359: Potatoes From the Sky

00:00SPEAKER- Brad, I have a UI complaint.

00:01SPEAKER- Great, hit me.

00:03SPEAKER- You know when you're watching the sports on TV?

00:07SPEAKER- Theoretically, sure.

00:08SPEAKER- Yeah, and there's information you wanna have

00:12SPEAKERthat changes based on the sport.

00:13SPEAKERSo you always want to know the score

00:15SPEAKERand which teams are playing.

00:16SPEAKERBut then if it's baseball,

00:17SPEAKERyou wanna know how many people are on base

00:20SPEAKERand how many strikes there are

00:21SPEAKERand how many outs there are

00:22SPEAKERand how many balls there are and that kind of stuff.

00:25SPEAKERIf you're watching basketball,

00:27SPEAKERyou wanna know how many fouls each team has in a quarter

00:31SPEAKERand you wanna know how many timeouts they have left.

00:34SPEAKER- Maybe top scorers.

00:36SPEAKER- Yeah, top scorers is nice to have.

00:37SPEAKERBut that one, that's like a top right UI thing,

00:41SPEAKERnot like a main.

00:43SPEAKERThe WNBA playoffs are happening right now

00:45SPEAKERand the Valkyrie's poker playing.

00:46SPEAKERAnd because of the playoffs,

00:49SPEAKERthey sell playoff rights separately

00:51SPEAKERfrom regular season rights.

00:54SPEAKERSo the networks that air the games in the playoffs

00:57SPEAKERare different.

00:58SPEAKERAnd some of these games are on USA, Brad,

01:01SPEAKERand you know what they do?

01:02SPEAKERThey just put the score.

01:03SPEAKERIt's the score, the quarter, and the time left.

01:06SPEAKERThat's all that's on the board.

01:07SPEAKER- If you were to tell me that sports broadcasting

01:09SPEAKERis not one of USA Network's core competencies,

01:12SPEAKERI don't think I'd have a hard time believing you.

01:14SPEAKERAlthough this might be the first time

01:16SPEAKERI've heard anything about USA in like 10 years.

01:18SPEAKERI'm almost surprised they still exist.

01:20SPEAKER- Characters wanted, Brad.

01:21SPEAKERThat's everything you need to know about USA.

01:22SPEAKERNo, so, okay.

01:24SPEAKERNBC is, USA is part of the fine network of

01:27SPEAKERNBC universal products.

01:30SPEAKER- Okay, true.

01:31SPEAKER- I feel like they also had some games on CNBC

01:35SPEAKERearlier this year, weirdly enough.

01:38SPEAKERBut anyway, the point is, we need to standardize,

01:42SPEAKERlike this stuff, there needs to be like

01:43SPEAKERan IEEE ISO standard for what stuff you put on the score,

01:49SPEAKERthe always on scoreboard on the TV.

01:53SPEAKER'Cause I want to just glance at that no like,

01:55SPEAKERI want state of the game.

01:56SPEAKERI want like video game HUD design on my sports watching.

02:00SPEAKER- Should make it customizable.

02:02SPEAKER- Yeah.

02:03SPEAKERWhy not have a YAML file that you can update on your own?

02:06SPEAKER- Yeah, just give it a video game style gameplay

02:08SPEAKERoption screen where you get to tweak the UI and like...

02:11SPEAKER- God, that's next level.

02:12SPEAKER- You can make it dynamic.

02:13SPEAKERYou could make it a dynamic UI where it only,

02:16SPEAKERwhere it fades out so you can see the whole court.

02:18SPEAKER- Yeah.

02:19SPEAKER- Except when like somebody scores

02:20SPEAKERand then the score pops, like fades back into view.

02:22SPEAKER- And what if you could give it like the full wild plug it?

02:25SPEAKERWell, okay.

02:25SPEAKERSo you know about the thing that they're doing

02:27SPEAKERwith the motion cameras now, right?

02:29SPEAKERI want to say this is for football mostly,

02:30SPEAKERbut I feel like some men's basketball games get it.

02:33SPEAKER- So ironically, I've been sitting here waiting to ask

02:35SPEAKERif basketball has been doing any cool high tech

02:38SPEAKERbroadcast stuff, 'cause it seems like football gets

02:40SPEAKERall of the toys, like the camera on wire over the field

02:43SPEAKERand field overlays and all that stuff.

02:46SPEAKERBut go ahead.

02:47SPEAKER- Well, so basketball, they don't need the camera on wire

02:49SPEAKER'cause they just put cameras all around the arena.

02:51SPEAKERThere's like, there's roof, so it's not a problem.

02:54SPEAKERThey do have, increasingly they have,

02:58SPEAKERsomebody started putting cameras in weird places

03:00SPEAKERa few years ago and now they're having real fun with it.

03:01SPEAKERSo there's like, there's the camera that's like

03:04SPEAKERunderneath the goal on the post.

03:06SPEAKERLike it usually looks like a kind of crappy GoPro.

03:09SPEAKERIt's the basketball analog to that,

03:11SPEAKERthat the camera that's in the little,

03:16SPEAKERthe things that mark the entrance to the end zone.

03:19SPEAKERAnd then they also now often have one on top

03:22SPEAKERthat's on like a servo that tilts up and down

03:26SPEAKERabove the backboard facing down.

03:31SPEAKERBut yeah, and then there's like top down cameras

03:33SPEAKERand all that kind of stuff.

03:34SPEAKERThe big one for me is that they're doing motion tracking.

03:39SPEAKERI can't remember where I saw this,

03:40SPEAKERbut I think it was one of the men's games last year

03:42SPEAKERhad motion tracking and they were like getting limb placement

03:46SPEAKERand inferring limb placement for the players

03:49SPEAKERon the court at any given time by,

03:53SPEAKERI think just like having a whole buttload of cameras

03:56SPEAKERaround the edges of the thing and then kind of synthesizing

04:00SPEAKERthat into a picture, a monk illus of players, basically.

04:03SPEAKER- Is it time to start sticking ping pong balls

04:05SPEAKERto basketball players?

04:06SPEAKER- Look, they don't, they put chips and stuff

04:09SPEAKERin the jerseys and things now.

04:12SPEAKERYeah, and like in the W,

04:14SPEAKERsome occasionally, it's not every game,

04:17SPEAKERbut often they'll have like a mic'd up player

04:19SPEAKERwhere somebody is just wearing a mic on the court

04:21SPEAKERand you hear, you get to hear like what they're yelling

04:23SPEAKERto each other and stuff, which is frigging awesome.

04:27SPEAKERYeah, I want to see people to like load up NBA 2K though

04:31SPEAKERand watch the live game in the video game

04:34SPEAKERwith like accurate limb placement and all that stuff.

04:37SPEAKERThat's the next step.

04:38SPEAKER- Yeah, that sounds like these tournament spectating stuff

04:41SPEAKERthat Valve built for Dota.

04:43SPEAKER- Yeah.

04:44SPEAKERYou can just in the client and spectate a live running game

04:46SPEAKERand like zoom around the map on your own,

04:48SPEAKERzoom in on whatever you want.

04:49SPEAKERAnd yes, yes, yes, they should do that.

04:52SPEAKER- I want the WoW style like healer plugin though,

04:56SPEAKERthat like when somebody scores, it's like Gabby scores!

05:00SPEAKERExclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point

05:02SPEAKERacross your whole screen, you know?

05:04SPEAKER- Seems like all this cool technology seems like a way

05:07SPEAKERto maybe finally get me interested in sports.

05:09SPEAKER(upbeat music)

05:14SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)

05:38SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Check Pod.

05:40SPEAKERI'm Will.

05:41SPEAKER- I'm Brad.

05:42SPEAKER- Hey, happy, what is it, Thursday, Friday, October?

05:45SPEAKERIt's October.

05:46SPEAKER- I don't (laughs)

05:48SPEAKERI've more or less with some very light dozing

05:51SPEAKERbeen up since 3 a.m., which you informed me

05:53SPEAKERis about the time that you went to sleep last night.

05:55SPEAKER- Yeah, I went to bed about three last night

05:57SPEAKER'cause of work stuff that we don't,

05:59SPEAKERwe'll talk about it later.

06:00SPEAKERWe're not gonna talk about it right now.

06:01SPEAKER- Burning it on opposite ends this week.

06:03SPEAKER- Yeah, it's usually, it's funny.

06:05SPEAKERI used to be a real like super late night guy

06:09SPEAKERand I have totally, my life has changed since having a kid

06:14SPEAKERto the point that I'm now the reliable bedtime person

06:16SPEAKERin our house and Jean is the one who's up super late

06:18SPEAKERall the time and yeah, I'm not as good

06:22SPEAKERat the super late nights as I once was.

06:24SPEAKER- It's not, you know, sleep's good for you.

06:27SPEAKERIf you can do it, I recommend it.

06:29SPEAKER- It turns out, yeah, we needed to live, who knew?

06:31SPEAKER- I've started shifting some late night activities

06:34SPEAKERto morning, like there've been more and more cases

06:37SPEAKERwhere it'll be like nine o'clock

06:38SPEAKERand I'm getting kind of drowsy and it's like,

06:40SPEAKERwell, I could keep trying to do this while I'm tired.

06:43SPEAKER- Yeah.

06:44SPEAKER- Or I could just go to bed and naturally wake up around five

06:46SPEAKERand then do it in the morning

06:47SPEAKERafter I've had a whole night's sleep.

06:49SPEAKER- Well, there was a period-

06:50SPEAKER- What's really the difference there

06:51SPEAKERin terms of use of time?

06:53SPEAKER- There was a period when the kiddo was little

06:55SPEAKERwhere I would get up in the morning and like do editing,

06:58SPEAKERlike if we had blog posts or something to go up that day,

07:00SPEAKERI would just edit the blog posts at like five o'clock

07:03SPEAKERin the morning after I did her first feeding

07:06SPEAKERand that was great, like that was a good time

07:08SPEAKERbecause like that was, I'd had a cup of coffee,

07:10SPEAKERI was like, I fed the child and then I put her back to sleep

07:14SPEAKERand like everything was cool and I was really productive

07:17SPEAKERand then as soon as she stopped needing bottles,

07:19SPEAKERthen that all immediately collapsed.

07:20SPEAKER- Yeah, of course.

07:21SPEAKER- Yeah.

07:22SPEAKER- Sure.

07:23SPEAKERYeah, numerous occasions I've been like trying to play

07:25SPEAKERsome game for a podcast at night and I'm like,

07:27SPEAKERyou know what, I'm just gonna put this to sleep

07:29SPEAKERand go to bed and then eight hours, well, if I'm lucky,

07:32SPEAKEReight hours later, I wake up and just sit right back down

07:35SPEAKERand continue playing it.

07:36SPEAKER- Well, yeah, and the part of that is if I'm tired

07:40SPEAKERand I'm playing a game, I'm much less likely

07:42SPEAKERto actually enjoy it.

07:43SPEAKER- Yeah, that's exactly that, it's just I'm in a better mood,

07:46SPEAKERI'm able to focus and retain information better,

07:48SPEAKERlike it's just a positive all around.

07:51SPEAKER- Well, you know what else is positive all around?

07:54SPEAKERNews.

07:55SPEAKER- Oh yeah, that's always an uplifting.

07:58SPEAKER- We have a news roundup, we had interesting stories

08:02SPEAKERthat we wanted to talk about this week, topics of interest

08:06SPEAKERand so we decided to do a news roundup this week.

08:09SPEAKER- Some micro topics.

08:10SPEAKER- Yeah, we have like four things,

08:13SPEAKERshould we tell people what they are

08:14SPEAKERor should we hold them in case?

08:15SPEAKER- Yeah, that seems like a nice thing to do,

08:17SPEAKERpresent an index.

