00:00SPEAKER- Okay, let me ask you a question, Brad.
00:02SPEAKER- Ask away?
00:03SPEAKER- Am I being unkind by having my daughter
00:08SPEAKERin this 20, 25, 20 years after it came out
00:11SPEAKERplay Shadow of the Colossus?
00:13SPEAKER- That's a big question.
00:15SPEAKERThe question I am uniquely unqualified to answer.
00:18SPEAKER- Well, you've played Shadow of the Colossus.
00:19SPEAKER- I certainly have.
00:20SPEAKERI reviewed it, as a matter of fact.
00:22SPEAKER- You had emotional feelings
00:23SPEAKERas a result of playing that game, I'm assuming.
00:26SPEAKER- And then had another incident
00:27SPEAKERwith that game many years later.
00:28SPEAKER- What was the other incident?
00:30SPEAKER- Let's not talk about it.
00:31SPEAKER- Oh, okay, okay.
00:33SPEAKER- A quick look snafu, let's say.
00:35SPEAKER- Oh.
00:36SPEAKER- Let's say I maybe went in blind
00:37SPEAKERand forgot a core mechanic for most of the video.
00:41SPEAKER- Oh, oh no.
00:43SPEAKER- It was, finally the story can be told.
00:48SPEAKERIt was one of those, hey, we're going to PAX.
00:51SPEAKERWe just need extra content to go up over the break.
00:53SPEAKER- Yeah.
00:54SPEAKER- What do you got?
00:55SPEAKEREverybody find shit to quick look as fast as possible.
00:57SPEAKEROh, I've got a preview build of this on my desk.
00:59SPEAKERIs the video embargo up?
01:01SPEAKERYeah, it will be.
01:02SPEAKERLet's throw that in and play it.
01:04SPEAKERIt was just an overly rushed production of--
01:06SPEAKER- For the remaster?
01:07SPEAKER- No, no, this was, ah, I don't remember what--
01:10SPEAKER- It came out in 2018.
01:11SPEAKER- Situation, no, 'cause it was way before that.
01:13SPEAKERI'd have to go look, actually.
01:15SPEAKER- Did they re-release it for PS3 or something?
01:17SPEAKER- Ah, I'd have to look, maybe.
01:19SPEAKER- There was a collection, I think.
01:21SPEAKER- Maybe that's what it was.
01:21SPEAKER- It was like an eco in Shadow of the Colossus collection.
01:24SPEAKER- I think that might be what it was.
01:25SPEAKER- Yeah.
01:26SPEAKER- That might be what it was.
01:27SPEAKER- It was around the time The Last Guardian came out,
01:28SPEAKERif I remember right.
01:29SPEAKER- It was one of those things of just,
01:30SPEAKERah, we just need to produce some video,
01:31SPEAKERand I have not prepped for this at all.
01:33SPEAKERLet's just throw it in there.
01:34SPEAKEROh crap, boy, I flubbed that one badly.
01:37SPEAKEROh well, we don't have time to re-record it.
01:39SPEAKER- Well, so it's funny,
01:40SPEAKERit's funny because watching somebody who's grown up
01:43SPEAKERplaying a mixture of really, really old games,
01:46SPEAKERlike '80s and '90s games, and then also modern stuff,
01:49SPEAKERlike Peek and Breath of the Wild,
01:52SPEAKERwhen she was presented with that first,
01:54SPEAKERhey, here's where you learn to climb section,
01:57SPEAKERutterly flummoxed her.
01:58SPEAKER- Really?
01:59SPEAKERAre you climbing on a beast at that point,
02:00SPEAKERor is it like a cliff or something?
02:02SPEAKER- They make you climb up to a beast to get to the,
02:04SPEAKERclimb up a wall to get to the first thing,
02:06SPEAKERand she was just going at the rocks,
02:07SPEAKERlike you could climb the rocks.
02:08SPEAKERI was like, I don't think you can climb the rocks.
02:11SPEAKER- Saying she also forgot about the stamina mechanic?
02:13SPEAKER- Well, I don't know if she forgot
02:15SPEAKERabout the stamina mechanic,
02:16SPEAKERbut I explained the stamina mechanic to her.
02:18SPEAKERBut the thing is, she saw the big giant colossus,
02:21SPEAKERand her first instinct was,
02:23SPEAKERwell, it's a video game, time to get blasting,
02:25SPEAKERand started whaling it with arrows.
02:28SPEAKERAnd the health bar was going down a little bit,
02:30SPEAKERand I was like, I don't,
02:31SPEAKERlike, this is not gonna be a fun experience
02:33SPEAKERif you sit here and spend two hours
02:37SPEAKERbombing this thing with arrows.
02:38SPEAKER- Does the game not lead you at all to climbing
02:41SPEAKERand doing the actual thing?
02:42SPEAKER- It says over and over again,
02:44SPEAKERhey, you might consider climbing up on this.
02:47SPEAKERBut like, you know, the early 2000s were a gentler time,
02:51SPEAKERa kinder time, perhaps,
02:53SPEAKERand there was no yellow paint on that colossus.
02:56SPEAKER- No, in fact, actually,
02:57SPEAKERthere was no yellow paint in the world.
02:58SPEAKERThe yellow paint was white paint back then.
03:00SPEAKERAnd the ledges were, like, when you failed,
03:04SPEAKERinstead of giving you a different message
03:06SPEAKERthat, like, hinted and implied
03:08SPEAKERthat you should try something else,
03:10SPEAKERit just gives you the same message
03:11SPEAKERover and over and over again.
03:12SPEAKER- Yeah, that sounds like some late PS2 era tutorializing.
03:15SPEAKERYou know, I don't mind yellow paint in concepts.
03:17SPEAKERI have no problem with it when it's there
03:19SPEAKERand it's yellow paint.
03:20SPEAKERI do admire when they come up
03:21SPEAKERwith something more diegetic for it, though.
03:24SPEAKERLike, I'm trying to think,
03:25SPEAKERwas it Dishonored or some game
03:27SPEAKERI was seeing people posting screenshots of
03:29SPEAKERwhere it's like, oh, no, this was a valid, I think.
03:31SPEAKERA valid uses ropes.
03:32SPEAKER- Yeah, valid has ropes, like, dangly ropes everywhere.
03:35SPEAKER- Instead of, again, you know, yellow paint's fine.
03:36SPEAKERIt's just a little arbitrary.
03:37SPEAKERBut, you know, to make it some, like, in-world object
03:40SPEAKERis a nice, elegant way to kind of hide it
03:42SPEAKERbut still make it what it is.
03:43SPEAKER- I'm gonna tell you, we had, on the anacrusis,
03:46SPEAKERwe had one corridor that was, like,
03:48SPEAKERa section at the end of one of the episodes
03:52SPEAKERthat was just a really long corridor
03:54SPEAKERand, like, the whole level, basically,
03:56SPEAKERyou snake in and out of this really long corridor, right?
03:58SPEAKERSo you're starting at one end
03:59SPEAKERand you're going to the other end.
04:01SPEAKERAnd when we were playtesting it,
04:04SPEAKERthe number of times people would come out of a door
04:06SPEAKERand they'd turn left instead of right
04:07SPEAKERor right instead of left was,
04:10SPEAKERit's like a 50/50 chance every time.
04:11SPEAKERAnd it got to the point that the poor environment artists
04:14SPEAKERwere, like, had giant 15-foot arrows that were animated
04:18SPEAKERand moving in the right direction
04:20SPEAKERand pointing in the right direction.
04:22SPEAKERWe did smoke on the bad end and light on the good end
04:25SPEAKERand more light on the good end and dark, dark on the bad end
04:29SPEAKERand, like, players are real stupid, man.
04:31SPEAKERPlayers, and just to be clear, this is our fault, right?
04:34SPEAKERBut players, you cannot spell it out.
04:37SPEAKERI'm never gonna fault anybody for using yellow paint.
04:39SPEAKERYellow paint, vital.
04:40SPEAKER- You know, Double Dragon figured this out 35 years ago.
04:45SPEAKERPop up a big flashing cartoon pointing hand in their face.
04:48SPEAKER- Yeah, you can't overdo it.
04:51SPEAKER- Can't miss that.
04:52SPEAKER(upbeat music)
05:10SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)
05:20SPEAKER- Welcome to "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod."
05:22SPEAKERI'm Will.
05:23SPEAKER- I'm Brad.
05:24SPEAKERIt's 2020, God, I almost said 2025.
05:27SPEAKER- Yeah.
05:27SPEAKER- It's 2026.
05:28SPEAKER- This is our second episode of 2026, I guess?
05:31SPEAKER- Yes, technically, yes.
05:33SPEAKERBut the last one we recorded so long ago that-
05:36SPEAKER- Yeah, I've forgotten what your voice sounded like,
05:37SPEAKERhonestly.
05:38SPEAKER- What even is doing this podcast?
05:41SPEAKER- I'm glad people seem to enjoy
05:43SPEAKERthe ranking of startup sounds.
05:45SPEAKERWe missed a couple which we'll-
05:46SPEAKER- Yes.
05:47SPEAKER- May or may not address at some point in the future.
05:49SPEAKER- I plan to self-flagellate this weekend
05:52SPEAKERover the Neo Geo startup sound.
05:53SPEAKER- I did not have any access to Neo Geo stuff
05:56SPEAKERand I did not know that it had a startup sound,
05:57SPEAKERso I couldn't listen to that.
05:59SPEAKER- And you got it in the arcade even,
06:00SPEAKER'cause the arcade's the only place I ever played a Neo Geo,
06:02SPEAKERbut even there, you heard it and it's,
06:05SPEAKERthat's a, it might be S tier.
06:07SPEAKER- That's our bad.
06:08SPEAKERYeah, it's our bad.
06:09SPEAKER- But this week, this is the first real week of 2026,
06:14SPEAKERis also the week that tech journalists and companies
06:18SPEAKERand nerds and seemingly AI people
06:22SPEAKERand also Lego descend upon Las Vegas
06:25SPEAKERfor the Consumer Electronics Show.
06:28SPEAKERAnd while many of these shows in different categories
06:31SPEAKERhave waxed and waned over the years,
06:34SPEAKERCES seems unstoppable.
06:36SPEAKER- I don't wanna start the show with a showstopper,
06:38SPEAKERsince you mentioned AI.
06:40SPEAKERWe have maybe our first example of a very major company
06:43SPEAKERin here kind of poo-pooing AI in a fashion.
06:46SPEAKER- Are you talking about Dell talking to PC Gamer before CES
06:49SPEAKERand saying, "Hey man, people don't buy computers
06:51SPEAKER"because of AI."
06:53SPEAKER- I sure am.
06:54SPEAKER- Yeah.
06:54SPEAKER- I sure am.
06:55SPEAKERYou know, that seems like a sign.
06:57SPEAKER- Well, look, on one hand you have Dell saying that,
06:59SPEAKERon the other hand, you have Satya Nadella
07:00SPEAKERcoming out with a blog post the week after Christmas
07:02SPEAKERthat said, "Hey man, when you call AI slop,
07:04SPEAKER"you're hurting everybody."
07:06SPEAKER(laughing)
07:08SPEAKER- I'm not even gonna respond to that.
07:10SPEAKER- I made a t-shirt that says Microsoft Slop
07:12SPEAKERin the Microsoft logo, and people seem to be enjoying that.
07:14SPEAKER- Oh man, can you also make the S in slop a dollar sign?
07:17SPEAKER- I, see, now, I literally thought about doing that
07:20SPEAKERwhen I was doing the design for it,
07:21SPEAKERand I was like, that's a step too far, it's too much.
07:23SPEAKER- Is it?
07:24SPEAKERYeah, you know, I guess it's kind of crossing the streams,
07:25SPEAKERright, that's like, that's very mid to late 90s era.
07:30SPEAKER- That's classic Microsoft hate.
07:32SPEAKERThis is modern Microsoft hate.
07:34SPEAKER- Yeah, every generation needs its own hate
07:35SPEAKERof Microsoft, right?
07:36SPEAKER- Yeah, we all, for different reasons,
07:39SPEAKERdid you see my shirt?
07:40SPEAKERI know you're not on the internets as much these days.
07:43SPEAKER- I did not.
07:44SPEAKER- I will put a link for it in the Discord so you can see.
07:46SPEAKERI had to learn how to use Inkscape to do vector editing
07:50SPEAKERto make it look right.
07:51SPEAKER- Wait, can people actually buy this shirt?
07:53SPEAKER- Yeah, I posted it as a share,
07:55SPEAKERand then some people asked if I would post it
07:56SPEAKERso they could actually, 'cause I, like,
07:58SPEAKERI printed it 'cause I wanted to make one for myself,
08:00SPEAKERand then I shared it with a couple people like,
08:02SPEAKER"Hey, will you post this?"
08:03SPEAKERAnd then next thing I know,
08:03SPEAKERI've sold, like, kind of a lot of 'em.
08:05SPEAKER- Wow.
08:06SPEAKER- Not like a life-changing a lot,
08:07SPEAKERbut, you know, a couple bucks a pop.
08:09SPEAKER- That seems like a good facsimile of the Microsoft font,
08:12SPEAKERthe current Microsoft font, though.
08:13SPEAKER- Yeah, the current one.
08:14SPEAKERI looked at, I'll be honest,
08:16SPEAKERI started out with the '80s one with all the angles.
08:19SPEAKER- Yes, is that the one with the little notch cut out
08:21SPEAKERof one of the letters?
08:22SPEAKER- That's the late, that's the '90s one.
08:24SPEAKER- That's the '90s one.
