blank game,
23:02SPEAKERyou're starting with no physics and no gravity
23:04SPEAKERand no collision and none of that stuff.
23:07SPEAKERAnd starting with that stuff turned on
23:08SPEAKERis incredibly helpful, so.
23:10SPEAKER- Sure, sure.
23:11SPEAKERI didn't realize,
23:12SPEAKERI didn't realize there were like third-party,
23:14SPEAKERlike, you know, what's the term?
23:17SPEAKERRenderers engines for calculating light maps
23:19SPEAKERand stuff like that.
23:20SPEAKERI just, I didn't realize components like that
23:22SPEAKERwere pluggable in the Unreal engine.
23:23SPEAKERYou know, like I kind of assumed that like,
23:26SPEAKERkind of assumed there was one way to bake light maps
23:28SPEAKERand it was their way.
23:29SPEAKER- No, there's a bazillion.
23:31SPEAKERSo, I mean, I don't know if there's a bazillion
23:33SPEAKERlight map things, but there are,
23:35SPEAKERthere are, I don't want to say infinite,
23:37SPEAKERbut there's a seemingly infinite number
23:39SPEAKERof Unreal engine plugins.
23:41SPEAKER- Yeah, I believe that, you know,
23:42SPEAKERI've looked through the Unreal, the asset store before,
23:44SPEAKERHorizon Unity that calls it the assets.
23:46SPEAKERAnyway, like I know there's tons of stuff out there
23:48SPEAKERfor like getting your game onto Steam or workshop,
23:53SPEAKERlike mod support, like plugins for real.
23:55SPEAKERI guess what I'm, I guess the distinction I'm trying to make
23:57SPEAKERis instead of adding extra functionality
23:59SPEAKERthat's not in the engine,
24:00SPEAKERyou're replacing very low level functionality
24:02SPEAKERthat does ship with the engine.
24:03SPEAKERAnd that's what I was surprised
24:04SPEAKERthat there are options for doing.
24:06SPEAKER- Yeah, so I think that the main reason
24:09SPEAKERthe other light mask calc exists,
24:12SPEAKERlet's see, it's Lu, it's Lu Xiong's GPU light mask swarm.
24:19SPEAKERAnd it's, or GPU light mask.
24:22SPEAKERAnd it's, it's a, it's basically a port
24:26SPEAKERof the GPU light mask accelerator
24:29SPEAKERthat'll run on 70 series cards.
24:31SPEAKER'Cause by default, they pretty much,
24:32SPEAKERthe Unreal engine one only works on 3080s
24:35SPEAKERor 2080s or 3080s, I think.
24:38SPEAKERAnd it's, it's because of, I believe memory limits.
24:40SPEAKERI can't remember.
24:41SPEAKER- I see.
24:43SPEAKER- So that's the one example.
24:44SPEAKERUnreal treats GPU light mask still as a beta thing.
24:48SPEAKERIf you're working in an office with a bunch of people,
24:50SPEAKERyou can run the swarm controller.
24:52SPEAKERThe CPU, the CPU light mask calculator will,
24:55SPEAKERwill distribute across all of the computers in your network.
24:58SPEAKERAs long as you have the swarm controller installed
25:00SPEAKERon them and running.
25:01SPEAKERWhich, which means it can go a little bit faster,
25:03SPEAKERbut it still takes a long time.
25:05SPEAKERAnd it means that you have to leave those computers running
25:07SPEAKERif you want to take advantage of that.
25:09SPEAKER- Sure, I wonder how throughput limited that is.
25:12SPEAKER- Not very.
25:12SPEAKER- Now we're not working those calculations.
25:14SPEAKERLike I assume the amount of the actual amount of data
25:16SPEAKERthat's going back and forth is pretty small.
25:17SPEAKERIt's just the computation that is heavy.
25:19SPEAKER- Yeah, so the thing that,
25:20SPEAKERthe thing that I believe happens in the beginning
25:22SPEAKERis it breaks up the levels into chunks.
25:24SPEAKERAnd, and then that's the thing that's not super threaded
25:28SPEAKERor seems to be CPU bound or seems to limit itself
25:32SPEAKERto a small number of CPU threads.
25:35SPEAKERFor then runs for a fairly long time
25:37SPEAKERis breaking up the level into discrete chunks.
25:39SPEAKERAnd then it distributes those out using that swarm client
25:42SPEAKERto the, to the other machines on the network.
25:45SPEAKERAnd they're, they're, they're not big.
25:47SPEAKERIt's just the math is complicated
25:48SPEAKERbecause it's basically bouncing a bazillion rays
25:51SPEAKERaround the world.
25:52SPEAKERThe difference is we don't have to buy a big SGI workstation
25:55SPEAKERor some Cray render or something to do it anymore.
25:57SPEAKERWe can just run it on a bunch of desktop PCs
25:58SPEAKERwith 30 cores each.
26:00SPEAKER- Those were the days.
26:01SPEAKER- And the nice thing is you can set the swarm thing
26:04SPEAKERso it just eats like two cores,
26:06SPEAKERwhich most people won't even notice
26:07SPEAKERwhen they're using their computers.
26:08SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
26:10SPEAKER- That's cool.
26:10SPEAKER- The reason this benchmark is interesting though,
26:12SPEAKERis if you're a, let's say an environment artist
26:14SPEAKERor a level designer or work in those spaces
26:16SPEAKERand you have to rebuild these levels frequently,
26:19SPEAKERyou'll often, like if you're doing the good build
26:22SPEAKERfor the shipping level, when the game is ready to be,
26:24SPEAKERwhen you're ready to release the game
26:26SPEAKERor update a new level in the game or whatever,
26:29SPEAKERyou'll do the good lighting calculations
26:31SPEAKERright before it ships, right?
26:32SPEAKERAnd that that'll run for hours and it's time consuming.
26:35SPEAKERBut if you're making like,
26:37SPEAKERsay if you're changing the position of a box or a door
26:40SPEAKERor a tree or something, you'll run a preview version
26:43SPEAKERof those calcs more often than that
26:45SPEAKERbecause you want to see the shadow for the tree
26:47SPEAKERin the right place and make sure that it doesn't interfere
26:49SPEAKERwith something else or whatever.
26:51SPEAKERAnd that can get fairly time consuming
26:52SPEAKERand it kind of takes you out of work.
26:54SPEAKERLike if you have to do it during the day,
26:57SPEAKERyou do it before you go away for lunch
26:59SPEAKERor you do it at the end of the day
27:00SPEAKERbecause it's going to prevent you from doing anything
27:02SPEAKERfor the rest of the day.
27:03SPEAKER- Yeah. - So.
27:05SPEAKER- Yeah, I got kind of excited
27:06SPEAKERwhen you told me you were doing this
27:07SPEAKERbecause some months ago you were still working
27:10SPEAKERon the anacrusis.
27:11SPEAKERThis was not for this benchmark.
27:12SPEAKERIt was for a shipping game at the time,
27:13SPEAKERbut you sent me, it was around the time
27:15SPEAKERwe were both building computers.
27:16SPEAKERYou remember this?
27:17SPEAKER- Oh yeah, it was when I was baking lights.
27:18SPEAKER- You just sent me unbidden.
27:20SPEAKERYou sent me a screenshot of task manager
27:22SPEAKERwith every single core on your 1300K pegged,
27:25SPEAKERflat lined at 100%, which even doing,
27:28SPEAKERlike I've been experimenting
27:29SPEAKERwith different AV1 software encoders recently
27:32SPEAKERand even doing that stuff,
27:34SPEAKERlike I haven't been able to get it to,
27:35SPEAKERI mean, it'll load each core pretty steadily,
27:38SPEAKERbut you still see a bunch of spikes up and down,
27:40SPEAKERbut this was the only, kind of the only thing,
27:44SPEAKERexcept maybe compiling like the Linux kernel
27:46SPEAKERor something, some heavy software compilation.
27:48SPEAKER- 7-Zip, baby.
27:49SPEAKER- So maybe you can get 7-Zip to do it,
27:51SPEAKERbut like I have not seen anything else besides that,
27:54SPEAKERwhatever unreal calculations you were doing
27:56SPEAKERthat so heavily, thoroughly, completely pegs each core.
28:01SPEAKER- Oh yeah. - Every core all at once.
28:03SPEAKER- Yeah, so it's- - So it seems,
28:04SPEAKERit seems like this seems ripe for testing.
28:06SPEAKER- It's, and that was, and just to be clear,
28:07SPEAKERthat's even using the GPU light mass,
28:09SPEAKERit still pegs all the cores.
