00:00SPEAKER- I miss going to the movies, man.
00:01SPEAKER- Yeah? - Yeah.
00:03SPEAKER- Even when I could go to the movies,
00:04SPEAKERI didn't go to the movies.
00:05SPEAKERBut then again, I didn't go much of anywhere, so.
00:07SPEAKER- I went to the movies enough that I paid for one of those,
00:09SPEAKERlike pay 20 bucks a month and go as much as you want deals.
00:12SPEAKER- That was almost enough to get me back there, actually.
00:14SPEAKERDid you feel like you were getting
00:15SPEAKERyour money's worth out of that?
00:16SPEAKER- It was kind of cyclical.
00:19SPEAKERSo I paid for the AMC one,
00:20SPEAKERwhich was at the Metreon downtown.
00:22SPEAKERAnd you know how when you're at GDC,
00:24SPEAKERsometimes you're at a conference at Moscone
00:25SPEAKERand you have like three hours between meetings
00:28SPEAKERand you don't wanna go be social,
00:29SPEAKERyou just wanna go have a quiet, dark room.
00:31SPEAKER- Sure, yeah.
00:33SPEAKER- I'm pretty sure I watched "Captain Marvel"
00:34SPEAKERtwo or three times during GDC one year.
00:36SPEAKER- I really, I have great admiration for people
00:38SPEAKERwho are impulsive enough to just go see a movie on the spot.
00:41SPEAKERI don't think I'm capable of it.
00:43SPEAKER- Yeah, like if we had had that when we worked downtown,
00:45SPEAKERwhen I was still working downtown,
00:47SPEAKERand like it was just like get off Muni or Bart,
00:52SPEAKERor walk from the office to the movie theater,
00:54SPEAKERI would have gone all the time.
00:55SPEAKER- That's amazing.
00:56SPEAKERJust the idea of to be standing right next
00:58SPEAKERto the movie theater and then just on the spot to say,
01:00SPEAKER"I'm gonna go see a movie," is like mind blowing to me.
01:02SPEAKER- Like you don't do that?
01:03SPEAKEROh, it's the best.
01:04SPEAKER- Every movie I've ever seen in my life
01:05SPEAKERrequired like 48 hours of contemplation.
01:08SPEAKER- Sometimes we're very different people.
01:10SPEAKER- Yeah.
01:11SPEAKER- But so I just saw that Alamo is doing this thing
01:15SPEAKERwhere if you pay 150 bucks and guarantee 150 bucks
01:20SPEAKERin food and Bev, you can rent a whole theater.
01:23SPEAKER- Wow.
01:23SPEAKER- For you and your like your Rona pod.
01:26SPEAKER- Is there any minimum number of people?
01:27SPEAKERCould that be like for four people?
01:29SPEAKER- It could be for one person, it looks like.
01:30SPEAKERIf you're willing to buy like 150 bucks worth of food
01:32SPEAKERat the Alamo, not that much.
01:34SPEAKER- Probably not that hard to do.
01:35SPEAKER- Yeah, I could do that.
01:36SPEAKER- It's like three beers.
01:38SPEAKER- Yeah, look, it's more than that,
01:40SPEAKERbut you get one of those,
01:41SPEAKERlook, you have to avoid the popcorn
01:43SPEAKERand you get into the novelty food,
01:44SPEAKERyou know, the potstickers and the whatever themed food is.
01:49SPEAKER- Gotta go for a high caloric density,
01:51SPEAKERhigh calorie to money, right, to cost ratio.
01:54SPEAKER- High calorie to mass.
01:54SPEAKERYeah, you don't wanna get a lot of,
01:56SPEAKERI just wonder how,
01:58SPEAKERlike, can you get them to show whatever you want?
02:00SPEAKER- Oh, I didn't think about that.
02:01SPEAKERI thought you meant you had to be seeing a first run,
02:03SPEAKERlike whatever it was on, that's, huh.
02:05SPEAKERWhat, could you just bring your own?
02:07SPEAKER- I mean.
02:08SPEAKER- Here's a thumb drive, just pull up the MKV on there.
02:10SPEAKER- Yeah, look, here's my Plex login, I gotcha.
02:13SPEAKERI just, like, what would I like to see in,
02:16SPEAKERthere's a handful of movies that I never saw in theaters
02:18SPEAKERthat I would love to see in theaters,
02:20SPEAKERlike "Alien" is on that, I never saw "Alien" in theaters.
02:23SPEAKER- Sure.
02:26SPEAKER- I just, yeah, I'm into this idea a lot,
02:29SPEAKERbut I think three people, you know,
02:32SPEAKERa hundred bucks a person is a lot.
02:34SPEAKERI'd have to get another,
02:36SPEAKERwe'd have to like diagonally sit in opposite corners
02:38SPEAKERof the theater with like another three or four people
02:40SPEAKERto make the finances work for it.
02:41SPEAKER- Yeah, the social distancing kind of undermine
02:43SPEAKERthe group social aspect a little bit, maybe.
02:47SPEAKERI guess if it's your theater,
02:49SPEAKERyou can just holler and heckle all you want, right?
02:51SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, like do a double feature,
02:54SPEAKERwatch "Happy Gilmore" and "Billy Madison"
02:56SPEAKERand, you know, blaze up, have a good time.
03:00SPEAKERLive large.
03:00SPEAKER- Yeah, we really are different people.
03:03SPEAKER(upbeat music)
03:24SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)
03:33SPEAKER- Welcome to "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod."
03:36SPEAKERI'm Will.
03:37SPEAKER- I'm Brad, I brought the emails.
03:38SPEAKER- You brought the, you have the emails?
03:41SPEAKER- Sitting here looking at, let's see,
03:43SPEAKERall of them are labeled.
03:44SPEAKER- Okay.
03:45SPEAKER- Just about half of them are also starred.
03:47SPEAKERI don't know if that denotes anything special
03:48SPEAKERabout those emails.
03:49SPEAKER- That means that I marked them as special,
03:52SPEAKERnot knowing that you were labeling them.
03:53SPEAKER- Okay. - 'Cause we have a plan,
03:55SPEAKERbut we have not communicated the new order of emails.
03:59SPEAKER- Yes, a new order is rising in our shared Gmail account.
04:04SPEAKER- Look, if the Russians hack us,
04:05SPEAKERit's gonna be very orderly.
04:07SPEAKER- Yeah. - That's all I'm saying.
04:09SPEAKER- Yeah, so it is.
04:11SPEAKER- We've got a fresh crop.
04:12SPEAKERIt's the September, the September harvest is in.
04:14SPEAKER- That's right. - These emails
04:15SPEAKERare pumpkin spice flavored, I think.
04:17SPEAKER- I'd like to have a little bit of an agrarian flair
04:19SPEAKERto these email episodes.
04:20SPEAKERI love, I know I've said it before, I love email week,
04:22SPEAKERjust because we know what the topic's gonna be.
04:25SPEAKER- So, you know, this is the thing we talked about
04:27SPEAKERoff the lines a little bit. - Yes, I've got some ideas.
04:30SPEAKER- But I think the thing about this podcast
04:34SPEAKERthat has become clear over the last year
04:36SPEAKERand change of doing it,
04:37SPEAKER'cause we're at the one year mark now,
04:39SPEAKERis that the research episodes are often very time intensive.
04:46SPEAKERThe emails episodes are very not time intensive.
04:49SPEAKERIt would be nice to have one more regular format.
04:53SPEAKERLike even when we do interviews,
04:54SPEAKERthey're pretty time intensive.
04:55SPEAKERLike it would be nice to have one regular format
04:58SPEAKERthat is not like somebody doing eight hours of reading
05:01SPEAKERbefore we do a recording.
05:03SPEAKER- Like I had that idea about guests the other day.
05:04SPEAKERI was like, what if every other episode
05:07SPEAKERthat's not the email episode was a guest episode?
05:08SPEAKERBut you're right, like getting guests
05:10SPEAKERis like such a moving target
05:11SPEAKERthat that's really tough to rely on.
05:14SPEAKER- I mean, I think once we get a pipeline of guests,
05:17SPEAKERit could be, but it's pretty time consuming
05:20SPEAKERto like think about who the guests should be
05:22SPEAKERand then figure out when the schedules work.
05:24SPEAKER- Booking them is a big part of the workload.
05:26SPEAKERBut then the big one is just that life always,
05:29SPEAKERnot always, but life can always happen.
05:30SPEAKERYou know what I mean?
05:31SPEAKER- Yeah, it turns out, well, you have a real job.
05:34SPEAKERI have a job-ish.
05:35SPEAKER- If you're, more to the point though,
05:37SPEAKERlike your guests surely has a busy life already
05:41SPEAKERand sometimes life can get in the way.
05:42SPEAKERAnd then all of a sudden you're trying to figure out
05:44SPEAKERwhat to do if they can't make it.
05:45SPEAKER- Well, yeah, and like we have a couple of guests,
05:47SPEAKERwe have a pretty deep well of potential incoming guests
05:51SPEAKERthat we've engaged with
05:52SPEAKERand that are excited about coming on the show
05:54SPEAKERand either like they don't have a good place to record
05:57SPEAKERor they're moving or they're doing book tours
06:00SPEAKERor whatever it happens to be, it makes it challenging.
06:05SPEAKERSo you have to be, yeah.
06:07SPEAKER- Yeah, we're making progress though
06:08SPEAKER'cause we knew what this week's episode was gonna be
06:11SPEAKERand we know what next week's episode is gonna be, which is-
06:13SPEAKER- Wait, what's next episode gonna be?
06:15SPEAKER- I thought it was the Hitchhiker Sky episode.
06:18SPEAKER- Oh, we're doing that next week.
06:19SPEAKER- Oh yeah, okay. - Are we?
06:20SPEAKER- I mean, we can, yeah, sure, why not, let's do it.
06:23SPEAKER- Maybe I've been reading too furiously if we're not.
06:26SPEAKER- I just told you that
06:27SPEAKERso you'd hurry up and finish the damn book.
06:28SPEAKER- Okay, I'm getting there.
06:31SPEAKER- Are you enjoying?
06:32SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm not super deep in, yeah, I can't say.
06:35SPEAKEROkay, fine. - No, no, save it.
06:37SPEAKERI was just curious.
06:38SPEAKER- I'm just, I'm glad I read the introduction
06:40SPEAKERbefore I started the book so I get the Ford prefect joke
06:42SPEAKER'cause otherwise I wouldn't have had a clue
06:44SPEAKERwhat the prefect was.
06:45SPEAKER- There's a lot of '70s Britishisms in there.
06:47SPEAKER- Yes, yes.
06:48SPEAKER- But emails.
06:49SPEAKER- Yeah, emails.
06:50SPEAKERNone of them are about Hitchhiker's Guide.
06:52SPEAKER- That's perfect.
06:53SPEAKER- They're all about- - That could be next month.
06:54SPEAKER- Yeah, they're all about other stuff.
06:56SPEAKER- I wanna hear people's stories
06:57SPEAKERabout when they first read Hitchhiker's Guide next month.
07:00SPEAKER- Yes, I've seen a couple of those on the Discord already.
07:03SPEAKER- Me too.
07:04SPEAKER- All right, what's the email address?