08:25SPEAKER- The '80s one is like the,
08:26SPEAKERit looks like a trapezoid kind of.
08:29SPEAKER- Oh yeah, it's much more, I don't, oh, wait,
08:33SPEAKERthe one that looks like a heavy metal band logo?
08:35SPEAKER- Kind of, yeah, that's a good way to describe it.
08:38SPEAKER- Wow, that extremely, it's like two steps away
08:41SPEAKERfrom like a Metallica logo or something.
08:43SPEAKER- Yeah, I couldn't get that one.
08:45SPEAKERI couldn't make that one work, unfortunately.
08:47SPEAKER- That's actually, I kinda like that logo.
08:50SPEAKERI shouldn't say that, but, oh, I mean,
08:52SPEAKERearly, early Microsoft at least made like real products
08:54SPEAKERthat people could use, like basic.
08:56SPEAKER- Yeah, that was a fine era of Microsoft.
08:58SPEAKERWe wouldn't have the PC we have today
09:00SPEAKERif it weren't for that era of Microsoft, probably.
09:02SPEAKER- We might have a better one though.
09:04SPEAKER- I mean, okay, yeah, that's true,
09:07SPEAKERbut sometimes you gotta roll with the punches you got.
09:11SPEAKER- Yeah.
09:12SPEAKER- Anyway.
09:13SPEAKER- I watched a talk, I shouldn't get into this.
09:14SPEAKERMaybe we'll save this for- - What's the talk?
09:15SPEAKER- I watched a talk over, I watched a lot of YouTube,
09:17SPEAKERas we discussed on the Patreon episode.
09:19SPEAKER- Yeah.
09:20SPEAKER- Really just ringing the all I can
09:22SPEAKERout of that YouTube premium.
09:24SPEAKER- Yeah.
09:25SPEAKER- I watched a whole ass talk by Brian Cantrell,
09:29SPEAKERwho was an old school son guy.
09:31SPEAKER- Yeah, I remember Brian.
09:32SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't know him, but I remember hearing his name.
09:34SPEAKER- Yeah, one of the best speakers
09:36SPEAKERwho is like a hardcore computer guy I've ever seen.
09:40SPEAKERAnyway, we should talk about this some other time,
09:42SPEAKERbut he gets into, it's about the BIOS.
09:44SPEAKERHis talk is about the BIOS
09:46SPEAKERand what his current company is doing
09:47SPEAKERto effectively circumvent the BIOS/UEFI.
09:51SPEAKER- What?
09:52SPEAKER- Because he is a guy who comes from, again,
09:54SPEAKERfrom the Sun era where operating systems
09:56SPEAKERand hardware were married together.
09:59SPEAKERComputers were products top to bottom
10:01SPEAKERwhere the OS was made to support the hardware,
10:04SPEAKERnot an OS that was made independent of hardware,
10:07SPEAKERyou know, that could be run portably on whatever.
10:09SPEAKERAnd that's, they are trying to swing back in that direction
10:13SPEAKERwhere the OS is the only arbiter
10:15SPEAKERof what happens on the hardware.
10:17SPEAKER- I'm not sure about that one, Brad.
10:18SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, it's a philosophical thing
10:20SPEAKERthat you could certainly debate the pros and cons of.
10:22SPEAKERBut anyway, in that talk, he goes into a lot of history
10:25SPEAKERabout CPM and early Microsoft stuff
10:28SPEAKERand how the BIOS came about and the Compaq thing
10:31SPEAKERand all kinds of stuff.
10:33SPEAKERIt's a fascinating talk.
10:34SPEAKER- That sounds fascinating.
10:35SPEAKERI would watch that.
10:36SPEAKER- We'll get into that later.
10:37SPEAKER- Well, okay, so anyway, I, let's see,
10:39SPEAKERI hosted the talkovers for the CES keynotes
10:42SPEAKERon Monday for PC World.
10:43SPEAKERSo I watched Intel and Nvidia part two
10:46SPEAKERand AMD's two-hour death march.
10:49SPEAKERAnd then, mm-hmm.
10:52SPEAKER- Yeah, so yikes, I said.
10:54SPEAKER- Look, we'll talk about it.
10:56SPEAKER- Who had the death march, AMD?
10:57SPEAKER- AMD was the intro keynote for CES
11:00SPEAKERand there are some requirements for things
11:02SPEAKERthat they have to bring in partners
11:04SPEAKERfrom every aspect of the show.
11:06SPEAKERAnd that includes like healthcare and all sort of,
11:07SPEAKERbut it was just, they said the letter,
11:10SPEAKERthey said the word AI 207 times by my account.
11:13SPEAKER- Did you have a clicker?
11:14SPEAKER- I did.
11:15SPEAKER- Nice.
11:16SPEAKER- I put a, I stopped my pedal every time
11:19SPEAKERthat Dr. Lisa Sue said AI.
11:21SPEAKER- Great.
11:21SPEAKER- And the number went up on the screen
11:23SPEAKERbecause of the little Linux script I wrote.
11:24SPEAKER- Of those three, was there anything
11:26SPEAKERactually consumer-facing at all?
11:29SPEAKER- So the gen, so okay, Intel announced Panther Lake,
11:33SPEAKERwhich is shipping soon.
11:35SPEAKER- That matters to real, regular people.
11:37SPEAKER- Yeah, the big takeaways, they didn't really get
11:39SPEAKERinto the hardware a whole lot.
11:42SPEAKERNobody, they didn't have any like demo,
11:43SPEAKERthey didn't have like partner hardware on the stage.
11:46SPEAKERIt was a relatively short talk.
11:49SPEAKERBut they had, they announced a handheld
11:51SPEAKERgame console initiative, all out of the stream deck,
11:55SPEAKERsorry, steam deck and the AMD X2 chips designed
12:04SPEAKERfor handheld games, handheld PC consoles.
12:07SPEAKER- Yeah, we should remind people Panther Lake
12:09SPEAKERis the first part on 18A, their new fab process,
12:13SPEAKERtheir first like new super-efficient TSMC competitor,
12:17SPEAKERsupposedly.
12:18SPEAKER- It's a competitor with TSMC's four nanometer processes
12:21SPEAKERand beyond, so.
12:22SPEAKER- And it's laptop only, this is not relevant to desktop,
12:25SPEAKERalthough presumably Nova Lake, the next desktop part
12:28SPEAKERwill descend from this in some fashion.
12:30SPEAKER- I think it's laptop only asterisk in the same way
12:32SPEAKERthat like Strix Halo is laptop only.
12:35SPEAKERUnlike, so the thing about this is that it scales
12:37SPEAKERacross a wide variety of product skews.
12:40SPEAKERWe talked about it a little bit when Adam was on the show
12:42SPEAKERearlier last year, but they have, you know,
12:45SPEAKERit's a system of chips is what they're calling an SOC now
12:48SPEAKERand it's like a core low power IO chip,
12:51SPEAKERsome big high power compute cores
12:53SPEAKERand then a variable speed GPU core that uses,
12:57SPEAKERI think they're calling it a third generation,
12:59SPEAKERbut it's actually technically a second,
13:02SPEAKERit's a Battlemage core GPU with up to 12 GPU cores,
13:08SPEAKERwhich is a lot for mobile.
13:10SPEAKERAnd that puts it when paired with a giant pool of memory,
13:14SPEAKERputs it in the kind of Strix Halo category
13:16SPEAKERis what they're saying.
13:17SPEAKERThe kind of early benchmarks that people ran on the floor,
13:20SPEAKER'cause they were letting people do that,
13:21SPEAKERlook really promising,
13:23SPEAKERespecially for that 12 core GPU part remains to be seen,
13:29SPEAKERlike what, how much availability they're gonna have
13:31SPEAKERwhen that stuff's gonna ship.
13:32SPEAKER'Cause I think that that's not one of the first parts
13:34SPEAKERof the shipping, but that part was all really unclear.
13:38SPEAKER- That's cool.
13:38SPEAKERI mean, that seems like maybe a big deal.
13:41SPEAKERLike obviously handhelds are getting huge.
13:45SPEAKERIt would be pretty interesting if Intel became a player
13:47SPEAKERin that space successfully.
13:49SPEAKER- Yeah, one of the things that's interesting
13:51SPEAKERabout the Intel one versus the Ryzen,
13:52SPEAKER'cause Ryzen has been doing disaggregated chip designs
13:56SPEAKERfor a while now with AMD has.
13:58SPEAKERAnd the interesting thing is that most of their compute
14:01SPEAKERis on one chiplet inside that package.
14:04SPEAKERSo they don't theoretically have the stuttering
14:07SPEAKERand the kind of scheduling problems that the Ryzens have,
14:11SPEAKERespecially the dual CCD Ryzens have
14:13SPEAKERwhen you're trying to move threads
14:15SPEAKERfrom one part of the package,
14:18SPEAKERfrom one chiplet to another chiplet
14:19SPEAKERbasically inside the package.
14:20SPEAKERSo anyway, TBD, we'll get hardware there soon
14:23SPEAKERand have benchmarks and we'll talk about that
14:25SPEAKERover at PC World, I'm sure.
14:27SPEAKERBut yeah, so the Intel thing was interesting.
14:30SPEAKERIt was pretty fast.
14:30SPEAKERThey set AI, I think 50 times, 47 times by my count.
14:34SPEAKER- That's pretty low, lower than the other guys.
14:36SPEAKER- Yeah, it was a shorter keynote,
14:38SPEAKERbut they were on the same pace basically, AMD and Intel.
14:41SPEAKER- So not, sorry to keep preventing you from moving on.
14:44SPEAKERNo news about Aero Lake refresh, huh?
14:46SPEAKERI wonder if that's even still happening or not.
14:48SPEAKER- No news about Aero Lake refresh.
14:50SPEAKERNo news about Nova Lake, which has the desktop 18A part.
14:54SPEAKER- Yeah, Nova Lake is the actual next desktop part,
14:56SPEAKERbut there were rumors last fall
14:58SPEAKERthat they were gonna do another round
14:59SPEAKERof Aero Lake this spring.
15:02SPEAKERLike modest bump to whatever core clocks
15:06SPEAKERand who knows what else,
15:06SPEAKERbut I wonder if that's even still happening or not.
15:09SPEAKER- We'll talk about that in a little bit.
15:12SPEAKERThe weird thing I've been hearing rumor wise
15:14SPEAKERfrom a bunch of people is that we might see older DDR4 parts
15:18SPEAKERmake a resurgence because of the rise of memory,
15:24SPEAKERDDR5 prices in the last two months, three months.
15:26SPEAKER- There are people posting shots of DDR4 memory
15:29SPEAKERon our Discord now.
15:30SPEAKER- Yeah.
15:31SPEAKER- 'Cause that's what they're buying.
15:32SPEAKER'Cause that's what there is.
15:34SPEAKER- We'll talk about it in a minute.
15:35SPEAKERAMD, so AMD had the main key.
15:37SPEAKERSo Nvidia, Jensen also did an Nvidia keynote
15:40SPEAKERthat was the typical, hey, we're gonna talk about AI a bunch
15:43SPEAKERand get the stock price to go up.
15:46SPEAKERThey had some robots and stuff there.
15:47SPEAKERThey had some other, like they said the self-driving,
15:49SPEAKERthey have a self-driving car partnership with the Mercedes
15:52SPEAKERwhere they have instrumented cars,
15:54SPEAKERlike the Waymos and the Zooxes and all that
15:56SPEAKERdriving around downtown San Francisco right now.
15:58SPEAKER- Wait, does that mean Nvidia is doing the AV part
16:01SPEAKERthemselves, the autonomy?
16:03SPEAKERLike are they devising their own self-driving algorithms
16:06SPEAKERor stack?
16:07SPEAKER- I don't know.
16:07SPEAKERI don't know what the division of labor is on that.
16:09SPEAKERAll I know is that when you look at it,
16:11SPEAKERthere's a big giant disclaimer on the side.
16:12SPEAKERI took a photo of it.
16:13SPEAKERIt was so weird.
16:14SPEAKERI'll send it to you.
16:15SPEAKERYou can be show art.
16:16SPEAKERBut it literally says this is a partnership
16:18SPEAKERbetween Mercedes-Benz and Nvidia
16:21SPEAKERfor a self-driving car prospect.
16:23SPEAKERAnd by standing in the street,
16:25SPEAKERyou're consenting to have your photo taken.
16:27SPEAKERIf you don't want that, you can email this address
16:29SPEAKERand they'll take your photos out of the pool.
16:32SPEAKER- Interesting, okay.
16:33SPEAKER- Anyway.
16:34SPEAKER- It's really interesting how Nvidia is just becoming
16:36SPEAKERsuch a household word because it's so valuable.
16:38SPEAKER- Because it's an enormous company, yeah.
16:40SPEAKER- Like people who had no reason to know
16:42SPEAKERwhat Nvidia was five years ago in my life,
16:44SPEAKERjust randomly mention it now.
16:46SPEAKERLet me tell you, the people who watch CES live streams
16:52SPEAKERare very enthusiastic about Nvidia remembering their roots.
16:57SPEAKER- I can see it.
16:58SPEAKERI would be too. - And supporting
16:58SPEAKERthe gaming market.
16:59SPEAKER- Yeah, I would be too.
17:00SPEAKER- Yeah.
17:01SPEAKERSo Jensen did that keynote actually before the Intel one.
17:05SPEAKERWe skipped that 'cause it was,
17:06SPEAKERthose are usually a death march for consumer hardware
17:09SPEAKERand not particularly worth watching.