28:11SPEAKERLike it's, it made the power cable
28:14SPEAKERcoming into the computer get warm.
28:15SPEAKER- Wow.
28:16SPEAKER- Which is probably good, right?
28:17SPEAKER- Interesting.
28:18SPEAKER- Yeah, so anyway, that's what I've been working on.
28:21SPEAKERI'm curious what people think.
28:22SPEAKERI'd be curious to hear your feedback.
28:25SPEAKERLike I said, this is coming from a place
28:27SPEAKERof wanting to mimic something that's a semi-realistic.
28:31SPEAKERIt's a little bit weird 'cause I think a lot of UE5 games
28:34SPEAKERare probably not shipping with a lot of pre-baked lights.
28:36SPEAKERThey're probably doing global rendering,
28:38SPEAKERmeaning that the light is,
28:40SPEAKERthe main light for the world is dynamic.
28:44SPEAKERBut you know, like we're doing fog and other stuff
28:46SPEAKERthat requires a little bit of pre-compute.
28:48SPEAKERSo it's, I think we'll have something
28:52SPEAKERthat's at least representative of the performance you'll get
28:57SPEAKERif not of the actual game.
28:59SPEAKER- Yeah, that's very cool.
29:00SPEAKERYou know, at first I was thinking to myself like,
29:02SPEAKERah, how big is the audience for this kind of benchmark?
29:04SPEAKERIt's limited to the people
29:05SPEAKERwho are working game developers, of course,
29:07SPEAKERbut you could see this like,
29:08SPEAKERespecially if it's something you can release,
29:10SPEAKERyou could see this just becoming part
29:11SPEAKERof like more standard benchmarking suites,
29:14SPEAKERlike because it is a legitimate real world,
29:17SPEAKERvery heavy and often very, very parallelized workload.
29:20SPEAKER- I think if I were releasing this for wider
29:23SPEAKERthan this one particular project we're working on,
29:25SPEAKERI'd probably want to do, like,
29:30SPEAKERI think I'd probably want to do something
29:31SPEAKERthat's a little more representative of an actual game.
29:35SPEAKERLike, I think there's probably games out there
29:37SPEAKERthat would be willing to give us access
29:39SPEAKERto like a level from the game
29:40SPEAKERto do the same calculation on.
29:42SPEAKER- Yeah, that would be cool.
29:43SPEAKERYeah, I guess, or to put it another way,
29:45SPEAKERwhat I was trying to say,
29:46SPEAKERit's like, if you look at a lot of the benchmarking suites
29:48SPEAKERthat are used in reviews for CPUs
29:50SPEAKERand graphics cards and stuff, like they're fairly robust,
29:53SPEAKERbut in some cases it feels like they're kind of struggling
29:56SPEAKERto actually really load modern hardware, you know?
29:58SPEAKERAnd so having another real world,
30:00SPEAKERsomething that's not just yet another synthetic benchmark,
30:03SPEAKERbut something that is a real world workload
30:05SPEAKERthat you can point out and say,
30:06SPEAKERhere's how this actually works.
30:07SPEAKER- Absolutely true.
30:08SPEAKER- It's cool.
30:09SPEAKERI'm excited.
30:10SPEAKERIs that, what form will that take, ultimately a video?
30:13SPEAKER- It'll be a video.
30:14SPEAKERIt'll be part of a video about a different thing.
30:17SPEAKER- Okay.
30:18SPEAKER- I'm being very intentionally vague.
30:19SPEAKERI'm sorry.
30:20SPEAKER- All right, all right, that's fine.
30:21SPEAKERI look forward to hearing more.
30:23SPEAKER- It's a thing about a thing, Brad.
30:24SPEAKER- Yes.
30:25SPEAKERAll right, shall we move on?
30:27SPEAKER- Yeah, let's hear about Matter and Threat.
30:28SPEAKERI'm sure this is good.
30:29SPEAKERI feel like it seems like I haven't heard much
30:31SPEAKERin a little bit.
30:32SPEAKEREverything's going great, I bet.
30:33SPEAKER- Swimmingly, hey, look, there's only one.
30:37SPEAKERYou might've heard this one before.
30:38SPEAKERWe need one standard to unify all the standards.
30:41SPEAKEREighteen, cut to 18 months later.
30:42SPEAKERNow there's only one standard, right?
30:44SPEAKER- No, it's the number of standards there were before plus one.
30:47SPEAKER- Yes, plus one.
30:48SPEAKER- I don't think it's fair in this case.
30:50SPEAKERI think, okay, well, go ahead.
30:53SPEAKERTell me how it's going, Brad.
30:54SPEAKER- Okay, I drew a lot on a kind of year in review
30:59SPEAKERin December that The Verge ran by Jennifer Pattison-Toohey,
31:04SPEAKERwho apparently has kind of been pushing Matter and Threat
31:06SPEAKERto the limit.
31:07SPEAKERWe talked at the top of the episode.
31:09SPEAKERWe need to explain Matter and Threat again.
31:11SPEAKERWe've covered it fairly extensively.
31:12SPEAKER- Yeah, but the idea is that Matter and Threat,
31:15SPEAKERThreat is a radio standard.
31:16SPEAKERMatter is an interoperability kind of communication standard
31:21SPEAKERso that theoretically, all of your devices,
31:24SPEAKERall of your smart home devices colloquially known
31:28SPEAKERas the internet of shit will talk to each other
31:32SPEAKERand work with each other.
31:34SPEAKERNow, this is a thing you could have done before
31:37SPEAKERif you had some intentionality with your purchases.
31:39SPEAKER- Oh yeah, or even if you didn't actually,
31:41SPEAKERespecially if you didn't,
31:42SPEAKERthat's how I ended up with Home Assistant,
31:43SPEAKERwas I've got a couple of smart plugs that I got
31:46SPEAKERbecause they advertised with us on a podcast,
31:48SPEAKERand then I've got some others
31:49SPEAKER'cause we bought like a three-pack on Amazon
31:51SPEAKERthat was on sale, and then I've got yet a third vendors plugs
31:55SPEAKERas a Christmas gift, you know what I mean?
31:57SPEAKERLike at some point, that's how I came to Home Assistant
31:59SPEAKERwas just like retroactively, I was like,
32:02SPEAKERI've got all these competing things.
32:04SPEAKERI wish they all just worked in one interface.
32:06SPEAKERSo yes, you could, and maybe will continue to do this
32:10SPEAKERthe old fashioned way with something like Home Assistant
32:12SPEAKERrather than standardizing it at the radio
32:16SPEAKERand application level like Matter promised.
32:19SPEAKER- I mean, just to be clear,
32:20SPEAKERI have Matter running on my Home Assistant box right now,
32:23SPEAKERand all of the Matter and Thread devices in the house,
32:25SPEAKERincluding the Apple TV and the smart plugs that I have
32:29SPEAKERand the handful of other things that I don't actually use
32:31SPEAKERexcept for Christmas time, 'cause they're Christmas lights,
32:34SPEAKERare working off of the Home Assistant Thread Radio
32:40SPEAKERusing the Matter standard.
32:41SPEAKERLike it's been pretty good for me.
32:42SPEAKER- Yeah, okay, that's fair.
32:43SPEAKER- I've only used, like I said, a handful of things,
32:45SPEAKERand I don't, so the interesting thing about,
32:50SPEAKERis it Thread?
32:50SPEAKERI always get confused about which is which, Matter.
32:53SPEAKERThe interesting thing about Matter is that they have the idea
32:54SPEAKERof this, the edge router thing, right?
32:56SPEAKERWhere you-
32:57SPEAKER- Border router, yeah.
32:58SPEAKER- Border routers, yeah, where things that are plugged in
33:00SPEAKERaround your house, like smart speakers
33:01SPEAKERand digital picture frames and your refrigerator maybe,
33:04SPEAKERand made by Google and Apple and Samsung,
33:08SPEAKERall can like expand the mesh of your mesh network, right?
33:12SPEAKER- Like the theory is that you would never have to buy
33:15SPEAKERa dedicated controller or hub.
33:17SPEAKERLike, I guess, what SmartThings is, or like the Phillips Hue
33:20SPEAKERhub, stuff like that, you know, like a thing that is just
33:22SPEAKERa little lump of plastic that serves no other purpose
33:24SPEAKERthan to unify all the actual client devices.
33:27SPEAKER- But that's also what Home Assistant is, right?
