00:00SPEAKER- Sounds like you've got the old NTFS dirty bit over there.
00:03SPEAKER- Look, the number of times Windows crashes
00:06SPEAKERand I reboot and I reboot into Linux,
00:08SPEAKERI'm like, why the hell is going on?
00:09SPEAKERMy stuff isn't working.
00:11SPEAKERAnd then I look at all my mounts
00:12SPEAKERand all my NTFS mounts are dirty and thus unwriteable.
00:16SPEAKERAnd that causes unpredictable things
00:18SPEAKERfor things like my Steam library is three.
00:21SPEAKERThat's how many times it's happened in the last week.
00:23SPEAKER- Last thing you want is an unclean Windows install.
00:26SPEAKER- I mean, the unclean Windows install,
00:28SPEAKERwe're referencing last week's episode
00:31SPEAKERof Dual Boot Diaries, I guess.
00:32SPEAKER- Which I listened to very excitedly.
00:34SPEAKERThat at some point you mentioned me
00:36SPEAKERand said I must be yelling at my radio,
00:37SPEAKERbut in fact I was not.
00:39SPEAKERI was excitedly listening to what you were talking about
00:41SPEAKERbecause there were like three different things in there.
00:42SPEAKERI was like, oh, I know how to fix that.
00:43SPEAKERI can, I should hit him up.
00:45SPEAKERBut that NTFS dirty bit thing, A, sucks.
00:49SPEAKER- Yeah.
00:50SPEAKER- B can be fixed with a single command.
00:52SPEAKER- Oh, can you fix it without having to boot
00:53SPEAKERback into Windows?
00:54SPEAKER- All it is is a flag being set on the NTFS volume
00:57SPEAKERthat says this was not mounted,
00:59SPEAKERthis was not unmounted or shut down properly.
01:00SPEAKERLike don't remount it 'cause it might be fucked up.
01:03SPEAKERYou literally can run one command
01:04SPEAKERto just clear that flag and then it's fine.
01:06SPEAKER- Oh my God.
01:07SPEAKER- That would have fixed all your problems.
01:09SPEAKERYou just needed to boot into something that you could run.
01:11SPEAKER- Well, okay, so that, the dirty bit
01:14SPEAKERwasn't what caused me to reinstall Windows.
01:16SPEAKERThe thing that caused me to reinstall Windows
01:18SPEAKERwas that I messed up the boot partition
01:19SPEAKERand I didn't, rather than just fixing it the easy way
01:23SPEAKERby booting into the Windows installer and doing that,
01:26SPEAKERwhich I did the second time it broke.
01:28SPEAKER- Yeah, so that was another, I guess,
01:29SPEAKERI didn't know you can use the installer for this,
01:31SPEAKERbut you can also just make a Windows recovery USB stick
01:34SPEAKERthat will do stuff like that for you.
01:35SPEAKERSo that was another, again, I wasn't yelling at the radio.
01:38SPEAKERI was like excitedly going,
01:39SPEAKER"Oh, I need to tell him about a thing."
01:42SPEAKERI forget how you do it, you can Google this,
01:43SPEAKERbut there is a way to create a Windows recovery USB
01:46SPEAKERfrom within Windows and then you just boot off of that
01:48SPEAKERin the future when you have boot problems in Windows
01:50SPEAKERand it will fix those.
01:52SPEAKER- Honestly, the automatic startup repair thing
01:54SPEAKERhas never once worked for me in the last,
01:57SPEAKERsince they implemented it like 15 years ago, 20 years ago,
02:00SPEAKERbut you can do it manually.
02:01SPEAKERLike you can just wipe that partition entirely
02:03SPEAKERand then create a new MBR or new UEFI boot thing
02:08SPEAKERand then it's doable.
02:10SPEAKER- Yeah, this is from people on our Linux channel.
02:12SPEAKERLike the purpose of that thing
02:13SPEAKERis to fix broken Windows bootloader.
02:15SPEAKER- Yeah.
02:16SPEAKER- So I would recommend go making one of those.
02:18SPEAKER- I like it.
02:19SPEAKER- Yeah, there's something else, but I've forgotten what it was.
02:22SPEAKER- I had to get up this morning
02:23SPEAKERjust before we started this podcast
02:25SPEAKERbecause I have had an outstanding project
02:27SPEAKERthat I haven't done yet.
02:28SPEAKER- That is.
02:29SPEAKER- And I had to walk into the room with the thermostat
02:31SPEAKERand manually reach out to it with my hand
02:34SPEAKERand turn the knob.
02:35SPEAKER- Welcome to living like us commoners.
02:37SPEAKER- I don't know how I'm gonna deal with this.
02:39SPEAKERI gotta, look, I gotta install a couple of Docker containers
02:43SPEAKERand then I gotta flash some firmware.
02:46SPEAKERIt's all pretty rote, pretty straightforward.
02:49SPEAKER- That's modern living.
02:50SPEAKERJust gotta install a couple of Docker,
02:51SPEAKERset up a couple of Docker containers to run your thermostat.
02:55SPEAKER- Look, it's not a large house, I realize that.
02:57SPEAKERIt's like no more than maybe 15 steps to the thermostat
02:59SPEAKERfrom anywhere in the house.
03:01SPEAKERBut when I'm sitting here at my desk
03:03SPEAKERand I have to get up and I mean,
03:05SPEAKERI guess I have wireless headphones,
03:06SPEAKERso I don't have to take my headphones off again anymore.
03:08SPEAKERSeems pretty lazy when I think about it, really.
03:11SPEAKER- Nope.
03:12SPEAKERLook, I'm sitting here thinking about
03:13SPEAKERbuying a Switch 2 controller and selecting for controllers
03:16SPEAKERby which ones will wake up the system from the couch
03:19SPEAKER'cause not all of them do that still.
03:20SPEAKER- I like those 8BitDo ones, 8BitDo ones.
03:23SPEAKER- Yeah, those are shake to wake,
03:26SPEAKERwhich I'm not sure how I feel about it.
03:27SPEAKER- Shake to wake the controller?
03:29SPEAKER- No, you know, to wake the system.
03:30SPEAKERSo the, is it 8BitDo or 8BitDo?
03:33SPEAKER- Adam says do.
03:34SPEAKER- Yes, that's where I, a decade of verbal muscle memory
03:40SPEAKERwas called into question when I heard him saying 8BitDo
03:42SPEAKERrecently, but it sounded like he,
03:43SPEAKERit sounded like he had that on good authority,
03:45SPEAKERso I'm inclined to think he's right.
03:47SPEAKER- I believe he's had meetings with them before.
03:49SPEAKER- Yeah, so I think that's probably actually the case,
03:51SPEAKERbut anyway, the recent 8BitDo controllers
03:54SPEAKERwith a firmware update will wake the Switch 2,
03:56SPEAKERbut not with a button.
03:58SPEAKERYou pick the controller up and shake it,
04:00SPEAKERwhich offends my digital input sensibilities.
04:03SPEAKER- My ultimate Bluetooth controller,
04:06SPEAKERwhich is the controller I've used for the Switch 1
04:08SPEAKERand Switch 2 is plugged in, like it has a little dock,
04:13SPEAKERand the dock has one of their 2.4 gigahertz dongles in.
04:17SPEAKER- Into the Switch?
04:18SPEAKER- No, it's into the bottom of the dock.
04:20SPEAKER- Right, but I mean, we're talking about the Switch,
04:21SPEAKERnot PC. - Plugging into the Switch
04:22SPEAKERand now the Switch 2.
04:23SPEAKERI also use it for the Steam Deck, honestly.
04:25SPEAKER- Maybe that's different.
04:26SPEAKERIt might be different using that dongle.
04:28SPEAKER- So yeah, when you use the dongle,
04:30SPEAKERit shows up as a wired controller,
04:31SPEAKERso you just press the center button like anything else.
04:33SPEAKER- That would be the different,
04:34SPEAKERoh, I didn't know you could use a 2.4 gigahertz for that.
04:36SPEAKER- Uh-huh, it's great. - Interesting.
04:38SPEAKERI think the shake to wake was strictly over Bluetooth,
04:40SPEAKERlike if you connect it as a Bluetooth controller
04:42SPEAKERas if it's a pro controller or something.
04:44SPEAKER- Why would that work when the button doesn't, though?
04:46SPEAKERThat's ridiculous. - I don't know, I have no idea.
04:48SPEAKERIt's the weirdest thing.
04:49SPEAKERApparently even the Switch 1 pro controller
04:51SPEAKERwill not wake the Switch 2.
04:53SPEAKER- Yeah, I knew that, yeah.
04:55SPEAKER- Speaking of not getting up to do things,
04:58SPEAKERthis is important functionality.
05:01SPEAKER- I've thought about moving my Switch 2 dock
05:04SPEAKERto the other side of the room.
05:05SPEAKERI think we talked about this on the podcast a few weeks ago.
05:07SPEAKER- Oh yes, the subterranean HDMI.
05:10SPEAKER- Yeah, the Discord had a lot of ideas.
05:12SPEAKERThey were like, yeah, just run the Discord
05:14SPEAKERaround underneath, I mean, the HDMI around underneath.
05:17SPEAKERGet a one-way fiber HDMI.
05:20SPEAKERYou can poke a tiny hole through
05:22SPEAKERand put the ends on when you get set up,
05:25SPEAKERand then you're good to go.
05:27SPEAKERAnd I was like, that does sound pretty good.
05:28SPEAKERAnd then I looked at what those fiber HDMI cables cost,
05:30SPEAKERand I was like, I don't have 'em to pay that much, so.
05:32SPEAKER- Yeah, well, I mean, I got one for pretty cheap,
05:34SPEAKERlike 50 bucks.
05:35SPEAKERThe problem is it doesn't work.
05:36SPEAKER- Yeah, that seems bad.
05:37SPEAKER- I was actually just Googling about this the other day
05:39SPEAKERbecause I am back to wanting to play PC games
05:42SPEAKERin the living room again recently,
05:44SPEAKERand every single fiber HDMI cable you can find out there
05:48SPEAKERis just nothing but people going,
05:49SPEAKERand I had the same experience.
05:50SPEAKERI bought two of them, and they both had the same thing.
05:52SPEAKERLike, oh, this works,
05:52SPEAKERbut it drops connection every three minutes.
05:54SPEAKERLike, I lose picture for five to 10 seconds
05:57SPEAKERwhile it tries to re-handshake every couple of minutes,
05:59SPEAKERand it's just, it's so close to being there,
06:02SPEAKERbut it's not quite there.
06:03SPEAKER- Let me get you to share the good word
06:05SPEAKERabout moonlight and sunshine.
06:06SPEAKER- Yeah, I just need to get something
06:08SPEAKERthat can run moonlight properly.
06:10SPEAKERMy TV sure ain't cutting it.
06:12SPEAKER(upbeat music)
06:40SPEAKER- Welcome to "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod."
06:42SPEAKERI'm Will.
06:43SPEAKER- I'm Brad.
06:44SPEAKER- Brad.
06:46SPEAKERIt's that time of month again.
06:49SPEAKER- Is it?
06:50SPEAKER- Well, I mean, no, we don't, it's like,
06:52SPEAKERI was just trying, I didn't have anything to say.
06:54SPEAKERI don't have a baby rejoinder for this one.
06:56SPEAKERWe are-
06:57SPEAKER- It's that time of month when stuff is happening.
06:59SPEAKER- Yeah, stuff and things have happened.
07:01SPEAKER- Turns out to be kind of all times of month, actually.
07:04SPEAKER- Yeah, we have, I don't know,
07:07SPEAKERit's not exactly a news roundup.
07:09SPEAKERIt's kind of a deeper dive into some things
07:11SPEAKERwe've talked about a little bit before, some new things.