17:11SPEAKERBut they did a Nintendo Direct style stream
17:16SPEAKERthat was prerecorded later that night,
17:19SPEAKERI'll talk about in a sec.
17:20SPEAKER- That's smart actually, just from a kind of audience
17:23SPEAKERor gamer relations standpoint, let's say,
17:26SPEAKERlike it was smarter than to just break that out
17:27SPEAKERand put it somewhere else.
17:28SPEAKER- It's a huge win because they got a lot of attention
17:31SPEAKERon that and it's a thing that they've been doing
17:33SPEAKERfor a little bit and I don't think a lot of people
17:34SPEAKERknow about.
17:35SPEAKERAnd it was 30 minutes, it was dense with stuff
17:41SPEAKERthat I was actually interested in.
17:42SPEAKERThey showed off footage from a handful of new games
17:44SPEAKERthat are part of the GeForce experience program or whatever.
17:49SPEAKER- Yeah, I saw some of that Resident Evil 9
17:50SPEAKERfootage going around.
17:51SPEAKER- It was Resident Evil 9.
17:52SPEAKERThey showed the IO Interactive James Bond game
17:55SPEAKERmore than I'd seen anywhere else, I think,
17:58SPEAKERand a couple other things, some stuff out of China
18:00SPEAKERthat looked cool.
18:01SPEAKERAnd then the other, well, we'll talk about it,
18:05SPEAKERlet's just go and do it.
18:06SPEAKERThey also announced the G-Sync Pulsar stuff,
18:08SPEAKERwhich we've heard rumors about for a while.
18:10SPEAKERIt's basically black frame insertion G-Sync
18:13SPEAKERis a kind of an oversimplification.
18:16SPEAKERBut the idea is that instead of having the glow decay
18:21SPEAKERover time, you flash the correct image on
18:25SPEAKERfor the time that it's correct and then flash off,
18:28SPEAKERlike actively turn that off and then flash on.
18:31SPEAKERThey've been working on it for a long time.
18:32SPEAKERThey weren't able to get it to work without flicker
18:34SPEAKERuntil they got above a certain refresh rate, it seems like.
18:38SPEAKERAnd it seems like they're targeting 60 to 70 frames
18:42SPEAKERper second for the insertion,
18:44SPEAKERfor the minimum insertion frame rate,
18:46SPEAKER'cause they need to have some time in between the frames
18:49SPEAKERfor it to go.
18:51SPEAKER- We should say black frame insertion is one method
18:54SPEAKERof reducing motion blur on modern displays,
18:56SPEAKERlike OLEDs in particular.
18:58SPEAKER- Yeah, and I think these initial wave of panels
19:01SPEAKERaren't OLEDs, I think they're IPS panels.
19:04SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm sure it works just as well with LCDs.
19:06SPEAKERI think like LG OLEDs were where that feature
19:08SPEAKERfirst started popping up, but I think it works
19:10SPEAKERon any kind of low persistence display.
19:13SPEAKER- It's really weird, oh, they're IPS panels, yeah.
19:15SPEAKERAnd they're launched with like three or four
19:18SPEAKERIPS 27-inch panels.
19:20SPEAKERI might guess is that they're all the same panel,
19:21SPEAKERall basically the same hardware, just with different trim.
19:24SPEAKERBut I don't know that for sure.
19:26SPEAKER- Sorry, really quick, I have to correct myself.
19:28SPEAKERLow persistence is the opposite of what you need
19:29SPEAKERfor this sort of thing.
19:31SPEAKER- Yeah, you want it to turn on and off quickly.
19:35SPEAKER- Okay, so the other thing that came out
19:36SPEAKERon the G-Sync front is that MediaTek,
19:39SPEAKERa company that makes a lot of monitor controllers,
19:41SPEAKERis now making G-Sync compatible controllers for monitors.
19:44SPEAKER- Interesting, okay, I think my TV has a MediaTek SoC
19:47SPEAKERin it, for example.
19:48SPEAKER- Exactly, it should open up G-Sync to a lot more monitors.
19:52SPEAKERThe interesting thing about the Pulsar thing
19:54SPEAKERis it seems like now there's like three tiers of G-Sync,
19:56SPEAKER'cause you had G-Sync before, and then you had
20:00SPEAKERG-Sync compatible with FreeSync monitors,
20:02SPEAKERand then you had just normal VRR,
20:03SPEAKERand now these Pulsar monitors are gonna be
20:05SPEAKERprobably above that, 'cause they require
20:07SPEAKERsome special panels, basically, to work,
20:09SPEAKERis my understanding.
20:10SPEAKER- Okay, do you know if, this might be getting
20:12SPEAKERin the weeds, technically, but is it the,
20:15SPEAKERare the frames just being inserted by the monitor itself?
20:18SPEAKERLike, does this require any intervention
20:20SPEAKERon the part of the game or the graphics card,
20:22SPEAKERor does this just work purely on the monitor?
20:25SPEAKER- So, they haven't released a white paper yet,
20:27SPEAKERI think it's coming.
20:29SPEAKERTypically, G-Sync stuff is a conversation
20:31SPEAKERbetween the monitor and the panel, and the card.
20:33SPEAKER- So, this might be newer graphics cards only,
20:35SPEAKERor something like that?
20:36SPEAKER- My guess is, typically the G-Sync stuff,
20:39SPEAKERthey'll, everything, like, everything is support,
20:42SPEAKERtypically that doesn't have a level of support.
20:45SPEAKERMy guess is, in order to use this,
20:46SPEAKERyou're gonna have a certain amount of performance,
20:48SPEAKERand that's probably gonna be your gate.
20:49SPEAKERSo, I don't know for sure.
20:50SPEAKER- Okay.
20:52SPEAKER- The other thing that they announced was,
20:55SPEAKERwell, G-Sync, they're putting brightness sensors,
20:58SPEAKERlight, ambient light sensors in monitors now,
21:01SPEAKERthe Pulsar monitors all have this,
21:03SPEAKERso that you get the same kind of dimming, and dim rooms,
21:06SPEAKERand brightening, and bright rooms,
21:07SPEAKERand matching the color temperature
21:09SPEAKERof your ambient light, potentially, even.
21:11SPEAKER- Like a very Apple-like feature
21:12SPEAKERto take to a gaming monitor, but okay.
21:14SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like, it's one of those things
21:16SPEAKERthat I was looking to say, I was like,
21:17SPEAKERoh, my phone and laptop have done this for a decade.
21:19SPEAKER- Right.
21:21SPEAKER- That's kind of nice, but yeah.
21:22SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, it's not a bad thing.
21:24SPEAKER- Like, ambient color temperature, I don't think I want,
21:26SPEAKERbut the ambient brightness sounds pretty good, actually.
21:28SPEAKEREspecially when you're talking about HDR monitors
21:30SPEAKERthat get kind of bright,
21:31SPEAKERthis is one of the other things that came out of CS,
21:33SPEAKERnot on the PC space, but on TVs,
21:36SPEAKERlike, a lot of companies are announcing
21:38SPEAKER4,500 NIT monitors now.
21:40SPEAKER- Wow.
21:41SPEAKER- Yeah. - That's a lot.
21:42SPEAKER- Extreme high-end, but still.
21:44SPEAKER- Dude, what the, my TV is somewhere
21:45SPEAKERbetween like 1,500 and 2,000, and I can't,
21:48SPEAKERI almost can't look at it at the max brightness,
21:50SPEAKERand that's not even half of what you're talking about.
21:52SPEAKER- Yeah, so that's coming.
21:54SPEAKERLet's see, GeForce Now for Linux,
21:56SPEAKERthey've announced, they released a Steam Deck client
22:00SPEAKERa few months ago,
22:01SPEAKERand now they're doing just a generic Linux client
22:04SPEAKERthat will work with, it's launching on Ubuntu,
22:08SPEAKERwill come to other distros as they expand the beta.
22:12SPEAKER- Is there an advantage to the standalone client?
22:14SPEAKERI would think that stuff
22:15SPEAKERwould all just be web-based these days,
22:17SPEAKERbut, I mean, I guess you could build better,
22:19SPEAKERI don't know, hardware acceleration support
22:20SPEAKERinto a client than a browser can do, et cetera.
22:23SPEAKER- Yeah, so you get better hardware acceleration,
22:24SPEAKERyou get support for more controller types.
22:26SPEAKEROne of the things they're talking about
22:27SPEAKERis adding support for HOTASs and stuff like that.
22:30SPEAKERI assume wheels will probably come after that.
22:33SPEAKER- Is it interesting?
22:34SPEAKERI mean, you live in the Linux world
22:35SPEAKERmore than I do these days,
22:36SPEAKERto see software that is distro-specifically compatible,
22:40SPEAKERis that common?
22:41SPEAKER- That's pretty normal, yeah.
22:42SPEAKERIf you look at Discord and Slack and stuff like, and Notion,
22:46SPEAKERthey all ship Ubuntu packages,
22:51SPEAKERand then what people do is they unpack those
22:53SPEAKERand repackage them for distro in the AUR or whatever.
22:57SPEAKER- Yep, of course.
22:59SPEAKER- So yeah, that's it for that.
23:01SPEAKERThen the AMD keynote was two hours long.
23:04SPEAKERThe only thing of interest there,
23:06SPEAKERthey released and announced the 9850 X3D,
23:09SPEAKERwhich is a 7% speed bump on the 9800 X3D.
23:14SPEAKERThat's the eight-core single CCD
23:17SPEAKERwith huge v-cache Ryzen chip.
23:22SPEAKERThey didn't talk about that at the keynote at all.
23:25SPEAKERIt was literally two hours of hell with,
23:29SPEAKERthey did announce a Strix Halo, the Ryzen AI Halo box,
23:33SPEAKERwhich is like a Mac Studio size kind of box,
23:36SPEAKERlike a two and a half liter maybe thing
23:38SPEAKERthat has a Strix Halo, the new Strix Halo bump in it.
23:45SPEAKERThat's like a little,
23:46SPEAKERthey called it an AI compute box basically, but.
23:49SPEAKER- Yeah, I saw that thing
23:49SPEAKERand I thought it looked pretty interesting
23:51SPEAKERuntil I clicked through and realized it
23:53SPEAKERis basically for AI development is how they're
23:55SPEAKERpositioning it, I think.
23:56SPEAKER- Yes, so one of the things that's happened
23:58SPEAKERover the last year and the reason Strix Halo is interesting
24:01SPEAKERis what is typically a detriment for these,
24:05SPEAKERfor like small form factor and integrated graphics machines,
24:08SPEAKERwhich is that they have to use slow-ass DDR5 system memory
24:13SPEAKERis actually a real bonus for AI
24:15SPEAKER'cause it means you can run 128 gigabytes
24:18SPEAKERof slow-ass DDR5 memory,
24:20SPEAKERwhich lets you load a greater than 32 gigabyte model
24:23SPEAKERinto RAM, which means it'll actually run and be functional.
24:27SPEAKERSo yeah, it's more AI bullshit, but.
24:31SPEAKER- When you say slow ass, are we talking like 4,800 MTs,
24:34SPEAKERlike kind of the JETIC DDR5?
24:37SPEAKER- No, no, no, I just mean slow compared to like GDDR7 VRAM.
24:41SPEAKER- On card, on card, faster, yes.
24:43SPEAKER- Yeah, so like if you're playing games
24:45SPEAKERand running an integrated GPU with slow DDR5 versus GDDR7,
24:53SPEAKERyou're getting much less fill rate
24:55SPEAKERand much less memory bandwidth,
24:57SPEAKERbut on AI workloads, that is much less important
25:00SPEAKERthan just having a whole shitload of RAM, so.
25:04SPEAKERSo that was pretty much it.
25:06SPEAKERLiterally the AMD, when they had people from OpenAI
25:09SPEAKERand they had a bunch of other AI model places,
25:11SPEAKERthey had a place that was doing 3D worlds
25:13SPEAKERthat looked like complete bullshit.
25:15SPEAKERThey had a place that was doing video generation
25:19SPEAKERthat looked like complete bullshit.
25:20SPEAKERThey had a place, they had some healthcare stuff.
25:23SPEAKERThe OpenAI guy came on and was like,
25:25SPEAKER"Hey, you know what people love to do is ask a chat GPT
25:29SPEAKERabout child rearing questions, baby questions."
25:31SPEAKERAnd I was like,
25:32SPEAKER"That sounds like a good way to end up in the hospital."
25:34SPEAKERSo don't do that. - It sure does, it sure does.
25:37SPEAKERThere may be less fragile things than your infant child
25:41SPEAKERjust to test out AI on.
25:43SPEAKER- The interesting thing was the comments on the chat,
25:47SPEAKERand this was on the PC World chat, not on the AMD chat,
25:49SPEAKERbut the comments on the PC World chat
25:51SPEAKERwere just overwhelmingly negative.
25:54SPEAKERI appreciate everybody who stuck through that with us
25:56SPEAKER'cause it was nice to have the company.
25:57SPEAKER- I was gonna say that sounds like a rough talk over.
26:00SPEAKER- It was, like if I understood,
26:03SPEAKERyou know when you hear those stories about wolves
26:05SPEAKERthat chew their own legs off to escape a trap?
26:08SPEAKERYeah, I understand that now.
26:10SPEAKER- Woof.
26:12SPEAKER- Okay, so let's get to something
26:13SPEAKERI'm super duper crazy excited about.
26:16SPEAKER- Okay, we like those.
26:19SPEAKER- The Lego Smart Bricks/Smart Play Initiative.
26:22SPEAKER- Smart Legos.