33:29SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
33:30SPEAKER- Like that's what, I don't, I did not,
33:32SPEAKERwhen they initially pitched this to people,
33:34SPEAKERthat was not the thing I took from this.
33:36SPEAKERThe thing I took from this was that all of the smart hubs
33:39SPEAKERwould work together on the same protocol,
33:41SPEAKERso you wouldn't have to have, like, okay.
33:45SPEAKERSo I use Home Assistant to take all of the different
33:48SPEAKERdisparate stuff in my house and glue it together
33:50SPEAKERinto one application, and then I dole it back out
33:53SPEAKERfrom there to things like Google Home and Apple's Siri
33:57SPEAKERand Alexa, if that was a thing that I used,
34:00SPEAKERso that I could access them from the different places
34:02SPEAKERthat I wanted to do, like voice assistants.
34:04SPEAKERMy understanding was that I shouldn't have to do that step
34:08SPEAKERwith Matter, that all the Matter devices should just be able
34:11SPEAKERto talk to each other, and like my Home Assistant
34:13SPEAKERwould see HomeKit and Google Play and all the different,
34:17SPEAKERNest things, and my Nest things would see the HomeKit
34:20SPEAKERand the Google Play and all the different standards,
34:23SPEAKERand it seems like that's just not happening.
34:25SPEAKER- That is the promise.
34:26SPEAKEREvery device is supposed to work with every vendor's
34:29SPEAKERecosystem, and when we say ecosystem,
34:30SPEAKERwe're talking Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa.
34:32SPEAKER- Samsung.
34:33SPEAKER- Sam, what is--
34:34SPEAKER- SmartThings, Samsung.
34:35SPEAKER- SmartThings, are there other big ones out there
34:37SPEAKERat this point?
34:38SPEAKER- Yeah, Phillips Hue is one.
34:39SPEAKER- Yeah, okay.
34:41SPEAKER- I don't think Lutron has signed on,
34:44SPEAKERbut Lutron has a hub with their Cassetta products.
34:46SPEAKER- Right.
34:47SPEAKER- There's a bunch of different places that this fires in.
34:50SPEAKERThe interesting, the good thing about this was,
34:54SPEAKERthere were kind of two, in reality there were a bunch
34:56SPEAKERof ecosystems, but in reality there were two, right?
34:58SPEAKER'Cause it was like HomeKit, which had some specific
35:00SPEAKERhardware requirements, and then there was everything else,
35:03SPEAKERwhich was more or less hubs using Zigbee or Z-Wave
35:07SPEAKERor some variation of one of the two.
35:10SPEAKERAnd then Lutron had Cassetta, which is its own set
35:11SPEAKERof radios, which is quite nice, but is off on its own.
35:14SPEAKER- Yeah, anyway, this piece that Tui did was basically
35:17SPEAKERkind of a year in review of spending 2023 testing
35:20SPEAKERmatter and thread devices, and to be fair,
35:23SPEAKERit sounds like she's got so many things on her network,
35:25SPEAKERit's like far, far beyond what any average consumer
35:28SPEAKERwould probably do.
35:29SPEAKER- Well, and it's worth mentioning 2023, I think,
35:32SPEAKERis really the first year that matter and thread stuff
35:34SPEAKERstarted shipping in any kind of real quantity.
35:36SPEAKER- That's true, it's been, God, it's been almost a year
35:38SPEAKERsince I was looking at some Nanoleaf thread smart bulbs
35:42SPEAKERthat had, I think, were like kind of the first thread
35:44SPEAKERsmart bulbs to hit the market.
35:45SPEAKER- Yeah, the first thing I bought was an Eve,
35:49SPEAKERwhat was it I said, an Eve Electric, maybe?
35:50SPEAKER- Yeah.
35:51SPEAKER- Eve Energy smart plug, and I bought it just to test
35:54SPEAKERthe matter implementation on my home assistant box.
35:58SPEAKER- Yes. - The assistant yellow.
36:00SPEAKER- I think, actually, let me see if I can find it
36:03SPEAKERin the story, I think Eve and, yes, it's Eve and Nanoleaf
36:06SPEAKERare the two companies she mentioned kind of bet everything
36:10SPEAKERon matter and thread and are now pivoting back
36:12SPEAKERto making non, making Wi-Fi devices again,
36:15SPEAKERif that tells you how things are going.
36:16SPEAKER- Well, it's worth mentioning that the Eve box
36:19SPEAKERthat I got started out as a Bluetooth device
36:23SPEAKERand then got thread updates over time so that it was able
36:26SPEAKERto connect to the thread border routers.
36:28SPEAKER- Yeah.
36:29SPEAKER- But, okay, so it was a rough year, is the TLDR.
36:33SPEAKER- Yes, I guess, like, I just kind of will address
36:36SPEAKERsome of the main points phrased in the story
36:37SPEAKERand we'll link this, there's also a couple of R's pieces
36:39SPEAKERthat we read for this, those will all be in the show notes,
36:42SPEAKERbut just kind of going bullet point by bullet point
36:44SPEAKERof what matter and thread we're supposed to deliver, okay?
36:46SPEAKERSo, like, the first one is you can use any company's device
36:50SPEAKERin any other company's ecosystem, that's the idea.
36:52SPEAKERLike, if you're an Apple home user, primarily,
36:55SPEAKERbut you end up with some devices that are made
36:57SPEAKERfor Alexa or whatever, theoretically, those are still
36:59SPEAKERsupposed to work in the ecosystem of your choice.
37:02SPEAKER- And that works, right?
37:04SPEAKER- Sort of, yes.
37:05SPEAKERIt sounds like, I'm just gonna quote from the story here,
37:08SPEAKERit sounds like, basically, at a baseline, yes,
37:11SPEAKERbut the actual functionality that you're going to get
37:13SPEAKERis going to vary by which ecosystem in
37:15SPEAKERand what features that ecosystem supports.
37:18SPEAKER- I mean, that's kind of how open standards work, right?
37:20SPEAKERIs that, like, everybody supports which parts
37:22SPEAKERof it they want and everybody else supports the parts of it
37:25SPEAKERthat they don't, they don't support the parts
37:27SPEAKERthat they don't want.
37:28SPEAKER- Yeah.
37:29SPEAKER- So, like, if I, so is there a, for example, here, I guess?
37:32SPEAKER- Yes, there is, I mean, you're not wrong,
37:34SPEAKERbut also, as a consumer, that's the last thing I want
37:36SPEAKERto worry about is, well, do I need to eyeball a table
37:38SPEAKERon the back of this thing to know if all of its features
37:40SPEAKERare supported in home or Apple Home or whatever it is
37:43SPEAKERI like to use?
37:43SPEAKER- Okay, I mean, I will say, this morning, I got up
37:46SPEAKERand the power had gone off last night and all of the
37:48SPEAKERlight bulbs were on in the house and I had to open up
37:50SPEAKERthe Wyze app and go in and toggle on each light bulb
37:54SPEAKERthe on power off return to last state rather than
37:58SPEAKERfull blast 'cause at three o'clock in the morning
38:02SPEAKERwhen the power went off and all the lights turned on
38:04SPEAKERin the bedrooms, it wasn't great.
38:05SPEAKER- Oh, good.
38:06SPEAKER- Yeah.
38:07SPEAKER- That sounds fun.
38:08SPEAKEROkay, yes, here's a quote talking about, talking about
38:10SPEAKERdevices working in different ecosystems.
38:12SPEAKER"If you connect your Philips Hue smart bulbs to Apple Home
38:14SPEAKERvia Matter, you can't use Apple Home's
38:16SPEAKERadaptive lighting features.
38:17SPEAKERIf you pair an Eve Energy smart plug with Amazon Alexa,
38:20SPEAKERyou lose its energy monitoring feature.
38:23SPEAKERIf you add Govee's Matter light strip to your smart home
38:26SPEAKERplatform of choice, you can't play with any of its
38:27SPEAKERcool lighting effects."
38:28SPEAKERSo it's like, all these things are, like, able to connect
38:32SPEAKERat a basic level and have their basic functionality work,
38:35SPEAKERbut, like, higher level stuff or anything that requires
38:38SPEAKERany kind of, like, vendor-specific support
38:40SPEAKERis not working cross-platform at all.
38:41SPEAKER- But, okay, so I can use adaptive lighting
38:44SPEAKERwith Philips Hue bulbs in my, I have to do it from
38:48SPEAKERthe Apple Home app, and I can use, I have one of those
38:51SPEAKEREve Energy smart plugs, and in Home Assistant I see
38:55SPEAKERthe energy usage, and in the Eve app I see the energy usage,
38:59SPEAKERbut if I ask Google about the energy usage,
39:01SPEAKERthe Google Home device isn't gonna know what the hell
39:03SPEAKERI'm talking about 'cause it doesn't understand that.