07:06SPEAKERI always forget.
07:07SPEAKER- It is techpod@content.town.
07:09SPEAKERThe internet's number one content destination.
07:12SPEAKER- That's right.
07:12SPEAKER- Techpod@content.town.
07:14SPEAKERWe have all the answers to any question you might ask.
07:16SPEAKERI promise.
07:17SPEAKERAll right, first email is from Charlie.
07:21SPEAKERThis is very timely.
07:22SPEAKERIt's extremely timely.
07:24SPEAKERI know it says something about the communities
07:25SPEAKERwe hang out in, but I feel like this is half
07:27SPEAKERof all anybody's talking about right now.
07:30SPEAKERI don't wanna talk about what the other half is.
07:32SPEAKER- Yeah, the other half is really a bummer.
07:33SPEAKERSo we'll get into that on the other show,
07:35SPEAKERthe fall of Western civilization.
07:38SPEAKER- All right, here's Charlie's question.
07:39SPEAKERWhat happens on the back end when a high number of people
07:41SPEAKERtry to order a product at the same time?
07:44SPEAKERAs we've seen with the new console pre-orders
07:47SPEAKERand the GeForce 3080 situation,
07:50SPEAKERmajor retailers and providers of cloud services
07:53SPEAKERare still unable to keep things running smoothly
07:55SPEAKERduring these high demand scenarios.
07:57SPEAKERWhy hasn't this problem been solved yet?
07:59SPEAKER- It has been solved.
08:00SPEAKERThe sneaker people figured it out years ago.
08:01SPEAKER- How did they?
08:03SPEAKER- Yeah, the sneaker situation, like you get a token,
08:05SPEAKERyou show up at a specific time, you get a token,
08:06SPEAKERyou use the token, you exchange the token for services.
08:09SPEAKER- Do you mean physically show up with your token?
08:11SPEAKER- With a physical token?
08:12SPEAKER- Both, look, I'm not a sneaker person.
08:14SPEAKERI'm sure John Drake has a lot of information about this.
08:16SPEAKERIf we asked him.
08:17SPEAKER- Yes, obviously going to a place
08:19SPEAKERnot exactly an option right now.
08:21SPEAKER- All I know is that the one time that I tried to engage
08:24SPEAKERwith the sneaker culture business is like,
08:27SPEAKERI logged in five minutes before I made sure
08:29SPEAKERall my credit card stuff was into the site.
08:31SPEAKERI was logged in, ready to go on the right page,
08:34SPEAKERhit the button to refresh it, hit the button to add to cart.
08:36SPEAKERAnd by the time I clicked add to cart,
08:38SPEAKERit had shifted over to sold out.
08:39SPEAKERSo it was maybe a five, like I was in limbo
08:43SPEAKERfor maybe eight seconds where I was like,
08:44SPEAKERoh shit, I'm gonna get these shoes finally, that's awesome.
08:46SPEAKERAnd then they were gone.
08:47SPEAKER- I mean, it may have been a failure,
08:48SPEAKERbut at least it was a seamless or painless failure.
08:50SPEAKER- There was no ambiguity in that I had failed
08:53SPEAKERto achieve these shoes on the first pass.
08:56SPEAKER- Get your failure up in your face nice and early
08:58SPEAKERand just move on with your life.
09:00SPEAKER- Yeah, I could move on to not having the shoes.
09:03SPEAKERI transitioned directly from wanting to buy shoes
09:05SPEAKERto never owning the shoes, it was great.
09:08SPEAKER- I mean, obviously like the PS5 pre-order situation
09:11SPEAKERwas largely a failure of messaging,
09:12SPEAKERbut the Xbox and G4 stuff was messaged quite clearly
09:16SPEAKERand those were also on fire.
09:18SPEAKERSo it is definitely partially a backend problem,
09:20SPEAKERbut like, is it a case of these specific retailers
09:24SPEAKERnot dealing with these high demand situations often enough
09:25SPEAKERto like backstop their systems to withstand it?
09:29SPEAKERLike they just don't have the practice?
09:31SPEAKER- It's definitely, I mean, that is definitely a component.
09:34SPEAKERIt's the same thing when we talked about,
09:36SPEAKERI can't remember what game it was,
09:37SPEAKERbut was it Call of Duty or something that launched
09:39SPEAKERand the servers just shit the bed for five days.
09:41SPEAKER- We have talked about this exact thing
09:43SPEAKERfor game launches before.
09:45SPEAKER- Yeah, so it's the same thing.
09:46SPEAKERThere are multiple systems that have to talk to each other.
09:49SPEAKERIn this case, you have the retail front end,
09:52SPEAKERyou have the inventory backend,
09:53SPEAKERyou have the payment processing backend
09:55SPEAKERand under normal situations,
09:58SPEAKERthe bottlenecks are not apparent.
10:00SPEAKERAnd then what happens is when you get 50 million people
10:03SPEAKERtrying to buy an Xbox at the same time,
10:06SPEAKERone of those systems bottlenecks,
10:07SPEAKERusually the credit card processing is my understanding
10:10SPEAKERand the whole thing falls to shit
10:12SPEAKERand like everybody gets stuck in horrible limbo.
10:15SPEAKERThe one company who's pretty good at this,
10:17SPEAKERit turns out is Apple.
10:18SPEAKERThey've been doing the online pre-orders now
10:20SPEAKERsince like the iPhone 5.
10:22SPEAKERAnd like if you are online at the right time
10:26SPEAKERand you hit the right button and you know what you want
10:27SPEAKERand you don't dilly dally,
10:28SPEAKERyou usually can buy the thing that you're looking for.
10:30SPEAKER- So any idea of who Apple's cloud compute provider is?
10:34SPEAKER- Apple.
10:35SPEAKER- Wait, do they run their own stuff?
10:36SPEAKER- They have data centers.
10:37SPEAKER- Well, yeah, for their customer facing stuff,
10:41SPEAKERbut I mean for-
10:43SPEAKER- For their iCloud stuff?
10:45SPEAKER- Are they really big enough in that game
10:47SPEAKERto provide everything they need for themselves?
10:49SPEAKERLike you don't think they're doing any-
10:51SPEAKER- They're one of the gamble or you know,
10:53SPEAKERGoogle, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook.
10:56SPEAKER- You're right, you're right.
10:58SPEAKERI just assumed like, I mean,
11:00SPEAKERall I've ever heard is that AWS and Azure
11:02SPEAKERare so much of that market
11:04SPEAKERthat I assumed there was no way
11:05SPEAKERthat Apple could be providing all of their needs.
11:07SPEAKER- So Apple is still small compared to AWS and Azure
11:11SPEAKERand all that stuff.
11:12SPEAKERBut yeah, no, and Google.
11:13SPEAKERBut yeah, Apple has giant data centers.
11:16SPEAKER- They're doing it all?
11:17SPEAKEROkay.
11:19SPEAKER- There's probably teams upon teams of people.
11:21SPEAKER'Cause they own a credit card processing system now.
11:24SPEAKERLike they, with Apple Pay, they're soup to nuts.
11:26SPEAKERThey're vertically integrated, they're Japanese in 1980.
11:29SPEAKER- You're right, I should have known
11:30SPEAKERthat is Apple's whole thing.
11:31SPEAKER- Yeah.
11:32SPEAKER- But you know, the backend, the iCloud,
11:34SPEAKERthe once you already have the product,
11:35SPEAKERthose services that you engage with,
11:36SPEAKERI knew that they were handling all that stuff themselves.
11:39SPEAKER- I mean, it's entirely possible
11:40SPEAKERthere's another payment processor in there,
11:41SPEAKERbut at the scale that they work,
11:42SPEAKERit would behoove them to just not pay other people
11:45SPEAKERto do that work and figure it out themselves.
11:46SPEAKER- Of course.
11:47SPEAKERAnother question I had looking at this was,
11:51SPEAKERin this future of cloud computing
11:52SPEAKERand like spinning up virtualized servers on demand
11:56SPEAKERand scaling things almost endlessly,
11:58SPEAKERlike do you think we could, could we get to a point
12:01SPEAKERand especially like maybe even machine learning
12:02SPEAKERis involved in this in some way, I don't know,
12:04SPEAKERcould we get to a point where all the systems
12:06SPEAKERyou described, payment processing, authentication,
12:08SPEAKERlike X, Y, you know, all the bottlenecks,
12:11SPEAKERcould those all just be deployed by robots dynamically
12:14SPEAKERas the need arises and just like not run
12:17SPEAKERinto these situations anymore?
12:20SPEAKER- So this is the interesting part about this whole thing.
12:22SPEAKERThis is the thing Hansa explained to me in like 2012, 2011.
12:26SPEAKER- God, I miss getting drunk with Hansa.
12:29SPEAKERHe was one of the smartest people
12:31SPEAKERI have ever hung out with.
12:32SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, don't play German board games with him.
12:35SPEAKERHe just holds the whole state of the game in his head.
12:37SPEAKERBut we would, he was explaining
12:41SPEAKERwhy that similar situation failed.
12:43SPEAKERAnd he's like, look, there's some stuff that you can't,
12:46SPEAKERlike you can spin up infinite web servers
12:49SPEAKERto deliver web pages, right?
12:50SPEAKERAnd that is, there's a tool that does that for you.
12:54SPEAKERAnd the workload for that is really easy.
12:56SPEAKERBut what you can't do is spin up multiple load balancers
12:59SPEAKER'cause you need to have one giant beefy load balancer.
13:01SPEAKERYou can't have multiple copies of a database server
13:04SPEAKERbecause then the databases get out of sync
13:06SPEAKERand bad things happen.
13:07SPEAKERSo like if the bottleneck is the front end
13:11SPEAKERgoing to the inventory to see if the thing is in stock
13:13SPEAKERbefore they transferred to the payment processor,
13:16SPEAKERyou can't have, like there's bad things happen
13:18SPEAKERif the inventory system gets out of stock
13:21SPEAKERwith the, out of sync with the,
13:24SPEAKERif multiple nodes of the inventory system get out of sync.
13:26SPEAKERSo the reason this stuff still happens
13:28SPEAKERis that it's hard to fake those workloads.
13:30SPEAKERLike you can fake a normal workload pretty easily
13:32SPEAKERwith a few hundred machines and spinning up VMs
13:35SPEAKERto do unit testing and stuff like that.
13:37SPEAKERBut it's pretty expensive to spin up 30,000 instances
13:41SPEAKERand hit, you know, 30,000 fake,
13:45SPEAKERyou know, about massive scale, all ending at one time.
13:47SPEAKER- That makes sense.
13:49SPEAKER- Yeah. - Mystery solved.
13:50SPEAKER- It's probably cheaper to just deal with the aftermath
13:52SPEAKERthan to harden your system against that.
13:54SPEAKEROr alternately, each time you have that kind of sales system
13:57SPEAKERyou'd log it and you see what happens
13:58SPEAKERand you see how to do it better next time.
14:02SPEAKERBut sometimes it's something stupid,
14:03SPEAKERlike maybe the load balancer has logging turned on
14:07SPEAKERand then you get gated by how fast
14:10SPEAKERyou can write to the disks, write that log to the disks, so.