26:24SPEAKER- It's so fucking cool, dude.
26:26SPEAKERSo there are three components of this thing.
26:28SPEAKERThere's Smart Bricks,
26:29SPEAKERwhich is like a little two by four brick height,
26:32SPEAKERnormal ass brick with sensors and logic
26:38SPEAKERand like positional tracking for NFC
26:42SPEAKERor some sort of contactless sensor.
26:46SPEAKERRadios, speakers, lights, all that kind of stuff.
26:51SPEAKERThe top is transparent so you can see through it
26:53SPEAKERand lights can shine on the top in different configurations.
26:56SPEAKERAnd the next component are Smart Tags.
26:59SPEAKERAnd Smart Tags and Smart Mini Figs
27:01SPEAKERare the last two components.
27:03SPEAKERThey kind of sound like the same thing.
27:04SPEAKERThey're just trackable little guys
27:09SPEAKERthat the Smart Bricks can track
27:10SPEAKERand be aware of both their position in 3D space
27:13SPEAKERand proximity to other things and stuff like that.
27:16SPEAKERThose tags and the Mini Figs contain code
27:19SPEAKERthat determines what happens
27:21SPEAKERwhen they interact with other items.
27:23SPEAKERSo one of the things they showed
27:25SPEAKERwas a game where you had little cars
27:28SPEAKERand the person who got the car closest to a trophy
27:31SPEAKERthat had the Smart Brick in it won.
27:34SPEAKERAnd the device could like tell which,
27:38SPEAKERlike it would show the color of the car on the Smart Brick
27:42SPEAKERthat got closest to the trophy
27:43SPEAKERwhen you're rolling them from across the table,
27:44SPEAKERstuff like that.
27:47SPEAKERIt kind of looks like what they do
27:50SPEAKERwith those Super Mario Brothers games,
27:54SPEAKERthe Lego Super Mario Brothers games that they do.
27:56SPEAKERI think that mostly works through barcodes
27:58SPEAKERand stuff like that.
27:59SPEAKERBut it seems like they built an expansion of that concept
28:03SPEAKERthat's user programmable.
28:05SPEAKERAnd the upshot is because the bricks have compute
28:10SPEAKERand the tags are trackable
28:13SPEAKERand the bricks can talk to each other too.
28:14SPEAKERSo if you have one Smart Brick, it works with the tags,
28:17SPEAKERbut if you have multiple Smart Bricks,
28:18SPEAKERthey can talk to each other to the point that like
28:20SPEAKERone of the kits they showed was a Star Wars kit
28:23SPEAKERthat had an X-Wing and a TIE fighter in it.
28:25SPEAKERAnd like the kids were flying around
28:27SPEAKERwhen the TIE fighter aimed at the X-Wing,
28:28SPEAKERit would make pew pew pew noises and vice versa.
28:32SPEAKERAnd like some of this is a bummer
28:35SPEAKER'cause it's like taking out the play for the kids.
28:38SPEAKER- Sure, yeah, I can see that.
28:40SPEAKER- But the idea that you can write code,
28:42SPEAKERdump it on one of these tags with your phone
28:45SPEAKERand then hook that to a Lego build
28:49SPEAKERand make that Lego do something interesting
28:51SPEAKERwhen it's in the right proximity to other stuff
28:54SPEAKERor the Smart Bricks or whatever
28:56SPEAKERis really, really exciting to me about this.
28:59SPEAKER- I watched the, I'm surprised they didn't put out
29:01SPEAKERa presentation of this themselves.
29:03SPEAKERI mean, maybe that's not what CES is for,
29:05SPEAKERthe best one I could find,
29:06SPEAKERor the one you linked was the best one I saw,
29:08SPEAKERwhich is a pretty off angle shot of a screen.
29:11SPEAKER- Yeah.
29:11SPEAKER- It was kind of hard to see the Legos actually lighting up
29:14SPEAKERor change of colors the way the guy was describing,
29:16SPEAKERbut like the very most basic expression of this
29:19SPEAKERwas like two Legos that were programmed
29:21SPEAKERto change colors across the RGB spectrum,
29:24SPEAKERdepending on their distance.
29:24SPEAKERSo you could just kind of move them closer and farther away
29:27SPEAKERand they would change colors.
29:30SPEAKER- One of the other demos I saw somebody talk about
29:32SPEAKERon Blue Sky was making like a Xylophone that had,
29:39SPEAKERI think the bricks were in the hands
29:41SPEAKERand you put the tags on the top of the devices
29:43SPEAKERand when the bricks got close to the tags,
29:45SPEAKERthen it would bong the right sound.
29:47SPEAKER- That's neat.
29:48SPEAKERI think the one place I'm, I mean,
29:50SPEAKERI guess I'm having a hard time conceptualizing
29:52SPEAKERthe part where these things need to move around
29:54SPEAKERin order to change state.
29:56SPEAKER- Yeah.
29:57SPEAKER- And there's not a lot of like mechanized Lego stuff
29:59SPEAKERthat I'm aware of.
30:00SPEAKERThis is basically just you manually moving blocks around
30:03SPEAKERto make things happen, I guess.
30:04SPEAKERIs that correct?
30:06SPEAKER- A part of it is, yeah, there's a fair amount.
30:08SPEAKERLike there's a lot of adult Lego that has motors.
30:10SPEAKER- Okay.
30:11SPEAKER- For example, like Gina has a train set
30:13SPEAKERthat has a trolley car that has a motor in it
30:15SPEAKERthat can tootle around the tracks.
30:17SPEAKER- Okay, see, I am way behind on what the Lego product lineup
30:21SPEAKERis like these days.
30:22SPEAKER- Well, but I think the interesting thing to me
30:23SPEAKERis that it doesn't require that stuff.
30:25SPEAKER'Cause that stuff's kind of expensive.
30:26SPEAKERLike when you start motorizing your Lego,
30:28SPEAKERyou get into real money real fast.
30:30SPEAKERFor me, this is interesting.
30:32SPEAKER'Cause I saw a Unity developer, Scott Anderson,
30:35SPEAKERwas on Blue Sky talking about just running
30:38SPEAKERJohann Sebastian Joust on bricks alone.
30:41SPEAKER- Sure.
30:42SPEAKER- Right, so like that becomes a thing
30:44SPEAKERthat you just play the music and hears the music.
30:46SPEAKERAnd then when the music stops, you have to stop moving.
30:48SPEAKERAnd if it doesn't, then your wand makes the bad sound
30:52SPEAKERand you get kicked out of the game.
30:53SPEAKER- Sure, sure, I guess I'm thinking too small
30:55SPEAKERor too rigidly.
30:57SPEAKER- We're talking about divorcing the blocks
30:58SPEAKERfrom the standard like rigid, single Lego constructs, right?
31:02SPEAKERYou're talking about loose blocks,
31:05SPEAKERmoving around in a room and that kind of thing.
31:07SPEAKER- So there've been a bunch of toys
31:08SPEAKERthat kind of have similar behavior.
31:11SPEAKERThere's this thing called little bits
31:12SPEAKERthat has like a series of sensors
31:15SPEAKERand a series of motors and actuators and servos
31:19SPEAKERand solenoids and stuff like that
31:20SPEAKERthat you can kind of hook up with magnetic.
31:23SPEAKERThey have like, they have point to point magnetic clips
31:26SPEAKERthat are almost like pogo pins
31:29SPEAKERthat can snap onto each other.
31:30SPEAKERBut those, the sensors, like those,
31:35SPEAKERin order to build a bunch of sensors,
31:36SPEAKERyou have to have a bunch of those units.
31:38SPEAKERIt's not like this thing where all the sensors
31:40SPEAKERare jammed into this one standard size
31:43SPEAKERtwo by four Lego brick, right?
31:47SPEAKERAnd I think that's the intro, that's what,
31:50SPEAKERthat and the fact that Lego is really ubiquitous
31:52SPEAKERmakes it interesting to me, right?
31:55SPEAKER- The idea that you could have, say,
31:58SPEAKERlike one of the things they showed was a smart tag
32:02SPEAKERthat they suggested that you could put a smart tag
32:04SPEAKERon your brother and have an alarm go off
32:06SPEAKERwhen he gets near your bedroom door, right?
32:08SPEAKERStuff like that. - Rad.
32:09SPEAKER- Yeah. - That is,
32:11SPEAKERI mean, I didn't have a brother,
32:12SPEAKERbut that still immediately makes me eight years old again.
32:14SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly. - Sounds awesome.
32:15SPEAKER- Yeah, if you want to build,
32:16SPEAKERlike if you wanted to use this to build an alarm system
32:19SPEAKERfor your bedroom as a kid, that's a totally doable thing.
32:22SPEAKER- Yes, yes, add that to your Home Alone Immersive Sim.
32:25SPEAKERAnd it kind of, I hope, my hope,
32:27SPEAKERI don't know what the pricing is on this stuff yet,
32:29SPEAKERbut my hope is that it will fill the gap
32:31SPEAKERbetween the Lego robotics stuff
32:35SPEAKERand like the base Lego toys, so.
32:38SPEAKER- Yeah, just to reiterate now that you have,
32:40SPEAKERagain, I was envisioning this as like,
32:42SPEAKERoh, these are all supposed to be used on one Lego playset,
32:44SPEAKERbut that's a rigid block-based thing.
32:46SPEAKERHow do these work?
32:46SPEAKERAnd I see these are much more like
32:48SPEAKERyou're taking these Lego blocks into the real world
32:51SPEAKERand making things happen there.
32:52SPEAKER- They're also putting them on Lego playsets,
32:54SPEAKERto be clear, one of the playsets
32:55SPEAKERis like Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots
32:58SPEAKERwith Luke and Darth Vader fighting each other
33:00SPEAKERwith laser swords in the Emperor's throne room
33:04SPEAKERfrom Return of the Jedi.
33:05SPEAKERAnd like one person stands on one side
33:07SPEAKERand you can kind of control, the guys are on little sticks.
33:10SPEAKERSo when their lightsabers touch,
33:12SPEAKERthen it makes a, you know, it makes a lightsaber noises
33:16SPEAKERfor the appropriate ones and stuff like that, so.
33:18SPEAKER- Do any of these have batteries in them, I wonder?
33:21SPEAKER- Yeah, so the smart bricks have batteries,
33:23SPEAKERthe tags and the smart minifigs don't.
33:26SPEAKERThe smart bricks, I think they said 45 minutes of play
33:28SPEAKERon a single charge, if you go at it really hard,
33:30SPEAKERyou kind of shake it to wake it up,
33:33SPEAKERjust like your 8BitDo Switch 2 controller.
33:37SPEAKERAnd they turn off, they seem to be aggressively power saving
33:42SPEAKERis what the people I saw who experienced them
33:44SPEAKERon the show floor said.
33:45SPEAKERAnd they come with a charger that's a contactless charger,
33:48SPEAKERyou just set them on for a few minutes
33:49SPEAKERto charge them back up.
33:50SPEAKER- That sounds neat.
33:51SPEAKER- It sounds like phenomenally cool.
33:54SPEAKERAnd I talked about Johann Sebastian Joust.
33:56SPEAKERFor people who don't know what Johann Sebastian Joust is,
33:59SPEAKERit's a game, it was part of that Super Friends PS4 bundle
34:04SPEAKERyears and years ago.
34:05SPEAKER- Yeah, they did it with PlayStation Move controllers there,
34:08SPEAKERI think.
34:08SPEAKER- Yeah, but for a long time,
34:10SPEAKERit was a staple of the indie game, like show circuit.
34:15SPEAKERAnd you play it by holding a PlayStation Move controller
34:19SPEAKERin each hand and they play music.
34:24SPEAKERIt's hooked up to a computer laptop
34:25SPEAKERthat plays music over like a Bluetooth speaker or something.
34:28SPEAKERAnd when the music is going fast, you can move fast.
34:30SPEAKERWhen the music stops, you have to freeze
34:33SPEAKERor not move your hand,
34:34SPEAKERyou can move the rest of your body if you want.
34:36SPEAKERAnd as soon as you move your body while the music stops,
34:39SPEAKERyou get kicked out of the game.
34:40SPEAKERSo what ends up happening is,
34:43SPEAKERit's like being able to build this on Lego,
34:44SPEAKERso it's just using bricks that you hold
34:47SPEAKERis super fascinating and opens the door
34:49SPEAKERfor all sorts of weird experiments.
34:51SPEAKERAnyway, definitely worth watching the video.
34:54SPEAKERIt's on a channel called Bricks by...
34:58SPEAKERBricks by, hold on, it's loading slowly.
35:02SPEAKERBuild with Peter is the name of the channel.
35:04SPEAKER- Okay, yeah, I'll just put our whole mode stock up
35:07SPEAKERwith this episode so people can hit that link.
35:09SPEAKER- Perfect.
35:11SPEAKERNext one is Solid State Batteries, a friend of the...
35:14SPEAKERThis is rad.
35:15SPEAKER- Yes, yes, this stuff sounds...
35:18SPEAKERI don't wanna say it almost too good to be true.
35:20SPEAKERI mean, I looked into this just enough
35:22SPEAKERto know that the tech has existed for like 150 years
35:26SPEAKERin concept, it's just that it's never been quite
35:30SPEAKERmassaged to the point that it's useful
35:32SPEAKERfor consumer applications,
35:33SPEAKERbut it sounds like somebody might've finally gotten there.