39:05SPEAKERRight, like, I don't, I guess I don't see that as a problem.
39:11SPEAKERI see that as, like, that's like saying, hey,
39:15SPEAKERGoogle added a bunch of proprietary shit to Chrome
39:17SPEAKERthat Safari and Firefox aren't gonna support.
39:20SPEAKER- Well, but I mean, that's, I mean, that analogy would hold
39:23SPEAKERif there were some global browser alliance that had promised
39:25SPEAKERall these browsers were gonna be able to interoperate.
39:28SPEAKER- I mean, what's the W3C then?
39:30SPEAKER- Oh, geez, that's a whole other episode.
39:33SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
39:34SPEAKER- Trust me, I get up to my elbows in enough half-baked tech
39:37SPEAKERto absolutely understand why the stuff wouldn't be working
39:40SPEAKERright at a high level, but again, I'm coming at this
39:43SPEAKERfrom the angle of this thing is supposed to take
39:45SPEAKERall the guesswork out of this process of buying stuff.
39:47SPEAKERLike, the idea of this whole standard is you're supposed
39:50SPEAKERto just be able to buy devices and have them all work,
39:53SPEAKERand the second I have to start doing homework
39:56SPEAKERto actually figure out what that's gonna mean in practice
39:58SPEAKERis the second that I'm just never going
40:01SPEAKERto touch this standard, and I think that's probably
40:04SPEAKERwhere I'm going to end up at at the end of this episode.
40:06SPEAKER- I think we're in the trough of despair, man.
40:08SPEAKER- Yeah.
40:09SPEAKER- I think this is like, we've heard the promise,
40:12SPEAKEReverybody got all excited about it, it started coming out,
40:14SPEAKERand it's not living up to the promise.
40:16SPEAKER- Yeah, I'll cop to having been fairly excited
40:20SPEAKERabout what they were pitching for Matter and Thread
40:22SPEAKERa year and a half ago when we did that FOSSbot episode,
40:25SPEAKERand it does not seem to be playing out.
40:26SPEAKEROkay, let's move on to the next point.
40:27SPEAKERI mean, this one is more pretty flatly damning, I think.
40:31SPEAKERMatter has something called multi-admin mode,
40:33SPEAKERwhich I had not been aware of, but they defined it
40:36SPEAKERin the spec enough to give it a name.
40:38SPEAKER- Yeah.
40:38SPEAKER- If that tells you anything.
40:39SPEAKERAnd the idea there is basically you can,
40:41SPEAKERit's kind of the inverse of what we were just talking about,
40:43SPEAKERwhere it's like you can use multiple products
40:45SPEAKERin any one ecosystem of your choice.
40:47SPEAKERIn this case, you can use one product
40:49SPEAKERin multiple ecosystems, so you could have like,
40:52SPEAKERI guess the best use case example is like,
40:54SPEAKERyou like Apple stuff and you like to use
40:56SPEAKERthe Apple Home interface, but your wife likes Alexa
40:59SPEAKERor Google Home, the idea is that the device would show up
41:03SPEAKERin all of those home hubs on say everybody's phone,
41:06SPEAKERand you could access the basic functionality
41:08SPEAKERof the device from any of those.
41:10SPEAKERSounds like that absolutely just does not work.
41:12SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't, this doesn't surprise me at all.
41:15SPEAKERThis one, again, this feels like not being intentional.
41:20SPEAKERLike I get that normal people aren't intentional
41:22SPEAKERabout computer stuff often, but all of this feels like,
41:26SPEAKERhey, you have to think about how this works
41:30SPEAKERand how this is going to work.
41:31SPEAKERMaybe this is just, maybe I'm just so damaged
41:33SPEAKERfrom years of covering this stuff that I can't,
41:36SPEAKERI can't, like I, yeah, I don't know.
41:40SPEAKER- That's kind of how I feel.
41:41SPEAKERI'm kind of like, don't cut them too much slack.
41:43SPEAKERI mean, again, I get in practice why all of this stuff
41:46SPEAKERis such a huge mess.
41:48SPEAKER- Also, my assumption is we're first year,
41:51SPEAKERlike if I have one argument with this,
41:54SPEAKERone complaint with this standard, I would say
41:56SPEAKERthat they pitched something that was way, way, way,
41:59SPEAKERway optimistic for something that's going to have
42:02SPEAKERsome really gnarly teething pains when you're talking
42:05SPEAKERabout five enormous worldwide global companies
42:08SPEAKERthat all want, that all agreed to this standard
42:11SPEAKERbecause they think they can own it.
42:14SPEAKERAnd like, yeah, it doesn't surprise me that Philips
42:17SPEAKERmade a thing that doesn't work with everybody.
42:19SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, that seems to be the case
42:21SPEAKERis that everybody kind of wants to do their own thing
42:24SPEAKEReven within a spec that says they should all
42:26SPEAKERbe working together.
42:27SPEAKER- So I will say when I moved the Eve thing
42:31SPEAKERfrom my HomeKit network into the Home Assistant network,
42:34SPEAKERwhich was a little bit of a process, I had to download it.
42:37SPEAKERI had to go to a setting on the app.
42:39SPEAKERI had to download, generate a new pairing image,
42:43SPEAKERprint that out, take a picture of my phone
42:45SPEAKERfrom the Apple Home app.
42:47SPEAKERIt was a weird process, but like I made the choice
42:51SPEAKERto pair everything with Home and let it, with Home Assistant
42:55SPEAKERand let it propagate out to HomeKit and Google Home
42:58SPEAKERfrom there rather than thinking I could add it
43:02SPEAKERto the Apple Home and have it get sucked
43:03SPEAKERinto Home Assistant and Google Home from there.
43:06SPEAKER- Oh yeah, yeah, I would never do that to be clear.
43:08SPEAKERAs a Home Assistant user, I also would add everything
43:10SPEAKERthrough Home Assistant.
43:11SPEAKER- Yeah, I like, I guess a lot of my, a lot of this,
43:15SPEAKERboth the first two points are like,
43:17SPEAKERI don't think this is a problem.
43:19SPEAKERI think Home Assistant is the good implementation
43:21SPEAKERof all of these technologies, probably.
43:23SPEAKER- I agree with you, but I also still think,
43:25SPEAKERlike Home Assistant has gotten way more accessible
43:26SPEAKERthan it used to be, but I still don't think
43:28SPEAKERit's within reach of the average consumer
43:30SPEAKERwho doesn't want to think about any of this stuff.
43:31SPEAKER- Oh, it's definitely nerd shit, yeah.
43:33SPEAKER- Yeah, yes, extremely.
43:35SPEAKERThird point is about the Thread border routers
43:38SPEAKERthat we were talking about, where basically your fridge
43:40SPEAKERor your light fixture can be a device that routes traffic
43:44SPEAKERfrom other clients instead of a dedicated box.
43:47SPEAKERSounds like that is still a giant mess.
43:50SPEAKERShe says that most of the devices on her network
43:52SPEAKERare still running through dedicated boxes
43:54SPEAKERand that specifically, I'll just quote this,
43:57SPEAKER"The dozen or so Thread border routers in my home
43:59SPEAKERhave formed their own proprietary Thread networks
44:02SPEAKERbased on their manufacturer and adults talk to each other."
44:05SPEAKER- Yeah, this is bad.
44:06SPEAKERLike, just to be clear, this seems like either,
44:09SPEAKERideally the apps should look and say,
44:11SPEAKER"Oh, hey, there's three Thread networks here.
44:13SPEAKERDo any of these belong to you?
44:14SPEAKERDo you want to join one of the existing networks?"
44:16SPEAKERAnytime you add something, so you end up
44:18SPEAKERwith one Thread network instead of a bazillion
44:20SPEAKERThread networks, there's probably political reasons
44:23SPEAKERthey don't want to do that because everybody wants
44:24SPEAKERto own this network, but the benefit of having
44:27SPEAKERa big giant mesh network with a bunch of border routers
44:30SPEAKERis that you have everything connected to the same network
44:33SPEAKERso that when you add something new, it benefits
44:36SPEAKERfrom the breadth and width of the net mesh
44:38SPEAKERand doesn't get disconnected and this is both
44:41SPEAKERan onboarding and installation and setup failure,
44:45SPEAKERa communication failure, this sucks all the way around.