14:15SPEAKER- It sucks to say this,
14:16SPEAKERand I am by no means defending this mess,
14:18SPEAKERbut it's not like all the people who feel like
14:20SPEAKERthey got screwed trying to get a 3080
14:22SPEAKERsuddenly want a 3080 less because of the experience.
14:25SPEAKERSo I can see why the NVIDIA's and Sony's of the world
14:30SPEAKERwould just kind of sail right through and keep going.
14:32SPEAKER- It's not as bad as when,
14:34SPEAKERand at the end of the day,
14:37SPEAKERthis is about consumer electronics, not like vital things.
14:41SPEAKERIt's not like, you know,
14:42SPEAKERwhen you had 10 days to sign up for insurance
14:44SPEAKERunder the Affordable Care Act
14:46SPEAKERand that site just didn't work for any of those 10 days.
14:48SPEAKER- Yes. - That it turned out was bad.
14:51SPEAKER- Yes, that's for sure.
14:52SPEAKER- Also actually like what I just said was not totally fair
14:55SPEAKERto NVIDIA and Sony because both of them actually came out
14:58SPEAKERpretty publicly and apologized for the situation
15:00SPEAKERin the last week or two.
15:04SPEAKER- I mean, I feel like this is the second generation
15:05SPEAKERof console stuff is specifically that like
15:08SPEAKERthe hardware vendors released the hardware
15:10SPEAKERand it was unclear whether they,
15:11SPEAKERlike you couldn't tell if they thought
15:12SPEAKERthere was gonna be a market for it, right?
15:14SPEAKER- Yes. - Like I remember
15:16SPEAKERon the PS4, Xbox One generation, people were like,
15:18SPEAKER"I don't know if people are gonna buy these phones,
15:20SPEAKER"they're really popular it turns out."
15:21SPEAKERAnd yeah, and then here we are
15:23SPEAKERat 100 million consoles later, 200 million consoles later.
15:26SPEAKER- Actually, I mean, I don't wanna spend the whole episode
15:28SPEAKERon this topic or this question,
15:29SPEAKERbut did you read the fact that NVIDIA put up,
15:32SPEAKERthey actually, like Sony just tweeted,
15:34SPEAKERwhich for a company like Sony that I understand
15:37SPEAKERis like kind of momentous in its own right
15:39SPEAKERthat they even said anything,
15:40SPEAKERbut they just posted a tweet saying like,
15:42SPEAKER"Hey, sorry, this definitely could have gone better,
15:44SPEAKER"we will have more stock soon."
15:45SPEAKERBut NVIDIA straight up put up a whole webpage on their site,
15:49SPEAKERG-Force RTX 3080 launch, what happened?
15:51SPEAKERYou asked, we answered.
15:53SPEAKER- Oh, that's cool. - It's a full on fact
15:55SPEAKERof launch has made it near impossible to find one
15:58SPEAKERand this is really disappointing, what happened?
16:00SPEAKERWhat's the overall stock situation?
16:03SPEAKERWhy do you start with such low inventory?
16:05SPEAKERWhy not wait until more cards are produced?
16:08SPEAKERWhat changes are you making on your store?
16:10SPEAKERLike they, I'm searching here for bots.
16:15SPEAKERYes, there are multiple references to bots in this fact.
16:18SPEAKER- So the other thing that has happened
16:20SPEAKERand that's a good point, I forgot about that,
16:22SPEAKERis the sneaker bots have been weaponized
16:24SPEAKERagainst this kind of electronic good too,
16:26SPEAKER'cause it's a scalping situation.
16:28SPEAKERLike you can buy a 3080 and then turn it on eBay
16:30SPEAKERfor 200, 300, 400, 500 bucks more
16:33SPEAKERand make a pretty good amount of money doing that.
16:41SPEAKEROh God, I completely lost my thought there.
16:44SPEAKER- Okay, I can fill time.
16:47SPEAKER- By saying that, you look stone faced all of a sudden.
16:52SPEAKER- Oh shit, it's totally gone.
16:54SPEAKER- I get it, I've been there.
16:56SPEAKER- It was important too.
16:57SPEAKER- Mental short circuit occurs, something broke in there.
17:01SPEAKERI know how it goes.
17:02SPEAKER- It was Bitcoin.
17:04SPEAKERPeople, we don't have this question in the queue,
17:06SPEAKERI don't think, but somebody had asked
17:07SPEAKERif this is because Bitcoin miners
17:08SPEAKERor cryptocurrency miners are scooping up
17:11SPEAKERall the high end GPUs and the shift,
17:14SPEAKERA, people don't mind Bitcoin with GPUs really anymore.
17:17SPEAKERThey use specialized ASICs, but B, the Bitcoin,
17:21SPEAKERthe miners are going for like compute units per watt
17:26SPEAKERand the high end video cards that are optimized
17:28SPEAKERfor cycles per clock are not particularly good for that.
17:33SPEAKERYou're much better off buying a less expensive card
17:35SPEAKERthat uses less power, but has an equally wide
17:38SPEAKERcompute pipeline.
17:39SPEAKERSo they'll be looking at 3070s and maybe even 3060s.
17:43SPEAKER- Interesting.
17:43SPEAKER- Especially early on, because the mining tools
17:47SPEAKERaren't optimized for the new GDDR memory
17:50SPEAKERand stuff like that, you may even see like,
17:52SPEAKERyou may be better off running on a 1060 or a 2060
17:55SPEAKERthan a 3090 even is the thing I read, so.
17:59SPEAKER- That's good news, good news for people
18:01SPEAKERwanting to get a hold of one of these.
18:03SPEAKERI'll mention real fast in this fact,
18:05SPEAKERNVIDIA says they canceled a bunch of orders
18:07SPEAKERplaced by bots after the fact.
18:09SPEAKER- Oh good, that's probably where the extra
18:11SPEAKERexcess new inventories come from.
18:12SPEAKER- Those did not ship according to them,
18:14SPEAKERso that's something.
18:15SPEAKER- I mean, honestly, given what happened in China
18:18SPEAKERand the state of the pandemic and stuff like that,
18:20SPEAKERit's amazing to me that any of this stuff has launched.
18:23SPEAKER- Yes, yes, I'm with you.
18:24SPEAKERAlso, like, I don't know how much it matters,
18:26SPEAKERbut that card is on a new process for them,
18:28SPEAKERthe Samsung eight nanometer, they have not been on before.
18:30SPEAKER- And a new foundry too.
18:31SPEAKER- Yeah, so that may have constrained supply somewhat as well.
18:35SPEAKER- It's funny, I could be wrong on this,
18:36SPEAKERbut I can't remember a time that NVIDIA
18:39SPEAKERwasn't building chips on TSMC's foundries,
18:42SPEAKERso it's interesting that they moved to Samsung for this.
18:45SPEAKER- I really want one of those cards.
18:46SPEAKERLike I've been on a, I'm on a GTX 1080 regular, not TI,
18:51SPEAKERsince I don't even know how long, four years ago?
18:54SPEAKERAnd I have felt zero compunction to upgrade until right now,
18:57SPEAKERand all of a sudden--
18:58SPEAKER- Well, the bad news for you and the good news
19:00SPEAKERfor everybody else who wants to spend money to get a card
19:02SPEAKERis that there are, as I understand it,
19:06SPEAKERthe reviewers got cards and influencers
19:08SPEAKERand everybody else is behind the people
19:10SPEAKERthat are paying cash money for hardware, so.
19:12SPEAKER- That is my understanding, that's fine.
19:15SPEAKERAlso, I've got these 1440p monitors right now,
19:17SPEAKERthat's a lot more pixels to drive.
19:19SPEAKERSuddenly the 1080 is feeling a little more long in the tooth.
19:22SPEAKERAll right, we should move on to the next email.
19:25SPEAKERPierce from Marquette, Michigan.
19:29SPEAKERYou mentioned in a previous podcast
19:30SPEAKERthat everyone should have a headlamp.
19:32SPEAKERI would add everyone should have one
19:34SPEAKERthat also has a red light mode as well.
19:36SPEAKER- This is, yes.
19:37SPEAKER- Yeah, and I've actually got some experience
19:39SPEAKERwith this recently also that I wanted to ask about.
19:41SPEAKERIt's very handy for not blowing out your pupils
19:43SPEAKERlate at night when you need to use it to find something
19:45SPEAKERor in very specific use cases.
19:48SPEAKERFor example, using it in the car while driving.
19:51SPEAKERA few years back, my wife was studying for a college course
19:54SPEAKERand needed to read her textbook
19:55SPEAKERwhile we were traveling in the car.
19:57SPEAKERShe was able to do this by turning on the red LED light
19:59SPEAKERon her headlamp.
20:01SPEAKERI was not affected and could still see everything around me
20:03SPEAKERjust fine while driving and she could read her book,
20:05SPEAKERthough making out her highlighting was a tad bit difficult.
20:09SPEAKERSo-
20:10SPEAKER- Don't use the red highlighter there, yes.
20:11SPEAKER- So like I had only recently became aware of this
20:14SPEAKERin the last year or two that-
20:16SPEAKER- You didn't know, you're not into astronomy?
20:17SPEAKERDid you do the college or anything?
20:19SPEAKER- No, no, sadly no.
20:20SPEAKERBut yeah, I didn't really realize that red light, I guess,
20:22SPEAKERis the only wavelength
20:23SPEAKERthat will totally destroy your night vision.
20:25SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't know why that is.
20:26SPEAKERI suppose, my bet is it's a rods and cones thing, right?
20:28SPEAKER- Okay, yeah, well, bummer.
20:29SPEAKERThat's what I came in here to ask was why that is.
20:32SPEAKERIs that true of everything, like not even orange light?
20:35SPEAKER'Cause like orange is typically like, you know,
20:37SPEAKERonce the Apple night shift and the, well, God,
20:41SPEAKERwhat was the original version of that?
20:42SPEAKERThe third party-
20:43SPEAKER- Flux.
20:44SPEAKER- Flux, right, I feel terrible about that
20:46SPEAKER'cause like Flux started that old trend and then-
20:48SPEAKER- Well, Flux got Sherlocked.
20:50SPEAKER- Everybody implemented their own at the OS level
20:52SPEAKERand now Flux has been forgotten, that sucks.
20:55SPEAKER- Well, Flux is still really good.
20:56SPEAKERFlux, if you have like hue bulbs,
20:58SPEAKERwill sync up your bulbs in your house to the Flux.
21:02SPEAKERYou could Flux your house, you know.
21:03SPEAKER- Flux lives on.
21:06SPEAKER- So that's a different thing.
21:07SPEAKERThat's a different effect.
21:08SPEAKER- No, I know it is, I know why that happens,
21:11SPEAKERbut I was wondering if there was any overlap there
21:13SPEAKERwhere like orange light was also better at night
21:15SPEAKERor is that still too close to daylight to be useful?
21:21SPEAKER- I don't know.
21:22SPEAKER- The reason I ask all this is I have
21:24SPEAKERan LED color changing nightlight in the bedroom.
21:29SPEAKERYou know, it's one of those, like at least in the Apple home
21:31SPEAKERyou can just slide the, it's got a color wheel,
21:33SPEAKERit's full on 16.7 million colors or whatever it is.