08:19SPEAKER- Our friend of the show, Nathan Edwards over at The Verge

08:21SPEAKERwrote a really funny article that my wife had already seen

08:24SPEAKERwhen I sent it to her yesterday,

08:26SPEAKERwhich is like that to me is one of the signs

08:29SPEAKERthat things have broken nerd containment

08:31SPEAKERis if I send her a text story and she's like,

08:33SPEAKERoh yeah, I saw Nathan's article already, it was really good.

08:36SPEAKERHis neighborhood is in one of the beta coverage areas

08:40SPEAKERfor Google winged drones and he's been using it

08:43SPEAKERto send stuff to his neighbors.

08:45SPEAKER- Yeah, the neighborhood dads goofing on each other part

08:49SPEAKERis all well and good, but I actually just want to talk

08:52SPEAKERabout the underlying tech and service offering here.

08:55SPEAKER- Yeah, and I think it's an excuse for us to talk about

08:58SPEAKERthe majority of our adult life being subsidized

09:01SPEAKERby their venture companies or big giant public companies

09:04SPEAKERliving in San Francisco over the last 20 years.

09:06SPEAKER- Is he here?

09:07SPEAKERWell, whatever.

09:08SPEAKER- No, he's in Texas now, but yeah.

09:10SPEAKER- We'll get to it.

09:12SPEAKER- Let's see, the third circuit court found that AI training

09:15SPEAKERis copyright theft, which is one other bullet point.

09:19SPEAKERI don't think we need to get into that too, too much.

09:20SPEAKERThat's maybe the whole thing.

09:22SPEAKER- Well, yeah, we can find some detail,

09:24SPEAKERbut it is one narrow case and we're not lawyers,

09:27SPEAKERso I don't know how broadly this precedent will be applied,

09:29SPEAKERassuming it even stands because I'm sure this is destined

09:32SPEAKERfor the Supreme court, but.

09:33SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that's the,

09:35SPEAKERlike I was seeing people talk about it the other day

09:37SPEAKERand I wanted to talk about it because it's like,

09:38SPEAKERI don't think any of this matters

09:39SPEAKERuntil we get to see what the Supremes say.

09:41SPEAKER- Yeah.

09:42SPEAKER- And then Valve added a crazy new video codec to Steam

09:46SPEAKERfor low latency in-home streaming.

09:48SPEAKER- Yes, I came across this a couple of weeks ago

09:51SPEAKERand was very excited to read it

09:52SPEAKERas someone who is putting a PC under the TV soon,

09:57SPEAKERhas not done so yet.

09:58SPEAKERAnd maybe I'll get into why when we get there.

10:00SPEAKER- You like a codec?

10:01SPEAKER- Yes, I also love a video codec.

10:03SPEAKERIn fact, I had read the entire blog

10:05SPEAKERby the author of this codec like two weeks ago

10:08SPEAKERand found it fascinating.

10:09SPEAKERAnd then I was like, wait, we should,

10:10SPEAKERthat is ready-made tech pod material, so here we are.

10:14SPEAKER- It's very good.

10:16SPEAKERFor folks who do production work,

10:18SPEAKERit's kind of like the MediaTek codec,

10:21SPEAKERwhich I can't remember the name of right now,

10:23SPEAKERbut basically it's a high bandwidth, low latency,

10:28SPEAKERlocal streaming codec, but tuned for games,

10:32SPEAKERwhich is interesting.

10:33SPEAKER- You're not thinking of NDI are you?

10:34SPEAKER- I'm thinking about NDI, yeah.

10:35SPEAKER- Yeah, that's a new tech codec.

10:37SPEAKER- New tech, sorry.

10:37SPEAKER- Although they are kind of villains that I'd--

10:40SPEAKER- Look, yeah, NDI is problematic for a host of reasons.

10:44SPEAKER- NDI got kicked out of FFmpeg

10:46SPEAKERbecause of their bad behavior.

10:47SPEAKER- What?

10:48SPEAKER- Oh yeah, that was years ago.

10:49SPEAKER- Oh, Steam drama.

10:50SPEAKERAnd then the last thing is European governments

10:52SPEAKERare ditching Windows, ditching US products, it turns out.

10:55SPEAKERI can't imagine why.

10:57SPEAKER- Yeah, this has kind of been an ongoing thing for a while,

10:59SPEAKERbut there is another, in fact, maybe the most prominent

11:02SPEAKERor most interesting example of it so far.

11:04SPEAKERSo we'll talk about digital sovereignty a little bit.

11:07SPEAKER- But where do you wanna start?

11:09SPEAKER- Well, let's just start at the top of this document

11:10SPEAKERwith the Google--

11:11SPEAKER- Start with Nathan's potatoes.

11:15SPEAKER- Product, goods delivery, product delivery by drone

11:18SPEAKERis happening.

11:19SPEAKERLike it just feels like another one of those,

11:21SPEAKERlike actually living in the field,

11:22SPEAKERlike it feels like one of those AT&T, you will things,

11:26SPEAKERlike for a long time, those commercials aired

11:30SPEAKERand then for a long time, it was like, yeah, okay,

11:31SPEAKERI'm sure that's a bunch of speculative,

11:33SPEAKERlike pie in the sky stuff that I may not actually live to see

11:37SPEAKERor will never happen.

11:38SPEAKERIt's like flying car stuff, you know,

11:39SPEAKERbut like more and more things that actually

11:42SPEAKERwould have qualified to be in those sorts

11:44SPEAKERof speculative commercials are actually all around us now.

11:47SPEAKER- Where's my jet pack, Brad?

11:49SPEAKER- It's not like, there are like functional jet packs now.

11:53SPEAKERI mean, they use like water and things like that, right?

11:56SPEAKER- Well, there's also ones that have like jet engines

11:57SPEAKERon your hands and stuff.

11:58SPEAKERLike that guy that made those is like,

12:01SPEAKERI don't think he's gonna live a long time, but they exist.

12:05SPEAKERSo this story, a friend of the show, Nathan Edwards,

12:08SPEAKERwho as a former, I guess he worked as an assistant editor,

12:12SPEAKERassociate editor or something at Maximum PC

12:13SPEAKERwhen I left a hundred years ago.

12:15SPEAKER- Oh, I didn't know you worked with them.

12:17SPEAKER- Yeah, Nathan's great.

12:17SPEAKERNathan is one of quietly the funniest people I know

12:22SPEAKERand he wrote, also we've talked to him about,

12:24SPEAKERhe's been on the Linux.

12:25SPEAKERHe was on, is he on Dual Boot Diaries

12:27SPEAKERor did you just talk to him about Dual Boot Diaries a lot?

12:29SPEAKERAnyway, he's been on the changing to Linux beat

12:32SPEAKERfor a while as well over at the Verge.

12:34SPEAKERBut he realized that his neighborhood is served

12:37SPEAKERby Google's project wing drones, which are these,

12:42SPEAKERI think they can do up to like 15 pounds of stuff.

12:45SPEAKERYou can get it delivered from a Walmart super center

12:47SPEAKERnear his house.

12:48SPEAKER- It sounds like the ones doing these deliveries

12:51SPEAKERare limited to 2.7 pounds.

12:52SPEAKER- Oh, 2.7, okay.

12:54SPEAKERI don't know if that's for the drone itself

12:56SPEAKERor just what this delivery service is currently limited to.

12:58SPEAKER- It might be that the drone weighed 15 pounds.

13:00SPEAKERI remember 15 pounds being a part of it.

13:02SPEAKERAnyway, the point is they're not charging anything

13:06SPEAKERto do the deliveries and you basically can go

13:10SPEAKERinto the wing app and buy something from Walmart

13:13SPEAKERfor the price that you would pay for it

13:14SPEAKERif you drove over to Walmart and they'll bring it in

13:17SPEAKERone or more drone flights to you.

13:19SPEAKER- Okay, so that was something I was not clear on

13:21SPEAKERin the story.

13:22SPEAKERPeople are buying it through wing, not through Walmart.

13:24SPEAKERIt's not like walmart.com does not just have drone now

13:27SPEAKERlisted as a shipping option.

13:29SPEAKER- No, yeah, I think it's limited enough

13:31SPEAKERthat they don't want that many of them going out probably.

13:34SPEAKERSo let's see, I don't know if we have these

13:36SPEAKERin San Francisco, but when I was in LA a few months ago,

13:40SPEAKERI saw a bunch of those little sandwich delivery robots

13:42SPEAKERthat look like, they look like coolers

13:44SPEAKERwith wheels basically.

13:46SPEAKER- Oh yeah, yes, I've seen those in LA as well.

13:48SPEAKER- Yeah, so you see them driving around a fair amount.

13:51SPEAKERSo like drone delivery kind of isn't new.

13:54SPEAKERThis is interesting 'cause as Nathan said,

13:57SPEAKERlike this is cheaper, they don't charge a delivery fee

14:00SPEAKERfor this 'cause presumably 'cause A, they're testing it

14:03SPEAKERand subsidizing it, but B, the cost of delivering stuff

14:06SPEAKERwith these drones is probably pretty low

14:09SPEAKER'cause you have to be within a 15 mile radius

14:12SPEAKERor 10 mile radius or something.

14:13SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I think we should say

14:16SPEAKERthe per delivery cost is pretty low.

14:18SPEAKERLike the upfront cost amortized over deliveries

14:21SPEAKERprobably makes that number go way up

14:23SPEAKER'cause I have to assume the initial outlay

14:25SPEAKERfor this hardware is and the control system is not cheap,

14:28SPEAKERbut although that's the type of thing

14:30SPEAKERthat'll get cheaper over time if this catches on.

14:33SPEAKER- So this is, and these are hybrid,

14:36SPEAKERthese are not like, what do you think of as like

14:38SPEAKERa camera drone where they're just four propellers,

14:40SPEAKERthey're 16 props, four for horizontal, forward and back,

14:46SPEAKERand then 12 to go up and down.

14:48SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, they look like little airplanes

14:50SPEAKERkind of with fins and wings and fins and rotors.

14:54SPEAKER- And it's unclear to me if they're piloted

14:56SPEAKERor if they're autonomous.

14:58SPEAKER- Surely they're autonomous.

15:00SPEAKER- It says they're approved for the FAA

15:02SPEAKERfor beyond line of sight piloting,

15:03SPEAKERbut I don't know what that means.

15:06SPEAKERMy guess is that, like he said in the article

15:09SPEAKERthat the first time you're there,

15:10SPEAKERthat you have a delivery done, you have to be there,

15:12SPEAKERwhich I assume means you go into the backyard

15:14SPEAKERand tell it where you want it to land

15:16SPEAKERand then it just lands in that same place

15:17SPEAKERevery time in the future.

15:18SPEAKER- Yeah, which I assume is for kind of identity

15:20SPEAKERauthentication probably, right?

15:22SPEAKERLike we wanna make sure you're not using the service

15:25SPEAKERto send people things they don't want

15:27SPEAKERor harass them with deliveries, drones in their backyard.

15:30SPEAKER- Well, one would think that, but from the article,

15:32SPEAKERI don't think that's the case 'cause he started like,

15:35SPEAKERlook, Nathan's, like I said, Nathan's a funny guy.

15:37SPEAKER- Yes, you're right, I forgot that there is a part in this

15:39SPEAKERwhere he does in fact send a delivery unbidden to a neighbor.

15:43SPEAKER- Yeah, just they realize independently

15:47SPEAKERthat the cheapest thing you can buy is an 89 cent potato,

15:51SPEAKERsingle potato from Walmart, no delivery fee.

15:54SPEAKERSo for less than a buck, you can have a feed

15:58SPEAKERof technical engineering land a potato in your backyard.

16:01SPEAKER- Yeah, on the pilot thing, I started to say

16:03SPEAKERthere's no way that there could be human pilots behind this

16:05SPEAKERbecause they need this to operate at scale.