44:48SPEAKER- Yeah, for sure, sounds like a giant mess.
44:51SPEAKERAlso, I haven't mentioned so far,
44:52SPEAKERsome manufacturers have kind of backed away
44:54SPEAKERfrom this a little bit, like Belkin almost a year ago,
44:57SPEAKERI think, announced that they were stepping back
44:59SPEAKERfrom the whole thing and kind of--
45:00SPEAKER- From the matter in Thread or from--
45:01SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yes.
45:03SPEAKER- I mean, it doesn't surprise me.
45:04SPEAKER- And other manufacturers who are participating
45:07SPEAKERare kind of trying to, it sounds like,
45:08SPEAKERcarve out their own fiefdoms within it.
45:11SPEAKER- Well, but I mean, it's quite literally saying,
45:15SPEAKERhey, we're gonna take the thing that makes this good
45:17SPEAKERand then just not do it.
45:18SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, it seems to be kind of how it's shaping up.
45:22SPEAKERShe talks about the thing you were talking about
45:23SPEAKERwith the onboarding, she says that the simple onboarding
45:28SPEAKERof you can use any app you want and just basically scan
45:30SPEAKERthe matter code on the device and it's just on
45:32SPEAKERactually does generally work pretty well
45:34SPEAKERor when it works, it's quite elegant.
45:36SPEAKERBut I think she gave the same example you did,
45:38SPEAKERyou said your thing fell off the network
45:40SPEAKERand you had to get it back on, right?
45:41SPEAKER- Well, no, no, I wanted to switch from the Apple Hub
45:43SPEAKERto the Home Assistant Hub.
45:45SPEAKER- It was switching, I see.
45:46SPEAKER- Yeah, because, just to be clear, sucking it
45:49SPEAKERfrom the Apple Hub into the Home Assistant Hub
45:52SPEAKERwasn't working particularly well,
45:54SPEAKERwhich meant that it wasn't accessible
45:55SPEAKERin things like Google or Alexa.
45:57SPEAKERSo yeah, but I think my assumption, and this may be naive,
46:05SPEAKERbut my assumption was that at least
46:07SPEAKERfor this first generation, maybe two generations,
46:10SPEAKERprobably you're gonna have to use some proprietary app
46:12SPEAKERto do most of the configuration stuff for everything.
46:14SPEAKER- That's kind of exactly where she's at here.
46:16SPEAKERShe gives an example about some TP-Link Tappos
46:19SPEAKERlight switches that she could not get to connect
46:23SPEAKERto the network through Apple Home because they're TP-Link.
46:26SPEAKERBut she says, "I quickly defaulted to the Tappo app
46:28SPEAKERwhere they paired immediately.
46:29SPEAKERWhen I went back to add them to Apple Home
46:31SPEAKERand then Google Home through Matter,
46:32SPEAKERtwo of them dropped offline on both platforms,
46:35SPEAKERbut continue to work fine in the Tappo app."
46:37SPEAKERSo yes, it's still a lot of vendor siloing.
46:41SPEAKER- So I have some of those Tappo switches
46:43SPEAKERthat I use for like Christmas tree
46:44SPEAKERand Christmas lights around the house.
46:46SPEAKERAnd I had the same exact experience
46:48SPEAKERuntil I paired them with the Home Assistant Matter network,
46:52SPEAKERand then it was fine.
46:53SPEAKERSo your mileage may vary, I guess.
46:55SPEAKER- Yeah, and then she talks about,
46:58SPEAKERyou mentioned some of your devices have upgraded to Matter
47:00SPEAKERthat used to be like what, Bluetooth?
47:02SPEAKER- They were Bluetooth and Zigbee or Bluetooth and HomeKit,
47:05SPEAKERI think is actually what they were,
47:06SPEAKERwhich is like a Zigbee fork, I think.
47:08SPEAKERI can't remember how Apple does that.
47:10SPEAKER- She says, "For example, her Philips Hue hub
47:13SPEAKERhas gotten less reliable since she did the upgrade
47:15SPEAKERto Matter support for it."
47:17SPEAKER- I like, yeah, this is the thing,
47:20SPEAKERthe problem with this thing is everybody is using,
47:24SPEAKERit's up to everybody's implementations, right?
47:26SPEAKERAnd if your hub has a bad implementation,
47:28SPEAKERif your endpoint has a bad implementation,
47:30SPEAKERif you're like, yeah, I just, I'm bummed.
47:35SPEAKER- Yeah, it is a bummer, right?
47:36SPEAKERAnd I was hopeful about this stuff.
47:38SPEAKERAlthough again, because we're deep
47:39SPEAKERinto the Home Assistant rabbit hole,
47:41SPEAKERit kind of covers that use case.
47:43SPEAKER- Well, it covers that use case,
47:44SPEAKERbut it also, like I have Zigbee, Z-Wave and HomeKit.
47:48SPEAKERNo, I don't have HomeKit.
47:49SPEAKERI have Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter and Thread
47:52SPEAKERall running on the same box.
47:53SPEAKERIt's in the center of my house.
47:55SPEAKERIt's powered with power over ethernet.
47:57SPEAKERIt's relatively easy to access and maintain.
48:00SPEAKERBut mostly I just let it sit there
48:01SPEAKERand I update it every couple of months
48:02SPEAKERwhen it gets an update.
48:03SPEAKERAnd then I don't think about it too much.
48:06SPEAKERAnd in that regard, it works exactly the way I want
48:08SPEAKERfor this kind of stuff I just don't want to think about.
48:11SPEAKERI just want it to work.
48:12SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, the one aspect of this
48:14SPEAKERthat is not supported by the Home Assistant use case
48:17SPEAKERis the onboarding, the initial setup for new device.
48:21SPEAKER- Yeah.
48:22SPEAKER- Because you're still, even with Home Assistant,
48:23SPEAKERyou're still, well, unless it's Matter,
48:25SPEAKERit sounds like if it's Matter,
48:26SPEAKERyou're gonna add it straight into Home Assistant, right?
48:28SPEAKERLike you mentioned.
48:29SPEAKER- It has to be Matter out of the box.
48:31SPEAKER- But still, I think I would use the,
48:34SPEAKERon the official app to set up the pairing would be my guess.
48:39SPEAKER- That's the thing I cannot stand, honestly.
48:41SPEAKERThat's the thing, that's the aspect of all of this
48:43SPEAKERthat annoys me the most is just having
48:45SPEAKERlike half a dozen different smart vendor apps on my phone
48:48SPEAKERand having to get a new one
48:49SPEAKERevery time I buy somebody else's product.
48:51SPEAKER- Oh, so I just put them all in a folder
48:52SPEAKERand then never think about it again.
48:53SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, if you don't have to make an account in one,
48:55SPEAKERit's way better, but some of them-
48:57SPEAKER- Well, okay, so I don't buy anything that's cloud mediated,
49:00SPEAKERso I'd never have to do an account.
49:02SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, well, generally, once you do the setup,
49:05SPEAKERonce you, you might wanna go check and make sure-
49:07SPEAKER- I'm gonna look at Wyze.
49:07SPEAKERI think Wyze might have an account, I can't remember,
49:09SPEAKERbut those bulbs were pretty good and they were really cheap.
49:11SPEAKER- I think, I'm pretty sure TP-Link Casa has an account.
49:15SPEAKERI think the Belkin Wemo stuff does as well.
49:17SPEAKERIt's not routing like control signals
49:20SPEAKERfor the devices through the cloud, but it's-
49:22SPEAKER- Yeah.
49:23SPEAKER- But you do have to make an account
49:24SPEAKERjust to get past the app onboarding
49:26SPEAKERto let it actually pair something.
49:27SPEAKER- I have a Casa account, I have a Wyze account.
49:29SPEAKER- Yep, all that stuff sucks.
49:31SPEAKER- It doesn't bother me.
49:32SPEAKERI try not to worry about it too much.
49:34SPEAKERThe thing, so the thing that I found,
49:37SPEAKERI was early on Zigbee and bought a whole bunch
49:39SPEAKERof Cree Zigbee bulbs, which were great.
49:42SPEAKERWhen they started clunking out about 10 and 12 years in,
49:45SPEAKERI replaced them all with wifi bulbs because the wifi,
49:49SPEAKERI have, turns out I've spent a fair amount of money and time
49:52SPEAKERbuilding a really robust wifi network
49:54SPEAKERthat covers the entirety of my house.