07:16SPEAKERSo we're doing a threefer here.
07:18SPEAKERWe're gonna talk more about DDR prices
07:19SPEAKER'cause some new stuff has come to light
07:21SPEAKERand some new things are happening
07:22SPEAKERand none of it's good for people
07:25SPEAKERwho like to build computers.
07:26SPEAKER- I know we just talked about this recently,
07:28SPEAKERalthough then it was a little more on a focus
07:30SPEAKERon the impending storage pricing crisis
07:32SPEAKERthat seems to be coming and not the current DDR prices,
07:35SPEAKERbut some shit has gone down in the last day
07:39SPEAKERthat was so extreme
07:41SPEAKERthat we kind of couldn't not talk about it some more.
07:45SPEAKER- Well, and I think that there's some more,
07:47SPEAKERI mean, we talked about the downstream stuff before.
07:48SPEAKERWe talked about, well, we'll get into it.
07:52SPEAKERWe're also gonna talk about why the Steam Machine,
07:55SPEAKERValve's new standalone console,
07:58SPEAKERSteam Deck without a screen, basically,
08:01SPEAKERdoesn't have HDMI 2.1.
08:03SPEAKER- Yeah, Earth Technica has done some good reporting
08:05SPEAKERand talking to Valve there.
08:08SPEAKERAnd the answer may surprise you.
08:09SPEAKER- And then I also wanna talk about a thing
08:11SPEAKERthat has bothered me recently as some,
08:15SPEAKERwell, there's been a lot of AI encroaching in places
08:17SPEAKERthat are a pain in the ass to turn off.
08:20SPEAKERSpecifically, I use Firefox.
08:21SPEAKERI've used Firefox for a long time.
08:23SPEAKERI've given Firefox money, Mozilla money in the past.
08:25SPEAKER- Really?
08:26SPEAKER- They came to me and asked for money recently
08:28SPEAKERas basically the same day I went through
08:31SPEAKERa really involved process to turn off all of the AI crap
08:35SPEAKERthat they've added to Firefox.
08:37SPEAKERAnd I didn't give them money.
08:38SPEAKERI'm not giving them money while they're adding AI stuff.
08:40SPEAKERAnd I sent them a note that said that.
08:41SPEAKERSo I would encourage you to do the same
08:42SPEAKERif you feel that way.
08:43SPEAKER- You're not the only Firefox user I know
08:45SPEAKERwho has gone through this same process in the last few days
08:48SPEAKERof jumping through some hoops to pull that shit out of there.
08:51SPEAKER- Yeah, and then the other side of this
08:53SPEAKERis that Sean Hollister at The Verge
08:56SPEAKERhas been writing about Google's AI news bot.
08:59SPEAKERSo this is the thing that creates the headlines in news,
09:01SPEAKERhas been munging up people's headlines
09:04SPEAKERby making AI summaries of the stories into the headlines.
09:07SPEAKERWe'll talk about it.
09:08SPEAKERAnyway, let's kick off with the fun stuff, the DDR prices.
09:13SPEAKER- Yes, fun.
09:14SPEAKER- Hashtag fun.
09:15SPEAKER- I got to tell you, man, I am coming here fresh off of,
09:18SPEAKERthis is early Friday morning that we were recording this.
09:21SPEAKERI'm coming in here fresh off of having watched
09:23SPEAKERGamers Nexus' new video, which just went up
09:24SPEAKERearly this morning.
09:25SPEAKER- Yeah, Steve has feelings about this.
09:27SPEAKER- In which, man, Steve is on one in that video
09:30SPEAKERlike I have not seen before.
09:32SPEAKERHe is seriously at his most CNBC, like Jim Cramer,
09:35SPEAKERrant-ist that I have ever seen.
09:38SPEAKERLike he is really just going at it.
09:40SPEAKER- The difference is that Steve understands
09:43SPEAKERthe things he's talking about and I don't think
09:44SPEAKERJim Cramer ever has.
09:45SPEAKER- To be clear, I am very specifically talking about
09:47SPEAKERthe presentation style, not the content,
09:49SPEAKER'cause I would not credit Jim Cramer
09:53SPEAKERin terms of expertise in any way,
09:54SPEAKERbut it was very much the ranting about the merger
09:58SPEAKERof government and industry and the screwing over,
10:02SPEAKERif not full-on destruction of the American consumer.
10:05SPEAKER- Yeah, so the thing, we talked about this
10:08SPEAKERa little bit a couple weeks ago when it first started
10:10SPEAKERcoming to light and prices started going up,
10:12SPEAKERbut there's a global RAM shortage caused by the rise
10:17SPEAKERof AI data, so the incredible amount of AI data center
10:20SPEAKERgrowth that's happening right now.
10:22SPEAKER- Yeah, can I real quick jump in here?
10:23SPEAKERI know AI is A, definitely culpable for a lot of the stuff,
10:28SPEAKERand B, also kind of the most obvious target,
10:30SPEAKERbut we should probably be clear here,
10:33SPEAKEReven if the AI bubble bursts tomorrow,
10:36SPEAKERdata centers are not going away.
10:39SPEAKERData centers run all of the services that everybody
10:41SPEAKERin the world uses constantly now,
10:42SPEAKERso this seems like it's going to be some degree of problem,
10:46SPEAKERwhether or not the AI business sticks around
10:49SPEAKERin some ongoing fashion.
10:50SPEAKER- There's a large difference in scale, though.
10:52SPEAKERThis is a Wendell topic over level one techs,
10:56SPEAKERbut the construction of AI data centers
10:59SPEAKERrequires a ton more power, and because of the way those,
11:05SPEAKERespecially the ones that they're using to train models work,
11:09SPEAKERthey need an incredible amount of RAM
11:11SPEAKERcompared to a normal data center that's a bunch of servers
11:14SPEAKERthat are sliced up into virtual servers, basically.
11:16SPEAKER- That's fair, even when you see people out there
11:18SPEAKERtalking about speccing out home AI workstations
11:21SPEAKERfor training workloads and so forth,
11:23SPEAKERyou see them talking about buying 128 gig of RAM,
11:26SPEAKER256 gig of RAM.
11:27SPEAKER- Yeah, and those big racks, I can't remember
11:31SPEAKERwhat the big racks that NVIDIA cells have,
11:33SPEAKERbut I want to say it was something like four terabytes
11:35SPEAKERof RAM for a full-height data center rack, right?
11:42SPEAKERSo the thing about RAM, and I apologize
11:45SPEAKER'cause I've talked about this multiple places,
11:47SPEAKERand I'm not sure I remember how much we got into it here,
11:50SPEAKERbut the thing about RAM is there's three companies
11:53SPEAKERthat make RAM, SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron.
11:57SPEAKERLike the manufacturer, the actual RAM chips,
11:59SPEAKERthe DCs, five, six, whatever, RAM chips.
12:03SPEAKERAnd that supply that they can make is relatively constrained
12:07SPEAKERonce they get up to the maximum production
12:09SPEAKERfor any particular type of RAM.
12:11SPEAKERSo that market has traditionally been really, really stable
12:14SPEAKERoutside of natural disasters and stuff like that.
12:16SPEAKERSo the prices follow a pretty fixed curve,
12:20SPEAKERkind of in the same way that the console business
12:22SPEAKERhas early peaks at the start of the generation
12:25SPEAKERand then kind of tails off until the next generation
12:27SPEAKERof hardware comes out, right?
12:28SPEAKERAnd it's a similar kind of shaped curve for RAM pricing.
12:32SPEAKERTypically, the new generation of RAM comes out,
12:35SPEAKERit's really expensive, that supply is low at the beginning,
12:38SPEAKERproduction ramps up, we get a wide proliferation of products
12:42SPEAKERand then the prices go down until they stop manufacturing
12:45SPEAKERand then it starts to go back up again
12:47SPEAKERbecause the supply dwindles.
12:48SPEAKER- Yeah, and we should mention a corollary to this.
12:50SPEAKERWe talked about this some when Adam was on
12:52SPEAKERabout your visit to the Intel fab recently.
12:55SPEAKERFabrication capacity is not something
12:57SPEAKERthat you just spin up more of on a lark.
12:59SPEAKER- No. - It is extraordinarily
13:02SPEAKERexpensive and slow to ramp up more production.
13:05SPEAKERSo it's not like these companies can just be like,
13:06SPEAKERhey, let's throw another couple of production lines on
13:09SPEAKERso we can keep supplying the consumer DDR5 market.
13:11SPEAKERLike that's not going to happen.
13:13SPEAKER- Well, it's worth saying these aren't cutting edge fabs,
13:20SPEAKERright, it's not like Intel's 18A process in Arizona,
13:25SPEAKERit's not like TSMC's four nanometer process
13:27SPEAKERwe talked about where they're using bleeding edge technology
13:32SPEAKERand they're doing incredibly small process size, right?
13:37SPEAKERIt's more mainstream than that.
13:40SPEAKERBut these companies are traditionally very conservative.
13:43SPEAKERThey don't adjust to market conditions.
13:46SPEAKERThey make their production schedules
13:47SPEAKERare done well in advance.
13:48SPEAKERThey sell a lot of their product
13:50SPEAKERin contracts years in advance.
13:52SPEAKERSo like Nvidia or Lenovo or Dell or HP
13:56SPEAKERwill buy X amount of RAM from Micron or Samsung
13:59SPEAKERor SK Hynix or someone and they buy that in bulk
14:04SPEAKERand they buy that in contracts years in advance, right?
14:06SPEAKERSo that amount of that production
14:07SPEAKERis already claimed and gone, right?
14:09SPEAKERThey can't, like they have to make that
14:11SPEAKERor else they're going to be in default to their contracts
14:13SPEAKERand they have problems.
14:16SPEAKERThen there's stuff like data centers, right?
14:18SPEAKERSo that sells in a different channel
14:20SPEAKERand the data center people say,
14:21SPEAKERokay, we're building a 100 megawatt data center.
14:23SPEAKERWe need 400 exabytes of memory or whatever, right?
14:27SPEAKERSo when can you supply that and how can you get it to us?
14:29SPEAKERAnd we want a package like this and blah, blah, blah.
14:32SPEAKERAnd then the Slack traditionally has gone
14:34SPEAKERto consumer market, the stuff that you buy at Best Buy
14:37SPEAKERand Micro Center and Newegg and Amazon and places like that.
14:43SPEAKERAnd that's often sold through to people like Patriot
14:46SPEAKERand Crucial was one of those, Corsair sells RAM,
14:49SPEAKERlike all these companies, G.Skill,
14:52SPEAKERall of these companies that sell enthusiast RAM
14:54SPEAKERor whether it's enthusiast or just plain green sticks,
14:57SPEAKERit's all sold through to these relatively smaller companies
15:01SPEAKERthat do direct to consumer business.
15:04SPEAKERNow, what's happened is the increase
15:08SPEAKERin data center RAM requirements have gone up to the point
15:12SPEAKERthat instead of just selling that RAM through HP and Dell
15:16SPEAKERand Super Micro and all the companies that do rack sales,
15:23SPEAKERnow the data center people are just buying
15:25SPEAKERthe RAM allocations up directly
15:27SPEAKERand companies like Nvidia are saying,
15:29SPEAKERhey, we aren't going to sell RAM for you
15:32SPEAKERon these processes anymore.
15:35SPEAKERIf you want the RAM, you have to get it directly
15:37SPEAKERfrom the manufacturer.
15:37SPEAKER- Interesting. - Yeah.
15:39SPEAKER- Who handles the assembly though?
15:40SPEAKER'Cause it still needs to go on some kind of--
15:42SPEAKER- Nvidia says, hey, get us the thing,
15:44SPEAKERwe'll put it on the board.