35:35SPEAKER- Yeah, so the TLDR on Solid State Batteries
35:37SPEAKERis that instead of a liquid electrolyte,
35:40SPEAKERlike we've used in pretty much every battery
35:41SPEAKERyou've ever used, you use a solid component,
35:45SPEAKERwhich means the energy density is higher
35:48SPEAKERand theoretically the kind of life cycle
35:52SPEAKERof the batteries should be a lot better.
35:55SPEAKER- Sounds like also a lot less prone
35:56SPEAKERto fire-related incidents.
35:59SPEAKER- They're much less likely to build up hydrogen
36:01SPEAKERand then explode.
36:03SPEAKERThe problem has always been this thing
36:05SPEAKERcalled the dendrite problem,
36:06SPEAKERwhich is basically like little...
36:11SPEAKERI think they're called dendrites
36:12SPEAKER'cause they look like dendrites in your brain,
36:14SPEAKERbecause they make little conductive paths
36:18SPEAKERfrom the anodes to the cathodes inside the batteries.
36:21SPEAKER- Like tiny little spurs that form in there effectively.
36:24SPEAKER- Yeah, and it shorts out the battery,
36:25SPEAKERbasically rendering it useless
36:27SPEAKERin a relatively low number of cycles traditionally.
36:29SPEAKERSo this company called Donut Labs,
36:31SPEAKERwhich is a great name for a company,
36:32SPEAKERhas said they've cracked the chemistry of the problem
36:37SPEAKERand they're selling the batteries
36:40SPEAKERto this company called Verge Motorcycles,
36:42SPEAKERnot related to the website.
36:45SPEAKERAnd a friend of the show, Robbie Baldwin,
36:47SPEAKERover at SAE Labs wrote about this.
36:50SPEAKERIt's basically a solid electrolyte battery.
36:52SPEAKERIt charges in about 10 minutes for the motorcycle
36:55SPEAKERand the Verge Motorcycles is saying
36:57SPEAKERthe battery will last for 10,000 charge cycles.
37:01SPEAKERThe battery people are saying it's good for 100K probably,
37:05SPEAKERwhich would be like multiple motorcycle lifetimes
37:08SPEAKERin my, that seems like a lot of charge cycles.
37:11SPEAKER- It sure does.
37:12SPEAKERYou've got here, I thought 10,000 sounded a little low
37:15SPEAKERuntil I saw that apparently it's like about 1,500 cycles
37:18SPEAKERfor traditional lithium ion.
37:20SPEAKER- So traditional lithium ion in consumer electronics
37:23SPEAKERis typically 1,500 charge cycle rating, like a phone.
37:27SPEAKERCar batteries work a little bit differently than that,
37:29SPEAKERso they're potentially higher.
37:31SPEAKERAnd since they have more storage,
37:33SPEAKERyou can afford to lose a little bit more than you would.
37:35SPEAKERBut the point is 10K charge cycles is pretty amazing.
37:40SPEAKERAnd they don't use rare earths
37:41SPEAKERthat are only mined in China right now,
37:43SPEAKERwhich is also a bonus.
37:44SPEAKER- Dude, do you have any idea why vehicles
37:45SPEAKERseem to be the first venue for solid state batteries
37:48SPEAKERto be deployed?
37:48SPEAKERIs it a size thing?
37:49SPEAKERIs it like, hey, these still,
37:51SPEAKERand can, let me rephrase this.
37:53SPEAKERThese cannot be miniaturized enough
37:55SPEAKERto put them in consumer electronics yet?
37:57SPEAKER- I think that the benefits for vehicles
37:59SPEAKERare much greater than the benefits for phones.
38:01SPEAKER- Okay, actually maybe I should clarify,
38:03SPEAKERis this mainly a charge speed improvement?
38:06SPEAKER- Charge speed and capacity per weight.
38:08SPEAKERSo the reason the motorcycle people like it
38:10SPEAKERis 'cause you get the same amount of capacity
38:13SPEAKERand a much lower weight,
38:14SPEAKERwhich also has the knock-on effect of increasing your range.
38:17SPEAKER- Oh, we're talking weight, not volume,
38:19SPEAKERor not mass rather, sorry.
38:21SPEAKER- Well, mass, weight, same thing, but yeah.
38:24SPEAKER- Point being, point being,
38:25SPEAKERyou're not necessarily gonna be a lot smaller.
38:27SPEAKER- Well, so I don't know about the volume.
38:30SPEAKERI know that the mass is lower
38:31SPEAKERfor the same amount of charge capacity.
38:33SPEAKER- Okay.
38:34SPEAKER- And that, because of that, you're getting,
38:37SPEAKERlike there's two things that increase,
38:39SPEAKERthat decrease your range, right?
38:40SPEAKERThe amount of charge your battery holds
38:42SPEAKERand the weight that you're having to haul around.
38:44SPEAKERSo reducing weight on one of the heavier items
38:46SPEAKERthat's part of the motorcycle
38:48SPEAKERwill increase the range commensurate amount as well.
38:53SPEAKERMy assumption, the Donut Labs people,
38:55SPEAKERI think there was a verge article about this too,
38:57SPEAKERand the Donut Labs people seem to be optimistic
39:00SPEAKERthat it's gonna come to everything.
39:01SPEAKER- Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean,
39:02SPEAKERit seems like a unilateral improvement for every use case
39:05SPEAKERwhere you would use a battery eventually.
39:07SPEAKER- It seems like stuff like whole house battery storage
39:11SPEAKERand municipal battery storage,
39:12SPEAKERthere's huge gains to be had by something
39:15SPEAKERthat has a longer life cycle for bigger capacity,
39:19SPEAKERfor bigger capital investments.
39:21SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, but that's even greener for a phone,
39:23SPEAKERyou know, like that would theoretically allow you
39:25SPEAKERto keep a phone for much, much longer.
39:27SPEAKEROf course, I mean, other advancements and obsolescence
39:29SPEAKERmight force an upgrade anyway, but.
39:31SPEAKER- Yeah, whereas your whole house battery,
39:33SPEAKERyou upgrade much less frequently.
39:35SPEAKER- Right, right.
39:37SPEAKER- Okay, so there's that,
39:38SPEAKERthat's Donut Labs and Verge Motorcycles.
39:40SPEAKERWe have Lenovo's repairable ThinkPad.
39:43SPEAKER- Yeah, is this literally just framework
39:45SPEAKERis making enough waves
39:47SPEAKERthat other people are getting in now or?
39:49SPEAKER- I think that it's, I think this is not upgradeable,
39:53SPEAKERjust to be clear.
39:54SPEAKER- Okay.
39:55SPEAKER- So they're not committing to shipping new hardware
39:57SPEAKERthat you can buy and put it into this thing.
40:00SPEAKER- Got it.
40:00SPEAKER- What they have done is made a laptop that you can,
40:03SPEAKERthat it's designed so that a normal human can open it up
40:05SPEAKERand replace components.
40:07SPEAKER- So in other words,
40:08SPEAKERit's exactly what laptops used to be 20 years ago.
40:11SPEAKER- It's what ThinkPads were as recently as 10 years ago.
40:14SPEAKER- Right, yeah.
40:15SPEAKERWhen you remember when you could just open up your laptop
40:16SPEAKERand replace parts in it.
40:18SPEAKER- Except, except they still solder on the RAM.
40:21SPEAKER- Yep.
40:22SPEAKER- But like the daughterboards for the USB ports,
40:24SPEAKERwhich is one of the, like they looked at
40:26SPEAKERwhat they were doing and if they could do a little bit more
40:28SPEAKERto make the parts that fail most often,
40:30SPEAKERmore easily repairable.
40:32SPEAKERSo like you can swap out the keyboard really easily.
40:34SPEAKERYou can swap out the USB port daughterboards really easily.
40:39SPEAKERYou can pop the battery out, stuff like that.
40:41SPEAKER- I wonder what the impetus for this is.
40:42SPEAKER'Cause you know, the cynical conventional wisdom
40:45SPEAKERis that the less repairable it is,
40:46SPEAKERthe more likely you are to just have to buy another laptop,
40:49SPEAKERwhich is probably what they would prefer,
40:50SPEAKERbut is this a right to repair thing or?
40:53SPEAKER- Well, I mean, right to prepare is important.
40:54SPEAKERLenovo is generally pretty progressive about this stuff.
40:57SPEAKER- Okay, okay.
40:58SPEAKERI would say it's probably the market
41:02SPEAKERfor this particular ThinkPad.
41:03SPEAKERThe X1 is really popular with nerds.
41:06SPEAKER- Yes, probably more than anything else
41:09SPEAKERwhen I see people talking about Linux laptops,
41:11SPEAKERthe wisdom is just go get a ThinkPad.
41:13SPEAKER- It's ThinkPad or System76 or Framework
41:16SPEAKERare the ones that are doing really good support work.
41:19SPEAKER- If you're not like System76 and Framework
41:21SPEAKERor for the ultra ultra hardcore nerds.
41:25SPEAKER- Well, and System76 tends to lag a little bit
41:27SPEAKERin hardware, I think their newest machine
41:29SPEAKERis still an Arrow Lake machine or something like that.
41:31SPEAKERSo anyway, so I thought that was interesting.
41:34SPEAKERIt's good news.
41:35SPEAKERAdam posted a good video that shows like he field strips it.
41:39SPEAKERIt's also simple stuff like them labeling the screws inside
41:43SPEAKERso that you don't have to have a repair manual
41:45SPEAKERto know which screws have to unscrew
41:46SPEAKERto take out each individual component, stuff like that.
41:51SPEAKERLet's see, HP put a keyboard in a,
41:55SPEAKERsorry, a computer in a keyboard.
41:57SPEAKER- Yeah, this is kind of similar to the Raspberry Pi 400, 500,
42:02SPEAKERthat whole series of Raspberry Pi in a keyboard type stuff.
42:05SPEAKEROr frankly, it's what computers were
42:08SPEAKERat the dawn of home computing, right?
42:09SPEAKER- Well, except for it's like a little low profile keyboard.
42:12SPEAKERIt's like not a big chunky boy.
42:13SPEAKER- Right, but same concept of the keyboard
42:15SPEAKERand the computer are the same unit.
42:17SPEAKER- Yeah, this one is, it's an AMD Kraken point,
42:20SPEAKERwhich is-- - What's the real what?
42:22SPEAKER- Kraken.
42:24SPEAKER- They're just making things up now.
42:27SPEAKER- I mean, look, all words are made up from a certain level.
42:31SPEAKER- Fair.
42:32SPEAKER- It's basically Ryzen AI 5 350 to Ryzen AI 7 370 Pros.
42:38SPEAKERSo they're like mid range mobile parts, basically.
42:40SPEAKER- I wonder what the market is for this
42:43SPEAKERor who they're positioning this for.
42:45SPEAKER- Well, think about, think about like a,
42:47SPEAKERI was thinking about like hospitals
42:49SPEAKERwhen you go to a hospital room and they have that,
42:50SPEAKERthey usually have a little NUC size machine
42:54SPEAKERsmacked onto some sort of post
42:55SPEAKERwith a monitor and a keyboard.
42:56SPEAKERWhat if it's just the keyboard?
42:58SPEAKER- Right, or just very, very light office needs,
43:01SPEAKERthat kind of thing.
43:02SPEAKER- I mean, look, this should be as capable as a laptop.
43:04SPEAKER- Yeah. - Right?
43:05SPEAKER- Yeah, that's cool.
43:07SPEAKER- And imagine, imagine a world where
43:09SPEAKERinstead of being issued a laptop at work,
43:11SPEAKERthey just give you a keyboard
43:12SPEAKERand then you take that and plug that in at home,
43:14SPEAKERyou plug it in at work, whatever.
43:16SPEAKER- I mean, that is tweaking my TV VCR combo,
43:19SPEAKERhang ups a little bit of like the keyboard craps out
43:22SPEAKERand suddenly your computer is useless, but.
43:24SPEAKER- Well, but if you're in a corporate environment,
43:26SPEAKERyou just get another keyboard, right?
43:28SPEAKER- In that case, and also I'm sure these things
43:30SPEAKERare probably relatively cheap, so.
43:32SPEAKER- Yeah, plus they're not like
43:34SPEAKERthey're nice mechanical keyboards.
43:36SPEAKERThey're still, you know, they're keyboard-esque keyboards.
43:39SPEAKER- Yeah, like this is not a place I live
43:41SPEAKERin terms of computing needs,
43:43SPEAKERbut I think this is kind of an increasingly
43:45SPEAKERsuper interesting category because compute is getting
43:48SPEAKERso significant and also miniaturized
43:52SPEAKERor it's becoming vanishingly small at this point, you know,
43:55SPEAKERlike you can just hide it places now,
43:57SPEAKERlike the idea of, you know,
43:59SPEAKERwatching the business machine shrink over time,
44:02SPEAKERI guess is what I'm saying is kind of fascinating to watch.
44:04SPEAKER- This was, there's a good video from Antonio at The Verge
44:09SPEAKERover on TikTok of this that will,
44:11SPEAKERit's linked in the story that's in our notes.
44:13SPEAKER- Yeah, that's cool.
44:14SPEAKER- Shout out to Antonio.
44:16SPEAKERHe did good stuff as he is this year.
44:18SPEAKERLet's see, we got Corsair put a stream deck
44:20SPEAKERin a gaming keyboard,
44:21SPEAKERwhich is like the most obvious thing in the world.
44:23SPEAKER- Speaking of, yes, sure.
44:26SPEAKER- I'm, I like my gaming,
44:29SPEAKERI like to choose my gaming keyboard really thoughtfully
44:32SPEAKERand I like having a stream deck separately on my desk,
44:34SPEAKERbut I understand why people would want this
44:36SPEAKERand it's like 350 bucks, so it's kind of a little bit,
44:39SPEAKERmaybe save a couple of bucks there.