21:37SPEAKERYeah, I'm sure it doesn't actually reproduce all those,
21:38SPEAKERbut you know what I'm talking about.
21:40SPEAKER- Yes.
21:41SPEAKER- I had it on orange for the longest time.
21:42SPEAKERWell, actually I had it on green for a long time.
21:44SPEAKERI don't know why.
21:45SPEAKERAnd then I was like, oh, that's probably too close to blue
21:48SPEAKERto be looking at in the middle of the night
21:49SPEAKERwhen I wake up to go to the bathroom.
21:51SPEAKERAnd then I moved it to orange and then I thought like
21:53SPEAKERmaybe even orange is too close to daylight.
21:54SPEAKERThis was once I, you know, found out about the red stuff
21:57SPEAKERbeing the best for night.
21:59SPEAKERSo I changed it to red,
22:00SPEAKERwhich is great for not ruining my night vision,
22:04SPEAKERbut it kinda is not bright enough
22:06SPEAKEReven at full brightness to really see.
22:08SPEAKER- Well, so I used the red flashlight
22:12SPEAKERwhen we went out to look at the Perseids a few weeks ago.
22:14SPEAKERAnd it only is useful when your eyes are fully adjusted.
22:19SPEAKER- Okay.
22:20SPEAKER- Like it's part of the reason this worked for him
22:22SPEAKERin the car is that when he was looking,
22:25SPEAKERwhen other headlights were shining at him
22:26SPEAKERand stuff like that, his eyes were adjusting
22:27SPEAKERfor the headlights and then snapping right back.
22:30SPEAKERHe probably could barely see the red light
22:32SPEAKERwhen he was looking at the road and the lights
22:33SPEAKERand the street lights and stuff like that
22:34SPEAKERwould be my guess.
22:35SPEAKERBut as long as she was looking down, it was fine.
22:38SPEAKER- I'm sure like even your own headlights
22:40SPEAKERare constricting your pupils at least somewhat, right?
22:44SPEAKER- I would think so.
22:45SPEAKERI mean, compared to like your full, full dilated,
22:50SPEAKERyou know, I've been out in a cave
22:52SPEAKERfor the last three days, look, it's probably that.
22:56SPEAKERIt's funny, I took an astronomy class in high school
22:58SPEAKERat the local college and that was when I was introduced
23:02SPEAKERto the red light magic because the astronomers all had,
23:06SPEAKERlike at that point they had just normal incandescent
23:08SPEAKERflashlights and they put a piece of red cellophane
23:10SPEAKERover the cone and would use those like little mag lights
23:14SPEAKERthat had rubber banded cellophane on them.
23:16SPEAKERAnd it was really useful.
23:18SPEAKER- You think when you wake up in the middle of the night
23:20SPEAKERrandomly, are your eyes fully dilated
23:22SPEAKERbefore you open your eyes?
23:23SPEAKERI mean, your pupils fully dilated?
23:24SPEAKER- I would think so.
23:25SPEAKERI can always see really well.
23:26SPEAKERLike, I wonder if you have to be in any degree of conscious
23:29SPEAKERfor that to fully happen.
23:31SPEAKER- I would think that's an autonomous thing.
23:32SPEAKER- Yeah, I would too.
23:33SPEAKER- Only we had medical professionals handy to ask
23:35SPEAKERthis sort of thing.
23:36SPEAKER- Yeah, like I'd not get too much
23:37SPEAKERinto a cognitive rabbit hole here,
23:39SPEAKERbut I wonder what even controls that action.
23:43SPEAKER- Oh, that's definitely autonomic.
23:45SPEAKERYou don't have any control over that, yeah.
23:46SPEAKER- Oh no, I know you don't.
23:47SPEAKERI'm saying like, what are the mechanics
23:49SPEAKERof making that happen?
23:51SPEAKERLike, is that a, is that some part of the lizard brain or?
23:55SPEAKER- Brad, we got, I got just the guest for this.
23:57SPEAKERWe got to get him on.
23:58SPEAKERI got to figure out, we got to work the schedule.
23:59SPEAKER'Cause yeah, I got your guy for this one.
24:02SPEAKER- I got to write these questions down.
24:03SPEAKERIs there a term for something that happens
24:05SPEAKERwithout the involvement of the brain whatsoever?
24:06SPEAKERLike if the mechanics are entirely somehow like controlled
24:10SPEAKERby the organ itself?
24:13SPEAKERDoes that make sense?
24:14SPEAKERI don't know if this is an example of that.
24:15SPEAKER- Well, like the heart is self-regulating.
24:17SPEAKERThere's nodes in the heart that stimulate
24:18SPEAKERthe muscle fibers in the heart.
24:20SPEAKERBut I don't know, I can't remember
24:23SPEAKERif there's some autonomic,
24:25SPEAKERI feel like there's two systems there.
24:27SPEAKEROne that makes the beats go based on the flow of blood
24:29SPEAKERthrough the heart.
24:30SPEAKERAnd then the limbic system, I guess,
24:34SPEAKERautonomic nervous system that keeps the heart going, period.
24:38SPEAKERBut it's been a long time since I've studied
24:40SPEAKERany of this stuff.
24:40SPEAKERAnd probably what I know is 20 years out of date.
24:42SPEAKER- Yes, yes, we are definitely out of our depth here.
24:44SPEAKER- Yeah, this is a scary conversation.
24:46SPEAKERI expected, usually we get yelled at by the business people,
24:48SPEAKERbut this time it's going to be the science people.
24:49SPEAKER- Yes.
24:51SPEAKERAnyway, I don't know why that red nightlight
24:53SPEAKERis not really enough to see very well at night.
24:55SPEAKERSo I'm gonna have to go back to the orange.
24:56SPEAKER- Well, it's 'cause your eyes aren't adjusted.
24:58SPEAKER- Well, that's why I was asking,
24:59SPEAKERdo you think they're fully dilated when you wake up?
25:02SPEAKER- I mean, maybe you're just,
25:03SPEAKERI mean, one of the other things that happens
25:04SPEAKERas we get older is our night vision gets worse.
25:06SPEAKER- Oh, don't say that, don't say that.
25:08SPEAKER- I'm sorry, I got bad news.
25:10SPEAKER- All right.
25:11SPEAKER- Look, let me tell you,
25:12SPEAKERgoing out stargazing with a seven-year-old,
25:16SPEAKERit is heartbreaking. - An eye-opening experience.
25:19SPEAKER- Yeah, she sees, she's like,
25:20SPEAKER"Hey, there's a raccoon over there."
25:21SPEAKERI was like, "There's no raccoon over there."
25:22SPEAKERAnd then I hear the skittering.
25:23SPEAKERShe's like, "No, there's a raccoon over there."
25:26SPEAKERI need to eat more carrots.
25:27SPEAKER- Yes.
25:28SPEAKERI've already been told that I am an early candidate
25:30SPEAKERfor bifocals, so I don't need to hear any more
25:32SPEAKERabout my vision deteriorating.
25:35SPEAKER- Just, you know, you can also get longer arms
25:37SPEAKERif you need to.
25:38SPEAKERThat's the other way to do it.
25:39SPEAKERJust hold that reading stuff further out.
25:42SPEAKER- Start hanging out on the monkey bars more.
25:44SPEAKER- Yeah. - Okay, let's see.
25:47SPEAKERQuick question from Jonathan.
25:49SPEAKERIf you want a small, cheap network rack,
25:52SPEAKERIkea LAC tables are exactly the right size
25:55SPEAKERto put rack mount switches into.
25:57SPEAKERI wouldn't put anything heavy in,
25:59SPEAKERbut if it's just for a cupboard and a 24-port switch,
26:02SPEAKERthey totally work.
26:04SPEAKERI had actually, I don't know if this came up
26:05SPEAKERon the Discord or somewhere,
26:06SPEAKERbut I had seen this going around somewhere else recently.
26:10SPEAKERAlso, we used to have a couple of LACs around here
26:12SPEAKERthat we just kind of gave away on the sidewalk,
26:14SPEAKERwhich makes me really sad now.
26:15SPEAKER- It's a LAC rack.
26:16SPEAKER- I know, a LAC rack would be pretty awesome.
26:19SPEAKER- I feel like you'd have to hook the back legs together.
26:23SPEAKER- Yeah. - You'd have to drill for sure.
26:26SPEAKERYou can also get a quarter or a half rack
26:30SPEAKERfor like 80 bucks on Amazon, it seems like.
26:32SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
26:35SPEAKER- I don't think most normal human beings
26:37SPEAKERwant a full eight-footer, right?
26:39SPEAKERLike you want-- - I do.
26:41SPEAKER- What is that, a 48U? - I do.
26:43SPEAKER- You want like a 12U.
26:44SPEAKER- I want a rack that I can stand in.
26:48SPEAKER- Well, I mean--
26:49SPEAKER- That's a good reason for it.
26:49SPEAKERI just-- - It's just really heavy.
26:51SPEAKERYour floor isn't rated for it, probably.
26:53SPEAKERIf you filled that thing with computers, you'd--
26:54SPEAKER- Oh, not here.
26:55SPEAKERNo, I'd never do it in an apartment.
26:56SPEAKERThat's insanity. - Yeah, you'd sag the building.
26:57SPEAKER- That is, yeah.
27:00SPEAKERStand-up racks are for a cement floor basement
27:02SPEAKERand nothing else.
27:03SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly. - That's my stance.
27:06SPEAKERAnyway, that's a pretty hot tip.
27:08SPEAKER- I like that.
27:09SPEAKERI mean, you could have a little side table
27:10SPEAKERover here with a rack.
27:12SPEAKERI'm increasingly on the let's rack mount everything
27:14SPEAKERin the office train. - Yeah, yeah.
27:16SPEAKER- My switch is rack mountable, put the streaming computer
27:19SPEAKERrack mount. - Just get it
27:20SPEAKERall out of sight.
27:21SPEAKER- I told you about my water heat sink idea, right?
27:26SPEAKER- Yes, yes.
27:27SPEAKER- Just put a bucket of cold water in here
27:29SPEAKERat the start of the night and dump all the heat
27:31SPEAKERfrom the computer in there.
27:32SPEAKER- There you go.
27:33SPEAKER- Yeah.
27:35SPEAKER- All right.
27:36SPEAKERI have been looking at 10 gigabit network equipment again,
27:40SPEAKERso I might need a rack-size switch at some point.
27:44SPEAKERThat's down, that's way down the line.
27:46SPEAKER- What kind of files are you transferring over there, man?
27:48SPEAKER- Well, actually right now, I mean,
27:50SPEAKERsince we're doing everything at home,
27:51SPEAKERlike I am recording 30 to 40 gigabyte videos
27:54SPEAKERon a near daily basis.
27:56SPEAKER- Oh, shit.
27:57SPEAKER- Since I'm archiving- - So 10 gigabit makes sense.
28:00SPEAKER- Yeah, like I'm archiving everything
28:01SPEAKERat 30 megabit right now.
28:03SPEAKERSo yeah, like the Mario 2 stream we did yesterday
28:07SPEAKERwas over 30 gig when we finished like files of that size,
28:09SPEAKERtake a little bit of time to move around.