15:45SPEAKER- And you really? - You have to source it.
15:47SPEAKERYeah. - That's crazy.
15:48SPEAKER- Yeah.
15:50SPEAKERSo, and what's happened is the amount of investment
15:54SPEAKERin data centers right now, like OpenAI is talking
15:57SPEAKERabout building a trillion dollars worth of data centers.
15:59SPEAKERWhere they're gonna get the money for that, who knows.
16:01SPEAKERIf you wanna know more about that,
16:02SPEAKERread Ed Zitron's newsletter.
16:04SPEAKERHe talks about the fact that they're blowing through,
16:07SPEAKERthey've blown through venture capital.
16:09SPEAKERThey're now at a scale that the investment banks
16:12SPEAKERwon't fool with them anymore 'cause they have so much money
16:14SPEAKERin the pipe and they're onto sovereign wealth funds.
16:17SPEAKERAnd after they run out of sovereign wealth funds,
16:18SPEAKERit remains to be seen where the money comes from because--
16:21SPEAKER- That's when society finishes eating itself quite frankly.
16:25SPEAKERPeople will get into that later.
16:27SPEAKER- So anyway, like the scale at which they're building
16:32SPEAKERdata centers right now is such that power companies
16:35SPEAKERin parts of the country are saying, hey,
16:36SPEAKERyou can't build any more data centers here.
16:38SPEAKERWe can't continue to service these without degrading
16:42SPEAKERthe experience, the service for the humans
16:45SPEAKERthat use our product, right?
16:46SPEAKERSo Pennsylvania's power company, West Pennsylvania's,
16:48SPEAKERor East Pennsylvania's power company said,
16:50SPEAKERno more data centers, you can't build any more here.
16:54SPEAKERAnd we're seeing this enormous rollout and it's absorbed
16:57SPEAKERso much of the RAM capacity that the consumer space
17:02SPEAKERis getting squeezed and as a result, RAM prices have
17:05SPEAKERmore than doubled, like at this point,
17:09SPEAKERI think when I looked the other day,
17:11SPEAKERa 64 gig set of DDR5 6000, so like not JetEx spec,
17:17SPEAKERbut basic, like your basic enthusiast RAM cost 400 bucks.
17:23SPEAKER- Yeah, 6000 is what I put in this machine
17:25SPEAKERtwo and a half years ago.
17:26SPEAKERSo it's like hardly, it's not even close to bleeding edge.
17:29SPEAKER- Mm-mm, it's basically the, hey, here's what Intel
17:33SPEAKERand AMD recommend for your enthusiast CPUs.
17:36SPEAKERAnd a year ago that cost 125, 150 bucks.
17:41SPEAKER- Yeah, like literally the reason I put 64 in this machine
17:44SPEAKERand not 32 is that at the time the price difference
17:47SPEAKERwas like not nothing, but it was pretty minuscule.
17:50SPEAKERIt was, like you said, it was well under $200,
17:52SPEAKERlike 150, 160, 190 for the very fast.
17:57SPEAKER- For the nice stuff with lights, yeah.
17:58SPEAKER- 64 gig and that's, yeah, a thing of the past.
18:02SPEAKERYeah, 32 gig, sorry, 32 gig kits now are costing $400,
18:07SPEAKERnot 64 gig kits, 64 gig kits are much more expensive.
18:11SPEAKER- You're seeing a bunch of headlines now.
18:12SPEAKERI mean, these are somewhat sensationalized headlines,
18:15SPEAKERbut it's like, oh, 64 gig of RAM now costs more
18:17SPEAKERthan a PlayStation 5, stuff like that,
18:18SPEAKERor a PlayStation 5 Pro.
18:20SPEAKER- I don't think that's, I don't think that's that far off.
18:25SPEAKERYeah, a 64 gig kit of G.Skill 6000 mega transfer RAM
18:30SPEAKERthat's expo and XMP is $619 on Amazon today.
18:35SPEAKER- Fucking crazy, that's like more
18:37SPEAKERthan many graphics cards were.
18:38SPEAKERAll the graphics cards, as we've said before,
18:40SPEAKERare also affected by this because they have RAM on them.
18:42SPEAKER- It's to this, well, the RAM that's used for graphics card
18:45SPEAKERis less affected 'cause it is a different kind of RAM.
18:48SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, although AMD just announced their,
18:50SPEAKERit's not a lot of big bump,
18:51SPEAKERbut they are bumping the cost of their 1970 cards
18:54SPEAKERby a little bit. - I think everything,
18:55SPEAKERwe're gonna see bumps that uses RAM,
18:57SPEAKERincluding SSDs and hard drives,
18:59SPEAKEReverything that uses RAM is gonna get more expensive.
19:05SPEAKERSo the other thing about this is,
19:07SPEAKERthe other thing that's happened is this makes the cost
19:10SPEAKERof DDR4 hasn't gone up yet.
19:14SPEAKERSo those AM4 systems that are hanging on.
19:18SPEAKERLike you can build an AM4 system that has a video card
19:21SPEAKERand 32 gigs of RAM for less than what 64 gigs
19:26SPEAKERof DDR5 costs right now. - Interesting.
19:29SPEAKER- Like it is wild. - Like what speed of DDR4?
19:32SPEAKER- It's gonna be like 3,200 or 3,500 or something.
19:35SPEAKER- I'm not sure, what was the high end that DDR4 topped out
19:37SPEAKERat stably before we moved on to DDR5?
19:40SPEAKERLike I think they were getting close to 4,000.
19:42SPEAKER- I think the fastest I ran was 3,600.
19:45SPEAKER- Yeah, I think stable, that's probably about right.
19:47SPEAKER- But yeah, you can get a G.Skill Trident Z kit DDR4
19:54SPEAKERfor 204 bucks right now.
19:55SPEAKERThat's even gone up a little bit in the last week.
19:57SPEAKER- For what capacity? - 32 gigs.
19:59SPEAKER- Oh, okay, like that's, I mean, it sucks
20:00SPEAKERthat this is necessary, but that if you badly need
20:03SPEAKERto build a computer right now, that's not the worst option.
20:05SPEAKER- Yeah, 32 gigs is, I mean, look, that is a bad option.
20:10SPEAKERI don't know, like what I do,
20:13SPEAKERI think we're gonna see people making tough choices.
20:15SPEAKERLike when this happened in the '90s, so in '93, I think,
20:19SPEAKERor '94, there was a huge earthquake in Taiwan
20:22SPEAKERthat knocked a lot of the memory capacity off.
20:26SPEAKERAnd as a result, you started seeing people doing crazy stuff
20:29SPEAKERlike IBM started building machines with eight RAM slots.
20:32SPEAKERSo if you wanted an eight-megabyte system,
20:34SPEAKERyou had eight one-megabyte chips in there.
20:37SPEAKERAnd a lot of vendors were doing that
20:38SPEAKERbecause it was easier to get those,
20:40SPEAKERthose one-megabyte chips were inexpensive,
20:42SPEAKERwhereas the four-megabyte SIMs, I guess, back then,
20:48SPEAKERwere crazy, crazy expensive.
20:50SPEAKERSo it's a weird, it's gonna be weird
20:56SPEAKERfor a little bit.
20:57SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, the difference here is that, I mean,
20:59SPEAKERyou've seen this in other areas, you know,
21:01SPEAKERthere were floods that took out hard drive capacity
21:02SPEAKERin Thailand in the past.
21:05SPEAKERThe difference is that those were all unpredictable,
21:07SPEAKERnatural events.
21:09SPEAKERAll of this is self-inflicted.
21:11SPEAKER- Yeah, well- - This is all by choice,
21:12SPEAKERespecially the actual news item today,
21:14SPEAKERwhich we need to get to.
21:15SPEAKER- Yeah, so the reason we're talking about this today
21:17SPEAKERis on Wednesday of this week, Crucial, Micron,
21:20SPEAKERwho owns Crucial, the RAM,
21:22SPEAKERthe, I think, probably biggest consumer RAM vendor.
21:25SPEAKER- Are they?
21:27SPEAKERProbably up there.
21:27SPEAKER- They're up there.
21:28SPEAKER- Like, again, Micron is one of the three suppliers,
21:30SPEAKERmanufacturers of memory,
21:32SPEAKERand Crucial is their kind of house brand.
21:33SPEAKERIt was their consumer-facing label for not just RAM,
21:37SPEAKERbut SSDs, which we'll get to.
21:39SPEAKER- Yeah, and they've been around
21:40SPEAKERfor 20-plus years at this point.
21:43SPEAKERCrucial, Micron's just shutting down Crucial
21:45SPEAKER'cause they'd rather sell direct to AI.
21:46SPEAKERThey'd rather use that inventory to sell to AI data centers.
21:49SPEAKER- Yeah, yep, that is the long and the short of it.
21:53SPEAKERTechnically, that doesn't mean
21:54SPEAKERthey wouldn't still keep supplying ICs
21:56SPEAKERto other, to the GSkills and Corsairs of the world,
21:59SPEAKERbut practically, it probably does mean that
22:01SPEAKERbecause, well, why would they be doing this
22:03SPEAKERif they were still willing to supply
22:06SPEAKERto any consumer business in the first place?
22:08SPEAKER- So my understanding of the way this market works
22:10SPEAKERis that it's more complicated than that.
22:11SPEAKERIt's not, it's that production is bought years in advance.
22:15SPEAKERLike, people are buying wafers of RAM chips years in advance
22:19SPEAKERto the point that, like, Dell and Lenovo and HP
22:22SPEAKERprobably aren't going to be super affected
22:24SPEAKERby these price changes for quite a while.
22:25SPEAKERI mean, don't worry, they're gonna raise the prices
22:30SPEAKERto meet market conditions because they can.
22:33SPEAKERBut, you know, the allotments for those big companies
22:37SPEAKERthat are buying millions and millions and millions
22:39SPEAKERof terabytes of RAM every year are set well in advance.
22:43SPEAKERAnd it's part of the non-SLAC space
22:46SPEAKERthat the RAM manufacturers have that they have to produce
22:50SPEAKERand they know what they're selling it at and yada yada,
22:52SPEAKERright, it's the, it's the stuff that normally
22:57SPEAKERwould go to the consumers, the GSkills and the Patriots
22:59SPEAKERand the Crucials and all those companies
23:04SPEAKERthat is skin squeezed, right?
23:08SPEAKERSo the stuff that's on contract is gonna be sold
23:11SPEAKERat contract for the rate that the contracts
23:12SPEAKERwere established at.
23:13SPEAKERIf you hadn't done your 2026 and 2027 memory allocations yet
23:18SPEAKERwhen the prices started going up,
23:20SPEAKERthen you are really, really turbo fucked now.
23:22SPEAKER- Cool.
23:23SPEAKER- And I also think, like, while the big guys
23:26SPEAKERare probably gonna be fine 'cause they're buying
23:27SPEAKERan enormous volume, I think the folks like Framework
23:30SPEAKERand System76 and all the kind of smaller, Razor,
23:34SPEAKERall of the smaller enthusiast computing places
23:38SPEAKERare gonna probably have problems.
23:39SPEAKERSo, 'cause their prices are gonna go up
23:42SPEAKERto market price and that's rough.
23:45SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, I should just mention real quick here,
23:47SPEAKERI mean, all of this discussion's been focused
23:50SPEAKERon RAM because that's where the price inflation
23:51SPEAKERis currently happening.
23:52SPEAKERWe did mention a couple of weeks ago
23:54SPEAKERthat SSDs are headed in the same direction.
23:56SPEAKERCrucial, not a small player in the consumer SSD space.
24:00SPEAKER- No, Crucial's a fairly big SSD vendor as well.