44:41SPEAKER- Maybe Corsair Elgato stuff kind of pricey.
44:45SPEAKER- I was gonna say, speaking of TV VCR stuff.
44:48SPEAKER- Yeah.
44:49SPEAKER- Keyboard and your stream deck in one unit.
44:50SPEAKERI mean, not that either of those is super likely to die, but.
44:53SPEAKER- The thing that's happened in the last couple of years
44:55SPEAKERwith the stream deck stuff is that it's kind of taken over
44:59SPEAKERa lot of the production work.
45:01SPEAKERLike you look at people doing, not just Twitch streamers,
45:05SPEAKERbut people doing like video production and stuff like that.
45:07SPEAKERAnd like they have a rack mount button box now
45:10SPEAKERthat goes into your AV rack
45:12SPEAKERand you can use to turn on all your stuff
45:14SPEAKERand do all your business
45:16SPEAKERand it integrates with all your other stuff.
45:17SPEAKERSo like, I get it.
45:18SPEAKERIt makes sense for a production.
45:20SPEAKERLike if you're sitting on a production machine
45:21SPEAKERin a control room, it makes a lot of sense.
45:24SPEAKERAnd I think it's three dials, a touch bar
45:27SPEAKERand nine or 12 keys, I can't remember exactly.
45:30SPEAKER- 12.
45:31SPEAKER- 12 buttons, two dials.
45:32SPEAKER- Two dials.
45:33SPEAKER- Touch bar and 12 buttons.
45:34SPEAKER- Yeah, so.
45:35SPEAKER- Pretty good mix.
45:36SPEAKER- Yeah, that's, you know, 150 bucks worth of stream deck
45:39SPEAKERplus 150 bucks worth of keyboard, I guess.
45:44SPEAKERSegway announced e-bikes.
45:46SPEAKERSegway has been around.
45:47SPEAKERThey've been making like.
45:47SPEAKER- This is like the Segway, right?
45:49SPEAKER- This is the Segway, yeah.
45:50SPEAKERThe one's gonna change the world.
45:51SPEAKERWe're gonna redesign our cities around this thing.
45:53SPEAKER- How did they refer to that thing before it was announced
45:55SPEAKERwhen the hype was at its peak?
45:56SPEAKERWeren't they calling it it?
45:57SPEAKER- Oh, it had a woman's name.
45:58SPEAKER- Oh, I thought people were like for a while,
46:00SPEAKERweren't some like tech magnates that had seen it,
46:02SPEAKERlike maybe Steve Jobs or people like that.
46:04SPEAKERI thought people were just calling it it.
46:06SPEAKER- No, no, no, it had a name.
46:08SPEAKER- Well, it may have also had a name,
46:10SPEAKERbut I'd swear there was a phase in that cycle
46:11SPEAKERwhere they were just referring to it as it.
46:14SPEAKER- Was it Karen?
46:15SPEAKERNo, too soon.
46:18SPEAKERNo, it was, God, we used to make fun of it
46:21SPEAKERat Maximum PC a lot.
46:24SPEAKER- When was that?
46:25SPEAKERThat was 2001?
46:26SPEAKER- It was 2000.
46:28SPEAKER- 2001 is when the first one came out.
46:30SPEAKER- Yeah, we started getting,
46:34SPEAKERthey started trying to sneak it into tech magazines
46:37SPEAKERearlier in that.
46:38SPEAKERThey were very excited about it,
46:40SPEAKERbut it's owned by Ninebot, I think now.
46:42SPEAKER- Right, they're good on them.
46:43SPEAKERThey stuck around.
46:43SPEAKERIt wasn't all hype, apparently.
46:45SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, look, those personal,
46:47SPEAKERthe people mover things,
46:49SPEAKERthey sell a lot of like suitcase size things now
46:52SPEAKERthat you kind of stand on
46:53SPEAKERand they'll kind of roll you along on a single wheel.
46:55SPEAKER- Yeah, sometimes I see groups like tour groups
46:57SPEAKERin Golden Gate Park, they seem to rent these out
46:59SPEAKERto tourists and that sort of thing.
47:01SPEAKER- I've done that through Pacifica.
47:03SPEAKERThey called it Ginger was the code name.
47:04SPEAKER- Oh, right, yes, okay.
47:07SPEAKER- So yeah, so the Segway announced a couple of e-bikes,
47:10SPEAKER80 mile an hour range.
47:11SPEAKERThey have like turn signals
47:12SPEAKERand you can get rear facing radar and stuff like that
47:15SPEAKERif you don't want to look over your shoulder.
47:16SPEAKERBut 80 mile range sounds pretty good for an e-bike.
47:20SPEAKERI could use that to commute to work.
47:22SPEAKER- Hang on.
47:23SPEAKER- Two grand.
47:24SPEAKER- I'm looking, this has been very ignorant questions,
47:26SPEAKERhard to tell from these product shots.
47:28SPEAKERThese things still have pedals, right?
47:30SPEAKER- Yeah, that still has pedals.
47:32SPEAKER- Okay, they're just not very prominent on here.
47:35SPEAKER- Yeah, if you look at like the second shot,
47:37SPEAKERyou can see it, it's just straight forward and back.
47:39SPEAKER- Yeah, I see it now.
47:41SPEAKER- And they, like two grand is, I mean, look,
47:46SPEAKERI'm old enough that I remember
47:47SPEAKERwhen a bicycle costs like 100 bucks.
47:50SPEAKERBut when you look at a nice bicycle costing 1500 bucks now
47:53SPEAKERthat doesn't go for you,
47:55SPEAKERthis seems nice to be able to go up hills and stuff.
47:57SPEAKER- Yeah, I assume the range quoted is purely on the battery,
48:00SPEAKERright, like it has, like that's not--
48:01SPEAKER- I would assume so, yeah.
48:02SPEAKER- Not counting any human locomotion.
48:03SPEAKERAlso, do those things pick up any charge
48:06SPEAKERoff of pedaling at all?
48:08SPEAKER- Some of them do, some of them don't.
48:09SPEAKERI don't know about this one in particular.
48:12SPEAKERBut typically they, typically you charge going down hills.
48:17SPEAKER- Okay.
48:17SPEAKER- Just like an electric car.
48:18SPEAKER- Sure.
48:21SPEAKER- Anker, makers of battery backups for your phone
48:25SPEAKERthat sometimes explode recently.
48:27SPEAKER- I was gonna say, recent events maybe don't inspire
48:30SPEAKERa lot of confidence in this next item, but.
48:32SPEAKER- Having, I had one of those, I sent them a note.
48:35SPEAKERThey were like, "Hey, take it here to dispose of it.
48:37SPEAKERWe'll send you a new one."
48:37SPEAKERAnd they sent me a new one, so no complaints.
48:40SPEAKER- Better than not sending you a new one
48:41SPEAKERor saying anything about it.
48:43SPEAKER- Yeah, they're moving into whole home batteries.
48:46SPEAKER- Okay.
48:47SPEAKER- So that seems, that's good 'cause right now
48:51SPEAKERthe market leader in that is Tesla,
48:53SPEAKERwhich I'm not interested in participating in.
48:55SPEAKER- Sure, same.
48:56SPEAKER- But looking at the price of power at peak
48:59SPEAKERversus off peak times here,
49:00SPEAKERit seems like you could kind of arbitrage your way
49:03SPEAKERinto paying for that in like two years at the outside.
49:05SPEAKER- Oh wow, okay.
49:07SPEAKERI saw, I wish I had made a note of this.
49:09SPEAKERI saw a headline and passed over it.
49:11SPEAKERI don't think it came out of CES,
49:12SPEAKERbut about portable solar is apparently becoming cheap
49:16SPEAKERand ubiquitous enough that people are starting to use it
49:19SPEAKERin apartments quite a bit.
49:21SPEAKER- Yeah, it's really popular in,
49:22SPEAKERI think Germany is where I read.
49:23SPEAKER- Okay, I would believe that.
49:24SPEAKERLike people with balconies in particular,
49:26SPEAKERany kind of surface outside in an apartment
49:28SPEAKERyou can put a thing on.
49:29SPEAKER- Yeah, the idea is you buy four or $500 worth of panels
49:32SPEAKERand hang them off your balcony facing south
49:34SPEAKERand then just plug that into the wall
49:37SPEAKERand you get electricity from the sun
49:42SPEAKERthat you don't have to pay for, which sounds nice.
49:43SPEAKER- Yeah, it sure does.
49:46SPEAKER- Maybe I should just do that in my backyard.
49:48SPEAKER- You should.
49:49SPEAKER- 8BitDo announced the ultimate 3E,
49:53SPEAKERwhich is an Xbox controller with swappable X, P, A, Y buttons.
49:59SPEAKER- Okay, 'cause they have the pro three is out,
50:01SPEAKERbut the ultimate two was,
50:03SPEAKERwe've been talking about this company a fair amount recently
50:05SPEAKERfor whatever reason.
50:06SPEAKERSo it's interesting to see this.
50:08SPEAKER- They have the, this one has the TMR joysticks,
50:10SPEAKERwhich are like the next stage tunneling magneto resistance.
50:14SPEAKER- Yep, that's the one.
50:16SPEAKERWhat exactly is the utility of the swappable face buttons?
50:19SPEAKERSo is it purely for the,
50:21SPEAKERnot aesthetics, not the right word here,
50:22SPEAKERbut purely for the visual cue of which letter is which button?
50:27SPEAKER- I think so, that would be my guess.
50:29SPEAKERIs that basically swapping A and B
50:31SPEAKERbetween Switch and Xbox, for example?
50:33SPEAKER- That's kind of the feeling I get.
50:35SPEAKERMy guess is that they'll also probably sell,
50:37SPEAKERor you could 3D print additional buttons if you wanted.
50:40SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm worried that the swapability
50:43SPEAKERwould change the mechanical feel of the button a little bit,
50:45SPEAKERbut maybe I'm sure they've thought that through.
50:47SPEAKER- I don't know, I'm sure they'll send us one
50:48SPEAKERif you want to test it out and see what you think.
50:50SPEAKER- Sure.
50:51SPEAKER- They're generally pretty good at,
50:53SPEAKERI've been, of all the third-party controllers
50:56SPEAKERI've ever used, the 8BitDo ones are the ones
50:58SPEAKERthat I've been most consistently impressed by.
51:00SPEAKER- Yeah, people love them for sure.
51:02SPEAKERI don't know that, this is a pretty low-impact feature
51:04SPEAKERfor me, but it's interesting.
51:06SPEAKER- It looks like it has pogo pins,
51:08SPEAKERand the buttons are in a pad,
51:10SPEAKERand then you can kind of swap them out.
51:13SPEAKERThey also have, oh wow, it says it contains
51:15SPEAKERtwo interchangeable button modules,
51:17SPEAKERone with squishy silicone membrane buttons,
51:19SPEAKERand one with clicky micro switches.
51:22SPEAKER- Interesting, okay, so that's wild.
51:23SPEAKERThat's getting a little more interesting, then.
51:25SPEAKER- Yeah, silicone buttons, silicone face buttons, wow.
51:29SPEAKER- Well, the silicone pads are always in there,
51:31SPEAKER'cause it's like, when you take a controller part,
51:33SPEAKERyou get that little pad, and that's always silicone.
51:34SPEAKER- Yeah, the underneath part, yes.
51:36SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, but the microcontroller,
51:37SPEAKERthat sounds interesting.
51:41SPEAKERA company, a small company called Seattle Ultrasonics
51:44SPEAKERinvented Star Wars vibroblades.
51:46SPEAKER- Okay.
51:47SPEAKER- So this is a chef's knife that vibrates ultrasonically,
51:50SPEAKERand when people, I saw multiple people talking about this,
51:54SPEAKERthere was a, I think we linked to The Verge here,
51:56SPEAKERor no, we didn't, but Sean Hollister at The Verge
51:58SPEAKERsaid it was like the knife just fell through a tomato.
52:01SPEAKER- Yikes.
52:02SPEAKER- Yeah.
52:03SPEAKER- That's, that sounds very cool,
52:05SPEAKERbut also a little frightening.
52:07SPEAKER- I just want a katana, that's all I'm asking for.
52:09SPEAKER- Wow, they've got a picture of cutting through
52:11SPEAKERsome French bread that I have to assume is pretty,
52:13SPEAKERyeah, it's crumbly enough, the crust is flying everywhere
52:17SPEAKERenough to assume that it's a pretty crumbly,
52:21SPEAKERwhat in the world?
52:22SPEAKERThis seems a little frightening.
52:23SPEAKER- Yeah, this seems like you really messed yourself up
52:25SPEAKERwith it.
52:26SPEAKER- I, yeah, I mean.
52:27SPEAKER- Just to be clear, the video you're talking about
52:29SPEAKERis a cutting through bread with a chef's knife
52:32SPEAKERwithout sawing.
52:33SPEAKER- Yeah, but now they're holding up some green onions
52:35SPEAKERin the air, not against the surface,
52:37SPEAKERand just like waving the knife at the green onions
52:39SPEAKERand they are, and it's shearing them right off.
52:42SPEAKER- This thing looks terrifying.
52:44SPEAKER- This is mesmerizing, actually.
52:46SPEAKER- Yeah.
52:47SPEAKER- Trying to want, okay.
52:48SPEAKER- The scaling of the fish, scoring of the fish?
52:51SPEAKER- Starting to say I kind of want one of these,
52:52SPEAKERit's a $400 knife, though, so I don't know.