28:11SPEAKER- Hold on, just to be clear,
28:13SPEAKERyou're playing a 240 vertical line resolution game-
28:18SPEAKER- Look, man, don't, don't nitpick.
28:19SPEAKER- And you're recording it.
28:20SPEAKER- Don't nitpick my workflow, please.
28:23SPEAKERDon't forget, don't forget these files
28:25SPEAKERare going straight through another round of compression
28:27SPEAKERafter we record them.
28:28SPEAKER- Yeah, of course.
28:29SPEAKER- So they need to be high quality the first time
28:32SPEAKERbecause they're immediately gonna get crunched down
28:34SPEAKERto like eight megabit again.
28:35SPEAKERAnd if they, like, that's the thing,
28:36SPEAKERwe were pulling like Twitch archives,
28:37SPEAKERwhich are already eight megabit
28:39SPEAKERand throwing them through that encoder again,
28:41SPEAKERthat doesn't look very good.
28:43SPEAKER- No, no, Twitch archives are,
28:44SPEAKERlike Twitch and YouTube archives
28:46SPEAKERare not an acceptable archiving medium.
28:49SPEAKER- Right, that's what I'm saying.
28:49SPEAKER- That is for sure.
28:50SPEAKER- So like we need a high quality version
28:52SPEAKERto throw into our video robot.
28:55SPEAKER- Man.
28:56SPEAKER- To crunch it down again.
28:58SPEAKERAnyway, I probably wouldn't get a Switch.
29:00SPEAKERI would just get two 10 gig cards,
29:02SPEAKERone in my PC, one in my NAS
29:03SPEAKERand just do a direct connection.
29:05SPEAKER- That makes sense.
29:06SPEAKER- Yeah, it would be fun.
29:08SPEAKERLet's see here.
29:11SPEAKER- Is there a question in there?
29:12SPEAKER- No, it's just a little tip.
29:14SPEAKER- Okay, okay.
29:15SPEAKER- The lack is just happens to be the exact right size.
29:17SPEAKER- Oh, oh, oh, got it, okay.
29:21SPEAKER- Question from Justin.
29:23SPEAKERHow do I get my Windows audio to automatically Switch
29:25SPEAKERfrom my computer speakers to my TV HDMI when I turn it on?
29:29SPEAKER- That's impossible, you can't do it.
29:30SPEAKER- Windows audio device juggling is terrible
29:33SPEAKERand always has been.
29:34SPEAKER- Well, hold on.
29:35SPEAKERYou can do that if you leave it plugged in all the time
29:37SPEAKERand you set the HDMI on the TV as the primary
29:41SPEAKERby turning it when it's on.
29:43SPEAKERAnd then when you plug in the TV or turn on the TV ever,
29:47SPEAKEReven if it's not you doing it, it will switch, it should.
29:50SPEAKERThat's what it's supposed to do.
29:51SPEAKER- Which is great right up until the first time it happens
29:53SPEAKERand you don't want it to.
29:55SPEAKERWhen somebody else turns the TV on.
29:56SPEAKER- You're watching something untoward
29:58SPEAKERand say a partner turns on the TV in the other room
30:00SPEAKERand all of a sudden there's strange noises coming from it.
30:02SPEAKER- That's not exactly where my mind went with that,
30:04SPEAKERbut sure, that's also undesirable.
30:06SPEAKER- I'm just, I'm talking about buying gifts
30:09SPEAKERfor your partner in incognito mode.
30:11SPEAKER- Yes.
30:12SPEAKER- Gifts.
30:13SPEAKER- Yes, if you're watching a YouTube review
30:14SPEAKERof that cutlery set and you don't want to give away
30:16SPEAKERthe surprise.
30:17SPEAKER- Yeah, or you're like into some,
30:19SPEAKERyou're watching some anime and people are really excited.
30:22SPEAKER- Yeah, or just gotten way down a VTuber hole
30:25SPEAKERand you don't want anybody to know what you're up to.
30:27SPEAKER- Yeah, I got no beef with the VTubers.
30:32SPEAKER- Let's see if I can manage to include a VTuber thumbnail
30:35SPEAKERon both podcasts that I edit this week.
30:38SPEAKER- That was, there was some conversation about this week
30:41SPEAKERon the Discord.
30:42SPEAKER- It's attention getting.
30:44SPEAKER- People love their VTubers.
30:45SPEAKER- They sure do.
30:46SPEAKER- We have some friends who do some like VTubers stuff.
30:48SPEAKER- Whatever, dude, I know that, fuck that, man.
30:50SPEAKERI was VTubing five years ago.
30:52SPEAKER- Over here, how were you VTubing five years ago?
30:54SPEAKER- I full on used face rig on a UPF in 2015.
30:58SPEAKER- Wow, you were a thought leader.
31:00SPEAKER- Subbed myself in.
31:02SPEAKER- T-H-O-T-T, you could have been,
31:03SPEAKERyou could have been huge in Japan, Korea, and China.
31:08SPEAKER- Yes, I missed my calling.
31:10SPEAKER- Missed opportunity.
31:11SPEAKER- As usual.
31:13SPEAKERThere might be some third-party solutions out there
31:15SPEAKERto make the audio device switching a little better
31:18SPEAKERin Windows, but it's not amazing.
31:20SPEAKERIt's better than it used to be, actually.
31:22SPEAKER- I feel like there's a command line script,
31:23SPEAKERlike there's a NIRSOFT tool.
31:24SPEAKER- Oh yeah, NIRSOFT always to the rescue, NIRSOFT definitely.
31:27SPEAKERIn fact, I use a NIRSOFT utility to do exactly that,
31:30SPEAKERbut that's not quite, he's asking for automatic switching
31:34SPEAKERback and forth intelligently, and it doesn't,
31:37SPEAKERlike even in my use case with that NIRSOFT,
31:39SPEAKERI still have to click a shortcut every time
31:41SPEAKERI wanna change a device and stuff like that.
31:43SPEAKER- Well, so you can do task scheduler
31:45SPEAKERand have it watch for a particular event ID
31:48SPEAKERwith that device connecting,
31:50SPEAKERand then fire the NIRSOFT task on that.
31:53SPEAKERBut my guess is it's not gonna work very well,
31:54SPEAKERand it's gonna be really fucking annoying.
31:56SPEAKER- Knowing Windows, that's probably not very reliable,
31:58SPEAKERand probably more work than you wanna do.
32:02SPEAKERYeah, it's just kind of a mess.
32:06SPEAKERLet's see here.
32:08SPEAKERActually, I didn't even realize
32:09SPEAKERwe have two PC audio questions this week,
32:11SPEAKERso I'll just do the other one, this is from Jack.
32:15SPEAKERIf you have speakers hooked up to your computer
32:16SPEAKERand they have a volume knob on them,
32:18SPEAKERbut your keyboard also has volume keys, which do you use?
32:21SPEAKERThe software volume control or the hardware?
32:24SPEAKERI've always opted for the hardware knob, but my sneakers,
32:28SPEAKERI think he meant speakers here,
32:30SPEAKERbut my speakers on my desk will be behind monitors now,
32:32SPEAKERso I'm gonna have to try and retrain my whole situation.
32:37SPEAKERDo you have strong feelings about this?
32:38SPEAKER- I use the hardware knob at 50%.
32:39SPEAKER- And then never touch it?
32:41SPEAKER- Never touch it.
32:42SPEAKER- Oh my God, that is...
32:43SPEAKERI'm a little more flexible these days,
32:45SPEAKERbut that is the exact opposite of where I used to be
32:47SPEAKERlike way back in the day, like 20 years ago or whatever.
32:49SPEAKERLike I was full on hardware knob and nothing else.
32:51SPEAKERI didn't wanna touch any of the volume sliders on the PC
32:55SPEAKERfor any reason if I could help it.
32:57SPEAKERI don't know why,
32:58SPEAKERbut like application specific volume controls
33:00SPEAKERor even like the slider and windows or whatever,
33:02SPEAKERjust like, no, thank you.
33:03SPEAKERI don't like, I couldn't tell you.
33:05SPEAKERI wanted a consistent volume out of the source
33:07SPEAKERand just be able to change it to the hardware level.
33:10SPEAKER- So that's what I used to do, I guess.
33:13SPEAKERAnd since I started streaming more,
33:15SPEAKERgetting the audio levels right is more impactful
33:18SPEAKERto other human beings and not just me.
33:19SPEAKER- I think that's what broke me of that habit
33:21SPEAKERis at some point, if you're trying to stream,
33:23SPEAKERyou're trying to send one type audio out to people
33:25SPEAKERunder Discord and like another one to the stream you're doing
33:27SPEAKERand like you're trying to maybe record yet another volume,
33:29SPEAKERlike at some point you have to give in
33:31SPEAKERand just fill volume anywhere you can.
33:34SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly.
33:36SPEAKERI miss, so I also have studio monitors on my desk
33:39SPEAKERand haven't had an easy volume knob on them
33:42SPEAKERin like five years.
33:43SPEAKERSo when I got rid of the clipshes, the volume knob went away.
33:47SPEAKERSo that kind of solved the problem for me.
33:49SPEAKER- You will take my Cambridge soundworks cubes
33:52SPEAKERfrom my cold dead hands, so I will always have a volume knob.
33:56SPEAKER- You have a lifetime supply right now.
33:58SPEAKER- I will always have a volume knob,
34:01SPEAKERbut use the software ones too.
34:05SPEAKERThat's what they're there for.
34:06SPEAKERAll right.
34:07SPEAKER- I think we might have gotten a little bit of my daughter
34:08SPEAKERin that last question, so I apologize.
34:10SPEAKER- I didn't hear anything.
34:12SPEAKERUsing any of the RTX, mess with that broadcast app,
34:16SPEAKERthis price should probably save that for another week, but.
34:18SPEAKER- So the broadcast app, this question is from Brad.
34:21SPEAKER- Hey, do you mess with that broadcast app at all?
34:24SPEAKERIt doesn't really work for me 'cause I do two PC.
34:26SPEAKER- Oh, right.
34:27SPEAKEROkay.
34:28SPEAKERIt's spitting out virtual devices,
34:30SPEAKERso you need it to be on the same machine
34:32SPEAKERas the streaming is happening on?
34:35SPEAKER- Like theoretically, so I don't have an RTX card
34:38SPEAKERin the streaming machine 'cause I don't need one there.
34:42SPEAKERI could theoretically run it there
34:45SPEAKERand it would be nice maybe to filter Discord
34:46SPEAKER'cause a lot of times you play games with people
34:48SPEAKERwho have clacky keyboards.
34:49SPEAKERIt would be dope to take out the clackiness from their feed,
34:53SPEAKERbut it doesn't.
34:56SPEAKERBecause of the way I use the hardware mixer,
34:58SPEAKERit makes everything way more complicated
35:00SPEAKERand I don't think there's an easy way to do that
35:02SPEAKER'cause it runs, the Discord feed runs into voice meter
35:06SPEAKERand then across an SEO bus to the mixer
35:10SPEAKERwhere it gets mixed in and then goes straight to OBS,
35:12SPEAKERso there's no place for me to filter it out really.
35:13SPEAKER- It's fair.