24:03SPEAKER- Like the Crucial, I think P1 is the classic mid tier,
24:06SPEAKERlike, pretty good bang for the buck SSD
24:09SPEAKERthat has been around for several years now.
24:11SPEAKERLike, they're not, you know, they're not SK Hynix
24:15SPEAKERand Samsung and Western Digital Black level
24:18SPEAKERof like, gamer performance, but they are like,
24:20SPEAKERthat Crucial has been a good solid mid tier,
24:22SPEAKERlike, run your Windows install SSD option for a while now.
24:26SPEAKERSo that going away as well is also pretty harmful.
24:28SPEAKER- I'll actually go one step above that.
24:31SPEAKERThe Crucial T700, which was one of the early Gen 5
24:34SPEAKERPCIe NVMEs, was one of the top performers.
24:39SPEAKERIt was up there with the very fastest.
24:41SPEAKERSo like, they have, yeah, it's a huge loss
24:46SPEAKERfor the enthusiasts.
24:47SPEAKERI mean, they cater to multiple tiers
24:49SPEAKERof the storage market as well, because it's bad.
24:51SPEAKER- And I think, so there's two things
24:54SPEAKERthat worry me about this.
24:54SPEAKEROne is the obvious, the short term impacts
24:56SPEAKERon people who need to buy RAM,
24:58SPEAKER'cause RAM is a thing that dies occasionally
24:59SPEAKERand you have to buy new stuff.
25:00SPEAKERSo I hope for your sake that you stockpiled
25:04SPEAKERa set of DDR5 sticks a few years ago and you're good to go.
25:10SPEAKERI think I have a couple of sticks that I probably could RMA
25:13SPEAKERthat are a little hinky that I'm probably going to hit
25:15SPEAKERthe button on that I wasn't going to bother with before,
25:17SPEAKER'cause they were only 32 gigs or 16 gigs or something.
25:19SPEAKER- Sure.
25:21SPEAKER- The other thing is big giant companies like Micron
25:25SPEAKERdeciding to exit the consumer space
25:27SPEAKERis a grim portent for the future, I think.
25:31SPEAKERI think, you know, we've often said,
25:33SPEAKERoh, Nvidia makes 10, 9% of its revenue, whatever,
25:36SPEAKERfrom selling consumer GPUs, but each of the wafers
25:41SPEAKERthat they cut into 35, 40 GPUs could make 12 or 15
25:47SPEAKERdata center chips that are way more profitable, right?
25:51SPEAKERAnd those are made up numbers, I'm not, I'm just saying.
25:53SPEAKERLike each wafer that they're running through TSMC's
25:57SPEAKERfour nanometer process is something
25:58SPEAKERthat could be data center chips.
26:00SPEAKERAnd every time they sell consumer chips instead,
26:03SPEAKERthey're leaving that money on,
26:04SPEAKERthey're leaving money on the table.
26:05SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, if you read the wording
26:06SPEAKERof the Micron press release, they don't say
26:08SPEAKERthat the data center market is more profitable
26:10SPEAKERor lucrative or whatever.
26:12SPEAKERThey use the term fastest growing.
26:14SPEAKER- Yeah.
26:15SPEAKER- So it doesn't matter if even consumer revenue
26:17SPEAKERis increasing year over year,
26:18SPEAKERdata center revenue is increasing faster.
26:20SPEAKER- Gotta pull all the money.
26:21SPEAKER- Yes, it's the classic chasing growth forever.
26:23SPEAKERLike this really gets into the angle
26:25SPEAKERthat this Gamers Nexus video takes
26:27SPEAKERand I recommend you watch it.
26:28SPEAKERIt is that channel at its most political
26:30SPEAKERthat I have ever seen, like by far,
26:32SPEAKERbecause he leads with, he leads with the,
26:35SPEAKERand I am not surprised this is the case,
26:37SPEAKERbut I never thought to look into it before.
26:39SPEAKERThe number of government grants and tax breaks
26:41SPEAKERthat Micron has gotten over in recent years
26:44SPEAKERare in the numerous numbers of billions,
26:47SPEAKERboth state and local tax breaks, chips act grants.
26:50SPEAKERThey are taking enormous amounts of public money
26:53SPEAKERand using it to completely fuck the people
26:56SPEAKERgiving them the money.
26:57SPEAKER- Well, and it's not just the consumer,
26:59SPEAKERit's not just the enthusiast computing market,
27:01SPEAKERwhich is relatively small, right?
27:02SPEAKERIt's also, this is also gonna trickle down
27:05SPEAKERinto everybody who has to buy a computer or a phone
27:08SPEAKERor any kind of device that is thinking sand, right?
27:14SPEAKERWhich is like computers getting more expensive
27:18SPEAKERis bad for the overall economy
27:19SPEAKERbecause a lot of the work that we do
27:21SPEAKERis based around computers.
27:23SPEAKERThe RAM vendors have gotten in trouble in the past
27:25SPEAKERfor colluding and fixing prices and all that stuff
27:27SPEAKERand have been fined pretty mightily by the EU and the US.
27:31SPEAKER- I actually got, I got money from a Corsair
27:33SPEAKERclass action settlement over price fixing many years ago.
27:37SPEAKERSo it's, okay, yes, that's not unheard of.
27:40SPEAKERI would argue that that took place
27:41SPEAKERin a very different world than we are now entering.
27:44SPEAKER- Well, that's true.
27:45SPEAKER- Which is also a point made in that video,
27:47SPEAKERwhich is that Micron sure did give money
27:49SPEAKERto the Trump Ballroom and Inaugural Committee, for example.
27:52SPEAKERAnd there sure was a smiling handshake photo
27:56SPEAKERof Micron CEO and Howard Lutnick on Twitter
27:59SPEAKERthe day this move was announced.
28:01SPEAKER- Look, you bring your gold bar into the Oval Office
28:03SPEAKERand everything's nice and legal now.
28:05SPEAKERThat's just the way it works.
28:06SPEAKER- It's hard not to get angry watching the headlines
28:08SPEAKERlaid out, you know, six point whatever billion
28:11SPEAKERfrom the CHIPS Act, two billion in state tax breaks
28:13SPEAKERto this new fab facility.
28:15SPEAKERI mean, like it is, it really smacks of classic socializing
28:19SPEAKERof production and privatization of profits.
28:22SPEAKER- Yeah.
28:23SPEAKER- Which, look, man, I don't wanna get too political here,
28:26SPEAKERbut you know the Domino meme?
28:27SPEAKER- No, it's the little one to the big one?
28:29SPEAKER- Crucial exits of the consumer memory markets.
28:34SPEAKER- Pretty small Domino, let's be real.
28:36SPEAKER- Yeah.
28:37SPEAKER- But like all this shit really adds.
28:38SPEAKERThis is just another, yet another feature
28:40SPEAKERof the endless affordability crisis right now.
28:42SPEAKERLike at some point, too many examples, too many like,
28:46SPEAKERthis is just societal death by a thousand cuts.
28:48SPEAKERLike this is the kind of thing that really starts
28:50SPEAKERto shake faith in the system generally
28:53SPEAKERwhen enough of these happen.
28:55SPEAKER- Well, it turns out corruption,
28:57SPEAKERlook, I learned about corruption from the Clone Wars, right?
28:59SPEAKERWhen Ahsoka went to the Mandalore
29:01SPEAKERto teach the Mandalorians about corruption.
29:04SPEAKERIt's a real good episode of a children's TV show.
29:07SPEAKER- And small Domino, crucial exits to the market,
29:09SPEAKERlarge Domino, society is overthrown.
29:13SPEAKER- I've been yelling on the full nerd
29:16SPEAKERabout buying seeds a lot lately.
29:19SPEAKERSeeds are always fungible, man.
29:21SPEAKERSomebody next year, two years from now,
29:23SPEAKERsomebody's gonna be like, man, I really miss having turnips.
29:25SPEAKERI'm gonna be like, buddy, I got you.
29:26SPEAKERHere's some turnip seeds, go plant some turnips.
29:29SPEAKERYeah, now give me your gold bars.
29:31SPEAKER- Whatever, man, we've been like,
29:32SPEAKERthe public has been funding vaccine research
29:34SPEAKERand medical research that then-
29:36SPEAKER- The public has been funding fossil fuel companies, Brad.
29:39SPEAKER- That then entirely turns privatized
29:41SPEAKERthe second it brings money in for fucking decades.
29:43SPEAKER- Yep, we fund fossil fuel companies,
29:45SPEAKERwe fund all sorts of stuff.
29:47SPEAKER- Same shit, different industry.
29:49SPEAKER- Yeah, it's great, good news.
29:51SPEAKER- Yep, things are going great.
29:53SPEAKER- But you know what is good?
29:54SPEAKERThe steam machine.
29:55SPEAKER- Yeah, seems like it. - You know what's not great?
29:57SPEAKER- What's that?
29:58SPEAKER- HDMI 2.1.
29:59SPEAKER- Well, okay, I'd say on a technical level,
30:01SPEAKERHDMI 2.1 is pretty good.
30:03SPEAKERMaybe perhaps on a, political's not the right term,
30:05SPEAKERbut on a policy level, maybe it's not great.
30:09SPEAKER- Yeah, for people who are running Linux machines,
30:11SPEAKERbuilding Linux machines, HDMI 2.1,
30:14SPEAKERa lot of the features are turned off.
30:15SPEAKERI didn't know this.
30:16SPEAKER- A bit inaccessible, yeah, I didn't either.
30:18SPEAKERSo I think they announced when the steam machine
30:20SPEAKERwas first delineated that it would not support HDMI 2.1,
30:24SPEAKERand we've talked about this in the ancient past,
30:26SPEAKERbut 2.1 is the good one for playing video games.
30:29SPEAKER- Yeah.
30:30SPEAKERIt's the first HDMI spec that allows 4K at 120 Hertz.
30:35SPEAKERIt's the one that introduced VRR, the variable refresh,
30:38SPEAKERwhere the display refresh syncs to the frame rate output,
30:42SPEAKERwhich is different from G-Sync and FreeSync,
30:44SPEAKERwe should be clear.
30:45SPEAKERLike those are-
30:46SPEAKER- Yeah, what's the difference there?
30:47SPEAKERDo you know, I'm actually fuzzy on that.
30:48SPEAKER- They're just different methods of doing the same thing.
30:51SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
30:52SPEAKER- Like G-Sync was first, FreeSync came along,
30:53SPEAKERwhich is more open and kind of nominally backed by AMD.
30:57SPEAKERHDMI 2.1 VRR is just another implementation
31:01SPEAKERof the same concept.
31:02SPEAKERAnd it's the one specific to the HDMI spec.
31:05SPEAKER- Got it, okay.
31:06SPEAKER- So like, and we'll get to this as we talk about
31:09SPEAKERwhat the steam machine can do.
31:10SPEAKERThere are all kinds of examples of, for example,
31:12SPEAKERconsumer living room TVs that can do HDMI 2.1 VRR,
31:15SPEAKERbut cannot do FreeSync.
31:17SPEAKER- Yeah, that makes sense.
31:18SPEAKER- I guess that seems like that's also especially
31:20SPEAKEReven more common with receivers.
31:22SPEAKERLike most, like any receiver with 2.1 support
31:25SPEAKERis gonna take HDMI VRR,
31:27SPEAKERbut it will not necessarily take FreeSync.
31:29SPEAKER- I would think you have to plug your stuff
31:30SPEAKERdirectly into the TV to get FreeSync support.
31:33SPEAKER- Yes, that's, there might be receivers
31:35SPEAKERwith FreeSync support, but that sounds unlikely to me.
31:37SPEAKERBut again, not even-
31:38SPEAKER- Do people still use receivers?