16:07SPEAKERBut on the other hand, how many other examples

16:09SPEAKERof like robotics demos have we seen

16:11SPEAKERthat are kind of like implied to be autonomous

16:14SPEAKERand then you find out like, oh no,

16:16SPEAKERthat robot butler that was on stage

16:17SPEAKERactually had like three operators on control surface

16:21SPEAKERbackstage running it or whatever.

16:22SPEAKERSo for this being a pilot, ha ha pilot,

16:26SPEAKERlike a demo or like a beta program,

16:29SPEAKERI guess there could be humans flying these

16:32SPEAKERfor the time being, but I don't know.

16:35SPEAKER- When I think about this, I often think about,

16:38SPEAKERwell, A-way modes, which are like the moment-to-moment

16:41SPEAKERdriving is controlled by the machines,

16:44SPEAKERbut the tricky bits, people can take over, right?

16:47SPEAKERSo like if it gets stuck in traffic,

16:48SPEAKERit doesn't know what to do,

16:49SPEAKERthere's something blocking the road.

16:50SPEAKER- Yeah, and I think you're always gonna need that, right?

16:52SPEAKERLike you should always have somebody

16:54SPEAKERready to take over if something goes bad,

16:56SPEAKERbut yeah, obviously there's a distinction

16:59SPEAKERbetween having somebody who can take over

17:01SPEAKERversus needing somebody there all the time.

17:04SPEAKER- Well, and I think if you're not gonna build

17:09SPEAKERa drone bag heliport in your backyard,

17:12SPEAKERwhich nobody's gonna do.

17:14SPEAKER- I don't know, maybe, we'll see.

17:15SPEAKER- I'm good, thanks, I don't want this on my roof,

17:17SPEAKERI don't have to get a ladder out

17:18SPEAKERto get it off my roof is the thing.

17:19SPEAKER- How common is this gonna become, I don't know.

17:22SPEAKER- I gotta, I hope it's less common

17:25SPEAKERthan DoorDash ultimately, but anyway.

17:27SPEAKER- When you were talking about the cost of delivery,

17:28SPEAKERI assume you're mainly talking about the energy required.

17:31SPEAKER- Yeah, energy and wear and tear on the device probably,

17:33SPEAKERyeah, but the electric motors last a long time and yeah.

17:37SPEAKER- Like the article, the article does compare this

17:39SPEAKERto the cost of like driving to the store

17:41SPEAKERto get a single item, bottle of Tylenol or whatever.

17:45SPEAKER- You're driving a gas powered car,

17:46SPEAKERit's gonna be definitely cheaper to fly this 15 pound drone

17:49SPEAKERfour miles straight there and straight back

17:51SPEAKERthan it will be to put a quarter of a gallon

17:55SPEAKERof gas in your car, anyway.

17:59SPEAKERYeah, the TLDR is Nathan has been buying mostly potatoes

18:04SPEAKERto deliver to the other dads in his neighborhood

18:06SPEAKERand drop them in their backyard and as a result,

18:09SPEAKERthere's a potato based economy forming in the suburbs

18:11SPEAKERof Houston, Texas, so.

18:13SPEAKER- The robots are coming for all of us.

18:15SPEAKER- Yeah.

18:16SPEAKER- Another interesting detail that was in this

18:17SPEAKERis that every one of these deliveries also comes

18:20SPEAKERwith a bottle of water, which they gather

18:22SPEAKERis being used as ballast.

18:24SPEAKER- Yeah, I think it's to balance it out, yeah.

18:26SPEAKER- They leave the water, right?

18:29SPEAKER- No, they drop the bag, yeah, the bag has the water in it.

18:31SPEAKER- Right, right.

18:33SPEAKER- Yeah, so the water thing is interesting.

18:36SPEAKERI think 2.7 pounds doesn't seem like much,

18:39SPEAKERbut I think about the number of times I've driven out

18:43SPEAKERto get cold medicine for my kid or Benadryl

18:47SPEAKERor something like that late at night

18:49SPEAKERand it would be dope to be able to hit the button

18:50SPEAKERand have that just show up in your backyard in 10 minutes.

18:53SPEAKER- That's cool, I don't necessarily need this

18:55SPEAKER'cause I live in such a walkable environment.

18:58SPEAKERLook, if I need a bottle of Tylenol,

19:00SPEAKERI walk five to 10 minutes and just buy it.

19:02SPEAKER- You live in the liberal utopia

19:04SPEAKERof a 15 minute walkable city, Brad,

19:05SPEAKERthat's, you know, not everybody has that option.

19:08SPEAKER- You know, I'll never own property here,

19:10SPEAKERso someday, perhaps.

19:11SPEAKER- Yeah.

19:12SPEAKER- This is very cool to me, conceptually.

19:14SPEAKER- Yeah, like this feels to me better

19:16SPEAKERthan the drones delivering food on the sidewalk,

19:18SPEAKERlike the rolling coolers.

19:22SPEAKERBut also, I think it would be annoying

19:24SPEAKERif you're hearing these things,

19:25SPEAKERlike the amount of noise involved

19:26SPEAKERwith landing these in your backyard,

19:28SPEAKERhe doesn't talk about it in the article.

19:29SPEAKERI assume that it's fairly noisy.

19:32SPEAKER- Yeah, there is some actual noise pollution

19:35SPEAKERconcern now that you mention it.

19:37SPEAKERI'm sure that is a lot of very high pitched

19:39SPEAKERbuzzing noise to deal with.

19:41SPEAKER- Well, yeah, and like when one of the kids

19:43SPEAKERin my neighborhood got a drone for Christmas last year,

19:46SPEAKERthe number of mornings I was woken up by (vocalizing)

19:51SPEAKERas they're zooming around above us is more than I liked.

19:54SPEAKER- Yeah, the last thing I'm gonna mention here is,

19:56SPEAKERthis has been years ago now

19:58SPEAKERthat I read a blog post about this

19:59SPEAKERand it was entirely speculative.

20:00SPEAKERI don't think anybody was actually working on building this,

20:02SPEAKERbut it was kind of like a thought experiment proposal.

20:05SPEAKERI mean, this has been like 10 plus years ago, I think,

20:08SPEAKERfor an open protocol, a navigation protocol

20:13SPEAKERfor urban drone delivery of this exact nature.

20:16SPEAKER- Okay.

20:16SPEAKER- But they were talking, I think they likened it to TCP/IP

20:19SPEAKERto the way the internet works

20:20SPEAKERin a decentralized self-routing fashion.

20:23SPEAKERThe idea was for basically a communications

20:27SPEAKERand navigation protocol and network

20:30SPEAKERfor exactly this kind of thing going on at scale in cities.

20:34SPEAKERThey were specifically saying within cities.

20:37SPEAKERWithin one city.

20:38SPEAKER- So you build flight paths and stuff for this?

20:39SPEAKER- Kind of like drone-based career service

20:42SPEAKERbetween office buildings

20:43SPEAKERor you drop lunch off or whatever,

20:46SPEAKERbut basically the idea was like,

20:48SPEAKERmaybe this sounds like a nightmare

20:50SPEAKERconsidering the noise parts that we just discussed,

20:52SPEAKERbut the idea was kind of like a city

20:54SPEAKERwith a sky full of drones just zipping back and forth

20:57SPEAKERbetween buildings all day long,

20:58SPEAKERlike dropping things off in an autonomous,

21:00SPEAKERlike a self-navigating fashion.

21:02SPEAKER- It's like the Coruscant parts of the Star Wars prequels.

21:05SPEAKER- It's kind of exactly that.

21:07SPEAKER- Do not want.

21:08SPEAKER- Future's weird.

21:09SPEAKER- Yeah, I thought this was an interesting opportunity

21:12SPEAKERto talk about this,

21:13SPEAKERbut for the last 20 years, huge swaths,

21:17SPEAKERthis started with Cosmo, right?

21:18SPEAKERRemember Cosmo?

21:19SPEAKERYou might not have been here yet

21:20SPEAKERwhen Cosmo was still a thing.

21:21SPEAKER- I vaguely remember it.

21:22SPEAKERWas it Cosmo with a K?

21:23SPEAKER- Cosmo with a K in 2001.

21:25SPEAKERThey were over by the AMC theater on Van Ness.

21:27SPEAKER- I thought it might've been right before I moved here,

21:29SPEAKERbut didn't they market themselves

21:31SPEAKERby just saying cosmo.com all the time?

21:33SPEAKER- Yeah, and the idea was it was basically like DoorDash,

21:37SPEAKERbut exclusively for stoners

21:38SPEAKERbecause they had stuff that you would want

21:40SPEAKERif you were high at one o'clock in the morning

21:41SPEAKERand somebody would bring it to your house for you,

21:43SPEAKERwhich was, it's funny to say that now,

21:45SPEAKERbut in like 2001, that was an incredibly novel concept

21:48SPEAKERand no one understood how it worked

21:50SPEAKER'cause they were not charging for the delivery fees.

21:52SPEAKERLike they just paid people to drive around all the time

21:55SPEAKERor bike around all the time.

21:56SPEAKER- I feel like I remember Ryan Davis

21:58SPEAKERhaving very fond things to say about cosmo.com.

22:01SPEAKERI've had a lot of conversations with a lot of friends

22:03SPEAKERabout how awesome it was to be like,

22:06SPEAKERhey, I wanna get a videotape and a DVD, two candy bars

22:13SPEAKERand a two liter of Mountain Dew at three o'clock

22:16SPEAKERin the morning.

22:17SPEAKER- That 100% was him just reveling in the excess,

22:21SPEAKERthe decadence of having a Snickers bar delivered

22:24SPEAKERat one in the morning.

22:25SPEAKER- Yep, and now we don't even have to pay

22:27SPEAKERthe bike messenger guys to do that anymore.

22:30SPEAKERIt's just a robot.

22:32SPEAKERSo progress, I guess.

22:35SPEAKERBut like Uber and Lyft

22:37SPEAKERand all of those types of things were something,

22:39SPEAKERlike I remember when Uber started,

22:41SPEAKERyou would get a black car

22:42SPEAKERbefore they had people driving their own cars around.

22:45SPEAKERAnd that cost, you know,

22:47SPEAKERit cost less than a cab did at the time, right?

22:50SPEAKERLike everything almost for a long time,

22:54SPEAKERfor the dawn of the smartphone on,

22:56SPEAKERif you had a smartphone and knew how to work the system,

22:59SPEAKERyou would get massive discounts on almost everything.

23:02SPEAKERAnd it seems like that's drying up now

23:03SPEAKERwith the exception of the potato delivery,

23:05SPEAKERcourtesy of Wing and Walmart.

23:07SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, who knows how sustainable this is?

23:10SPEAKERMaybe not very, we'll see.

23:11SPEAKERAnd also there's any number of other like safety

23:14SPEAKERand labor related topics to talk about with this

23:20SPEAKERthat are probably outside the scope of this podcast.

23:21SPEAKER- Look, the worst thing that's happened

23:23SPEAKERwith the Wing drone so far is I think

23:24SPEAKERthey dropped a package into somebody's pool,

23:26SPEAKERbut, you know, 12 propellers, this thing weighs 15 pounds.

23:29SPEAKERIf it hits you, it would do some damage, so.

23:31SPEAKER- Yeah.

23:33SPEAKER- Okay.

23:34SPEAKER- You want to do the pyrowave steam stuff next?

23:37SPEAKERI think that's the other most interesting story this week.

23:40SPEAKER- Yeah, I spent some time yesterday testing it out.

23:42SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm glad you touched it.

23:43SPEAKER- I didn't realize it was in yet.

23:44SPEAKER- I didn't want to go to the extent

23:48SPEAKERof opting into the steam beta client.

23:50SPEAKER- Oh, I've been on the steam beta client for a while

23:52SPEAKER'cause of the frame, I had to be on the frame reviews.

23:55SPEAKER- Yeah, and I like to keep my stuff stock for work,

23:57SPEAKERbut I'm glad you touched it, but anyway.