35:14SPEAKER- Yeah.
35:15SPEAKER- That is fair.
35:16SPEAKERIf and when I get my hands on an RTX card,
35:18SPEAKERI am excited to try that stuff out.
35:19SPEAKEREspecially 'cause I got this super nice new mirrorless camera
35:22SPEAKERwhich already does nice depth of field optically.
35:25SPEAKERSo I'm hoping that, I mean, it seems like that RTX fake green
35:29SPEAKERor programmatic green screen feature works very well anyway,
35:34SPEAKERbut I'm assuming if you've got a camera
35:35SPEAKERthat focuses very well on the foreground
35:37SPEAKERand blurs the background, it'll be even better.
35:39SPEAKER- You shouldn't, but I mean, since you have the camera
35:41SPEAKERthat blurs the background, you shouldn't need the,
35:45SPEAKER'cause remember there's performance hit on that stuff.
35:46SPEAKERYou don't want to take a 10% performance hit
35:49SPEAKERon blurring the background when you have a lens
35:51SPEAKERthat does that on your camera already.
35:52SPEAKER- Oh no, I'm not talking about blurring the background.
35:54SPEAKERI'm talking about removing it.
35:56SPEAKER- Same thing.
35:56SPEAKER- Can, are there--
35:57SPEAKER- Oh, you want to green screen it with the--
35:58SPEAKER- Yes, yes, I want just a cut out of me
36:00SPEAKERin the foreground with no background.
36:02SPEAKER- Yeah, that works.
36:03SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm excited to try that stuff out.
36:05SPEAKER- It's funny 'cause all the Twitch kids
36:06SPEAKERare all about having cool backgrounds.
36:09SPEAKER- Well, a lot of people do that cut out now.
36:11SPEAKERLike I feel like a lot of the bigger Twitch feeds I look at.
36:15SPEAKERIn the three years that I've been streaming,
36:18SPEAKERit has gone, it started out as everybody green screening
36:21SPEAKERand then everybody went to the big room
36:25SPEAKERand now people are, that started,
36:26SPEAKERthe wave is starting to turn back it seems.
36:28SPEAKER- Don't get me wrong.
36:29SPEAKERIf I can sub stupid animated backgrounds in
36:31SPEAKERinstead of cutting myself out, keying myself out
36:34SPEAKERor whatever, I will absolutely lead in that direction.
36:36SPEAKER- Don't do static.
36:37SPEAKERH.264 does not like static, it turns out.
36:40SPEAKER- I will hang out in front
36:41SPEAKERof the Weather Channel all day long.
36:43SPEAKER- Yeah, that good place background, everything's fine.
36:46SPEAKER- That's right, at least it's fine somewhere.
36:49SPEAKER- Yeah, in hell.
36:50SPEAKER- Let's see, how about this one?
36:57SPEAKERTom from Cape Cod.
36:59SPEAKER- Okay.
37:00SPEAKER- I wanted to get your thoughts on the arc
37:02SPEAKERof industrial design of phones
37:03SPEAKERand other consumer tech products,
37:05SPEAKERspecifically Apple's iPhone and AirPod line.
37:08SPEAKERI've never understood the move towards a design
37:10SPEAKERprioritizing rounded edges and all glass
37:13SPEAKERthat seems incapable of being held reliably
37:15SPEAKERby the human hand and prone to sliding effortlessly
37:18SPEAKERfrom your pocket.
37:19SPEAKERLikewise, the smooth rounded edges of my AirPods case
37:22SPEAKERseem to be tailor made to slip out of the pockets
37:24SPEAKERof my scrubs while driving or off the edge
37:27SPEAKERof shelves and desks.
37:29SPEAKERSo I wanted to hear your thoughts on this drive
37:31SPEAKERtowards form over function that ultimately ends up being
37:34SPEAKERsomewhat or mostly concealed by some form
37:36SPEAKERof protective case anyway.
37:38SPEAKERI loved the early days with my Droid and iPhone 4
37:41SPEAKERwhere I could safely carry my phone naked
37:43SPEAKERas the day it was born unencumbered by a protective case.
37:47SPEAKER- I miss the plastic back phones.
37:48SPEAKER- Really?
37:49SPEAKER- Huh? - Yeah.
37:50SPEAKER- Interesting.
37:51SPEAKER- Well, I've...
37:53SPEAKER- Just for the ruggedness?
37:55SPEAKER- So my daughter was born in 2013.
37:57SPEAKERStarting about 2015, I always had to have a case
38:00SPEAKERon the phone 'cause I smashed two iPhones
38:02SPEAKERwithin about two weeks of each other.
38:03SPEAKER- Ooh, that hurts.
38:04SPEAKER- It was expensive.
38:05SPEAKER- Yeah, that hurts.
38:06SPEAKER- I mean, I didn't smash them, I had help.
38:08SPEAKER- Yes, of course.
38:09SPEAKER- As soon as they were equally destroyed.
38:12SPEAKERI feel like the post iPhone 4 design
38:16SPEAKERwas designed to move cases.
38:18SPEAKER- Like so?
38:19SPEAKER- Or AppleCare.
38:20SPEAKER- Yeah.
38:20SPEAKER- Well, you'd have to be a maniac to not buy AppleCare
38:23SPEAKERon a phone with a glass back.
38:24SPEAKER- Yeah, totally.
38:25SPEAKERWell, so the 4 had a glass back, did it not?
38:28SPEAKERI'm pretty sure it did.
38:29SPEAKERThe 4 did, the 5 did not.
38:29SPEAKER- I'm saying anything from the 4 on, yeah.
38:32SPEAKER- I think the 5 was all metal.
38:35SPEAKERAnd then...
38:36SPEAKERActually, so was the 6.
38:37SPEAKER- The 5 had a partial glass back.
38:39SPEAKER- The 6, everything else after that has been glass.
38:41SPEAKER- It was that little strip at the top that was glass.
38:42SPEAKER- Yeah, the strip at the top of the antenna.
38:43SPEAKER- I think that was for antenna purposes, yeah, right?
38:44SPEAKER- Yeah.
38:45SPEAKER- I mean, that's why they're on glass now, right?
38:46SPEAKERIt was mostly antenna stuff.
38:48SPEAKER- And wireless charge is just as transparent as plastic.
38:51SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm with you.
38:52SPEAKERI wish they would just come up with some
38:54SPEAKERhigh-end Italian plastic that Apple could be happy with.
38:57SPEAKER- Look, this is, yeah, this is very much...
39:00SPEAKERLike the design goal with...
39:02SPEAKERFirst off, scrubs have terrible...
39:05SPEAKERI've never worn a pair.
39:06SPEAKERI've only worn scrubs a handful of times.
39:07SPEAKERThe pockets suck.
39:09SPEAKERThey're always too shallow and shit falls out of them.
39:11SPEAKERSo...
39:13SPEAKER- There's that.
39:14SPEAKER- There's that.
39:15SPEAKERB, I don't...
39:17SPEAKERI think that they...
39:18SPEAKERPart of this is Johnny Ives bullshit
39:20SPEAKERabout making things thinner and shinier
39:22SPEAKERand making them feel expensive even if they're not.
39:24SPEAKER- And more rounded.
39:25SPEAKER- Yeah, well, I mean, the rounded
39:27SPEAKERis an old school Apple thing.
39:28SPEAKERThat's been around.
39:29SPEAKERLike they always did rounded icons and stuff like that.
39:30SPEAKER- Before, well, I mean, I'll just say it right now.
39:32SPEAKERI never owned an iPhone 4, but the 4 and the 5,
39:34SPEAKERwhich I did own, I think are my favorite iPhones still.
39:37SPEAKER- The 5 is probably my favorite iPhone at this point.
39:39SPEAKER- 5 might be my favorite iPhone.
39:40SPEAKERI mean, the chamfered edges were a little weird.
39:42SPEAKERYou know, the triangular kind of slanted shape, but...
39:45SPEAKER- There's a straight through line
39:46SPEAKERfrom the 4 and the 5 to the 10 though.
39:48SPEAKER- Like I've got...
39:49SPEAKERHang on.
39:50SPEAKERI've got my 5 right here.
39:53SPEAKERThe screen is flat.
39:54SPEAKER- What a beaut.
39:55SPEAKER- Nice, just nice, nice hard edge.
39:57SPEAKERIt's easy to swipe all the way to the edge of the screen.
40:00SPEAKERIt stands up.
40:02SPEAKERLike you can't see it in the camera,
40:03SPEAKERbut like it literally...
40:04SPEAKER- Yeah, the standing up is really good.
40:04SPEAKER- Literally stands up on its edge.
40:05SPEAKERI've got it sitting here standing up on its side right now.
40:08SPEAKER- I would put it on the tray in front of me
40:09SPEAKERand just balance it on the barely pulled out plane tray.
40:14SPEAKER- So do you know how starting with the 6,
40:16SPEAKERthey're glass and I've got an 8 right here,
40:18SPEAKERwhich you can maybe kind of see,
40:20SPEAKERlike the glass went to rounded starting with the 6.
40:23SPEAKERI have always had a hard time swiping
40:24SPEAKERto the far edge of the UI
40:26SPEAKERbecause of that stupid rounded edge and I hate it.
40:28SPEAKER- Well, so the 6 also had the new borosilicate glass
40:32SPEAKERand the curves...
40:34SPEAKERThe 6 was the one I broke two of
40:35SPEAKERand I'm pretty sure it was because those curves
40:37SPEAKERare incredible stress points.
40:39SPEAKERSo any kind of impact on the curve,
40:42SPEAKERthe corner curve seemed to smash them.
40:44SPEAKERI feel like the chamfered edges on the aluminum
40:47SPEAKERwere really good.
40:50SPEAKERBut I would say all modern phones
40:54SPEAKERwith a handful of exceptions are designed to have cases
40:57SPEAKERand that's just a cost of doing business.
40:59SPEAKER- Yeah, I suppose so.
41:00SPEAKER- I mean, also the thing to remember is in that time,
41:04SPEAKERI mean, the iPhone was expensive when it launched,
41:06SPEAKERbut we've gone from phones that they expected you
41:07SPEAKERto upgrade every year to...
41:10SPEAKERI'm into my third year, I think, on my iPhone 10
41:13SPEAKERand it's just now starting to kind of chug a little bit.
41:17SPEAKERSo I feel like, you know, buy a case.
41:23SPEAKERI'm on my second case for this phone, actually.
41:26SPEAKERI wore the first one out,
41:26SPEAKERone of the leather one that I got at first, so.
41:29SPEAKER- Case I'm using on this 8
41:30SPEAKERis billed as the world's thinnest case.
41:32SPEAKERIn fact, I feel like calling it a case is very generous.
41:35SPEAKER- Those don't do anything to protect the phone from drops,
41:37SPEAKERit's just scratches.
41:38SPEAKER- No, it's just scratches, I only got it.
41:39SPEAKERI got it 'cause it has a glass back
41:41SPEAKERand I wanted to not scratch that up
41:42SPEAKERto make sure the resale value hung around a bit.
41:45SPEAKER- Well, the nice thing about the thin cases
41:47SPEAKERon the glass back is if you smash the back,
41:49SPEAKERit doesn't matter 'cause you'll never know
41:50SPEAKERuntil you take the case off when you're ready to sell it.