31:39SPEAKER- I do.
31:40SPEAKER- You use an old one like me.
31:41SPEAKER- Well, yeah, but it's not many people,
31:44SPEAKERbut it's A, it's still the only way to drive big speakers
31:47SPEAKERunless you've got some kind of external amp.
31:50SPEAKERB, unless you're getting some,
31:52SPEAKERmaybe I shouldn't say dodgy HDMI switcher.
31:54SPEAKERI think there are some pretty good ones out there,
31:56SPEAKERbut it's like, it's probably the best supported way
31:59SPEAKERto get way more HDMI ports on your TV.
32:01SPEAKER- Yeah, but I guess my time of needing way more HDMI ports
32:06SPEAKERhas maybe gone away.
32:07SPEAKERLike it's not like, in the old days,
32:09SPEAKERI used to have five different streaming boxes
32:10SPEAKERand a DVD player and some consoles,
32:13SPEAKERso you could get all the different streaming services.
32:14SPEAKERNow you just have all the streaming services
32:16SPEAKERwork on everything.
32:17SPEAKER- Yeah, well, as somebody who has to cover
32:18SPEAKERevery video game system, I guess I'm an outlier,
32:20SPEAKERbut I had still four on a TV is still too limiting for me.
32:24SPEAKER- Okay.
32:25SPEAKER- Like six is fine.
32:26SPEAKERSix, I can absolutely get away.
32:27SPEAKERBut also like, I have a PS3 hooked up in the living room,
32:30SPEAKER'cause what if I want to play a PS1 or PS2 game
32:34SPEAKERon the TV at some point?
32:35SPEAKERLike that might come in handy.
32:37SPEAKER- I just grab it from the garage
32:38SPEAKERand plug it in when I want that.
32:40SPEAKER- I was thinking about searching for my copy
32:43SPEAKERof "Metal Gear Solid 2" over the holiday break
32:45SPEAKERand putting it in that PS3.
32:46SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I played the Dreamcast in a few weeks ago.
32:50SPEAKER- Right, it's nice to have.
32:52SPEAKEROf course, I mean, that's where like the retro tank
32:53SPEAKERand stuff like that comes in handy for old analog stuff.
32:56SPEAKER- Or having an old TV, it turns out.
32:58SPEAKER- Anyway, I digress.
33:00SPEAKEROkay, the Steam Machine does not support HDMI 2.1.
33:03SPEAKERAuto low latency mode is the other big one
33:05SPEAKERon 2.1 for games people.
33:07SPEAKER- That's the thing that switches the HDMI port to games mode
33:10SPEAKERwhen you have a game device plugged in.
33:11SPEAKER- It basically tells like the TV or the receiver
33:13SPEAKERor whatever else in the chain.
33:15SPEAKERLike, hey, turn off all of your post-processing
33:17SPEAKERthat adds latency.
33:18SPEAKERDrop to your game mode or whatever you want to call it.
33:21SPEAKERThat's the thing that will give the best gaming experience
33:23SPEAKERand then change back if you change to some other source.
33:26SPEAKER- Got it.
33:27SPEAKER- Anyway, like 2.1 has a lot of features
33:29SPEAKERthat are pretty useful for playing games.
33:32SPEAKERI guess this is actually about a year and a half old,
33:35SPEAKERbut the Ars Technica story pointed back to this happening.
33:40SPEAKERI think it was in February of 2024
33:42SPEAKERand then added some new stuff talking to Valve
33:44SPEAKERabout the Steam Machine in particular.
33:46SPEAKERThe HDMI forum apparently declared
33:47SPEAKERabout a year and a half ago
33:49SPEAKERthat it would not allow open source implementations
33:51SPEAKERof HDMI 2.1, so fucking consortiums, man.
33:57SPEAKER- Why would they do this?
33:59SPEAKER- I don't know what they're,
34:00SPEAKERI didn't dig too much into their rationale
34:02SPEAKERother than I assume it just has to be about control, right?
34:05SPEAKERYou know, they charge member companies
34:08SPEAKERof the forum membership fees.
34:10SPEAKERThey charge licensing fees on HDMI hardware.
34:13SPEAKERLike it is, you know, it's how they make their money.
34:16SPEAKER- Yeah, there's no-- - That's my best guess.
34:18SPEAKER- There's no public version of the 2.1 spec either.
34:21SPEAKER- Yes, they don't publish the 2.1 spec.
34:23SPEAKERAnd so I'm maybe getting a little car before the horse here.
34:27SPEAKERI assume there's nothing stopping you legally
34:31SPEAKERfrom reverse engineering 2.1 and implementing it yourself.
34:35SPEAKER- God, we really need to watch "Helton Catch Fire."
34:37SPEAKER- Yes, we really should.
34:38SPEAKERBut I don't even know how practical that is.
34:41SPEAKERIt may be that the 2.1 spec is of such complexity
34:44SPEAKERthat that's not even realistic to do.
34:46SPEAKER- Well-- - But also,
34:49SPEAKERthis is where you get into the policy
34:51SPEAKERor political aspect of this,
34:52SPEAKERand I don't mean government political,
34:53SPEAKERI mean like inter-entity relationship political here.
34:57SPEAKERBut like, even as like as a member company,
35:00SPEAKERyou would not wanna run afoul of the HDMI forum
35:02SPEAKERby going out on your own and doing this
35:06SPEAKERin spite of them, right?
35:07SPEAKERLike that probably gets your membership pulled
35:09SPEAKERor gets you penalized in some way that's unpalatable.
35:12SPEAKER- What a load of crap though.
35:15SPEAKERLike, I mean, so I assume somebody has done
35:18SPEAKERa closed source blob implementation of HDMI 2.1,
35:21SPEAKER'cause I know that there's like ultra 4K Blu-ray players
35:27SPEAKERthat are running Linux in the underside, right?
35:30SPEAKER- Maybe. - But then they probably
35:31SPEAKERhave some sort of closed-- - Well, yes.
35:33SPEAKERThe PS5, as we know, runs FreeBSD,
35:35SPEAKERand that does HDMI 2.1, so clearly,
35:38SPEAKERclearly open source operating systems,
35:39SPEAKERthere are ways to make it work in a way
35:41SPEAKERthat does not run afoul of the HDMI forum.
35:43SPEAKER- But I mean, I guess my assumption is
35:45SPEAKERthat you can do a closed source implementation
35:47SPEAKERon an open system, but they're not gonna let anybody
35:50SPEAKERopen source the HDMI 2.1 implementation
35:52SPEAKERbecause they don't want it to be public
35:54SPEAKERso that they can, then they can't charge people.
35:55SPEAKERThat sucks.
35:56SPEAKER- Closed source blobs of proprietary technology
35:59SPEAKERare pretty common, even in open source.
36:03SPEAKERMy router, for example, runs Linux,
36:05SPEAKERbut it has a proprietary driver or blob
36:09SPEAKERthat makes it actually run at full speed,
36:11SPEAKERwhich is why you can't install other operating systems
36:13SPEAKERon that thing unless you wanna eat
36:14SPEAKERlike a 60% performance penalty.
36:16SPEAKER- Boo. - Closed source.
36:19SPEAKERAnyway. - Yeah, so what's the TL;DR?
36:21SPEAKERDoes that mean that there's no VRR on the Steam machine?
36:25SPEAKER- Yes, that seems to be the case,
36:27SPEAKERat least out of the HDMI port.
36:29SPEAKER- It has a DisplayPort port, too?
36:31SPEAKER- It does have a DisplayPort port,
36:33SPEAKERand DisplayPort has its own separate standard,
36:36SPEAKERbut I think DisplayPort only does FreeSync.
36:37SPEAKERLike, it can't do HDMI VRR, so.
36:40SPEAKER- Well, yeah. - So again, you're limited,
36:42SPEAKERdepending on what kind of TV and optional receiver you have,
36:45SPEAKERthere might not be able to get VRR out of the Steam machine.
36:48SPEAKERThere is one-- - I hate this.
36:50SPEAKER- There's one interesting thing.
36:51SPEAKERKyle Orland-Rith is our story,
36:53SPEAKERand he talked to Valve a little bit.
36:55SPEAKERValve has actually devised a way to get 4K
36:58SPEAKERat 120 frames per second out of HDMI 2.0 output,
37:02SPEAKERwhich is what they're doing out of this thing.
37:03SPEAKER- Okay. - This thing,
37:05SPEAKERwe should say the Steam machine has 2.1 hardware in it.
37:08SPEAKERThey just can't implement the 2.1 support because, again.
37:11SPEAKER- Yeah. - HDMI Forum policy.
37:14SPEAKERThey're using Chroma subsampling, though, to 2.0,
37:17SPEAKERsorry, this is a lot of numbers, 2.0 tops out at 4K 60.
37:20SPEAKER- Yeah. - 2.0 debuted
37:22SPEAKERthe same year as the PS4 and the Xbox One,
37:24SPEAKERjust for reference. - 2013, I think.
37:26SPEAKER- 2013, yes. - Yeah.
37:27SPEAKER- So that just rounded into the historical context.
37:30SPEAKERYeah, so 4K 60 is the best that can do.
37:33SPEAKERValve is upping that to 120
37:35SPEAKERby effectively reducing the color depth
37:38SPEAKERsomewhat substantially.
37:39SPEAKERI don't know how much from this write-up.
37:41SPEAKER- They said it might impact text rendering
37:43SPEAKERfor games with a lot of text.
37:45SPEAKER- Yeah, apparently I guess that was the Arting's assessment
37:47SPEAKERof this, not of Valve's technique,
37:50SPEAKERbut just generally how Chroma subsampling
37:52SPEAKERaffects color depth and kind of visual perception.
37:55SPEAKERI always, I had to go do a quick refresher on this
37:58SPEAKER'cause I always forget, you know, Chroma is color,
38:00SPEAKERLuma is brightness.
38:02SPEAKERThose are the two main components of a video signal, right?
38:04SPEAKER- Yeah. - And I always forget,
38:05SPEAKERI mean, this is just a feature
38:06SPEAKERof rods and cones in your eye, right,
38:07SPEAKERthat basically the human eye is more sensitive
38:10SPEAKERto brightness than it is to color variation.
38:13SPEAKERAnd so you can, you can't mess with the brightness,
38:15SPEAKERbut you can reduce the color in certain ways
38:18SPEAKERwithout people noticing too much.
38:20SPEAKER- Yeah, well, this is why
38:21SPEAKERthere's like five different versions of HDR specs as well,
38:23SPEAKERright, is 'cause they choose to compress different things.
38:26SPEAKER- And different levels of, from a sampling,
38:29SPEAKERyou know, 444 or 422, et cetera.
38:32SPEAKERSo I don't know what the numbers are here,
38:34SPEAKERbut apparently Valve is basically compressing
38:36SPEAKERthe chroma of part of the signal to such an extent
38:39SPEAKERthat they can double the frame rate,
38:42SPEAKERwhich seems pretty impressive.
38:44SPEAKER- It's wild to me that HDMI isn't doing that,
38:49SPEAKERlike, they're not even letting AMD do a driver for this
38:52SPEAKERwhen AMD is a member of the forum.
38:53SPEAKER- So that's where that news that I mentioned
38:55SPEAKERfrom about a year and a half ago came from
38:57SPEAKERwas that they kind of handed their verdict down to AMD,
39:00SPEAKERthat no, you can't implement this
39:01SPEAKERin your open source driver.
39:03SPEAKER- I hate this. - Yeah, it's a bummer.
39:05SPEAKERIt's a real shitfests of close standards.
39:10SPEAKER- It's an absolute turd sandwich.
39:11SPEAKER- Yes, it's a real bummer.