49:57SPEAKERAnd it was infinitely more reliable than Zigbee radios
50:01SPEAKERin what are often metallic fixtures
50:05SPEAKERthat would block Zigbee with radio signals.
50:09SPEAKERAnd as a result, I would have bad radio drop off
50:13SPEAKERon the far side of the house
50:14SPEAKERand light bulbs would just stop working.
50:16SPEAKERSo once I switched to wifi, I haven't had that problem.
50:18SPEAKER- Yeah, that's fair.
50:19SPEAKERI mean, I guess your average house is just inherently
50:21SPEAKERgonna have way better wifi coverage.
50:23SPEAKERThen it's not like you're gonna put multiple Zigbee radios
50:25SPEAKERall over the house, right?
50:26SPEAKERAlthough, or it is a mesh network, so I guess.
50:28SPEAKER- I mean, theoretically, each of those bulbs
50:30SPEAKERshould have been a note on the mesh.
50:32SPEAKERIn reality, there's a limited number of hops
50:34SPEAKERyou can do with Zigbee.
50:35SPEAKERZigbee's I think better than Z-Wave.
50:37SPEAKERZ-Wave is like four hops or something ridiculous.
50:41SPEAKERBut in practical terms, when somebody would walk across
50:45SPEAKERor sit in a different place in the house,
50:47SPEAKERthe light at the far corner of my daughter's bedroom,
50:50SPEAKERwhich was as far from the Zigbee radios you would get,
50:52SPEAKERwould just stop responding.
50:54SPEAKERAnd it happened often enough.
50:55SPEAKERAnd then because of the age of those bulbs probably,
50:58SPEAKERwhen it stopped responding for, or lost signal
51:01SPEAKERin a frequent enough period of time,
51:05SPEAKERit would eventually need a reset to come back on.
51:08SPEAKERAnd I got tired of doing the leave it on for a second,
51:11SPEAKERleave it off for two seconds, leave it on for a second,
51:13SPEAKERleave it off for two seconds, leave it on for a second,
51:15SPEAKERleave it off for two seconds thing five times
51:18SPEAKERto reset the bulb.
51:20SPEAKERSo I just replaced them all with Wyze bulbs.
51:22SPEAKER- Yeah, that makes sense.
51:23SPEAKERAll of that is good to hear.
51:25SPEAKERI did talk to some people on the Discord
51:27SPEAKERand the home automation channel,
51:28SPEAKERand there are definitely some fans of Zigbee in there.
51:30SPEAKER- I think Zigbee's generally pretty good.
51:32SPEAKER- I don't know, man.
51:33SPEAKERMaybe I should just stick with wifi stuff at this point.
51:36SPEAKER- Here's the thing is if I had a bunch, if you have,
51:39SPEAKERif you're in a situation where you put Zigbee switches
51:42SPEAKERin your wall that serve as mesh nodes and as mesh routers,
51:46SPEAKERI think it's pretty solid.
51:49SPEAKERThe wiring in my house is old.
51:50SPEAKERSo all of our wires are two pole wires.
51:53SPEAKERThere's not a neutral wire.
51:54SPEAKERSo that means I couldn't run any modern switches
51:57SPEAKERbasically in this house.
52:00SPEAKERSo there's a Lutron cassette makes some two wire switches.
52:05SPEAKERThey're not Zigbee.
52:07SPEAKERThere were some GE Z-Wave switches that were two pole wires
52:12SPEAKERthat were a little scary.
52:14SPEAKERThey don't make those anymore.
52:15SPEAKERThey're really hard to find.
52:16SPEAKERThey got really expensive after they stopped making them.
52:19SPEAKERThat's pretty much it.
52:20SPEAKERSo the option for Zigbee mesh nodes was big giant wall warts
52:25SPEAKERthat dangle out of the wall to plug appliances
52:29SPEAKERor other things in.
52:30SPEAKERAnd I ended up just putting a couple of those
52:32SPEAKERin like disused plugs in corners of the house
52:35SPEAKERso that I would get a solid enough network
52:37SPEAKERso that my daughter's light would turn off at bedtime.
52:39SPEAKER- Literally just using them as repeaters.
52:41SPEAKERYou don't even have anything in them?
52:42SPEAKER- Straight up just repeaters, yeah.
52:44SPEAKERSo I was just burning electricity to make the radio better.
52:47SPEAKERAnd like I said, the wifi network's real good.
52:49SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
52:51SPEAKERDo you have any concern about,
52:52SPEAKERI don't know how well you can speak to this.
52:54SPEAKERLike if you reach a certain critical mass
52:56SPEAKERof internet of shit and devices on your wifi,
52:58SPEAKERlike at some point your wifi network is just,
53:00SPEAKERthe wifi radio I should say is fairly crowded.
53:03SPEAKER- Yeah, the bulbs are low traffic enough
53:05SPEAKERthat I don't really care.
53:07SPEAKER- That's fair.
53:08SPEAKER- I can open up my UniFi console
53:09SPEAKERand tell you how much traffic the average bulb does.
53:12SPEAKERBut it wasn't, when I looked, it was not very much.
53:17SPEAKER- It's probably not a lot.
53:18SPEAKERI mean, there's gotta be some kind of like
53:19SPEAKERfairly regular keep alive kind of signal
53:22SPEAKERgoing back and forth though, right?
53:23SPEAKER- Yeah, but I think it's like,
53:26SPEAKERI don't think it was very many packets, hold on.
53:28SPEAKER- Probably not.
53:29SPEAKERMaybe I'm overthinking that aspect of it.
53:31SPEAKEROr maybe like, I mean, that was a concern
53:33SPEAKERthat was raised on the Discord
53:34SPEAKERwas not cluttering up your wifi network with this stuff.
53:37SPEAKER- The one problem I will tell you is
53:39SPEAKERI'm getting close to the number of,
53:41SPEAKERI'm gonna have to move into a second subnet
53:43SPEAKERbefore too, too long.
53:44SPEAKER- Interesting, wow.
53:45SPEAKER- 'Cause I'm gonna be more than 200, well.
53:47SPEAKER- What's the size of your address range?
53:48SPEAKER- I mean, there's-
53:49SPEAKER- Talking to what, 8-bit subnet mask?
53:51SPEAKER- It's a, yes, 180.
53:55SPEAKER- What is that, 255 addresses?
53:57SPEAKER- Yeah, but I have some fixed IPs reserved at the front
54:02SPEAKERfor reasons that I don't remember.
54:03SPEAKERI just don't, I don't remember what they are now.
54:05SPEAKERSo I'm afraid to mess with them.
54:06SPEAKER- Maybe you can just release them and see what happens.
54:08SPEAKERIf nothing breaks, you're fine.
54:10SPEAKER- Also have, I also have, okay, so here's a wise bulb.
54:14SPEAKERI can tell you how much data it uses now.
54:18SPEAKERIt has, in the last 16 hours and one minute,
54:23SPEAKERit's done, I'm trying to find where the,
54:27SPEAKERoh, 1,250 packets for 101 kilobytes down
54:33SPEAKERand 4,490 packets for 270 kilobytes up.
54:37SPEAKER- That's not a lot of data.
54:38SPEAKERI mean, I wonder if it's more the interval
54:39SPEAKERthat it's actually touching the radio
54:41SPEAKERrather than the amount of data
54:42SPEAKERthat it's sending that matters there,
54:43SPEAKERbut either way, that doesn't seem like much.
54:45SPEAKER- Yeah, it's not much.
54:47SPEAKERThe bigger problem is the congestion on the subnet.
54:52SPEAKERSo yeah, you could put all this stuff
54:54SPEAKERin a separate VLAN if you wanted.
54:57SPEAKER- Again, like we mentioned at the top,
54:58SPEAKERyou probably should do that anyway.
55:00SPEAKERI've been meaning to do that for ages
55:01SPEAKERand just haven't done the homework.
55:02SPEAKER- So I generally just buy stuff from reputable places.
55:05SPEAKERI don't buy a bunch of like sketchy Teemu
55:08SPEAKERor AliExpress wifi devices, internet of things devices.
55:13SPEAKERBut yeah, I mean, there is,
55:16SPEAKERa lot of this stuff has firmware that's released
55:18SPEAKERand then is never looked at again
55:21SPEAKERand security vulnerabilities aren't patched or whatever.
55:23SPEAKERSo it is a concern.
55:26SPEAKER- Yes, everything I've got is,
55:28SPEAKERit's all iDevices, Belkin and TBLink,
55:30SPEAKERexcept for I've got one kind of no name.
55:33SPEAKERIt is a home, well, it's HomeKit enabled.