41:52SPEAKER- And it does give a nice textured grip
41:53SPEAKERthat makes it a little easier
41:55SPEAKERand does not increase the bulk of the phone.
41:56SPEAKERAnyway, I mean, it's totally understandable,
42:00SPEAKERbut they sure are late with the iPhone announcement
42:02SPEAKERfor the year, but all those rumors about it,
42:06SPEAKERall those rumors about the iPhone 12
42:07SPEAKERgoing back to the four or five era design language
42:11SPEAKERare very, very exciting to me.
42:14SPEAKER- This is the first time in a while
42:15SPEAKERthat we don't kind of know
42:16SPEAKERwhat the phone's gonna look like yet.
42:17SPEAKERUsually there's rumors by this point.
42:19SPEAKER- There are some renders out there, you can find some stuff.
42:21SPEAKERIt's not. - There's always renders,
42:22SPEAKERbut are they actual, typically the case manufacturers
42:27SPEAKERwill have leaked blanks and stuff like that by now.
42:30SPEAKER- I wonder if just the pandemic is just making it harder
42:32SPEAKERfor leakers to get their hands on that information.
42:34SPEAKER- I would bet that there are way fewer people
42:36SPEAKERactually touching the things across all,
42:40SPEAKERall types of these markets.
42:42SPEAKER- I think the latest rumors I saw
42:44SPEAKERsaid announcement like early October,
42:45SPEAKERso that's probably just a couple of weeks,
42:47SPEAKERthree weeks off maybe.
42:48SPEAKER- I mean, so the only thing that makes me excited
42:51SPEAKERabout those dual screen phones
42:53SPEAKERis that then you have something that you close up,
42:56SPEAKERthe clamshell closes up, you put it in your pocket
42:58SPEAKERand all the delicate bits are protected.
43:01SPEAKER- God, we're just back to flip phones again, aren't we?
43:04SPEAKER- I mean, you can buy a Razr right now.
43:05SPEAKER- Everything, everything just wraps back around eventually.
43:08SPEAKER- Yeah, pretty soon. - Yes, yes.
43:10SPEAKER- That joke in Zoolander about how small the phone is
43:12SPEAKERwill make sense to the next generation of children.
43:15SPEAKER- Indeed.
43:16SPEAKER- Also don't watch Zoolander, maybe.
43:18SPEAKER- All right, couple more emails real quick
43:20SPEAKERbefore we get out of here.
43:22SPEAKERThis one is from Tom in Toronto.
43:25SPEAKERCouple of more like socially minded topics here around tech.
43:30SPEAKERAround April, I decided to learn how to program.
43:32SPEAKERI've done random coding and scripting over the years,
43:34SPEAKERbut most of the time I didn't really understand
43:35SPEAKERwhat I was doing and just copied and pasted random stuff
43:37SPEAKERfrom Stack Overflow, a literal script kitty.
43:41SPEAKERAlso I'm approaching 40 and maybe this is my midlife crisis,
43:44SPEAKERbut the good news is that it's been great
43:46SPEAKERat keeping my mind occupied
43:48SPEAKERand has been incredibly rewarding.
43:49SPEAKERIt's obviously intimidating and daunting
43:51SPEAKERto start out at my age
43:52SPEAKERand considering I could barely remember high school math,
43:54SPEAKERI thought there was a good chance
43:55SPEAKERI wouldn't actually be able to do it.
43:58SPEAKERBut since April, I've learned enough C
44:00SPEAKERto be somewhat dangerous and enough Python
44:02SPEAKERto already consider other languages inferior.
44:05SPEAKERI've learned a ton and maybe I just happened
44:06SPEAKERto fall into decent communities, including your own,
44:09SPEAKERbut people have been incredibly helpful and supportive.
44:12SPEAKERWith that long self-congratulatory preamble over,
44:16SPEAKERone thing that keeps popping into my head is the thought
44:18SPEAKERthat a lot of the work programmers do
44:20SPEAKERmay not be very ethical.
44:22SPEAKERI don't just mean programmers and engineers
44:24SPEAKERthat write something illicit
44:25SPEAKERso that a car passes an emissions test.
44:28SPEAKERI mean the run of the mill work done
44:29SPEAKERwithin a lot of companies.
44:31SPEAKERHow many people do programmers put out of work each year?
44:34SPEAKEROpen AI has only been around for five years
44:36SPEAKERand GPT has only been around since 2018.
44:39SPEAKERWhere will they be in 2030?
44:42SPEAKERI also don't hear a lot of politicians
44:43SPEAKERand lawmakers addressing this sort of thing.
44:45SPEAKERGenerally when anything related to technology comes up
44:48SPEAKERin front of government leaders, it's embarrassing.
44:51SPEAKERI don't think most countries have any sort
44:53SPEAKERof programmers labor organization like engineers may have
44:56SPEAKERor the same level of just cultures
44:59SPEAKERwhere this sort of thing might be addressed.
45:02SPEAKERI'm guessing this must be discussed in academics,
45:04SPEAKERbut from the outside, a lot of the general organization
45:07SPEAKERseems insanely fragmented and heavily corporate.
45:11SPEAKERDo you know of any leaders out there
45:12SPEAKERtalking about this sort of thing intelligently?
45:14SPEAKERDoes any of this worry you as much as it does me?
45:18SPEAKERWill shook his head and then nodded his head.
45:19SPEAKERI think I'm with you on all of that.
45:22SPEAKERYeah, everything you said is right.
45:25SPEAKERYes, like I mean, whatever.
45:27SPEAKERI mean, that's just such a broad topic.
45:28SPEAKERYou know, the idea of automation displacing
45:30SPEAKERpeople's livelihoods becomes more and more urgent every day.
45:35SPEAKERI mean, yeah.
45:38SPEAKERLike the one, I don't know how much stock you put in this
45:41SPEAKERbut the one I always see floated as the nightmare scenario
45:43SPEAKERis the idea of the end of human operated long haul trucking.
45:48SPEAKER- Yeah, that seems like it would take a boatload of jobs.
45:50SPEAKER- Yes, and how many people that will put out of work
45:52SPEAKERand or more to the point, how close that might be.
45:54SPEAKERI mean, that's the part where maybe it breaks down
45:56SPEAKERis maybe like people always think things like self-driving
45:59SPEAKERare a lot closer than they actually are.
46:01SPEAKERMaybe that's 30 or 40 years away instead of 10.
46:04SPEAKERBut like, that's the one I keep seeing people saying
46:08SPEAKERis like, oh, that's the one that may actually happen
46:10SPEAKERand cause this massive, massive disruption.
46:14SPEAKER- So I talked to an economist friend
46:16SPEAKERabout the idea of automation killing jobs years ago.
46:19SPEAKER- Or in this case, we can also roll like AI killing jobs.
46:23SPEAKER- Yeah, same thing.
46:24SPEAKERI mean, AI is replacing brain jobs.
46:27SPEAKERAutomation is replacing physical jobs.
46:32SPEAKERAnd he said that every time this has happened in the past,
46:36SPEAKERstarting with like the invention of the cotton mill
46:39SPEAKERor cotton gin and the industrial revolution
46:41SPEAKERand all that stuff,
46:42SPEAKERevery time there's been a technological advance
46:45SPEAKERthat reduced the amount of labor
46:47SPEAKERthat goes into previous jobs,
46:52SPEAKERthe result of that labor going away was always more jobs.
46:58SPEAKERLike, because if all the blogging,
47:01SPEAKERin the example we were talking about was AI,
47:03SPEAKERmachine learning algorithms writing blog posts,
47:06SPEAKER'cause that's been like,
47:07SPEAKERif you recall, there was a thing in like 2013
47:10SPEAKERthat they had a bad ML algorithm
47:12SPEAKERthat could kind of generate a blog post
47:13SPEAKERoff of a press release pretty easily.
47:16SPEAKERAnd the thing that he said in that example was,
47:22SPEAKERhey, probably the people that are doing those jobs now
47:26SPEAKERwill find other jobs either picking the press releases
47:30SPEAKERthat go into the generator, so their output goes way up.
47:34SPEAKERSo instead of writing five $10 blog posts a day,
47:36SPEAKERthey'll write 50 $10 blog posts a day.
47:38SPEAKERSo there'll be way more content,
47:40SPEAKERwhich is a whole other problem.
47:42SPEAKEROr there'll be other jobs training the algorithms
47:47SPEAKERto work better or something like that.
47:50SPEAKERIt's always scary, I think,
47:52SPEAKERwhen we think about automation replacing people's jobs.
47:55SPEAKERBut the fossil fuel thing is kind of an interesting place.
47:59SPEAKERLike, yeah, we've lost a bunch of coal jobs,
48:01SPEAKERwe've lost a bunch of natural gas jobs.
48:03SPEAKERI mean, actually we haven't lost so many natural gas jobs
48:05SPEAKER'cause fracking is way up.
48:06SPEAKERBut the point is we've lost fossil fuel jobs
48:08SPEAKERand at the same time,
48:09SPEAKERthe number of environmentally friendly power generation jobs
48:13SPEAKERhave multiplied dramatically.
48:14SPEAKERAre there as many of those
48:16SPEAKERas there were oil drilling jobs 50 years ago?
48:18SPEAKERProbably not.
48:19SPEAKERBut there aren't as many oil drilling jobs
48:21SPEAKERas there were 50 years ago either
48:22SPEAKERbecause that whole industry has gotten pretty automated.
48:25SPEAKERAnd yeah, anyway.
48:27SPEAKER- Yeah, I believe what your friend is saying
48:29SPEAKERon a long enough time scale,
48:30SPEAKERof course, society is going to adapt.
48:32SPEAKERLike the problem is in the short term,
48:33SPEAKERhow much pain and uncertainty does that create
48:35SPEAKERfor the specific individuals being displaced?
48:38SPEAKERLike obviously, people who are kids now,
48:41SPEAKERonce they come up and those jobs are no longer there,
48:43SPEAKERthey will find something else to do
48:44SPEAKERbecause they've never had to find something to do
48:46SPEAKERin the first place before.
48:47SPEAKER- Yeah, like clean water distiller will be a job
48:49SPEAKERwhen our kids are looking for jobs,
48:52SPEAKERthey'll have to go out and moisture farm
48:54SPEAKERso that we have fresh water to drink.
48:55SPEAKER- But for the people that have built an entire life
48:57SPEAKERand career out of or around something
48:59SPEAKERthat suddenly is not there anymore,
49:00SPEAKERlike that is significantly more problematic
49:03SPEAKERthan it is for future generations.
49:05SPEAKERLike, I don't know.
49:06SPEAKERLike, I don't cotton to the idea
49:08SPEAKERthat progress should be held back
49:11SPEAKERbecause it will put people out of work.
49:13SPEAKER- You can't do that.
49:13SPEAKERIt doesn't work.
49:14SPEAKERWe've tried that before.
49:15SPEAKER- Yeah, not only that, but also like, you know,
49:16SPEAKERyou can follow that logic to say like,
49:18SPEAKERwe shouldn't pursue green energy
49:19SPEAKERbecause it will put fossil fuel workers out of a job.