39:13SPEAKER- So I guess use DisplayPort and buy TVs with DisplayPort
39:16SPEAKERis the answer?
39:17SPEAKER- This is kind of getting into a different domain here,
39:19SPEAKERbut it kind of reminds me of the situation
39:21SPEAKERaround video codec licensing and how--
39:24SPEAKER- Oh, it is, yeah.
39:25SPEAKER- You know, and how overly restrictive licensing
39:28SPEAKERcan actually end up shooting yourself in the foot
39:30SPEAKERand maybe even killing your valuable standard,
39:33SPEAKERbecause look at what happened in the,
39:35SPEAKERremember talking to Jean-Baptiste at VLC at VideoLAN?
39:38SPEAKER- Oh yeah, oh yeah.
39:39SPEAKER- Remember how much he hated H.265 and VP9 and--
39:43SPEAKER- Yep.
39:44SPEAKER- You know how you're hearing a whole lot
39:45SPEAKERabout EV1 everywhere because it doesn't have
39:47SPEAKERlicensing fees attached to it?
39:48SPEAKER- Really weird, yeah.
39:50SPEAKER- I mean, that's purely a software example here, though,
39:53SPEAKERwhere unfortunately here we've got 20 years
39:56SPEAKERof legacy HDMI ports out there.
39:58SPEAKERLike I don't think, when you've got a physical standard
40:01SPEAKERthat has proliferated to this extent,
40:02SPEAKERI don't think we're going to see HDMI go away anytime soon,
40:05SPEAKERbut this still sucks.
40:06SPEAKER- So the big question I have is if you use the,
40:10SPEAKERlike this, Kyle's R story says you can use
40:14SPEAKERthe DisplayPort 1.4 out port and convert it to HDMI
40:17SPEAKERusing a dongle, which makes me wonder if the best,
40:20SPEAKERif that's gonna have the desired outcome.
40:22SPEAKER- I don't think so.
40:23SPEAKERI try to do a little digging on this.
40:24SPEAKERI have experienced this in the past with my Pi KVM.
40:28SPEAKERDisplayPort, built into its spec,
40:30SPEAKERhas something called DisplayPort Dual Mode.
40:33SPEAKERYou'll see it denoted as DP++ a lot.
40:36SPEAKERThey have, I think they even have
40:37SPEAKERa little graphic designed logo around this.
40:39SPEAKER- Of course they do.
40:40SPEAKER- What that is is DisplayPort's version
40:42SPEAKERof outputting an HDMI signal.
40:45SPEAKERSo if you buy, you can buy passive, in fact, I did this,
40:48SPEAKERyou can buy like a passive DisplayPort to HDMI cable.
40:51SPEAKERIn my case, I got the Pi KVM and hooked it into my NAS,
40:54SPEAKERwhich is a full-size motherboard.
40:57SPEAKERPi KVM takes HDMI capture in,
41:00SPEAKERand my motherboard has both DisplayPort and HDMI out,
41:02SPEAKERso of course I just grabbed any old HDMI cable
41:04SPEAKERand went HDMI to HDMI.
41:06SPEAKERPi KVM had a terrible problem.
41:08SPEAKEREvery time I would reboot the machine,
41:09SPEAKERit would lose the handshake,
41:10SPEAKERthe video signal wouldn't come back.
41:12SPEAKERJust all kinds of the most infuriating,
41:14SPEAKERwhy is this video signal not working type nonsense.
41:18SPEAKEROn a lark, because they're cheap,
41:19SPEAKERI just bought a $10 DisplayPort to HDMI cable
41:22SPEAKERbecause I went and read about the DisplayPort Dual Mode thing
41:25SPEAKERand I was like, oh, DisplayPort supports HDMI,
41:27SPEAKERI should see if this works.
41:30SPEAKERInstantly worked perfectly and has never stopped working,
41:32SPEAKERlike going HDMI to deep, or sorry,
41:34SPEAKERgoing DP to HDMI worked better than going pure HDMI,
41:38SPEAKERlike DisplayPort was putting out cleaner,
41:41SPEAKERmore usable HDMI than HDMI was.
41:44SPEAKERAnyway, that's a long-winded preamble for saying,
41:47SPEAKERI don't know what DP Dual Mode would do with HDMI 2.1,
41:52SPEAKERI can't imagine they are implementing those features
41:55SPEAKERover DisplayPort, that's probably not the case.
41:57SPEAKER- It's gonna be 4K 60 probably, right?
41:59SPEAKER- Or it maybe would do 120,
42:01SPEAKERbut I doubt it does things like VRR and ALLM and such.
42:06SPEAKERAnyway, this is just a real bummer
42:07SPEAKERof like Valve is literally shipping hardware
42:10SPEAKERthat can do this better standard
42:12SPEAKERand they are just prevented from doing it
42:13SPEAKERbecause of which operating system they choose to run
42:16SPEAKERon their hardware,
42:17SPEAKERwhich happens to be the open operating system or one of them.
42:20SPEAKER- Maybe going from analog was a mistake.
42:22SPEAKER- Yep, I can't disagree with that, remember?
42:26SPEAKERI think we've said this before,
42:27SPEAKERremember when the video signal was stupid?
42:29SPEAKER- Yeah.
42:30SPEAKER- Remember when it was just a dumb signal
42:31SPEAKERwith no encoding in it,
42:32SPEAKERit was just electrical pulses without any processors
42:37SPEAKERon display controllers on either end,
42:39SPEAKERprocessing encryption and handshaking and authentication.
42:43SPEAKER- They had pins for the luminance
42:45SPEAKERfor each of the individual colors
42:47SPEAKERand then they had a chroma pin and you were good,
42:49SPEAKERthat's all you needed, it was perfect.
42:50SPEAKER- Yep, can't disagree.
42:55SPEAKERMaybe it'll change in the future, I don't know,
42:57SPEAKERbut it doesn't sound like the forum
42:58SPEAKERis likely to bend on this anytime soon.
43:03SPEAKER- Well, you know what is likely to bend,
43:06SPEAKERwell, no, they're not gonna bend anytime soon
43:08SPEAKERon this either, AI encroaching into more things.
43:13SPEAKERThe Google News, I don't know, do you use Google News?
43:15SPEAKERI use Google News all the time.
43:17SPEAKER- No, when you put this in the notes,
43:18SPEAKERI had to look up what Google News even is as a product,
43:21SPEAKERI'm not entirely sure.
43:22SPEAKERThat's not the same as,
43:23SPEAKERit's not the successor to Google Reader, is it?
43:26SPEAKER- Well, I mean, that's probably what Google would have said,
43:28SPEAKERbut no, Google News is, news.google.com
43:31SPEAKERis their news search engine.
43:33SPEAKER- Oh, I see, okay.
43:34SPEAKER- But it also feeds the results on that,
43:37SPEAKERit's where all the AMP stories go,
43:38SPEAKERso if you're a publisher and you made it work with Google
43:41SPEAKERto do a pre-formatted Google version of your post
43:44SPEAKERthat they host so it's really fast,
43:48SPEAKERthey also, in the app, in the Google app on your phone,
43:52SPEAKERthey do a programmatic newsfeed that's quite good,
43:54SPEAKERreally useful, it's tuned to your interests,
43:56SPEAKERit's, you know, I get gaming and tech
43:59SPEAKERand all the things that I'm interested in in the,
44:03SPEAKERand they're one of the few places that separates tech
44:06SPEAKERin a way that makes sense, so they,
44:09SPEAKERlike the entrepreneurial tech they delineate,
44:13SPEAKERlike fundraising and like AI startups and all that nonsense
44:17SPEAKERis a separate category from like enthusiast tech,
44:19SPEAKERthe stuff that I actually care about.
44:21SPEAKERSo it's really useful, it's a really useful service to me,
44:24SPEAKERI use it all the time, and they've started doing
44:26SPEAKERthese AI summaries of the headlines,
44:29SPEAKERI'm gonna see if I can find one here on the feed.
44:31SPEAKERSo here we go, normally a headline is just the headline
44:35SPEAKERthat the publisher posts, so on the benefit,
44:37SPEAKERlike here's one from Hackaday that's on the benefits
44:40SPEAKERof filling 3D prints with spray foam,
44:42SPEAKERand then there's a picture of a 3D print
44:44SPEAKERthat's been cut open and it's clearly filled
44:46SPEAKERwith spray foam, oh get it, that makes sense.
44:49SPEAKERNow this next article is from Tom's Hardware
44:52SPEAKERand instead of having a headline, it has,
44:54SPEAKERgaming-focused Linux distro, Bizite,
44:56SPEAKERreported over a petabyte of ISO downloads in one month,
44:59SPEAKERequating to roughly 150,000 downloads.
45:02SPEAKERThis surge, dot, dot, dot, C-more.
45:05SPEAKERWhen you click C-more, it continues this long-ass,
45:08SPEAKERnot headline, right?
45:09SPEAKER- I mean, is it formatted like a headline?
45:11SPEAKER- So on these, instead of the headline being on the bottom,
45:14SPEAKERwhich is where they usually are below the image,
45:15SPEAKERusually it's like an eyebrow with the publication,
45:20SPEAKERthen a picture, then a headline, and that's it,
45:22SPEAKERthat's all you get, maybe a heart.
45:24SPEAKEROn these, there's this little blurb
45:26SPEAKERthat's like the TLDR for the article,
45:29SPEAKERso you don't even have to click through,
45:31SPEAKERand then there's the headline, then there's the picture,
45:33SPEAKERthen there's the headline.
45:34SPEAKER- I mean, this is really just the eventual conclusion
45:37SPEAKERof a set of media platforms and a societal inclination
45:40SPEAKERto never read past the headline, right?
45:42SPEAKER- I mean--
45:43SPEAKER- Like they're just serving the market, perhaps.
45:46SPEAKER- You're not wrong, but at the bottom
45:48SPEAKERof the little AI description on these,
45:49SPEAKERit always says, "Generated with AI,
45:51SPEAKER"which can make mistakes."
45:52SPEAKERNow, a friend of the show, Sean Hollister,
45:55SPEAKERover at The Verge has been writing about this,
45:56SPEAKER'cause they have, their headlines have been having mistakes.
46:02SPEAKERAnd he wrote an article called,
46:04SPEAKER"Google's AI Newsbot is Still Confused,
46:06SPEAKER"But No Longer Replacing Our Headlines."
46:10SPEAKERThey had a, they had a replacing,
46:15SPEAKERthey had a problem where an article on PC Gamer,
46:21SPEAKERthe headline replacement was,
46:23SPEAKER"Baldur's Gate 3 Players Exploit Children."
46:26SPEAKER- Great.
46:27SPEAKER- The story was, Baldur's Gate 3 players
46:29SPEAKERdiscovered an exploit using Polymorph and Dominate
46:33SPEAKERthat impacts children models or something in the game.
46:37SPEAKER- Okay.
46:38SPEAKER- But the thing is, the AI didn't know what the exploit,
46:41SPEAKERdidn't know that exploit meant in this context,
46:44SPEAKERa way to do something with the game
46:46SPEAKERthat the vendor didn't intend,
46:48SPEAKERnot, "Hey, we're exploiting children."
46:54SPEAKERThe bot, their bot was sending pre-built DIY builds
46:59SPEAKERand linking to stories on other topics entirely
47:02SPEAKERfor their thing.
47:04SPEAKERAnd now it seems to be doing better,
47:07SPEAKERbut also this is a terrible feature
47:08SPEAKERand Google should stop doing it because it's really bad.
47:11SPEAKER- I mean, I assume, I don't know a ton about AMP,
47:13SPEAKERbut I assumed it has to be built into that, that they...
47:17SPEAKER- Yeah.