52:54SPEAKER- Look, 400 bucks isn't a ton for a good chef's knife,
52:58SPEAKERjust to be clear.
52:58SPEAKER- Also, I've never cut myself that badly chopping things,
53:01SPEAKERbut I have done it a few times enough
53:03SPEAKERthat this might be a little scary.
53:05SPEAKER- This looks like it might go straight through everything,
53:06SPEAKERyou might just come back with a stump.
53:08SPEAKER- Yeah, I wonder if, I wonder if working,
53:11SPEAKERtrained chefs are interested in something like this.
53:13SPEAKER- I don't know, I bet.
53:15SPEAKERLike, most of the chefs I've known are either really pro
53:18SPEAKERor really anti-technologies and not a lot in between.
53:22SPEAKERAnd my guess is that when you come into the kitchen
53:26SPEAKERwith this knife, everybody's gonna gather around
53:29SPEAKERfor a minute and they're gonna be very device,
53:30SPEAKERit's gonna be very divisive.
53:32SPEAKER- Okay, there's part of this demo where,
53:35SPEAKERI was confused what was going on
53:36SPEAKERbecause they're sort of like grazing
53:37SPEAKERa sliced tomato with it.
53:39SPEAKER- You're making the steam come off of it?
53:40SPEAKER- Yeah, so it looked like, I thought that was like,
53:42SPEAKERI was like, what is smoking there?
53:43SPEAKERWhat is going on there?
53:44SPEAKERAnd then yes, I realized what was actually happening.
53:46SPEAKER- That tomato vapes, man.
53:48SPEAKERYeah, I don't know, I'm interested, like you said,
53:51SPEAKER400 bucks, that's high.
53:54SPEAKERBut yeah, it's what a nice,
53:56SPEAKERless than a really nice chef's knife,
53:58SPEAKERas much as a nice chef's knife, I would say.
54:00SPEAKER- USBC charged, we should say.
54:03SPEAKER- I don't know that I need more charging things in my life.
54:06SPEAKER- Especially a knife.
54:07SPEAKER- It has a wireless charging tile that you can hook,
54:09SPEAKERI assume, hook into your knife block or something.
54:11SPEAKER- Yeah.
54:13SPEAKER- Pebble, remember Pebble?
54:15SPEAKER- I do.
54:15SPEAKER- The first wearable company, the first smartwatch company.
54:18SPEAKER- Yeah, didn't they get bought by somebody?
54:19SPEAKER- They got bought by Google.
54:20SPEAKER- Right.
54:21SPEAKER- Last year, Google open sourced the original Pebble OS.
54:24SPEAKER- That's cool.
54:26SPEAKER- And the original Pebble co-founder,
54:28SPEAKERone of them, Eric Migicovsky,
54:30SPEAKERis back with a company called Core Devices, I think,
54:34SPEAKERand they announced the Pebble Round 2,
54:37SPEAKERwhich is a smartwatch with like a two-week battery
54:40SPEAKERand buttons and color and all that stuff.
54:42SPEAKERIt looks really good.
54:43SPEAKER- Wait, is this like Google affiliated?
54:46SPEAKERHow do they have the Pebble name?
54:48SPEAKERSo I think that they bought it back or it was given up
54:51SPEAKERwhen he left Google, probably.
54:53SPEAKER- That's cool.
54:54SPEAKER- The website is repebble.com.
54:57SPEAKER- It's a pretty nice looking watch.
54:58SPEAKER- It's 200 bucks, looks good.
55:00SPEAKER- Yeah, well, not seeing a lot of side views
55:03SPEAKER'cause I find that as an avid Apple watch user,
55:06SPEAKERI find like the thickness of the smartwatch
55:08SPEAKERto be probably the biggest drawback.
55:11SPEAKERAnd this looks like it might be thinner than that.
55:13SPEAKER- The benefit of the e-ink,
55:15SPEAKERI don't know if they're still doing e-ink,
55:17SPEAKERI guess it's still, it looks like an LCD now.
55:18SPEAKER- This says e-paper, I suspect.
55:20SPEAKERI don't know if that's a distinction to be made or not.
55:23SPEAKER- Yeah, so the e-paper screen, it can be,
55:26SPEAKERit uses less power so that it needs less battery,
55:29SPEAKERbut they are doing that suspicious 2/3 picture of all of it.
55:34SPEAKERI don't know, man, it looks pretty small
55:35SPEAKERcompared to a modern Apple watch.
55:38SPEAKER- That's a pretty nice looking watch, actually.
55:40SPEAKER- Yeah, it's definitely got the round bezel
55:41SPEAKERkind of to trick you a little bit, but that's fine.
55:45SPEAKER- 200 bucks, that's out, you can reorder it now.
55:48SPEAKER- All right.
55:50SPEAKER- I loved my first gen Pebble in 2015, that thing ripped.
55:55SPEAKERThe Hyperspace Trackpad Pro,
55:56SPEAKERthis is a Kickstarter product that's now shipping.
55:59SPEAKER- Oh, I'm sure Adam is excited.
56:02SPEAKER- No, he's a trackball guy.
56:04SPEAKER- Oh, oh, that's right, he's trackball, not.
56:05SPEAKER- He's a weirdo. - Yes, right.
56:07SPEAKER- We don't talk about trackballs on this podcast, sir.
56:09SPEAKER- Yes, okay, I'm fine with that policy.
56:12SPEAKER- It's got the haptics, just like your Magic Trackpad
56:15SPEAKERon your MacBook or one of those.
56:17SPEAKER- So this is basically just an Apple competitor?
56:19SPEAKER- It's basically, hey, we wanted to make the Apple Trackpad
56:22SPEAKERfor Windows users, it's 129 bucks.
56:26SPEAKER- I was not familiar with Hyper as a company
56:28SPEAKERuntil I bought that NVMe enclosure from them last month,
56:33SPEAKERaround Black Friday, and I think it's extremely,
56:35SPEAKERit's like the nicest enclosure I can imagine, so.
56:39SPEAKER- I think they do docks and hubs is where I first saw them.
56:41SPEAKER- Yeah, with a single data point,
56:43SPEAKERI can say the one Hyper thing I have bought seems quite nice.
56:46SPEAKER- There you go.
56:49SPEAKERIt seems like they're good at manufacturing shit,
56:51SPEAKERis the takeaway I have.
56:53SPEAKERSee, I think that's the stuff that was good
56:56SPEAKERthat I thought was cool or interesting.
56:59SPEAKERThere's some stuff that nobody's talking about,
57:00SPEAKERfrom what I can tell, price of memory being number one.
57:04SPEAKER- Okay, yes. - Nobody's like, oh yeah,
57:06SPEAKERlaptops are gonna cost $6,000 this year.
57:08SPEAKER- I guess there's not, I mean, they could do some messaging,
57:11SPEAKERI started to say there's not a whole lot for them to say,
57:13SPEAKERbut obviously like in interviews and stuff,
57:14SPEAKERthey could message the problem.
57:16SPEAKERI mean, let's try to allay some concerns,
57:18SPEAKERbut on the other hand,
57:20SPEAKERthere's probably no good news to relay about it, right?
57:23SPEAKER- No, it's all bad.
57:25SPEAKERWhat the memory and storage situation will do
57:27SPEAKERto PC and component prices also kind of off the radar,
57:30SPEAKERexcept Nvidia is selling the 3060 again for some reason.
57:33SPEAKER- So is that real?
57:34SPEAKERI tried to find that. - That's real, yeah.
57:36SPEAKER- Last I looked, that was rumored,
57:37SPEAKERbut have they confirmed that?
57:39SPEAKER- My understanding is that's confirmed, I could be wrong.
57:41SPEAKER- What does that mean?
57:42SPEAKERDid they have supply sitting around
57:44SPEAKERthat they're able to just put straight into the channel?
57:46SPEAKERLike they can't be fabbing these things again
57:48SPEAKERall of a sudden, right?
57:49SPEAKER- Well, they probably aren't doing 4060s
57:53SPEAKER'cause that's on TSMC 4
57:54SPEAKERand I bet they're constrained on those waivers.
57:57SPEAKER- Oh, maybe there's, I don't know what process
57:59SPEAKERthe 3060 was on, that was eight nanometer, wasn't it?
58:02SPEAKER- Yeah, so that's probably idle.
58:04SPEAKER- Yeah, 3080 launched on Samsung eight nanometer,
58:06SPEAKERso if they're still using that,
58:07SPEAKERmaybe there's capacities just sitting around.
58:09SPEAKER- Yeah, or the capacity they could buy at least
58:12SPEAKERso they can have video cards to sell.
58:14SPEAKERAMD's bringing back Zen 3 CPUs, it seems like, VDR4.
58:18SPEAKER- Did they ever go away though?
58:20SPEAKER- Well, they stopped making them.
58:22SPEAKER- Did they stop making them?
58:23SPEAKERMaybe there were just so many in the channel
58:25SPEAKER'cause I still would see people talking
58:26SPEAKERabout buying them here and there.
58:27SPEAKER- I mean, it may be that they found a warehouse full
58:29SPEAKERsomeplace and were like, oh shit,
58:31SPEAKERwe have 20,000 CPUs we gotta unload.
58:33SPEAKER- This is grim, man.
58:34SPEAKER- It seems bad.
58:35SPEAKER- And then two of the three major PC part makers
58:38SPEAKERor IC CPU, GPU makers are dipping into,
58:43SPEAKERokay, what are we talking here?
58:45SPEAKERZen 3 debuted late 2020, I think.
58:48SPEAKER- That seems right.
58:49SPEAKER- And the 3060 was probably like early 2221.
58:55SPEAKERWe're ish, I'm ball-parking.
58:56SPEAKER- I think it was before that, I think it was 2019 or 2020.
59:00SPEAKER- No, 'cause the 3080 came out at the end of 2020.
59:02SPEAKER- Okay, so it was 2020, 2020, yeah.
59:05SPEAKERI remember 'cause it came out right around the same time
59:07SPEAKERas the PS5 and Series X.
59:09SPEAKERBut anyway, the point being,
59:12SPEAKERwe're talking about roughly five-year-old hardware
59:14SPEAKERbeing brought back prominently.
59:16SPEAKER- Yeah, it's grim.
59:16SPEAKER- Seems not good.
59:20SPEAKER- Nobody talked about tariffs.
59:21SPEAKERAMD had a guy from the Trump administration on
59:24SPEAKERtalk about how great technology is.
59:25SPEAKER- Cool.
59:30SPEAKER- One more good thing I forgot.
59:32SPEAKERPeople like this, Dell's bringing back XPS as a brand.
59:36SPEAKERThey killed XPS as a brand a few years ago.
59:38SPEAKERThis is their like performance gaming brand.
59:40SPEAKER- Oh, right, of course.
59:41SPEAKER- They're bringing it back, so.
59:42SPEAKER- I mean, do they get out of the market
59:43SPEAKERor just change the branding?
59:44SPEAKER- They just changed the name.
59:45SPEAKERThey call it Dell Pro or something.
59:47SPEAKER- Is this just a nostalgia play?
59:49SPEAKER- Yeah, pretty much.
59:50SPEAKER- All right, well, that's cool.
59:51SPEAKER- It was gone for one product cycle, I think, was it, so.
59:55SPEAKERAnd then the worst thing I saw out of all of the stuff
59:57SPEAKERI looked at for CES to pull this list together
1:00:00SPEAKERwas this robot that cuts your hair for you with AI.
1:00:04SPEAKERAnd it's not bad because the robot's bad,
1:00:06SPEAKERbut the fake head that they use to do the haircut demos
1:00:09SPEAKERis a nightmare.
1:00:10SPEAKER- Oh.
1:00:11SPEAKER- Did you not click on this one?
1:00:12SPEAKER- Oh yeah, no, I'm looking at it.
1:00:14SPEAKER- Yeah, it's bad. - It looks like CG.
1:00:15SPEAKER- Yeah, it's not, that's a real thing.
1:00:17SPEAKERThis is one of the better pictures.
1:00:19SPEAKERAnd it's a thing that you clamp onto your head
1:00:22SPEAKERand then it kind of gives you,
1:00:24SPEAKERit looks like a bad fade with the robot, so.
1:00:28SPEAKER- I don't know, I don't know.
1:00:30SPEAKERIt seems bad.
1:00:31SPEAKERI would just shave my head before I started using this.
1:00:34SPEAKEROkay, so the one big thing on TVs and monitors
1:00:36SPEAKERwe didn't talk about yet too is OLED monitors are,
1:00:41SPEAKERthere's a new pixel or sub pixel arrangement.
1:00:43SPEAKER- Oh, that's actually just some meat and potatoes
1:00:47SPEAKERuseful stuff.
1:00:48SPEAKERLike that's not flashy, typical CES prototype,
1:00:51SPEAKERnever come to market stuff.
1:00:52SPEAKERThat's just like, for people who don't know,
1:00:54SPEAKEROLEDs don't use the same sub pixel layouts
1:00:56SPEAKERtypically as your classic LCDs.
1:00:59SPEAKERAnd all of the text anti-aliasing is typically designed
1:01:02SPEAKERaround standard LCD sub pixel layouts.
1:01:05SPEAKER- Yep.
1:01:05SPEAKER- So different depending on the OLED you get,
1:01:07SPEAKERyou get weird fringing or other artifacts on text
1:01:09SPEAKERthat some people find very eye straining and so forth.
1:01:12SPEAKER- So new QD OLED pixel, sub pixel layout just dropped.
1:01:16SPEAKERThis one's called vertical stripes, I think.