24:00SPEAKER- Yeah, what is this?

24:01SPEAKER- Beta version of Steam.

24:02SPEAKEROkay, Steam has in-home streaming.

24:04SPEAKERA lot of people use things like Sunshine or Apollo.

24:08SPEAKER- Yeah, Moonlight, Sunshine, Apollo, that whole ecosystem.

24:10SPEAKER- Like open source options that are much more robust

24:13SPEAKERfor streaming, basically from streaming from a big PC

24:16SPEAKERto some other end point, like a mini PC

24:19SPEAKERor an Android TV device or whatever.

24:21SPEAKER- Steam Deck is popular, yeah.

24:23SPEAKER- I haven't touched Steam, so the Steam client

24:25SPEAKERhas its own kind of like dead simple.

24:27SPEAKERBasically, if you have two Steam clients

24:29SPEAKERrunning on a network, they'll just kind of find

24:31SPEAKEReach other, right?

24:31SPEAKERLike they kind of make it as seamless as possible

24:33SPEAKERis my understanding.

24:34SPEAKER- If you're logged into the same account,

24:35SPEAKERyou just have to go and type a number in

24:37SPEAKERwhen you connect a new machine.

24:38SPEAKERAnd then, yeah, the button that says play

24:41SPEAKERwhere it's play local also has a dropdown.

24:43SPEAKERYou can say, hey, play it on the local machine

24:45SPEAKERor you can play it on your machine in the other room.

24:47SPEAKER- Yeah, my understanding is that that option

24:49SPEAKERhas not been as performant or as like robust

24:52SPEAKERin terms of available codex and quality and stuff

24:54SPEAKERas the Sunshine style options for quite a while.

24:57SPEAKERI don't know if you've used it much.

24:59SPEAKER- So yeah, I've used it a lot over the years.

25:01SPEAKERIt has been varying levels of robust

25:03SPEAKERdepending on how much people are paying attention

25:05SPEAKERto it internally, it seems like.

25:06SPEAKER- Right, that seems like how Valve kind of operates

25:09SPEAKERin general with regard to all of their products.

25:11SPEAKER- I think it's how a lot of,

25:13SPEAKERlike it's how Apple operates too, right?

25:15SPEAKERLike iMovie was good because, or GarageBand was good

25:19SPEAKER'cause Steve Jobs used to fuck around in GarageBand, right?

25:22SPEAKER- I mean, it's just that ethos taken to the extreme

25:25SPEAKERbecause there's not technically managers, anyway.

25:28SPEAKER- Yeah, and there's only like four or 500 people

25:30SPEAKERat most working there at any time, so yeah.

25:32SPEAKER- We know how Valve be, but anyway,

25:34SPEAKERthe beta version of Steam,

25:36SPEAKERthey've added this pyrowave video codec

25:38SPEAKERwhich is kind of experimental

25:40SPEAKERand basically was come up with by one guy.

25:42SPEAKER- Yeah, it almost seems like a tech demo slash,

25:46SPEAKERhey, can I do this kind of project

25:48SPEAKERfrom reading his blog about it?

25:49SPEAKER- So yeah, there's a blog post I'll link in the show notes

25:52SPEAKERthat is, it's must reading if you care about the ins

25:55SPEAKERand outs of experimental low latency video codecs,

25:58SPEAKERbut basically the idea here is, okay,

26:02SPEAKERyou want gameplay to be as low latency as possible

26:06SPEAKERwhen you're streaming it, obviously for obvious reasons,

26:08SPEAKERyou want it to feel responsive.

26:10SPEAKERMost video codecs don't optimize for latency though,

26:13SPEAKERthey optimize for file size output.

26:16SPEAKERBecause if you're Netflix and you're streaming

26:19SPEAKERa bazillion episodes of Stranger Things a day,

26:22SPEAKERoptimizing for 3% smaller files,

26:25SPEAKERit turns out will save you a whole buttload of money.

26:27SPEAKER- Saves you storage and bandwidth and whatever.

26:29SPEAKERAnd also your video codecs originally were made

26:31SPEAKERspecifically to crunch video down in file size.

26:35SPEAKERBasically in a home streaming environment,

26:37SPEAKERyou kind of want the opposite, right?

26:38SPEAKERYou don't care so much if you're on,

26:40SPEAKERespecially if you're on a hard line,

26:41SPEAKERthis gets a little sticky

26:42SPEAKERif you're in like a congested wifi area

26:44SPEAKERand or have like an old wifi access point

26:47SPEAKERor crappy old standard of wifi or something.

26:50SPEAKERBut especially if you have a wired network

26:52SPEAKERbetween the two devices,

26:53SPEAKERyou don't really care about the file size

26:55SPEAKERof the video you're sending,

26:56SPEAKERwhat you care about is the latency.

26:58SPEAKERSo like the short version is the Pyrowave

26:59SPEAKERbasically drops a lot of the things

27:01SPEAKERthat get you much smaller video,

27:04SPEAKERbut take longer to encode out of its pipeline,

27:06SPEAKERits encoding pipeline at the expense of the data

27:10SPEAKERyou're sending back and forth on your network being huge.

27:12SPEAKER- Yeah.

27:13SPEAKER- There's a bunch more detail,

27:14SPEAKERI don't know how deep you want to get into this blog post.

27:16SPEAKERI mean, we could talk about I-frames and P-frames

27:19SPEAKERand B-frames and look ahead and caching

27:22SPEAKERand rate control and like a bunch of the blog posts

27:25SPEAKERI found super interesting.

27:26SPEAKERLike he basically kind of goes step by step saying like,

27:29SPEAKER"Hey, we were throwing out prediction here."

27:32SPEAKER- Yeah.

27:32SPEAKER- Now that I've said it, I'll just say like they're okay,

27:34SPEAKERthere are three kinds of frames and video encoding,

27:36SPEAKERI don't know how.

27:37SPEAKER- We can do it, this is a topic of interest.

27:40SPEAKER- I guess this is tech pod material.

27:42SPEAKERI-frames are the classic and I-frame is a self-contained

27:45SPEAKERframe that can decode entirely based on the data

27:47SPEAKERjust contained in that frame, meaning-

27:49SPEAKER- Every pixel in the video is represented in this.

27:52SPEAKER- Yes, yes, yes, like every, that frame,

27:54SPEAKERan I-frame can be reconstructed entirely

27:56SPEAKERwithout the benefit of other frames before or after it.

27:59SPEAKER- Yeah.

28:00SPEAKER- There are, okay, let me see if I got this straight,

28:02SPEAKERthere are P-frames which can take both the current frame

28:05SPEAKERand the previous frames into account

28:07SPEAKERand that's where you start getting partial frames

28:09SPEAKERthat if you've ever played a video that's like broken,

28:12SPEAKERit's basically a diff from the previous frame, right?

28:15SPEAKER- Yeah, and there's all kinds of math that goes on

28:17SPEAKERusing different techniques to achieve different results,

28:20SPEAKERbut yes, basically P-frames cannot be decoded on their own,

28:25SPEAKERthey rely on past frames for part of their data

28:28SPEAKERand then there's B-frames which I think of these,

28:30SPEAKERI keep track of these by what they stand for,

28:34SPEAKERlike I, I believe is intra-frame,

28:36SPEAKERmeaning only within the frame or enter from, yeah, right.

28:39SPEAKER- Intro, yeah.

28:40SPEAKER- P-frames are like previous, meaning they take past frames

28:43SPEAKERinto account.

28:44SPEAKER- Well, I always talk to those as partial,

28:45SPEAKERbut previous makes sense too.

28:47SPEAKER- Well, so P I think is previous because B-frames

28:49SPEAKERare between meaning that they take frames both before

28:52SPEAKERand after the frame into account.

28:53SPEAKER- Of course.

28:54SPEAKER- And so when you start having to look into the future

28:56SPEAKERfor the frame you're encoding,

28:58SPEAKERthen that requires extra buffering.

29:00SPEAKERThis long-winded explanation is a way of saying

29:02SPEAKERthere's a bunch of things that add latency

29:03SPEAKERin a typical encoding pipeline,

29:05SPEAKERbecause if you're having to hold a frame

29:07SPEAKERuntil the next frame comes in,

29:09SPEAKERyou can imagine how that is adding even more latency.

29:11SPEAKERAnd there's all kinds of other techniques

29:13SPEAKERthat also add even more latency, because again,

29:16SPEAKERthese tech, these codecs are all optimized

29:18SPEAKERfor spitting out high quality, but low file size video,

29:22SPEAKERwhich we don't care about on a LAN,

29:24SPEAKERwhere you have at least probably a gigabit of bandwidth

29:27SPEAKERbetween clients.

29:28SPEAKER- Minimum, you're gonna have two or 300 megabits,

29:31SPEAKEReven if you're on wifi,

29:32SPEAKERassuming the wifi is not super congested, yeah.

29:34SPEAKER- Right, so, so anyway, this, again,

29:37SPEAKERwe don't need to get into a lot of the more nuanced

29:40SPEAKERtechniques that I don't understand super well

29:42SPEAKERin terms of chunking frames and all kinds of like

29:44SPEAKERmathematical transforms and so forth.

29:47SPEAKERBut the short version is this Pyrowave codec drops

29:51SPEAKERa lot of that stuff at the interest of just making it go

29:53SPEAKERas fast as humanly possible.

29:55SPEAKER- Yeah, it's the Dodge Viper of video codecs.

29:57SPEAKER- Right, and the numbers he puts up in his tests

30:00SPEAKERin this blog post are pretty impressive,

30:02SPEAKERbecause we're talking about like sub-millisecond

30:04SPEAKERframe encode times.

30:06SPEAKER- Yeah, which is good.

30:07SPEAKERUsually you're looking at five or six milliseconds

30:09SPEAKERfor most hardware encoded video.

30:12SPEAKER'Cause the other, there's multiple things that happen.

30:15SPEAKEROne, on like NVENC video encode,

30:18SPEAKERit's grabbing the stuff from the frame buffer

30:20SPEAKERjust as it goes in, but then it also has to go through

30:22SPEAKERthe normal compression pipeline as well,

30:23SPEAKERwhich added some latency,

30:25SPEAKEReven with the hardware accelerated encode.

30:27SPEAKERAnd the larger point is that there's very few video markets

30:32SPEAKERthat care about latency, right?

30:35SPEAKERSo, and it's funny, 'cause this comes up in sports too,

30:37SPEAKERright, like I was watching a basketball game last night.

30:40SPEAKERI actually grabbed my Zune and went for a walk with the dog

30:44SPEAKERand listened to it on the radio for a quarter,

30:46SPEAKER'cause he needed to go out.

30:48SPEAKERAnd I was four or five seconds, six seconds ahead

30:52SPEAKERon the radio versus the streamed from Hulu,

30:55SPEAKERor ESPN app or whatever, just by virtue of the,

30:59SPEAKERyou know, the video signal going from wherever the game

31:02SPEAKERwas being played up to some studio someplace

31:04SPEAKERgetting compressed and then blasted out to their CDN

31:07SPEAKERand then distributing through their CDN,

31:08SPEAKERtheir live stream CDN added, you know,

31:11SPEAKERfive or 10 seconds of latency probably in the end of that.

31:15SPEAKERSo yeah, nobody optimizes for latency is the TLDR.

31:18SPEAKERIt's outside of like a handful of really,

31:21SPEAKERlike robotics people love low latency video,

31:23SPEAKERbecause if you're remote piloting a robot,

31:26SPEAKERyou wanna not be three seconds in the past, right?

31:29SPEAKERIt's really hard to drive.

31:31SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a really interesting kind of niche use case

31:33SPEAKERthat just happens to be exactly what you care about

31:35SPEAKERwhen you're trying to stream games between things.