47:18SPEAKER- And the AMP participants are very able to specify
47:20SPEAKERexactly what their aggregated headline should be, right?
47:24SPEAKER- Well, no, not anymore, I think that's the problem.
47:26SPEAKER- Well, no, what I mean is that functionality existed, right?
47:28SPEAKERLike Google has to be doing that.
47:30SPEAKERAnd it's not like the people who supply news to Google
47:35SPEAKERdon't have a way of saying,
47:36SPEAKER"This is exactly what our headline should be."
47:38SPEAKER- Oh, 100%.
47:39SPEAKER- That's what I mean.
47:40SPEAKER- The bad news is, so you can turn off sources,
47:43SPEAKERyou can give feedback on this.
47:45SPEAKERYou can't actually, as far as I can tell, say,
47:48SPEAKER"Hey, I don't want any more of these fucking AI summaries."
47:53SPEAKER- Are they denoted very clearly as such?
47:55SPEAKER- Kind of, it has a little disclaimer at the bottom.
47:59SPEAKERThe format is different, which I recognize,
48:01SPEAKERI assume most people probably don't.
48:03SPEAKER- Does it have the AI sparkle?
48:04SPEAKERThat's the real question.
48:05SPEAKERAnd this is really just a way for me to sidebar here.
48:08SPEAKERHow did we land on this little sparkly graphic as the...
48:11SPEAKER- It's magic.
48:12SPEAKER- Is that like, but I feel like I'm starting to see that
48:15SPEAKERon things that aren't very self-evidently AI related.
48:18SPEAKER- I think I saw it on toothpaste the other day.
48:20SPEAKER- Right, like I feel like that is just starting
48:22SPEAKERto appear everywhere now, which as bad as it is
48:26SPEAKERthat there are AI features everywhere,
48:27SPEAKERyou have to dodge and watch out for.
48:28SPEAKERAt least they had that little graphic on them,
48:30SPEAKERbut now that's infecting everything.
48:31SPEAKERSo it's gonna be even harder to tell what's AI.
48:34SPEAKER- So there is no sparkle.
48:36SPEAKERAnd some of these are actually aggregates
48:38SPEAKERabout the same story on multiple sites.
48:41SPEAKERSo like this Bizite article that I read a minute ago
48:44SPEAKERis on Tom's Hardware, ZDNet and Windows Central
48:47SPEAKERand Fudzilla and a bunch of other places.
48:49SPEAKERSo it's like a, they're making like a landing page
48:51SPEAKERfor the story about Bizite download surging,
48:54SPEAKERwhich is like maybe kind of useful,
48:57SPEAKERbut also it's a bad, this is a bad implementation.
49:01SPEAKERThey needed to fix this.
49:02SPEAKER- Yep, agreed.
49:03SPEAKERI have developed a Pavlovian aversion
49:05SPEAKERto that little sparkle graphic.
49:07SPEAKERI don't know about you.
49:08SPEAKER- I don't, I don't like the sparkle.
49:10SPEAKERSo speaking of places that the sparkle shows up on Hackaday
49:14SPEAKERon, let's see, flamedfury.com,
49:19SPEAKERwhich is someone's personal blog,
49:21SPEAKERlike some programmer's blog had a fantastic post
49:24SPEAKERat the end of October called Disable AI in Firefox.
49:29SPEAKER- This must be why this has been going around.
49:31SPEAKERLike I said, I've heard from other people
49:32SPEAKERI know who use Firefox.
49:34SPEAKER- Yeah, well, so Firefox has been kind of quietly
49:38SPEAKERencroaching AI into the browser experience.
49:41SPEAKERThere was a thing in the sidebar that nobody uses
49:43SPEAKERthat you could add your favorite chat bot the other day,
49:46SPEAKERwhether it's Gemini or chat GPT or co-pilot,
49:49SPEAKERor there was one or two others.
49:52SPEAKERThey also have had this thing where you can long
49:55SPEAKERkind of click a link and it pops up a little AI
49:57SPEAKERgenerated preview of what's at the other end of that link.
50:00SPEAKERThey're all completely useless garbage.
50:04SPEAKERYou can turn off these features individually,
50:08SPEAKERbut it was a little bit challenging
50:09SPEAKERand it wasn't immediately apparent where you could do them.
50:12SPEAKERAnd some of them, when you turn them off,
50:13SPEAKERyou can't turn them back on again,
50:14SPEAKERwhich is I think a really interesting choice,
50:16SPEAKERlike that AI links preview.
50:18SPEAKEROnce you click the button on that,
50:19SPEAKERon the version of Firefox,
50:20SPEAKERI have the option to turn it back on,
50:22SPEAKERjust disappears from the control panel.
50:24SPEAKERYou have to do it in the config flags.
50:27SPEAKERAnyway, this blog, Flame Fury,
50:30SPEAKERwe'll put the link in the show notes,
50:31SPEAKERhas a list of all of the about config flags
50:36SPEAKERthat you can just turn off to turn off all of this stuff.
50:39SPEAKERIt took me about five minutes.
50:40SPEAKERIt's fabulous, highly recommended Firefox.
50:44SPEAKERMy Firefox feels faster.
50:45SPEAKERI haven't actually done benchmarks or testing,
50:46SPEAKERbut what a load of crap.
50:50SPEAKERPlease don't do this anymore, Firefox.
50:51SPEAKER- You just did it all manually through the Firefox config?
50:55SPEAKER'Cause I've heard, I think there were people
50:57SPEAKERputting out scripts to do this now.
50:59SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm always a little, I'm a little hinky on that.
51:03SPEAKERI'm not gonna read the script to figure out what it does.
51:05SPEAKERI guess for something that it's like 12 options here,
51:08SPEAKERI think for this. - Yes, yes.
51:11SPEAKER- For something that's this simple,
51:12SPEAKERit's faster for me to just fix it manually
51:15SPEAKERthan to read the script
51:17SPEAKERand make sure the script doesn't do anything devious.
51:19SPEAKER- Yeah, like I am a little, I'm a little,
51:21SPEAKERI'm more than a little wary of kind of like shortcut scripts
51:24SPEAKERthat purport to do things like this for you.
51:26SPEAKERI mean, 95% of them are fine to be clear,
51:28SPEAKERbut they're way too easily a vector for bad behavior
51:33SPEAKERto trust all of them blindly.
51:35SPEAKERSo this seems like an incredible misread
51:39SPEAKERof the Firefox audience by Mozilla.
51:44SPEAKERIt seems crazy to me.
51:45SPEAKERLike, do they not understand that people who use Firefox
51:48SPEAKERare very frequently doing so ideologically
51:51SPEAKERbecause they don't wanna use Google-based
51:54SPEAKERor like bigger corporate browsers
51:55SPEAKERwith more of this shit in there?
51:57SPEAKER- Well, I think there's two things, right?
51:59SPEAKEROne is that Mozilla has traditionally gotten
52:01SPEAKERmost of its revenue from Google, right?
52:03SPEAKER- Yes, is that still the case?
52:05SPEAKERI know that that came up because the word going around,
52:09SPEAKERI don't, surely Google's never said this out loud,
52:11SPEAKERbut the word going around was that that was really
52:13SPEAKERjust a protective play on Google's part
52:16SPEAKERagainst any kind of antitrust from the government.
52:19SPEAKERThat would be basically a way for them to say,
52:20SPEAKERhey, look, we support other browsers.
52:21SPEAKERLike, please don't take Chrome from us.
52:24SPEAKERBut now that we're not in a world
52:26SPEAKERwhere that matters anymore,
52:27SPEAKERare they even still giving the money?
52:29SPEAKER- Well, so as part of the monopoly lawsuit,
52:32SPEAKERI think there was a, that was part of the question.
52:38SPEAKERGoogle hasn't pulled the money from those
52:39SPEAKERas far as we know yet.
52:40SPEAKER- Okay.
52:44SPEAKER- It's traditionally been cheaper for them to fund Mozilla
52:48SPEAKERso that there's real browser competition,
52:50SPEAKERChromium competition, than it is to not fund Mozilla.
52:55SPEAKERBut anyway, we'll see what happens with that.
52:58SPEAKERThat's no way to know.
53:01SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm just, again, kind of surprised
53:04SPEAKERthey actually made this move in the first place.
53:06SPEAKER- Well, I was gonna say that the reason,
53:08SPEAKERI actually understand how you get into,
53:10SPEAKERhow you're Mozilla and you end up in a place
53:11SPEAKERwhere you're like, oh yeah, we gotta put AI stuff in Firefox.
53:14SPEAKERAnd it's the, like, this is the struggle for every startup,
53:18SPEAKEReverybody that's trying to raise money right now,
53:21SPEAKERis if you don't have some sort of AI strategy,
53:23SPEAKERnobody's gonna write you a check.
53:24SPEAKER- Sure.
53:27SPEAKER- But even if your audience is vehemently anti-AI,
53:30SPEAKERand that's why we see things like game studios
53:33SPEAKERand indie game studios that are like,
53:35SPEAKERyeah, we're exploring AI tooling, blah, blah, blah, blah,
53:38SPEAKERblah, when that stuff is gonna be absolute poison
53:40SPEAKERin the market for 90% of games, 99% of games.
53:45SPEAKERSo I don't, like, I understand how they get there.
53:48SPEAKERI think it's a horrible misread of their audience probably,
53:51SPEAKERgiven the kind of people who are likely to use Firefox.
53:53SPEAKER- Yeah.
53:54SPEAKER- But yeah, I think making it difficult to turn off
53:57SPEAKERis the real crime, honestly.
53:58SPEAKER- Yeah, yes.
53:59SPEAKER- But I think having a button in the control panel
54:02SPEAKERthat was like, hey, disable all the AI crap
54:04SPEAKERwould go a long way.
54:05SPEAKER- Yeah, like one easy button,
54:06SPEAKERwe're just right clicking the feature itself
54:08SPEAKERand hitting disable or something for sure.
54:11SPEAKERYou know, at the same time, like,
54:13SPEAKERFirefox's existing audience is not necessarily sufficient
54:17SPEAKERto keep Firefox going in a very healthy way.
54:21SPEAKERLike Firefox's market share is like abysmally low.
54:24SPEAKER- It's like 1%.
54:25SPEAKER- It's like one to 2% on any given month, it seems like.
54:28SPEAKER- Well, and they've made changes recently too.
54:30SPEAKERLike, I don't know if you saw, but they,
54:32SPEAKERFirefox bought Pocket, Mozilla bought Pocket a long time ago,
54:35SPEAKERthe kind of like the read on a plain white page article
54:40SPEAKERcompany, read it later company, I guess is what it is.
54:43SPEAKER- Yeah.
54:44SPEAKER- And that, the Pocket metadata
54:47SPEAKERused to fill their blank homepage.
54:49SPEAKERSo like, you know, they have the normal thing,
54:52SPEAKERthey have some sponsored links, they have your links,
54:54SPEAKERthe ones you use most commonly,
54:55SPEAKERand they have a Google search bar for your site of choice,
54:59SPEAKERfor your search of choice on their default homepage.
55:03SPEAKERAnd it used to be all Pocket links,
55:05SPEAKERwhich was kind of useful,
55:05SPEAKER'cause it was like stuff that Pocket, you know,
55:08SPEAKERfilters up to the top of Pocket,
55:09SPEAKERand it was a useful list of things.
55:12SPEAKERNow they're doing that all programmatically,
55:14SPEAKERand it's just the normal turn of dipshit stuff
55:18SPEAKERwith sponsored obvious scams.
55:21SPEAKERSo it's like, hey, Kill Bill is back in theaters
55:23SPEAKERin a new version, it'll never play the same.
55:25SPEAKERSpeaker Johnson pleads with Republicans
55:27SPEAKERto keep concerns private after tumultuous week.