55:35SPEAKERIt isn't iHaper.
55:37SPEAKERI think it's how-
55:38SPEAKER- It has a security chip that is probably fine.
55:40SPEAKER- H-A-P-E-R, which is now defunct.
55:42SPEAKERLike you can't even find anything about that company.
55:43SPEAKERI've had it for like five years.
55:45SPEAKERIt's like kind of a no name light strip, LED light strip.
55:48SPEAKERBut it is HomeKit enabled unless they found some way
55:51SPEAKERto spoof the HomeKit, required HomeKit hardware.
55:53SPEAKER- There you go.
55:54SPEAKER- I assume it is legit enough that it's probably fine.
55:58SPEAKERBut yeah, you're right.
55:59SPEAKERI think most of the stuff I have
56:00SPEAKERis pretty reputable as well.
56:03SPEAKERI have thought about replacing that light strip with the,
56:05SPEAKERyou know, you can just buy the kind of light strip
56:07SPEAKERby the foot, LED strips by the foot.
56:09SPEAKER- Yeah, I love those.
56:10SPEAKER- And cut those and get like the little ESP 32 controllers.
56:12SPEAKER- Uh-huh.
56:13SPEAKER- Kind of, I thought, I have thought about getting away
56:15SPEAKERinto that stuff, but at any rate.
56:18SPEAKER- I think we just had an earthquake.
56:19SPEAKER- Whoa, I didn't feel anything.
56:21SPEAKERLive earthquake reacts.
56:23SPEAKERWhat is your go-to, what's your go-to geological source
56:26SPEAKERfor was there just an earthquake?
56:27SPEAKER- I go to USGS.
56:29SPEAKERFirst I post on Blue Sky, was there just an earthquake?
56:32SPEAKER- That was my method for years was run to Twitter
56:34SPEAKERand see if everybody's going to earthquake.
56:36SPEAKER- Look, I want my last thing,
56:38SPEAKERmy last thing that happened to be me asking
56:41SPEAKERif there was an earthquake.
56:43SPEAKER- I just, it sounded like a bus driving by
56:45SPEAKERand there was a little bit of a rumble.
56:46SPEAKER- Oh.
56:47SPEAKER- But I didn't feel a whole lot.
56:50SPEAKERIt could have also just been a bus driving by USGS.
56:54SPEAKER- Yes, where is San Juan Batista?
56:57SPEAKER- That's pretty far South.
56:58SPEAKERIt's like by Hetman Bay.
57:00SPEAKERThat's closer to me than you though.
57:01SPEAKER- Oh yeah, it is.
57:02SPEAKERYeah, that is down past Santa Cruz.
57:04SPEAKER- 714 UTC.
57:07SPEAKER- Oh, I didn't look at the time.
57:09SPEAKER- Oh, it was 10 minutes ago.
57:10SPEAKERNo, that's not it.
57:11SPEAKER- Okay.
57:12SPEAKER- Well, who knows?
57:13SPEAKER- We're still in the window for it to be on though.
57:15SPEAKERIt wouldn't have hit.
57:16SPEAKERYeah, it usually takes a minute or two.
57:18SPEAKER- Stay tuned as earthquake watch continues.
57:23SPEAKERWhat were we talking about?
57:24SPEAKERThose little light strips, the little,
57:27SPEAKERthere's a whole scene around like open source firmware
57:29SPEAKERfor those little ESP controllers.
57:31SPEAKER- There's so much fun stuff you can, like if I,
57:34SPEAKERwhen I move into the next house,
57:36SPEAKERI'm going to run those all under the edge
57:39SPEAKERof the kitchen cabinets.
57:40SPEAKER- Yes.
57:41SPEAKER- Because I want more lighting on my,
57:42SPEAKERI'm old and my eyes are bad and I want lighting there.
57:45SPEAKER- Great.
57:46SPEAKER- Yeah.
57:47SPEAKER- To be able to, especially if you set that up
57:48SPEAKERon like motion sensors or even if it was just on your phone
57:51SPEAKERor standard stuff, but like having like nice out of the way
57:54SPEAKERunder lighting where you're not actually staring
57:55SPEAKERat the bulb, but you still get the good kind of ambient
57:57SPEAKERbounce light and off under cabinets and stuff.
58:00SPEAKER- Have you seen, have you seen the new hotness
58:02SPEAKERon internet of shit stuff?
58:04SPEAKER- No.
58:05SPEAKER- Present sensors that use wifi radios signals as radar.
58:10SPEAKER- Oh.
58:11SPEAKER- So they can tell like where you are in the house,
58:14SPEAKERwhere you are in the room.
58:15SPEAKER- Wow.
58:16SPEAKER- Whether you're like laying on the sofa,
58:17SPEAKERwhether you're sitting up, whether you're awake or asleep.
58:20SPEAKER- Oh.
58:21SPEAKER- It's a little creepy.
58:22SPEAKER- Oh, definitely put that on its own VLAN.
58:25SPEAKER- Well, yeah, 'cause it just needs ambient wifi.
58:28SPEAKERIt doesn't, it doesn't need, it's not actually using data.
58:30SPEAKERIt's just using the radar, the radio as radar.
58:34SPEAKERIt's basically replacing motion sensors.
58:36SPEAKERThey're just little like puck things you put in the ceiling.
58:38SPEAKER- That's kind of cool.
58:40SPEAKER- It's honestly, it's the thing I've always wanted
58:43SPEAKER'cause they're more sensitive
58:44SPEAKERand they're like sensitive enough
58:45SPEAKERto detect moving a mouse or something.
58:47SPEAKER'Cause often I'll be in my office
58:49SPEAKERand the motion sensor isn't sensitive enough to detect that.
58:51SPEAKERSo it just turns off the lights in here after a while.
58:54SPEAKERAnd I would, I'm thinking I'm gonna put some in the house.
58:58SPEAKER- Yes, I've never really been big on setting up automations
59:01SPEAKERagainst motion sensing 'cause I just feel
59:02SPEAKERlike there are way too many edge cases
59:04SPEAKERwhere I wouldn't want the thing.
59:05SPEAKER- It's not great.
59:06SPEAKER- Like every single time you open a door,
59:08SPEAKERhaving a light come on, I don't think I want that actually.
59:11SPEAKER- So I have a door sensor on our back door.
59:14SPEAKEREvery time you go out the back door and it's after dark,
59:16SPEAKERthe back porch light turns on, which is awesome.
59:19SPEAKERThere's also a physical switch right next to there.
59:20SPEAKERSo if I don't want that happening,
59:21SPEAKERyou just flip the switch off before you go out.
59:23SPEAKER- Yeah, that's good.
59:24SPEAKER- The other one was when the kiddo was young,
59:29SPEAKERhaving a motion sensor in the master bedroom
59:33SPEAKERwhere we'd take her out of the bath to dry her off
59:35SPEAKERand get her dressed for bed was incredibly useful
59:38SPEAKER'cause you have a baby and a bunch of shit in your hands
59:41SPEAKERand you just walk in and the light turns on.
59:42SPEAKERThat was really nice.
59:44SPEAKER- Yeah, there are use cases.
59:45SPEAKER- But that's what I got.
59:46SPEAKER- Yeah, home automation, it's still in progress.
59:52SPEAKER- So here's the thing.
59:54SPEAKERWe're at the end of basically the first year or 18 months
59:56SPEAKERthat this stuff has been shipping.
59:58SPEAKER- Yeah, I should say the write-up from 2E on The Verge
1:00:02SPEAKERand also the Kevin Purdy on Ars Technica.
1:00:05SPEAKERI read some stuff from him.
1:00:06SPEAKERBoth of them conclude by saying,
1:00:08SPEAKERyes, this stuff is all a giant mess,
1:00:09SPEAKERbut we're still hopeful that this is going to be
1:00:12SPEAKERthe standard of the future in X number of years.
1:00:16SPEAKER- The thing I will say is it took a good 10 years
1:00:20SPEAKERbefore Z-Wave was usable at all.
1:00:24SPEAKERIt launched, it was terrible when it was new.
1:00:27SPEAKERZigbee took a similar length of time.
1:00:32SPEAKERThe interoperability adds a level of complexity
1:00:35SPEAKERthat goes far beyond what Zigbee and Z-Wave were able to do.
1:00:38SPEAKERI think that there are bugs with complicated things
1:00:43SPEAKERlike the mesh, the devices connected to the mesh
1:00:48SPEAKERspreading out from one vendor to another vendor's networks
1:00:52SPEAKERand vice versa, doesn't surprise me.