31:38SPEAKER- Well, this stuff happened with VR and cameras in like 2015

31:42SPEAKER'cause prior to 2015, nobody cared about like photon

31:47SPEAKERto signal latency on cameras.

31:49SPEAKER- Motion to photon or whatever that rating was.

31:53SPEAKER- Yeah, photon to screens basically

31:55SPEAKERis what people ended up caring about.

31:56SPEAKERBut then we started finding all these weird applications

31:59SPEAKERfor low latency cameras and now there's a whole stack

32:01SPEAKERof low latency video processing for cameras.

32:04SPEAKERAnd like this is, I think, this is a place

32:07SPEAKERwhere we'll find interesting use cases for this technology

32:10SPEAKERas it continues to advance.

32:12SPEAKER- Yeah, it's awesome that people are thinking about this.

32:14SPEAKERI'm putting work into this now 'cause it would be great

32:16SPEAKERfor in-home streaming to be way better for me.

32:20SPEAKERThis is something I want to do.

32:22SPEAKERSo thank you for taking my interests into account.

32:25SPEAKER- Well, and you can kind of mimic this stuff using,

32:28SPEAKERit's difficult to do with the default Steam streaming client

32:31SPEAKER'cause they don't really give you like FFmpeg-level controls

32:35SPEAKERfor the codecs that are used.

32:37SPEAKERYou can say, hey, which codecs are you using MP5 or AV1

32:42SPEAKERor using H.264 or what, but you can't say, hey,

32:46SPEAKERI want to do all iframes or whatever the equivalent

32:50SPEAKERof the FFmpeg flag is to do all iframes.

32:59SPEAKERThe, you can do that stuff with Moonlight and Apollo though.

33:02SPEAKER- Actually, I don't think you can 'cause I've spent

33:04SPEAKERa lot of time, well, I think it's codec-dependent.

33:07SPEAKER- You can do an FFmpeg command in Apollo.

33:12SPEAKER- No, no, no, what I mean is I don't think you can tell

33:15SPEAKERsome of, most of the more common codecs to only do iframes.

33:18SPEAKERFor example, this is actually something

33:20SPEAKERI have spent a lot of time with.

33:21SPEAKERI don't need to get into my insane encoding streaming setup

33:25SPEAKERagain, but you know, the thing where I stream from my PC

33:28SPEAKERto my NAS and then re-encode that

33:30SPEAKERand send it out to the streaming services.

33:32SPEAKERThe, and I do this for locally recorded videos too.

33:34SPEAKERI set the key frame interval as low as humanly possible.

33:39SPEAKER- Yeah.

33:40SPEAKER- Because this makes sense when you know what an iframe is.

33:42SPEAKERIframes are the only place you can cut cleanly on a video

33:45SPEAKERand not have to recompress it.

33:48SPEAKERBecause if you cut in between iframes

33:50SPEAKERwhere you only have partial frame data, of course,

33:52SPEAKERuntil you hit the next iframe from your cut,

33:54SPEAKERyou're just going to have a bunch of garbage.

33:55SPEAKER- It's pretty garbled, yeah.

33:57SPEAKER- So the lowest key frame interval I was able to do

34:00SPEAKERwith H.264 is five.

34:01SPEAKERSo every five frames is a key frame,

34:04SPEAKERwhich gives you the very nice advantage of what is--

34:07SPEAKER- 1/60th of a second, basically.

34:08SPEAKER- Yeah, so what is that?

34:09SPEAKERBasically, that is like what?

34:10SPEAKER12 cut points per second of a 60 frames per second video

34:14SPEAKERwhere you can cleanly cut on any of those iframes.

34:16SPEAKERSo basically that results in a huge file size.

34:18SPEAKERSo when I archive local videos that I record,

34:21SPEAKERthey're gigantic.

34:22SPEAKER- Yeah.

34:22SPEAKER- But then if I need to go in there and trim stuff,

34:24SPEAKERI can, that gives, like I said,

34:25SPEAKERthat gives me a ton of points where I can cut per second

34:28SPEAKERwithout having to actually re-encode the video.

34:31SPEAKER- Yeah.

34:31SPEAKER- Super handy.

34:32SPEAKERBut anyway, the upshot is I believe five,

34:35SPEAKERevery five frames, an iframe was the lowest setting

34:38SPEAKERit would accept.

34:39SPEAKER- For H.264?

34:40SPEAKER- Yeah, so I think these codecs maybe are not even set up

34:43SPEAKERto only do nothing but iframes.

34:44SPEAKERThat was just a long-winded digression, but--

34:47SPEAKER- Well, and on the streaming side,

34:48SPEAKERwhen you're streaming to a game client,

34:50SPEAKERyou need to support whatever you're doing

34:52SPEAKERon the sending side on the receiving client as well,

34:55SPEAKERand you need that supported in hardware

34:56SPEAKERor else things are gonna be weird.

34:58SPEAKER- Yeah, the blog gets into some good detail about,

35:00SPEAKERyou know, we're really just talking about the encoding step

35:03SPEAKERbeing optimized here because there's a whole bunch

35:05SPEAKERof other stuff that goes on in the pipeline

35:07SPEAKERbetween game running and target client decoding it

35:10SPEAKERand displaying it.

35:11SPEAKER- There's also a Valve blog explaining a little bit

35:14SPEAKERabout their implementation as well

35:15SPEAKERthat we can link in the show notes as well.

35:17SPEAKERBut, so I set it up.

35:19SPEAKERThe TLDR is I set it up on my, I put it on my desktop,

35:23SPEAKERI put it on my Linux, Windows and Linux desktops,

35:25SPEAKERI put it on the Steam machine,

35:26SPEAKERI put on the Steam Deck last night,

35:28SPEAKERand I tested it on a wide variety of those

35:31SPEAKERwith a couple of different games.

35:32SPEAKER- I'm glad you tested it with the Steam Deck.

35:34SPEAKERI wanna hear how it was over Wi-Fi if I go on.

35:36SPEAKER- So here's, the TLDR is it is shockingly good.

35:40SPEAKERLike-- - Interesting.

35:41SPEAKER- Immediately, immediately better to the point

35:44SPEAKERthat when I didn't flip it on on one of the clients,

35:46SPEAKERI was like, I was like, this feels juddery and bad.

35:49SPEAKERWhat I was playing on the Steam machine, which is wired,

35:54SPEAKERbasically, I wasn't able to tell

35:55SPEAKERthat it wasn't running locally,

35:56SPEAKERexcept for that it looked too good for the Steam machine.

35:58SPEAKER- In terms of quality?

35:59SPEAKER- Terms of quality. - And latency?

36:01SPEAKER- Yeah, so the latency feels incredible.

36:04SPEAKERThe quality, the judder that is normally there

36:06SPEAKERwith the video processing, which is not super bad,

36:09SPEAKERbut a little bit, but is a little bit apparent

36:15SPEAKERwhen you're playing, it feels like micro stutter almost,

36:18SPEAKERwas completely gone.

36:19SPEAKER- Wow.

36:20SPEAKER- Also, so I played, the two games I played

36:24SPEAKERwere Ace Combat 8 and Control Resonant.

36:27SPEAKERControl Resonant does ray tracing,

36:29SPEAKERand for whatever reason, the game had set Frame Gen

36:32SPEAKERand DLSS upscaling on fairly aggressively at 1080p,

36:37SPEAKEReven though the machine's able to run everything at full res

36:41SPEAKERand it was giving me some really gnarly,

36:43SPEAKERlike ray reconstruction artifacts,

36:45SPEAKERwhich were preserved perfectly in the video compression.

36:49SPEAKER- All right, great.

36:51SPEAKER- If I was doing H.264 or even AV1 with that,

36:53SPEAKERit would have A, created a bunch of noise

36:55SPEAKERthat the compressor would have made

36:56SPEAKERthe compressor under-performant,

36:58SPEAKERand B, would have kind of gotten soft and munged.

37:01SPEAKER- Interesting.

37:04SPEAKER- So Control Resonant's an interesting example

37:06SPEAKERbecause it has, the transition screens

37:08SPEAKERhave all this chromatic aberration

37:10SPEAKERand all this kind of visual noise

37:11SPEAKERthat is traditionally really hard

37:13SPEAKERfor video encoders to deal with,

37:16SPEAKERand it came through crystal clear.

37:17SPEAKER- Yeah, that's an interesting thing

37:19SPEAKERI hadn't thought about with this,

37:20SPEAKERas opposed to typical encoders

37:22SPEAKERthat use very adaptive variable rate encoding.

37:25SPEAKERThis is constant and kind of should just blow past

37:28SPEAKERthose more complicated scenes pretty well.

37:30SPEAKER- Looks real, like the ray reconstruction noise

37:33SPEAKERlooked like static almost laid on the surface of the world,

37:37SPEAKERand it looked unbelievable.

37:40SPEAKERI got up, I literally got up with the controller

37:42SPEAKERand walked into the other room,

37:44SPEAKERlooked at the monitor on my desk

37:45SPEAKERto see what was happening,

37:47SPEAKERand it was being recreated there.

37:49SPEAKERSo let's see, I tried it with a Windows and a Linux host,

37:52SPEAKERit works fine with both of them.

37:54SPEAKERThe Steam Machine was great.

37:56SPEAKERThe Steam Deck worked great when I was connected

37:58SPEAKERto my Wi-Fi 6 access point.

38:00SPEAKERThe Wi-Fi 5 access point was a little bit iffy.

38:04SPEAKERSo, performance wise.

38:08SPEAKERBut I was able to go through walls,

38:09SPEAKERI used it in the bedroom, I used it in the living room.

38:11SPEAKERIt was definitely a better experience

38:13SPEAKERthan doing H.264 on that thing.

38:17SPEAKERAnd the overhead, like to be clear,

38:20SPEAKERI was using 200 megabits for a 1280 by 800 HDR stream,

38:28SPEAKERbut the video quality was fantastic

38:31SPEAKERand it felt like I was playing locally,

38:32SPEAKERexcept for it looked way better

38:34SPEAKERthan I could have ever gotten the Steam Deck to run on.

38:37SPEAKER- Man, that's rad.

38:38SPEAKERThis is good timing for me, like I said.

38:41SPEAKER- Yeah.

38:42SPEAKER- It's worth mentioning this codec does HDR

38:44SPEAKERand also 444 color and brightness encoding,

38:50SPEAKERlike it basically does top-notch full quality

38:54SPEAKERon kind of every axis.

38:55SPEAKER- Well, so it does HDR if you're hosted on Windows.

38:58SPEAKERIf you're hosted on Linux, it's not gonna do HDR

39:00SPEAKER'cause HDR on Linux is a nightmare.

39:02SPEAKER- Yeah.

39:03SPEAKER- I was able to stream HDR from my Windows machine

39:06SPEAKERto the Steam Deck, which is the only other HDR screen,

39:11SPEAKERlike I have two HDR screens in the house,

39:12SPEAKERone's on my computer and one's on the Steam Deck.

39:14SPEAKERSo I was able to stream from one to the other

39:16SPEAKERand it worked great.

39:18SPEAKERBut like I said, 200 megabits per second over Wi-Fi,

39:20SPEAKERwhich had some deleterious effects

39:22SPEAKERon the other Wi-Fi users in my house.

39:24SPEAKER- I gotta get a new access point.

39:26SPEAKERI'm still on Wi-Fi 5.

39:27SPEAKERI actually just did a speed test

39:29SPEAKERfrom my MacBook the other day

39:30SPEAKER'cause I was copying some stuff to the NAS over Wi-Fi

39:33SPEAKERand I was like, man, that seems awfully slow.

39:35SPEAKERAnd I checked and I'm getting less,

39:37SPEAKERlike at the connection, like the signal, the Wi-Fi level,

39:40SPEAKERnot like IP throughput.

39:43SPEAKERI was getting less than a hundred megabits.

39:45SPEAKER- Ooh, you're in a busy,

39:46SPEAKERyou're a congested neighborhood, don't you?