55:30SPEAKER14 benefits seniors are entitled to,
55:32SPEAKERbut often forget to claim.
55:34SPEAKERAnd like, it's a real devaluation of the brand.
55:39SPEAKERLike I've turned off, I used to always use that homepage
55:42SPEAKERand look at the homepage,
55:43SPEAKER'cause there were always interesting things there,
55:45SPEAKER'cause anything that 20,000 people add to their Pocket
55:48SPEAKERis gonna be probably worth taking a look at, right?
55:51SPEAKERAnd this stuff is just the same garbage
55:53SPEAKERyou get on the homepage of MSN or CNN
55:55SPEAKERor the New York Times or anything, so thumbs down.
55:59SPEAKER- Yep.
56:00SPEAKER- And I realize I'm complaining about here,
56:04SPEAKERthey're doing the exact same thing that Google News does,
56:07SPEAKERand I'm complaining about it.
56:08SPEAKERI realize the hypocrisy here,
56:11SPEAKERbut the difference is that the Google News implementation
56:13SPEAKERis actually really good,
56:15SPEAKERand this implementation is really pretty generic, so.
56:18SPEAKER- Yeah, I like it, it's impossible to be free of biases,
56:21SPEAKERthe best you can do is be aware of them.
56:23SPEAKER- Yeah.
56:24SPEAKER- And rationalize them.
56:25SPEAKER- Yeah, I love rationalizing things.
56:27SPEAKER- Yes, we need more browsers in the world.
56:31SPEAKER- I mean, yeah, it's interesting.
56:33SPEAKERWe talked to the guys who make Cosmic from System 76
56:38SPEAKERon an upcoming episode of "The Dual Boy Diaries,"
56:40SPEAKERit'll be up next week, about Cosmic,
56:43SPEAKERwhich is their desktop environment
56:45SPEAKERthat's about to come out of beta.
56:47SPEAKERAnd we asked them why they did it,
56:51SPEAKER'cause there's plenty of desktop environments for Linux,
56:53SPEAKERand they're like, well, nobody was doing the things
56:55SPEAKERthat we thought were important here,
56:56SPEAKERand building toward the future and all that.
56:59SPEAKERAnd having multiple companies, multiple groups of people
57:03SPEAKERmaking things from different perspectives,
57:06SPEAKERit turns out, is incredibly valuable
57:08SPEAKERto the overall health of an ecosystem, so yeah, I agree.
57:11SPEAKERMore people making good stuff is good.
57:14SPEAKER- Not just more browsers,
57:15SPEAKERbut more browser rendering engines would be nice,
57:17SPEAKERbut I don't know.
57:18SPEAKER- I knew we have three, right?
57:19SPEAKER- Yeah, more or less.
57:21SPEAKERI mean, at least two of them are forks of each other.
57:24SPEAKER- Yeah, but ancient forks now.
57:26SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, actually, I don't know why,
57:27SPEAKERI just went back down this rabbit hole.
57:29SPEAKERI have to remind myself every couple of years
57:31SPEAKERwhich rendering engine was which.
57:33SPEAKERDid you know WebKit was forked from KDE
57:35SPEAKERnow that you're in the Linux land?
57:37SPEAKERI always forget that. - Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.
57:39SPEAKER- I always forget that all the browser engines
57:40SPEAKERthat run the entire web came out of fricking KDE originally.
57:45SPEAKERLike WebKit forked from that,
57:47SPEAKERand then I'm pretty sure Google forked Blink from WebKit.
57:51SPEAKER- That was my recollection.
57:52SPEAKERThat was ancient history at this point.
57:53SPEAKERIt was like 20 years ago.
57:55SPEAKER- And then Firefox, Firefox's Gecko is independent,
57:59SPEAKERor did it also come out of WebKit?
58:01SPEAKER- I think Firefox Gecko came out of its own thing,
58:03SPEAKERbut I don't remember.
58:04SPEAKERI think it came out of the old Firefox code base.
58:07SPEAKERIt was a refactor.
58:08SPEAKER- Yeah, that sounds right.
58:09SPEAKERAnd then there's the Ladybird project,
58:11SPEAKERwhich is relatively new.
58:12SPEAKERI think they're looking to ship a browser,
58:14SPEAKERlike an alpha next year or something.
58:16SPEAKER- That's exciting. - Which is its own
58:17SPEAKERfully new from the ground up web engine.
58:22SPEAKER- Yeah, Gecko has been based,
58:26SPEAKERGecko was a refactor of Netscape.
58:30SPEAKER- Oh, oh, right, okay, of course, yes.
58:33SPEAKER- Yep. - Anyway, standards.
58:36SPEAKER- There we go.
58:38SPEAKERSo I guess that's probably as good a place as any
58:40SPEAKERto wrap it up. - Yeah.
58:42SPEAKER- AI still sucks for multiple reasons.
58:45SPEAKER- Yes, the affordability crisis is only getting worse.
58:48SPEAKERThe, dude, I don't know if you watched
58:50SPEAKERthat Gamers Nexus video,
58:51SPEAKERbut the darkest thing, for PC enthusiasts to be clear,
58:54SPEAKERlike there are darker, broader economic trends at work,
58:57SPEAKERbut like for people who like building gaming PCs,
59:01SPEAKERthe darkest thing he mentions in that video
59:03SPEAKERis the idea that effectively the ability
59:05SPEAKERto build and own your own computer
59:08SPEAKERis slowly but surely being taken away.
59:10SPEAKER- Yep. - And that eventually
59:11SPEAKERthe idea is just going to be for you to rent computing time
59:14SPEAKERon some remote server.
59:15SPEAKER- Yeah, and the way they do that
59:16SPEAKERis just by buying all the RAM, it turns out.
59:18SPEAKER- Right, and effectively, I mean,
59:20SPEAKERthis is whether intentionally
59:21SPEAKERor just as a downstream consequence
59:23SPEAKERof both market forces and corruption.
59:25SPEAKERIf it just emerges organically,
59:27SPEAKERthe result is going to be the same of it's going to be,
59:29SPEAKERit's going to become more and more inaccessible
59:32SPEAKERto build and own your own computer.
59:34SPEAKER- I've been-- - It's about the darkest
59:36SPEAKERcyberpunk shit I could imagine in this very specific domain.
59:40SPEAKER- I've been watching those videos of the guys
59:42SPEAKERthat take old phones and then mill off the storage
59:47SPEAKERand put bigger storage on or mill off the CPU
59:50SPEAKERand then put faster CPUs on.
59:51SPEAKER- Nice.
59:52SPEAKER- And I'm like, yeah, that's where we're going.
59:54SPEAKERLike get ready, get good at drag soldering, baby.
59:56SPEAKER- Seriously, like that is, I've made this reference before
59:59SPEAKER'cause I only saw this movie recently a couple years ago,
1:00:01SPEAKERbut like that's the Henry Rollins character
1:00:03SPEAKERin Johnny Demonic, right?
1:00:04SPEAKER- Yeah. - Like the William Gibson
1:00:05SPEAKERvision of like dude in a workshop.
1:00:08SPEAKER- Yep. - Except instead of working
1:00:09SPEAKERon gas engines, he's like pulling circuit boards apart
1:00:12SPEAKERand jury rigging better chips onto things.
1:00:14SPEAKERAnd there's people out there soldering bigger SSDs
1:00:17SPEAKERonto their MacBook Pro motherboards and stuff.
1:00:20SPEAKER- Oh yeah. - Like it's gonna get
1:00:21SPEAKERweird out there.
1:00:22SPEAKER- Have you seen the guys that do the DIY home e-wasting?
1:00:27SPEAKER- No. - We talked about this already?
1:00:29SPEAKER- Did we think about it off air?
1:00:30SPEAKERI think we discussed this at some point recently.
1:00:33SPEAKER- Yeah, so there's YouTube channels where they show you
1:00:36SPEAKERhow to harvest the valuable metals out of your old e-waste
1:00:41SPEAKERso you can pull the gold and silver
1:00:43SPEAKERand whatever out, platinum. - Right, yep.
1:00:46SPEAKER- Wild. - Mm-hmm.
1:00:47SPEAKER- Anyway, yeah, it's a grim future.
1:00:49SPEAKERBut anyway, thanks for supporting the show.
1:00:50SPEAKERWe appreciate you all. - Mm-hmm, we sure do.
1:00:53SPEAKER- Sorry for the bad news episode, I guess.
1:00:55SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:00:56SPEAKER- But as always, we're brought to you by listeners.
1:00:59SPEAKERWe wouldn't be here without you, all the listeners,
1:01:01SPEAKERand we appreciate each and every one of you.
1:01:04SPEAKERIf you wanna find out how you can support the show
1:01:05SPEAKERand get access to the Patreon-exclusive Discord
1:01:08SPEAKERas well as the monthly Patreon-exclusive episode,
1:01:11SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techpod,
1:01:13SPEAKERwhere for $5 a month, that's all it costs.
1:01:16SPEAKERIt's like a third of a cup of coffee these days.
1:01:18SPEAKERIt's a quarter of a San Francisco sandwich.
1:01:22SPEAKERI don't know what gas costs 'cause I'm an electric car,
1:01:24SPEAKERbut maybe a gallon of gas, I don't know.
1:01:27SPEAKERYou get access to the Discord,
1:01:28SPEAKERyou get access to the Patreon-exclusive episodes,
1:01:30SPEAKERand you support Brad and me in our quest
1:01:33SPEAKERto continue bringing you an awesome tech podcast
1:01:35SPEAKERevery single week. - Yeah.
1:01:37SPEAKER- So again, it's patreon.com/techpod.
1:01:40SPEAKER- I found it useful recently,
1:01:42SPEAKERand I swear to God, this is not an upsell for our Patreon.
1:01:45SPEAKER- No, please, upsell our Patreon.
1:01:47SPEAKER- I mean, this is actually me putting myself
1:01:49SPEAKERin the consuming.
1:01:50SPEAKERI found it pretty useful to look at things
1:01:52SPEAKERin terms of like, alternate purchases.
1:01:54SPEAKERI mean, I know people do this all the time,
1:01:55SPEAKERbut in terms of the sandwich or cup of coffee type of analogy,
1:01:59SPEAKERlike I signed up for some like, sub stacks and stuff
1:02:02SPEAKERover Black Friday and was just like, you know what?
1:02:03SPEAKERYeah, I absolutely get three cups of coffee's worth
1:02:06SPEAKERof value or way more out of this thing every month.
1:02:10SPEAKEROf course I should support that.
1:02:11SPEAKER- Yeah, I think about it as like, you know,
1:02:15SPEAKERare we 1/20th of the value of a 64 gig pack
1:02:19SPEAKERof DDR5 6000?
1:02:20SPEAKERYeah, absolutely.
1:02:22SPEAKEREvery month.
1:02:24SPEAKERAnyway, we appreciate each and every one of you,
1:02:25SPEAKERbut we very, I wanna give a very special thank you
1:02:27SPEAKERto our executive producer, to your patrons,
1:02:30SPEAKERincluding Jason Lee, Infelicitous Rips, Andrew Slosky,
1:02:34SPEAKERJordan Lippett, Bunny Jerk, David Allen,
1:02:36SPEAKERJames Kamik, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3
1:02:40SPEAKERhigh-speed 3D printer.
1:02:42SPEAKERThank you all so, so much.
1:02:43SPEAKER- Thank you.
1:02:44SPEAKER- And that, I guess, will do it for us this week.
1:02:46SPEAKERWe will be back next week with another edition
1:02:49SPEAKERof the TechPod.
1:02:49SPEAKERUntil then, please consider the environment
1:02:52SPEAKERbefore printing this podcast.