1:00:54SPEAKERI think it's really, really unfortunate that the hubs,
1:00:58SPEAKERthat the default for every single edge router isn't,
1:01:05SPEAKERhey, is there a thread network here
1:01:08SPEAKERthat I need to connect to?
1:01:09SPEAKERMaybe there is, and then connect to that
1:01:12SPEAKERrather than just setting up their own stake in the ground.
1:01:14SPEAKER- Yeah, that's terrible.
1:01:16SPEAKER- That is a dopey decision that should be rectified.
1:01:18SPEAKER- Yes, I will say though, the danger of all these,
1:01:21SPEAKEReven if these problems are understandable
1:01:22SPEAKERat this early date, the danger is creating
1:01:25SPEAKERthis kind of retroactive chicken and egg situation
1:01:27SPEAKERwhere because it's a mess early on, nobody adopts it,
1:01:30SPEAKERnobody buys in and the manufacturers get scared
1:01:33SPEAKERand they all back off from it.
1:01:34SPEAKER- Not worried about that at all.
1:01:35SPEAKERNope, they've sold enough stuff already, we're fine.
1:01:39SPEAKERPeople are gonna be, yeah, 'cause here's the thing,
1:01:42SPEAKERit's in everybody's, it's in the manufacturer's interest
1:01:44SPEAKERfor this to work, 'cause then, 'cause if it doesn't,
1:01:48SPEAKERlike if there's competition and there's room
1:01:51SPEAKERfor other devices on your networks,
1:01:54SPEAKERthen there's opportunity for Apple to eat
1:01:56SPEAKERinto Google and Samsung Share and Google and Samsung
1:02:00SPEAKERto eat into Apple Share.
1:02:02SPEAKERIf they don't, if this doesn't work,
1:02:04SPEAKERthen that opportunity goes away and there's just gonna be
1:02:06SPEAKERtwo silos forever and ever and there's never an opportunity
1:02:09SPEAKERfor Google to capture iPhone users and Apple
1:02:12SPEAKERto capture Google users and the silos get deeper and deeper.
1:02:17SPEAKERSo they're gonna continue pushing it and they're right to.
1:02:20SPEAKERIt's gonna take a while, it's gonna suck for a little bit.
1:02:22SPEAKERIt'll be fine eventually, read reviews.
1:02:25SPEAKER- Yeah, so it just leaves you in a weird limbo right now
1:02:27SPEAKERif you're looking for new stuff and not sure what to get.
1:02:30SPEAKER- I mean, what I will say is a much smaller sample size
1:02:33SPEAKERthan the people that we talked about who write about this
1:02:36SPEAKERhave, but with the handful of devices I've used,
1:02:38SPEAKERthe Home Assistant implementation has been pretty good
1:02:41SPEAKERand it just works with the other stuff automatically.
1:02:43SPEAKERSo your mileage may vary, I guess.
1:02:47SPEAKER- That's promising.
1:02:48SPEAKER- Yeah, and that's as good a place as any, I think,
1:02:51SPEAKERto wrap it up this week.
1:02:52SPEAKERPlease let us know what you think about the twofer.
1:02:54SPEAKERIf you do, we will do these more.
1:02:56SPEAKERIf you like these, we'll do it more often.
1:02:57SPEAKERI think it's nice to be able to talk about things
1:02:59SPEAKERthat maybe couldn't sustain a whole episode on their own.
1:03:02SPEAKER- Yeah, I agree.
1:03:04SPEAKER- But we will be back next week with more
1:03:06SPEAKERof Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
1:03:07SPEAKERAs always, this podcast is brought to you by the listeners.
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1:03:34SPEAKERhow to support the show, you can go to patreon.com/techpod,
1:03:37SPEAKERwhere for five bucks a month,
1:03:38SPEAKERyou get access to the fabulous Tech Pod Discord,
1:03:41SPEAKERwhich is full of beautiful nerds,
1:03:43SPEAKEReven though they're advocating the use of Z-Wave,
1:03:45SPEAKERwhich I strongly disagree with.
1:03:47SPEAKER- To be fair, I think it was like one person
1:03:49SPEAKERwho was in on Z-Wave, most everybody.
1:03:51SPEAKERMost everybody was into Zigbee.
1:03:52SPEAKER- I'm not gonna pick on the Zigbee or the Z-Wave people,
1:03:55SPEAKERbut I'm just gonna say, we sometimes disagree,
1:03:57SPEAKERbut I still love each and every person in there.
1:04:01SPEAKERAnd for, like I said, five bucks a month,
1:04:03SPEAKERyou get access to that, you get the patron-exclusive episode
1:04:05SPEAKERwhere we've been threatening to talk about hell divers,
1:04:07SPEAKERbut haven't yet.
1:04:10SPEAKER- Oh my God, this flying enemy thing is so amazing.
1:04:13SPEAKER- I haven't seen the flying enemies yet.
1:04:15SPEAKER- I haven't seen the enemies either,
1:04:16SPEAKERbut the way they are handling it is-
1:04:18SPEAKER- You mean the fact that we're forcing the bugs to evolve
1:04:22SPEAKERby killing them more efficiently with the gas?
1:04:24SPEAKER- It's specifically, it's this weird plausible deniability
1:04:27SPEAKERstealth update thing they're doing,
1:04:28SPEAKERwhere they snuck them into the game without telling anybody,
1:04:30SPEAKERand then when people started finding them,
1:04:32SPEAKERand it seems like they're finding them sporadically,
1:04:34SPEAKERlike the spawn rate is quite low,
1:04:36SPEAKERand then the developers are basically denying
1:04:37SPEAKERthat they're in the game.
1:04:39SPEAKER- I don't know how I feel
1:04:40SPEAKERabout the developers gaslighting players.
1:04:42SPEAKER- I think it's, I mean, considering-
1:04:44SPEAKER- It fits with the brand, it fits with the game.
1:04:46SPEAKER- Considering the political milieu
1:04:47SPEAKERthat the game is lampooning,
1:04:49SPEAKERI think propaganda that turns truth on its head
1:04:53SPEAKERprobably makes perfect sense.
1:04:54SPEAKER- Did you see the propaganda on YouTube,
1:04:55SPEAKERwhere somebody, data miners pulled an upcoming video
1:05:01SPEAKERthat explained, spoilers I guess for "Helldivers 2,"
1:05:04SPEAKERif you care, come back in 45 seconds.
1:05:07SPEAKERThe bugs, the gassing that we're doing
1:05:10SPEAKERof the bugs right now is causing them to evolve,
1:05:13SPEAKERso we're gonna get new varieties of bugs that are super bugs
1:05:16SPEAKERbecause of the gassing that's happening
1:05:18SPEAKERacross all the planets.
1:05:20SPEAKER- They seem like they went into this game with some ideas.
1:05:26SPEAKER- This game has most ideas per gigabyte
1:05:31SPEAKERI've seen in a video game in a long time.
1:05:32SPEAKER- Yeah, it's pretty exciting.
1:05:34SPEAKER- Anyway, thanks to all of our patrons.
1:05:36SPEAKERYou can go to patreon.com/checkpod.
1:05:38SPEAKERLike I said, five bucks a month.
1:05:39SPEAKERWe appreciate everyone's support,
1:05:41SPEAKERbut we especially appreciate our executive producers,
1:05:43SPEAKERyour patrons, including Paddle Creek Games,
1:05:45SPEAKERMakers of Fractured Veil, which is out now.
1:05:47SPEAKERYou should check it out.
1:05:49SPEAKERI believe it is pretty good.
1:05:50SPEAKER- Oh, cool.
1:05:51SPEAKER- Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippitt, tech.bunnycrimes.com.
1:05:55SPEAKERThat's a URL now.
1:05:57SPEAKERJust Wedge, Joel Krauska, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen,
1:06:00SPEAKERJames Kamik, and Pantheon,
1:06:02SPEAKERmakers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer.
1:06:04SPEAKER- I'm sorry, can you repeat that URL again?
1:06:07SPEAKER- Tech.bunnycrimes.com.
1:06:09SPEAKER- Okay, it's pretty good.
1:06:11SPEAKER- It's pretty good.
1:06:12SPEAKERDid you go to it?
1:06:15SPEAKERMaybe.
1:06:16SPEAKERI'm going now.
1:06:17SPEAKERThat'll do it for us this week.
1:06:18SPEAKERThanks everybody for your support,
1:06:20SPEAKERand we will see you all next week.
1:06:23SPEAKER(upbeat music)