39:48SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, there are just no end of the dozens

39:51SPEAKERof Wi-Fi networks that'll come up

39:53SPEAKERwhen you do an SSID search here.

39:54SPEAKERLike there is an insane amount of congestion,

39:56SPEAKERso maybe that's it.

39:57SPEAKERAnd there's even Wi-Fi 7 can only probably do so much

40:00SPEAKERin an environment like that.

40:01SPEAKERBut I am on Wi-Fi 5 and it is probably time.

40:05SPEAKERThis is maybe a-

40:05SPEAKER- I mean, they're like a hundred bucks is the thing.

40:07SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

40:08SPEAKERThis is, I mean, this is exactly the kind of thing

40:10SPEAKERI care about and maybe it's a dumb thing to get hung up on,

40:14SPEAKERbut all the options I've looked at are very hot.

40:16SPEAKERLike all the-

40:17SPEAKER- Like it seems like physically warm.

40:19SPEAKER- Yes, yes.

40:19SPEAKERLike the, in fact, like the first gen Unifi Wi-Fi 7

40:23SPEAKERaccess points had fans in them.

40:24SPEAKER- Yeah.

40:25SPEAKER- And I think there are basically fanless options

40:27SPEAKERfrom everybody now, but they still eat a lot of,

40:30SPEAKERlike the, like the Omada access points I've looked at

40:33SPEAKERuse like 25 Watts or something crazy like that.

40:35SPEAKERLike they're very, they run very hot and I keep hoping,

40:38SPEAKERI mean, it's probably not a fire hazard

40:40SPEAKERif you're mounting it on the ceiling, right?

40:41SPEAKERI assume it's fine, but I'm still, it makes me,

40:43SPEAKERit still makes me a little skittish.

40:45SPEAKER- It's not a fire hazard, but it is a lot of power.

40:48SPEAKER- Yeah.

40:48SPEAKER- But like thinking about how much you use Wi-Fi.

40:50SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess I've been like hovering over

40:53SPEAKERbuying one of those Amadas for like months now

40:55SPEAKERand I should probably just go ahead and do it,

40:56SPEAKERbut I just keep worrying that like the next,

40:59SPEAKER'cause that happens with networking stuff.

41:00SPEAKERIt's happening on the 10 gigabit ethernet

41:03SPEAKERand twisted pair side right now.

41:04SPEAKERLike Realtek just put out a, in fact,

41:07SPEAKEReverybody is putting out like new 10 gigabit chips

41:10SPEAKERthat are like way, way lower power.

41:12SPEAKERSo that's finally getting better.

41:13SPEAKERSo I just keep expecting that'll happen eventually

41:16SPEAKERwith Wi-Fi as well and it hasn't yet.

41:18SPEAKER- Yeah, but you gotta balance out the pain in the ass

41:21SPEAKERyou're having right now with what it'll cost to upgrade to.

41:23SPEAKERLike, here's the thing is if they reduce power,

41:26SPEAKERif it's pulling 25 Watts and they reduce power to like five,

41:29SPEAKERthen you'll pay for the a hundred dollar upgrade

41:31SPEAKERin nine months of paying for electricity.

41:33SPEAKER- You're right, I should really just get better Wi-Fi.

41:35SPEAKERLike we have new phones and I have a new laptop

41:37SPEAKERin this place.

41:38SPEAKER- That's the thing.

41:39SPEAKER- My girlfriend's getting a new iPad soon.

41:41SPEAKERLike it's probably time.

41:42SPEAKER- Yep, the thing I will say, okay, so to test this,

41:47SPEAKERif you wanna try it,

41:48SPEAKERyou need to install the Steam beta update

41:50SPEAKERand then you need to look for a flag in your Steam client

41:52SPEAKERthat says enable the experimental RT3 client.

41:56SPEAKERThe RT3 client is their new 64 bit Steam client.

42:00SPEAKERIt's in kind of its own packaged container thing.

42:03SPEAKERAnd the RT3 flag is on both Windows and Linux machines.

42:08SPEAKERSo it's in slightly different places

42:10SPEAKERdepending on which client you're on.

42:12SPEAKERSo like the Steam Deck 1 buries at the bottom of the list

42:15SPEAKERafter you install the beta update.

42:17SPEAKERYou'll have to reboot the machine

42:18SPEAKERor you'll have to restart Steam twice to get the update.

42:21SPEAKERBut yeah, I set it up and I've been running it.

42:24SPEAKERThe big thing you lose, I think, with the RT3 client,

42:28SPEAKERwhich is why I'll turn it off on the Steam Deck

42:29SPEAKERprobably shortly, is that you can't suspend the games

42:33SPEAKERat this point that like that's not in there yet.

42:36SPEAKER- That's a pretty big thing to lose.

42:37SPEAKER- As of, okay, that's not in there yet as of June.

42:41SPEAKERSo, but this is their first 64 bit client.

42:44SPEAKERIt seems, oh, just from barely using it

42:48SPEAKERon the Linux machine, it seems way faster

42:51SPEAKERthan the existing 32 bit kind of janky client.

42:55SPEAKER- Okay, but man, big things for the Steam platform

42:57SPEAKERcoming soon, that's-

42:58SPEAKER- They've been busy, it turns out.

43:00SPEAKER- That's exciting.

43:00SPEAKERYeah, I'm very excited about this.

43:02SPEAKERAnd once it's out of beta and works properly

43:05SPEAKERand is solid, I could see maybe just using this

43:08SPEAKERand not even worrying about sunshine

43:11SPEAKERif this is as good as it sounds.

43:13SPEAKER- So what I will say, having used this,

43:16SPEAKERlike I've used the Steam streaming stuff

43:17SPEAKERfor more than 10 years at this point, right?

43:19SPEAKERThey rolled it out when they did the Steam link

43:21SPEAKERmore than a decade ago in the first wave of Steam machines

43:25SPEAKERback in the '16.

43:27SPEAKERAnd it has, for a long time it was very,

43:32SPEAKERhit and miss whether it would work.

43:33SPEAKERSo when Starfield came out, for example,

43:37SPEAKERI just couldn't get it to capture the window

43:39SPEAKERno matter what I did.

43:41SPEAKERThese days it handles the work that they've done

43:44SPEAKERfor the Steam Deck to get games to launch

43:48SPEAKERat the resolution that the Steam Deck should run at

43:49SPEAKERand all that stuff has benefited this

43:51SPEAKERbecause it will do things like launch the game

43:53SPEAKERat the resolution your TV is and limit your frame rates

43:58SPEAKERto the frame rate of the client

44:00SPEAKERand limit the resolution to the resolution of the client

44:02SPEAKERand all that kind of stuff.

44:04SPEAKERSo it's much, much more turnkey

44:06SPEAKERthan it has been in the past.

44:07SPEAKERIt's still not seamless, but I haven't had something

44:11SPEAKERthat just refuses to capture in a really long time now.

44:13SPEAKER- Okay, yeah, like I was a little concerned

44:15SPEAKERabout running non-Steam games like emulators

44:18SPEAKERor Microsoft Store versions of games

44:21SPEAKERand stuff like that over it.

44:22SPEAKER- So I haven't done Microsoft Store versions of games

44:24SPEAKER'cause I don't buy Microsoft Store versions

44:26SPEAKERof games ever anymore.

44:28SPEAKERBut I have run Epic Games over it.

44:31SPEAKERI have run things from Itch and from GOG

44:33SPEAKERand stuff like that before.

44:35SPEAKERAnd that generally works quite well.

44:38SPEAKERYou still have to do the kind of rigmarole

44:40SPEAKERof adding the non-Steam game to Steam

44:41SPEAKERand then playing it through the library for it to work.

44:43SPEAKERBut that stuff has worked okay.

44:46SPEAKERThey even have built-in handling for things like,

44:49SPEAKERhey, this game, Borderlands 4 has a launcher that pops up

44:53SPEAKERbefore you start the game and stuff like that.

44:55SPEAKERAnd it does a reasonable job

44:57SPEAKERof giving you the mouse interface

44:59SPEAKERthat you need to click through that stuff

45:00SPEAKERbefore it launches.

45:01SPEAKEROr in some cases, it'll even just run the flag

45:03SPEAKERon the launcher that skips the launcher entirely.

45:06SPEAKERSo you might have to run it first on your desktop,

45:08SPEAKERset up the launcher options,

45:09SPEAKERand then from that point on, you're good to go.

45:13SPEAKER- Yeah, it's cool. - Pretty good stuff.

45:14SPEAKER- It's happening, yeah.

45:15SPEAKER- Yeah. - I'll just follow up

45:16SPEAKERreal quick, also on my living room PC adventures,

45:19SPEAKERsince I said I would. - Yeah, you built this

45:20SPEAKERwith Atom a couple weeks ago, right?

45:21SPEAKER- Yeah, some people asked how that's going.

45:24SPEAKERThe short answer right now

45:25SPEAKERis that it has not been deployed yet

45:27SPEAKERfor the very, very simple reason that I have not had time,

45:31SPEAKERI've been super busy lately,

45:32SPEAKERbut have not had time to find a heat sink that fits yet.

45:35SPEAKER- Yeah, it's weird that that,

45:37SPEAKERthe problem you had was that the VRM coolers or something

45:40SPEAKERwas blocking most of the heat sinks?

45:42SPEAKER- It was just a real weird edge case.

45:44SPEAKERWell, I ran into multiple clearance or fitment issues,

45:47SPEAKERI guess is the term,

45:49SPEAKERwhere in one case it was with the Noctua,

45:51SPEAKERit was the RAM blocking it,

45:52SPEAKERwith the, is a thermal take that makes the all copper-

45:56SPEAKER- Thermal right, makes the all copper one, yeah.

45:58SPEAKER- With the all copper thermal right,

45:59SPEAKERit would have been fine,

46:00SPEAKERexcept that the Asus's sort of heat sink slash shroud

46:06SPEAKERover the VRMs on that motherboard

46:07SPEAKERjust happened to have this little lip sticking out

46:10SPEAKERwhere that thermal right just barely wouldn't fit.

46:13SPEAKER- That's what a Dremel's for.

46:14SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't know.

46:16SPEAKER- Cried them off.

46:18SPEAKER- Anyway, yeah, like it just,

46:19SPEAKERfor people who watch that stream,

46:21SPEAKERwe ended up putting a stock retail Intel cooler on

46:24SPEAKERthat was only rated for about half of the TDP of my CPU.

46:28SPEAKER- That's not enough TDP.

46:29SPEAKER- So like you could limit the hell out of that CPU

46:31SPEAKERand run it safely, but that's not fun.

46:33SPEAKER- For the living room, it's probably fine though, actually,

46:35SPEAKERmaybe even desired.

46:36SPEAKER- Yeah, well, let's see, it was limited to 65 watts,

46:39SPEAKERwhich is like a pretty low cap on that chip, unfortunately.

46:42SPEAKER- Let me rephrase, if you're running,

46:45SPEAKERif you're streaming from the bedroom, from the office,

46:48SPEAKERthen 65 watts is totally fine.

46:50SPEAKER- Definitely, but I do want to play local games on that too.

46:53SPEAKERLike I'm like indie games and anything that doesn't need

46:56SPEAKERlike heavy ray tracing or something from my bigger PC,

46:58SPEAKERI would rather just play locally in there if I could.

47:00SPEAKER- Gotcha.

47:01SPEAKER- Also, come on, I'm not going to leave performance

47:03SPEAKERon the table.

47:04SPEAKER- I mean, you know.

47:05SPEAKER- Anyway, it turns out I wish everybody went

47:09SPEAKERto the compatibility testing trouble that Noctua goes to.

47:11SPEAKER- They're good.