1:01:20SPEAKERAnd instead of having the sub pixels
1:01:21SPEAKERin kind of a triangly shape,
1:01:23SPEAKERthey're just three vertical lines
1:01:27SPEAKERthat are next to each other with the red being the long one
1:01:30SPEAKERand the blue being the small one and the mid-sized
1:01:34SPEAKERpresumably because of the differences in brightnesses
1:01:36SPEAKERon those color ranges.
1:01:38SPEAKER- Because red would be the demonstrate.
1:01:39SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:01:41SPEAKERSo they're saying it's better if it makes the text clearer
1:01:43SPEAKERon OLEDs.
1:01:44SPEAKER- Who's the manufacturer on that?
1:01:46SPEAKER- LG and Samsung are both doing them right now.
1:01:48SPEAKER- Oh, wow, cool.
1:01:49SPEAKERAll right, well, maybe that just kind of fixes the problem.
1:01:51SPEAKER- ASUS and MSI both have monitors
1:01:53SPEAKERthat are using the new layout next year.
1:01:56SPEAKER- Man, I was so hot on getting a OLED PC monitor
1:01:59SPEAKERuntil I watched a video about burn-in
1:02:00SPEAKERand I just don't think I can do it ever.
1:02:03SPEAKER- I try not to think about it too much.
1:02:06SPEAKER- Yeah, that's one option for sure.
1:02:07SPEAKERThey're just, they're still expensive enough
1:02:09SPEAKERthat if I started seeing burn-in after 18 months,
1:02:11SPEAKERlike some tests indicate I might,
1:02:14SPEAKERI just don't think I could handle it emotionally.
1:02:16SPEAKER- What if you just used an OS
1:02:18SPEAKERthat didn't have Windows Chrome
1:02:19SPEAKERand you were just all tiling all the time?
1:02:20SPEAKER- Yeah, the tiling is still a standard size though.
1:02:23SPEAKERYou're probably still gonna see seams.
1:02:26SPEAKERI just, for, you know, 98% of my computer
1:02:29SPEAKERuses productivity and Windows stuff.
1:02:31SPEAKERLike I don't do a lot of gaming in here.
1:02:33SPEAKERSo that would not be great.
1:02:35SPEAKER- So Samsung Display is supplying these panels
1:02:40SPEAKERto seven global manufacturers according to,
1:02:44SPEAKERI think this article's on The Verge.
1:02:45SPEAKER- Okay, that's good news.
1:02:46SPEAKERI just, I very quickly skimmed the TV roundup
1:02:49SPEAKER'cause TVs at CES are one of my favorite topics,
1:02:51SPEAKERbut it doesn't seem like much this year.
1:02:53SPEAKERObviously many LEDs and OLEDs are getting
1:02:56SPEAKERincrementally better as always,
1:02:57SPEAKERbut as far as like the future looking tech,
1:03:00SPEAKERyou know, the microLED or the self-inmissive quantum dots
1:03:04SPEAKERthat we talked about last year, it doesn't seem like,
1:03:06SPEAKERI think there's some more prototype stuff there
1:03:08SPEAKERfrom the looks of things,
1:03:09SPEAKERbut it doesn't look like anything close
1:03:10SPEAKERto like shipping reasonably priced products.
1:03:13SPEAKER- So the stuff I saw, the big stuff I saw,
1:03:16SPEAKERthe big kind of trends I saw were that people are shipping
1:03:20SPEAKERwhat was generally considered
1:03:22SPEAKERto be kind of unwise brightnesses.
1:03:24SPEAKERLike I said, up to 4,500 nits, eye blasters.
1:03:28SPEAKERAnd then the other one is that the cheap monitors
1:03:31SPEAKERand the good monitors are,
1:03:33SPEAKERthe gap between the cheap TVs and the good TVs
1:03:37SPEAKERseems to be closing pretty dramatically.
1:03:39SPEAKER- That's a good thing.
1:03:41SPEAKER- Yeah, so I think we're gonna start seeing
1:03:42SPEAKERmore differentiation based on features
1:03:44SPEAKERthat maybe are more kind of transient
1:03:47SPEAKERand less hardware specific.
1:03:50SPEAKER- Sure.
1:03:51SPEAKER- Anyway, TVs are weird, man.
1:03:52SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:03:53SPEAKER- That's the TLDR.
1:03:55SPEAKERSo that's a CES.
1:03:56SPEAKERI'm sure we missed some stuff.
1:03:57SPEAKERIf you had favorites that you were curious about,
1:03:59SPEAKERsend them in to techpod@content.town
1:04:01SPEAKERand we'll talk about them at the end of the month
1:04:03SPEAKERon the questions episode.
1:04:05SPEAKERI, like this one was pretty good.
1:04:08SPEAKERThere was a bunch of terrible AI shit.
1:04:11SPEAKER- Yeah, of course.
1:04:12SPEAKER- But I think that's just part for the course now.
1:04:15SPEAKER- Nothing like super mind blowing though
1:04:16SPEAKERon any fronts, really.
1:04:18SPEAKER- No.
1:04:20SPEAKER- No, like-
1:04:21SPEAKER- I don't feel like there's not really any one
1:04:22SPEAKEReverybody's talking about thing this year.
1:04:25SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that those Lego bricks,
1:04:28SPEAKERI'll be curious to hear what people say
1:04:29SPEAKERwho've been at the show more.
1:04:30SPEAKERI haven't talked to Adam or any of the folks
1:04:31SPEAKERfrom PCWorld who were there,
1:04:33SPEAKERbut I think that Lego, like,
1:04:37SPEAKERI think that Lego thing is one of those ones
1:04:38SPEAKERthat's like seems like a kind of interesting, neat thing now
1:04:41SPEAKERand in like 15 years, we're gonna be talking about it
1:04:43SPEAKERlike it was an inflection point for toys being smart
1:04:47SPEAKER'cause it's a smart way to make toys smart.
1:04:49SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:04:50SPEAKER- Honestly, the solid state battery shipping
1:04:52SPEAKERin an actual vehicle seems like it might be small,
1:04:55SPEAKERa small fry right now, but it seems like
1:04:57SPEAKERin terms of potential future impact,
1:04:59SPEAKERthat's probably the biggest deal.
1:05:01SPEAKER- 100%.
1:05:02SPEAKERI mean, look, Dave Filoni came out for that Lego thing,
1:05:04SPEAKERthough he wasn't there for the solid state batteries.
1:05:06SPEAKER- Did he have his hat on?
1:05:07SPEAKER- He did, and Chewbacca was there too,
1:05:09SPEAKERand R2-D2 and C-3PO.
1:05:10SPEAKER- Wow, you mean all the characters,
1:05:14SPEAKERthey don't have to pay like an expensive actor?
1:05:16SPEAKER- It's interesting, what a coincidence.
1:05:18SPEAKER- Interesting.
1:05:19SPEAKERLook, Chewbacca threw his arms up and made the sound,
1:05:21SPEAKERthat's all I cared about.
1:05:22SPEAKER- Yep.
1:05:24SPEAKER- I'll hug, any time I see Chewbacca,
1:05:25SPEAKERChewbacca's getting a hug, that's all I'm gonna say.
1:05:27SPEAKER- Wait, you've hugged Chewbacca before?
1:05:29SPEAKER- I've hugged a Chewbacca, yeah.
1:05:30SPEAKER- Man, man. - You've not?
1:05:31SPEAKER- I have not hugged a Wookie.
1:05:33SPEAKER- Would you not hug a Wookie?
1:05:34SPEAKER- I'm not saying I wouldn't.
1:05:35SPEAKER- Okay, don't Wookie hug shame me.
1:05:38SPEAKER- If conditions were right.
1:05:40SPEAKER- Okay, on that note, the conditions are right
1:05:44SPEAKERfor us to wrap this episode up.
1:05:45SPEAKERThanks everybody for hanging out, thanks for listening.
1:05:48SPEAKERWe will be back next week with another episode.
1:05:49SPEAKERBut before we go, it's time to encourage everybody
1:05:54SPEAKERto go visit patreon.com/checkpot
1:05:57SPEAKERand sign up for the Patreon.
1:05:59SPEAKERWhen you do that, you get access to our Discord,
1:06:01SPEAKERwhich is full of beautiful nerds just like you
1:06:03SPEAKERwho talk about stuff like CES stuff and, let's see,
1:06:08SPEAKERinsulation, we had a big fence talk
1:06:10SPEAKERwhen my fence blew down over the break.
1:06:12SPEAKERIt's been good times in the Discord this month.
1:06:14SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
1:06:16SPEAKER- You also get access to our monthly Patreon
1:06:18SPEAKERexclusive episodes where we talk about,
1:06:20SPEAKERI don't remember what we talked about
1:06:21SPEAKERon our Patreon exclusive episode last month.
1:06:23SPEAKER- A lot of stuff.
1:06:24SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:06:25SPEAKER- Crazy San Francisco power outage and storms
1:06:27SPEAKERand UPS battery replacements and--
1:06:31SPEAKER- Topics of interest.
1:06:32SPEAKER- Other stuff that I'm forgetting.
1:06:34SPEAKER- Yeah, we talk about, usually it's stuff that's smaller,
1:06:37SPEAKERtoo small for a full episode,
1:06:38SPEAKERbut still of interest to the audience.
1:06:42SPEAKER- Small projects.
1:06:44SPEAKER- Yeah, and you can, again, get access to that
1:06:46SPEAKERby going to patreon.com/checkpod.
1:06:48SPEAKERWe're listener supported,
1:06:49SPEAKERso we wouldn't be here without you all.
1:06:50SPEAKER- True.
1:06:51SPEAKER- We appreciate everybody who supports the show.
1:06:53SPEAKER- Also true.
1:06:54SPEAKER- But we especially appreciate our executive producer
1:06:56SPEAKERto your patrons, so we're gonna say their name every week,
1:06:59SPEAKERjust like we do every week, starting with Jason Lee,
1:07:03SPEAKERnextlander.net, comma, it's dot com,
1:07:06SPEAKERAndrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett, Bunny Hate Machine,
1:07:09SPEAKERDavid Allen, James Kamik, and Pantheon,
1:07:12SPEAKERmakers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer.
1:07:14SPEAKERThank you all so much.
1:07:15SPEAKER- Yes, thank you, thank you.
1:07:16SPEAKER- I just wanna say, I think Bunny Hate Machine
1:07:18SPEAKERis probably going through their,
1:07:21SPEAKERrevisiting early '90s Nine Inch Nails,
1:07:23SPEAKERmaybe late '80s Nine Inch Nails.
1:07:24SPEAKER- Okay, yes, sure, yes, that didn't click with me
1:07:27SPEAKERuntil you said it, and now, of course.
1:07:28SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:07:29SPEAKER- You know, the one thing we didn't save,
1:07:31SPEAKERthe one word I considered saying on this thing
1:07:33SPEAKERout of CES and did not is Wi-Fi 8.
1:07:36SPEAKER- Oh, you wanna do a post?
1:07:38SPEAKERWe can talk about Wi-Fi 8.
1:07:39SPEAKER- I don't know if there's much to say.
1:07:41SPEAKER- I mean, we'll do another episode on it at some point.
1:07:42SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, we'll get around to it.
1:07:44SPEAKER- I'm still on Wi-Fi 5.
1:07:46SPEAKER- But the pre-spec hardware is shipping,
1:07:48SPEAKERand so there's a bunch of Wi-Fi routers that are Wi-Fi 8.
1:07:53SPEAKERThey are pre-spec, which means you probably will be able
1:07:55SPEAKERto upgrade them to Wi-Fi 8 when the time comes.
1:07:59SPEAKER- Oh, really?
1:08:00SPEAKERI always assumed you were gated by the hardware
1:08:02SPEAKERon that stuff and that you might miss out on features.
1:08:04SPEAKER- No, so the hardware is final, though.
1:08:06SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
1:08:07SPEAKER- The software is still being finalized.
1:08:08SPEAKER- Got it, that makes sense, okay.
1:08:10SPEAKER- I don't buy pre-release Wi-Fi stuff for pretty good reasons.
1:08:15SPEAKER- I don't think I even buy early to mid-finalized Wi-Fi stuff.
1:08:19SPEAKERI always feel like buying into the tail end
1:08:21SPEAKERor close to the end of a Wi-Fi generation
1:08:23SPEAKERis usually the safe bet.
1:08:25SPEAKER- I think in the old days,
1:08:27SPEAKERwhen you were going from B to G to N,
1:08:29SPEAKERit made sense to get on as early as you could
1:08:31SPEAKER'cause those jumps were enormous.
1:08:33SPEAKERNow, unless you have a specific need to upgrade,
1:08:36SPEAKERthere's very little reason to upgrade.
1:08:38SPEAKERLike, already my Wi-Fi 6 stuff is faster
1:08:41SPEAKERthan my upstream internet connection is, so.
1:08:43SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, I was all ready to buy
1:08:46SPEAKERa TP-Link Omata Wi-Fi 7 access point.
1:08:49SPEAKER- Yeah, you mean enemies of the state TP-Link Omata?
1:08:52SPEAKER- Yes, enemy of the state TP-Link.
1:08:54SPEAKERNow I'm having second thoughts.
1:08:55SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, look, they're not gonna turn it off.
1:08:58SPEAKERIt'll just be on a list.
1:09:03SPEAKERWell, that'll do it for us this week.
1:09:04SPEAKERThanks, everybody, for listening.
1:09:05SPEAKERAnd as always, please consider the environment
1:09:08SPEAKERbefore pitching this podcast.