47:12SPEAKER- Because like you can, I absolutely could go on their site

47:15SPEAKERand put in my RAM, my motherboard, my case, my everything,

47:18SPEAKERlike every bit of that computer and, and granted,

47:21SPEAKERit was a lot of tabbing back and forth

47:24SPEAKERbetween different lists.

47:25SPEAKER- Yeah.

47:26SPEAKER- It would be nice if you could put all your specs in

47:27SPEAKERand just have them say, here's, here are the coolers

47:29SPEAKERthat work with every one of those things.

47:31SPEAKERBut I was able to narrow down on their site,

47:33SPEAKERwhich ones definitively would fit.

47:35SPEAKER- Oh, that's nice.

47:36SPEAKER- My setup.

47:37SPEAKERThe problem is they only have one and it's not very good.

47:40SPEAKER- It's, did you look at PC part picker?

47:42SPEAKERThey're usually pretty good about this stuff too.

47:45SPEAKER- I may have pulled it up briefly to poke around with this.

47:47SPEAKERI've got a couple of other promising contenders.

47:49SPEAKERThe ID cooling, I think it's the IS 55

47:52SPEAKERis one I was looking at.

47:53SPEAKERAnd then there's a scythe that Adam sent me the other day

47:56SPEAKERthat I also want to check.

47:57SPEAKERBut I think that's.

47:58SPEAKER- That's probably it.

47:59SPEAKER- Those companies don't publish

48:00SPEAKERany compatibility information.

48:02SPEAKERSo I think that's basically going to be ordering those

48:04SPEAKERand see if they fit and I'm going out of town in four days.

48:07SPEAKERAnd so that's kind of on the back burner

48:08SPEAKERuntil I'm back in town.

48:09SPEAKER- Gotcha, okay.

48:11SPEAKER- But I, but I am very excited to get that thing

48:13SPEAKERfinally set up when I get back.

48:15SPEAKER- That Ridge is a nice little case I use it for my machine

48:18SPEAKERthese days and it's a tight little package.

48:20SPEAKERDid you get the white one or a gray one?

48:22SPEAKER- It's the black gray.

48:23SPEAKER- Black, okay, cool.

48:25SPEAKERShould we talk a little bit about the Dutch going,

48:29SPEAKERlike they're just jumping straight into the deep end

48:32SPEAKERon the Linux Sideman.

48:33SPEAKER- Well, yes, but also I learned something about NixOS

48:36SPEAKERin the course of reading this.

48:37SPEAKER- I love NixOS, I think NixOS is extremely cool.

48:40SPEAKER- I love it conceptually.

48:42SPEAKERI actually installed it on, I inherited a little mini PC

48:46SPEAKERthat I've been tinkering around with,

48:48SPEAKERa hand-me-down and I put NixOS on it the other day,

48:51SPEAKERwhich is my second or third time tinkering with NixOS

48:53SPEAKERand I continue to think it's great conceptually

48:56SPEAKERand continue to not really enjoy actually using it

48:59SPEAKERin practice.

49:00SPEAKER- The thing I find is that, the thing I found,

49:02SPEAKER'cause I have it on a laptop, an old laptop

49:05SPEAKERthat I futz with sometimes and the thing I found,

49:07SPEAKERso we personally choose, NixOS is a Linux

49:11SPEAKERthat you can basically configure from one declarative file.

49:15SPEAKERSo you build a big giant text file

49:17SPEAKERwith the packages you want installed

49:18SPEAKERand the configuration you want for things like network

49:21SPEAKERand desktop environment and all that kind of stuff

49:24SPEAKERand then you just run a script on that

49:26SPEAKERand it builds a Linux for you.

49:28SPEAKERIf you wanna install new software,

49:29SPEAKERyou add it to your Flake description,

49:32SPEAKERthat piece of software, that thing's called a Flake

49:34SPEAKERand you don't manage the system in a traditional way at all

49:39SPEAKERis the way I would put it.

49:41SPEAKERNow the problem is all of the documentation is written

49:45SPEAKERas if you understand how Nix works

49:47SPEAKERand how you would do things like mount a network share

49:50SPEAKERin this context and they don't actually tell you

49:53SPEAKERhow to mount a network share.

49:54SPEAKERThere's like oral history of using NixOS

49:58SPEAKERthat is just opaque to me, a neophyte,

50:00SPEAKERa pretty good Linux user, but a neophyte NixOS user.

50:04SPEAKER- Yeah, and they're like another example

50:05SPEAKERis there are two different ways to install packages

50:07SPEAKERand they say nothing about what distinguishes

50:10SPEAKERthose two methods and I basically had to go on our discord

50:14SPEAKERand clarify with some people that one of the ways

50:17SPEAKERis basically people have done the work

50:18SPEAKERto make those packages sort of first class within Nix

50:21SPEAKERand provided like all the configuration options.

50:24SPEAKER- Kind of like the AUR for Arch.

50:26SPEAKER- Well, but also they've done configuration work

50:29SPEAKERto expose all the options through the Nix language

50:32SPEAKERand then these sort of second class packages

50:34SPEAKERhave just kind of been shoved in there

50:36SPEAKERwithout that at work having been done

50:37SPEAKERand you are gonna have to do a lot more on your own

50:39SPEAKERto get them to work right.

50:40SPEAKER- And then there's a whole other level of complexity

50:43SPEAKERaround stuff like flat packs

50:44SPEAKERand the kind of more prepackaged container stuff.

50:47SPEAKER- Yeah, anyway, for people who know what they're doing,

50:49SPEAKERit's extremely powerful and reliable

50:51SPEAKERbecause you can just rebuild your entire system

50:53SPEAKERfrom a configuration file if something breaks

50:55SPEAKERlike it keeps previous configs around

50:59SPEAKERso you can boot back into those if something breaks.

51:00SPEAKERLike it's very resilient and very maintainable,

51:04SPEAKERespecially if say we're gonna be running

51:06SPEAKERa fleet of client machines at the nation state level.

51:10SPEAKER- Yeah, and like the way you can even do things

51:14SPEAKERlike put your config file on GitHub

51:16SPEAKERso that then you can just pull that down and run.

51:19SPEAKERI think that's actually one of the installer options

51:21SPEAKERis grab your configuration from Git.

51:24SPEAKER- In fact, if you're going to the trouble

51:25SPEAKERof setting up a Nix OS machine,

51:27SPEAKERI think you're insane if you don't version control

51:29SPEAKERyour configuration.nix because why wouldn't you?

51:33SPEAKERIt's just a text file.

51:34SPEAKER- I think my thought is that that's gonna be

51:37SPEAKERmy next little small server box.

51:39SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that, yes, for a server,

51:42SPEAKERI think that makes a lot of sense

51:44SPEAKERfor something you want to set up once

51:45SPEAKERand then if it dies and you buy new hardware,

51:47SPEAKERyou can just slap that file on there

51:48SPEAKERand like tweak the network interface names and go.

51:51SPEAKER- Yep.

51:55SPEAKER- I'm gonna do the Linux router.

51:56SPEAKER- Okay.

51:57SPEAKER- And that's what this, I don't know if this many PC

52:00SPEAKERis up to it or not, but we're gonna find out,

52:02SPEAKERbut then I, for reasons we don't need to get into,

52:06SPEAKERI decided at some point that first I decided

52:08SPEAKERI was gonna use Nix OS for that and then I decided,

52:10SPEAKERyeah, maybe that's not the best choice.

52:11SPEAKERMaybe I should stick to something

52:12SPEAKERa little more boring and slow.

52:15SPEAKER- I would learn Nix OS before you put it

52:18SPEAKERin a production environment 'cause it's challenging.

52:21SPEAKER- It was more like the distro's posture toward

52:24SPEAKERpackage versions and that kind of thing

52:26SPEAKERand like I'm thinking maybe something as boring as possible

52:30SPEAKERin the like Red Hat rebuild or Debian stable.

52:32SPEAKER- Fedora, yeah, stable, something like that.

52:35SPEAKER- For something that is facing the open internet

52:37SPEAKERwould be a little more reassuring.

52:40SPEAKER- More conservative is good there.

52:42SPEAKER- Yeah, anyway.

52:43SPEAKER- But yeah, so the Dutch government's using Nix OS,

52:45SPEAKERlike this is the thing that's happening kind of

52:47SPEAKERin the wake of our current political upheaval

52:49SPEAKERin the United States.

52:51SPEAKERSorry, again.

52:54SPEAKER- Yeah, no, but I mean, that's an important detail

52:55SPEAKER'cause this is the whole reason all of this is happening.

53:00SPEAKER- Yeah, so a lot of countries,

53:03SPEAKERand to be clear, this has been happening for a while.

53:05SPEAKERI know Brazil and Portugal and some other nation states

53:09SPEAKERhave been looking at moving off of US-owned

53:12SPEAKERclosed software platforms for a long time.

53:14SPEAKER- France made headlines a few months ago

53:16SPEAKERfor this same thing, basically.

53:18SPEAKERLike what we're talking about is European countries

53:20SPEAKERlaunching efforts to decouple from US-based tech.

53:23SPEAKER- Yeah, and the Dutch are going to Nix OS,

53:27SPEAKERwhich I think is incredible.

53:28SPEAKER- Right, so the thing I learned in the course of this

53:30SPEAKERis that Nix, the language and package manager and Nix OS

53:34SPEAKERmostly originate from the Netherlands to begin with,

53:37SPEAKERwhich I have no idea.

53:38SPEAKER- I didn't know that.

53:39SPEAKER- So it is actually kind of homegrown

53:41SPEAKERwhen you get down to it.

53:42SPEAKER- Talk about Holland a lot lately on the tech pod.

53:45SPEAKER- Like I think, let me make sure I've got this detail right.

53:50SPEAKERYes, the Nix OS foundation is based in the Netherlands.

53:53SPEAKER- So that makes sense.

53:54SPEAKERTake your homegrown Linux and call it a day.

53:57SPEAKER- Oh, sorry, I don't think the language originated there,

53:59SPEAKERbut the packaging system did.

54:01SPEAKER- Okay.

54:02SPEAKER- Or with a Dutch national, at least.

54:05SPEAKERAnyway.

54:05SPEAKER- It is worth mentioning that there are two different things.

54:07SPEAKEROne is the Nix OS is the OS

54:09SPEAKERand the Nix packaging system is the package manager,

54:14SPEAKERbasically, for using Nix, the language.

54:16SPEAKER- Don't say to a Nix OS diehard that you're running Nix

54:20SPEAKERwhen you're talking about the distro

54:21SPEAKERbecause you will get a side eye.

54:24SPEAKER- It's really interesting to me,

54:26SPEAKERspending a lot of time in open source circles,

54:28SPEAKERwhich projects really support Nix and which don't?

54:31SPEAKERLike the weird, the tiling window managers,

54:34SPEAKERlike Neary and Hyperland are really super popular on Nix,

54:37SPEAKERI assume because the same kind of people

54:40SPEAKERwho want a text configured tiling window manager

54:42SPEAKERare also probably interested

54:44SPEAKERin running their entire system configuration

54:46SPEAKERfrom one big, giant, flat text file.

54:48SPEAKER- Yeah.

54:49SPEAKER- But yeah, it's an interesting, I don't know.

54:54SPEAKERIt's an interesting idea.

54:55SPEAKERI don't think it's ready for folks like me quite yet,

54:58SPEAKERbut good luck to the Dutch.

55:00SPEAKER- We're somehow, we're talking more about Nix

55:02SPEAKERthan about the nation state digital sovereignty stuff here,

55:05SPEAKERbut I'm setting up a new MacBook right now

55:07SPEAKERand I might actually try Nix again.

55:09SPEAKERI tried Nix, the package manager,

55:11SPEAKERin like 2017, 18 on my work MacBook

55:14SPEAKERbefore I even had a NAS,

55:16SPEAKERbefore I had really gone down the Unix-like rabbit hole,

55:19SPEAKERbut basically, whatever, we don't need to get into.

55:23SPEAKER- But this podcast was still just a segment on the bombcast.

55:25SPEAKER- Yeah, this was before this podcast even existed.

55:27SPEAKERWe don't need to get into why,

55:28SPEAKERbut I kind of wanted to try something besides Homebrew,

55:30SPEAKERwhich is the predominant package manager in macOS,

55:33SPEAKERbut Nix is available and works as a package manager

55:37SPEAKERfor macOS utilities as well.

55:38SPEAKERAnd I might give that another shot

55:40SPEAKERnow that I have a lot more experience

55:42SPEAKERwith this kind of thing.

55:43SPEAKER- Yeah, it's one of the things that I feel like

55:46SPEAKERonce you get over the hump,

55:47SPEAKERit's suddenly gonna be really easy,

55:49SPEAKERbut on the desktop, figuring out where the hump is

55:55SPEAKERis challenging, it turns out.

55:58SPEAKERBut for me, on the server, it's setting up a machine

56:00SPEAKERand then setting up a bunch of Docker containers

56:03SPEAKERor whatever containerized server applets,

56:08SPEAKERand then basically leaving that machine to run

56:11SPEAKERand updating it quarterly, probably,

56:13SPEAKERis what I do on the server, generally.

56:14SPEAKERSo yeah, it's pretty lightweight.

56:16SPEAKER- Yeah.

56:18SPEAKERDo you want to talk about the third circuit

56:19SPEAKERAI copyright thing?

56:21SPEAKERThis was interesting, I thought,

56:22SPEAKERbut it's kind of a quick hit.

56:24SPEAKER- Sure.

56:25SPEAKER- Basically, there was an artificial intelligence company

56:30SPEAKERtrained their legal

56:34SPEAKERreading AI on another competitor's product,

56:38SPEAKERand the court was like, yo, man, you can't do that.

56:40SPEAKERThat's not, that's copyright infringement.

56:42SPEAKERYou can't take other people's work.

56:44SPEAKERSo TLDR is one company

56:49SPEAKERsummarized kind of court filings.

56:51SPEAKER- Yes, that's Thomson Reuters,

56:53SPEAKERwhich I don't know if there's any relation

56:55SPEAKERto the Reuters news service there or not, but.

56:57SPEAKER- I don't know that.

57:00SPEAKERAnd then this company, Ross Intelligence,

57:02SPEAKERbasically took their kind of executive summaries

57:06SPEAKERof these court cases, they're called headnotes,

57:08SPEAKERand trained an AI on those,

57:12SPEAKERon the Thomson Reuters headnotes,

57:16SPEAKERand then Thomson Reuters sued them.

57:17SPEAKERIt was like, hey, you can't steal our stuff,

57:19SPEAKERand the court was like, yeah, this does seem like theft,

57:22SPEAKERwhich if that ends up holding,

57:24SPEAKERis really gonna be a problem for the larger AI companies.

57:28SPEAKERThis is one of those cases where the small guy

57:31SPEAKERestablishing a legal precedent is super bad

57:33SPEAKERfor the endemics, and I'm kind of surprised

57:35SPEAKERthat they haven't started throwing money at this, honestly.

57:37SPEAKER- Yeah, what's the standout quote

57:40SPEAKERfrom the circuit court judge who made this ruling?

57:43SPEAKERUnder Ross's framing, Ross is the defendant here,

57:46SPEAKERthis case appears to concern the future

57:48SPEAKERof AI legal technology, but appearances can be deceiving.

57:51SPEAKERIn truth, this is no more than an ordinary copyright case.

57:55SPEAKER- Turns out, if you take other people's copyrighted work

57:57SPEAKERand use it to profit, then that's theft.

58:00SPEAKERAnd while I have problems with the large portions

58:02SPEAKERof copyright and how things work,

58:04SPEAKERin this case, I think that the copyright is probably,

58:06SPEAKERlike, this is a win for us, the people.

58:09SPEAKER- Yeah, like, at first glance, and again, we're not lawyers,

58:12SPEAKERI barely know what I'm looking at here,

58:13SPEAKERbut at first glance, I was like, oh,

58:14SPEAKERis this only gonna be applicable to, like,

58:16SPEAKERsome narrow context in the legal discovery space?

58:19SPEAKERBut then that very broad language from the judge

58:22SPEAKERmakes it sound like, no, this is kind of maybe

58:24SPEAKERestablishing a very broad precedent.

58:26SPEAKER- Maybe training your AI models on copyrighted material

58:30SPEAKERis a bad idea, who knew?

58:32SPEAKER- But, I mean, the pipeline of circuit court rulings

58:36SPEAKERto Supreme Court cases feels like it's, uh,

58:41SPEAKERwell-trodden these days.

58:43SPEAKER- And often speedier than you would expect.

58:46SPEAKER- Right, yes, I have to assume

58:47SPEAKERthis is going to continue escalating.

58:49SPEAKER- I would assume this'll go all the way up

58:51SPEAKERto the Supreme Court if something else doesn't hit first

58:54SPEAKERthat covers the same ideas.

58:55SPEAKER- Yeah, there's other litigation going on,

58:57SPEAKERI don't know anything about it other than some of the quotes

59:00SPEAKERthat have come out of, like, the discovery,

59:01SPEAKERbut there was that one where there was

59:03SPEAKERa Microsoft executive quote floating around

59:05SPEAKERthat said something like this is basically

59:07SPEAKERthe largest labor theft in history or something like that.

59:10SPEAKER- Yeah, that one seemed bad.

59:12SPEAKER- I don't know what the nature of that case is, though.

59:14SPEAKER- Well, and then the other thing that's happening

59:16SPEAKERis the author's suit, the publisher and author's suit

59:19SPEAKERagainst the, I can't remember whether it's OpenAI

59:22SPEAKERor Anthropic, one of the companies that trained,

59:24SPEAKERor it might have even been Facebook, actually,

59:26SPEAKERthat trained on bazillions of copyrighted books.

59:30SPEAKER- Yeah.

59:31SPEAKER- Like, that settlement is happening now

59:33SPEAKERand the payouts are happening,

59:35SPEAKERand it seems like an absolute clusterfuck

59:37SPEAKERfrom the writers that I follow.

59:38SPEAKER- Yeah, I've seen links going around,

59:40SPEAKERbasically saying like, hey, you can go on here

59:41SPEAKERand search your books to see if your work

59:43SPEAKERwas part of the training set here

59:45SPEAKERand if you're eligible for a payout.

59:47SPEAKER- Yeah.

59:48SPEAKERSo anyway, it's still TBD if you training AI

59:53SPEAKERon copyrighted material is theft, we'll find out.

59:56SPEAKERSeems like sometimes things are going right direction,

1:00:00SPEAKERsometimes things are going the wrong direction.

1:00:01SPEAKER- It's really amazing.

1:00:02SPEAKERI don't know if this has always been the case,

1:00:03SPEAKERbut this Courthouse News Service article

1:00:05SPEAKERthat you linked for this,

1:00:06SPEAKERI mean, just as an example of how polarized

1:00:09SPEAKERthe environment is in this country at this point,

1:00:11SPEAKERthat every time you mention a federal judge at this point,

1:00:16SPEAKERyou have to specify which president appointed them.

1:00:19SPEAKER- Yep.

1:00:20SPEAKER- In every single case in this article,

1:00:22SPEAKERevery single judge's name,

1:00:24SPEAKERand there's like five judges mentioned in this thing,

1:00:26SPEAKERevery single time they have to tell you who appointed them

1:00:28SPEAKERbecause that actually, apparently,

1:00:30SPEAKERis highly relevant these days.

1:00:32SPEAKER- Yeah, well, you have to know what level

1:00:34SPEAKERof crooked they are, I guess.

1:00:35SPEAKER- Oh God, one of those judges is Emile Bove.

1:00:37SPEAKERAnyway, let's move on.

1:00:39SPEAKER- Which one is Emile Bove?

1:00:41SPEAKER- Let's move on.

1:00:42SPEAKER- Okay.

1:00:44SPEAKERWell, that'll do it for us this week, I guess.

1:00:46SPEAKER- I guess it will.

1:00:47SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:00:49SPEAKERLet us know what you think about,

1:00:50SPEAKERI'm curious if people are gonna try the Pyrowave thing.

1:00:53SPEAKERIt's one of those places

1:00:54SPEAKERwhere having moribund ethernet standards is kind of good

1:00:59SPEAKERbecause nobody in their house is, for the most part,

1:01:02SPEAKERusing the full bandwidth afforded by gigabit ethernet.

1:01:05SPEAKER- Right, yes.

1:01:06SPEAKERIt's like, yeah, it's all this gigabit LAN bandwidth

1:01:09SPEAKERjust sitting there doing nothing

1:01:10SPEAKERand finally somebody's using it.

1:01:12SPEAKERWiring your house for ethernet stays winning.

1:01:15SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm, look.

1:01:18SPEAKER- Yes, it's a pain in the ass, but.

1:01:20SPEAKER- I've been looking at the hole in my hall closet

1:01:23SPEAKERto the crawl space and thinking,

1:01:24SPEAKERwhat if I just ran a fiber into the, you know,

1:01:29SPEAKERlike from my office to the other places

1:01:31SPEAKERand like it's not expensive to upgrade the switch

1:01:33SPEAKERat this point, or maybe I just run 10 gig E.

1:01:36SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, that's the thing about those real tech chips

1:01:39SPEAKERthat just came out are the bill materials

1:01:43SPEAKERis like 10 bucks a chip.

1:01:45SPEAKERAnd they use, I think about a watt and a half now.

1:01:48SPEAKER- It's incredible.

1:01:49SPEAKER- I mean, they are real tech for what that's worth.

1:01:51SPEAKERThey have not necessarily always been the most respected.

1:01:55SPEAKERThey've always been kind of the cheap network.

1:01:56SPEAKER- It's always been janky, yeah.

1:01:57SPEAKERLike you always wanted the Intel network controller

1:02:00SPEAKERif you could get it.

1:02:01SPEAKERAlthough it sounds like these are probably better

1:02:02SPEAKERon that front, but it seems like.

1:02:04SPEAKER- 3COM 503C in the garbage tier of ethernet controllers.

1:02:08SPEAKER- Another cool thing about them is they're PCI express four

1:02:11SPEAKERand they only use one lane each.

1:02:13SPEAKER- Oh, that's nice.

1:02:14SPEAKER- As opposed to most of the older network solutions

1:02:16SPEAKERwould use a lot more PCI express lanes.

1:02:18SPEAKERSo they are also great for small servers

1:02:20SPEAKERthat have very limited PCI lanes.

1:02:22SPEAKERSo like, I think we're quickly headed for a future

1:02:26SPEAKERwhere like 10 gigabit networking gets much better

1:02:28SPEAKERon small devices.

1:02:29SPEAKER- That's cool.

1:02:30SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:02:31SPEAKER- That sounds really good.

1:02:33SPEAKERThat'll do it for us this week.

1:02:33SPEAKERThanks everybody for listening.

1:02:35SPEAKERAs always, "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod"

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1:03:12SPEAKER- Yeah, the launch of the Nintendo 64.

1:03:15SPEAKER- Oh God, what a gem of a console.

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1:03:37SPEAKERthe other day about buying old,

1:03:42SPEAKERbasically how people do grocery shopping now,

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1:04:01SPEAKER- It's true, it does and we do.

1:04:04SPEAKER- I wanna thank our executive producer to your patrons,

1:04:07SPEAKERincluding in Felicitous Rips, Jordan Lippitt,

1:04:10SPEAKERBunny, but with water in the basement.

1:04:12SPEAKEROh no Bunny, I'm so sorry.

1:04:14SPEAKERDavid Allen and James Kamik, thank you all so, so much.

1:04:17SPEAKER- Yes, thank you.

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1:04:27SPEAKER(upbeat music)