49:22SPEAKERLike that's obviously not tenable either,
49:23SPEAKERbut like that just places even more of an onus
49:26SPEAKERon political leaders to take care of those people
49:28SPEAKERand ease the transition and make sure
49:31SPEAKERthat they are not left destitute or helpless, right?
49:34SPEAKERBut unfortunately, it just feels like the will
49:36SPEAKERis never there at the political level
49:38SPEAKERto actually like have those sorts of,
49:41SPEAKERyeah, especially here.
49:44SPEAKER- The other side of this is the ethics of programming.
49:46SPEAKERAnd I think that people are starting
49:49SPEAKERto think about that much more now.
49:51SPEAKERIf you look at the impact of things like Facebook
49:53SPEAKERand election interference and, you know,
49:56SPEAKERplaces where like, if you write that,
49:59SPEAKERif you contribute to the algorithm
50:01SPEAKERthat determines what news people see on Facebook,
50:03SPEAKERare you culpable in the damage
50:05SPEAKERthat Facebook has done to Western democracies?
50:09SPEAKERI'm not in a position to say yes or no,
50:11SPEAKERbut I wouldn't wanna do that job probably.
50:14SPEAKERAnd I think people have to decide whether,
50:16SPEAKERyou know, a lot of good perks and a nice salary
50:18SPEAKERis worth contributing to that on an individual basis.
50:21SPEAKERIt would be nice if, like the American Society of Engineers,
50:26SPEAKERthe different engineering societies,
50:27SPEAKERlike there's chemical engineering societies,
50:29SPEAKERor there's civil engineer societies, stuff like that,
50:34SPEAKERdo kind of fill this hole for engineering,
50:38SPEAKERyou know, people who are engineer engineers,
50:42SPEAKERnot software engineers.
50:43SPEAKERAnd I feel like we don't have that kind of infrastructure
50:46SPEAKERaround software engineers,
50:47SPEAKERpartly because of the kind of shaming of unions
50:53SPEAKERfor white collar workers for a long time.
50:56SPEAKERNot that those societies are necessarily typical labor
50:59SPEAKERunions, but they do have some of the same purposes.
51:03SPEAKERAnd we would all be better off if more people
51:09SPEAKERwere thinking about what the long-term ramifications
51:13SPEAKERof their work and actions were.
51:15SPEAKER- Yes, yes, you're totally right.
51:17SPEAKERThere is no stopping the march of progress,
51:19SPEAKEReven if you want to, right?
51:20SPEAKERThe answer is just, you need more representation,
51:23SPEAKERmore, you know, more robust social safety net,
51:26SPEAKERmore regulatory action to try to funnel it
51:30SPEAKERin a positive direction and not a negative one.
51:32SPEAKER- Well, and the other thing to do,
51:35SPEAKERyeah, the thing to do is to look at what,
51:37SPEAKERfreeing up all of this labor.
51:39SPEAKERLike it's like automated, it's like industrial farming.
51:41SPEAKERYou know, when we industrialized farming in the sixties,
51:43SPEAKERin the US, all of a sudden we had a ton of brains
51:48SPEAKERthat could essentially be used for other things.
51:49SPEAKERSo like little Jimmy didn't have to go work on Papa's farm
51:52SPEAKERdoing the chickens every day.
51:53SPEAKERAnd he could go to college and get a degree
51:55SPEAKERand be an accountant or an engineer
51:59SPEAKERor a software programmer or whatever.
52:01SPEAKERAnd like each time that's happened,
52:04SPEAKERthe workforce has shifted generationally, but we do,
52:07SPEAKERyou're right, we do have to like help the people
52:09SPEAKERwho are pushed out of old jobs.
52:12SPEAKERSo whether it's bloggers or farmers or coal miners.
52:15SPEAKER- Somebody who's always gonna get left behind.
52:17SPEAKER- Yeah, Kirk Cameron, fuck that guy.
52:20SPEAKER- All right, last email. - Hot takes here, sorry.
52:23SPEAKER- Last email.
52:25SPEAKERThis one came in anonymously.
52:27SPEAKER- Oh.
52:28SPEAKER- There's a lot of talk in tech communities
52:30SPEAKERabout new things.
52:31SPEAKERIt's the nature of the beast, but there is no escaping
52:34SPEAKERthat new things cost money and meet old things,
52:36SPEAKERget phased out or thrown away.
52:38SPEAKERCompanies don't get to make cool new things
52:40SPEAKERunless people buy them, but often the changes are small
52:43SPEAKERand old things still work well.
52:46SPEAKERThere's an undercurrent of wanton consumerism to tech
52:48SPEAKERthat prevents a lot of people from engaging with it
52:51SPEAKERand can be a little crass when people dismiss
52:53SPEAKERwhat was amazing a few years ago as crap or unplayable
52:57SPEAKERor unwatchable or unlistenable.
53:01SPEAKEREveryone is different and can do what they want
53:03SPEAKERwith their money.
53:04SPEAKERSo I definitely don't want to start drawing lines
53:05SPEAKERor making examples, but I wanted to ask you too,
53:08SPEAKERhow long do you consider value in tech?
53:11SPEAKERI'm sorry, I misheard that.
53:12SPEAKERHow do you consider value in tech when you're shopping?
53:15SPEAKERDo you have to have a definite purpose or want something
53:18SPEAKERto last a minimum amount of time?
53:20SPEAKERI know it might be a bit different with work-related things,
53:23SPEAKERbut how do you feel about the consumerist angle
53:25SPEAKERthat drives a lot of tech hobbyism
53:28SPEAKERand whether there is a way to lower the barrier of entry
53:31SPEAKERfor some of this stuff?
53:32SPEAKERDo you get a kick out of doing something on the cheap
53:34SPEAKERnearly as well and saving some money?
53:38SPEAKERI will answer that last question first.
53:39SPEAKERYes, absolutely.
53:40SPEAKER- Yeah, 100%.
53:41SPEAKER- I 1000% get way more gratification out of doing something
53:45SPEAKERlike, you know, on a wish and a wing and a prayer
53:48SPEAKERor whatever, you know, like some bootstrapped cheap solution
53:52SPEAKERrather than like spending the big money
53:53SPEAKERand getting the nice thing.
53:54SPEAKERI will always rather put my own solution together
53:56SPEAKERfor something like that.
53:57SPEAKER- Oh, well, but it's tricky.
54:00SPEAKERThat can be tricky too, right?
54:01SPEAKERLike I was looking, I'm having router problems
54:03SPEAKERas predicated by our conversation a few months ago.
54:06SPEAKER- Fancy routers calling.
54:08SPEAKER- Fuck, I don't want a fancy router.
54:10SPEAKERAnyway, the point is I was looking at building
54:12SPEAKERa PF sense router with hardware that I have laying around.
54:15SPEAKERAnd when I figured out what the power would cost
54:18SPEAKERto run the PF sense hardware with the hardware
54:20SPEAKERI have laying around, I was like,
54:22SPEAKERit literally makes more sense for me to spend 180 bucks
54:25SPEAKERon an edge router that's gonna draw infinitely less power
54:30SPEAKERthan to try to like jury rig something together
54:33SPEAKERwith parts that I have just floating.
54:35SPEAKER- There are always gonna be considerations.
54:36SPEAKERI don't mean, it's not always a one size fits all,
54:38SPEAKERjust use your old stuff constantly kind of situation, but.
54:41SPEAKER- Yeah, no, but yeah, like this is a thing
54:44SPEAKERI've struggled with.
54:45SPEAKERI've done this, I've done, I've been in and out
54:46SPEAKERof this business for 20 years.
54:48SPEAKERAnd it's one of the things that when we started testing,
54:49SPEAKERwhen Norman and I started testing, we talked about a lot
54:52SPEAKERbecause at Maximum PC, the brand that I walked into
54:57SPEAKERand became part of and didn't have anything to do
55:00SPEAKERwith forming was performance at all costs,
55:04SPEAKERwhich in the nineties made sense, right?
55:07SPEAKERLike the jump from a Pentium 3 to a Pentium 4 was enormous.
55:13SPEAKERAnd if you were using that computer for work or for play,
55:17SPEAKERlike you could spend money on a new piece of,
55:20SPEAKERalso the hardware was a lot cheaper.
55:22SPEAKERYou'd spend 500 bucks on a new CPU
55:23SPEAKERand it would have a market improvement
55:25SPEAKERin either your enjoyment of your hobby
55:26SPEAKERor your day-to-day work life.
55:28SPEAKERYou could get more work done.
55:29SPEAKERIf you're a photographer or a video editor,
55:32SPEAKERgetting more work done on that machine
55:33SPEAKERmeant you were making more money, which is presumably good.
55:38SPEAKERThe thing that changed is that the performance increases,
55:44SPEAKERgenerationally you started to decrease.
55:46SPEAKERLike you'd go from a 30 or 40 or 50% performance boost
55:49SPEAKERin some cases to a five or 10% performance
55:52SPEAKERin a more incremental upgrade.
55:54SPEAKERAnd at that point, no, you shouldn't upgrade for a 10% boost
55:59SPEAKERunless there is a measurable impact, right?
56:03SPEAKERSo when we started testing, we wanted to balance that out.
56:05SPEAKERAnd we started thinking about, when you're buying phones,
56:08SPEAKERyou're buying a phone for at least a year or two.
56:11SPEAKERNormal people should be buying a phone
56:12SPEAKERfor at least two years,
56:14SPEAKER'cause that's what the contract terms were at the time.
56:16SPEAKER- Even two years to me sounds pretty woefully short.
56:20SPEAKERLike I'm kind of on the same page as this email
56:22SPEAKERor to some degree, like in a perfect world.
56:24SPEAKERAnd granted, we're not really there.
56:25SPEAKERLike in a world where Android and iOS updates are coming out
56:29SPEAKERthat make old phones run like garbage.
56:31SPEAKERAnd actually, they're actually getting worse over time
56:33SPEAKERinstead of just staying static.
56:35SPEAKERLike it's not feasible, but like ideally,
56:38SPEAKERI would like to be able to get like five years or more
56:40SPEAKERout of a phone because-
56:42SPEAKER- So the phone's a weird case, right?
56:44SPEAKER'Cause the batteries are good for usually about 1500 cycles
56:46SPEAKERand they're relatively easy to replace now.
56:48SPEAKER- Yeah, that's assuming like,
56:49SPEAKERoh, you might have to go get at least one,
56:51SPEAKERif maybe not two battery replacements in that time.
56:53SPEAKER- Yeah, but also like I do kind of subscribe
56:59SPEAKERto the Brian Lamb who started Wirecutter
57:02SPEAKERand is a longtime friend and one of the editors
57:05SPEAKERof Gizmodo for a long time has posted a thing years ago
57:09SPEAKERthat I think about every time it's time
57:11SPEAKERto look at new iPhones,
57:12SPEAKERwhich is that that's his primary computer.
57:14SPEAKERAnd like you and I sit in front of desktop computers
57:17SPEAKERmost of the day and it's not our primary computer.
57:19SPEAKERBut if your work or your life is such that like that phone
57:23SPEAKERis your day to day,
57:25SPEAKERthe main way that you connect with the digital world,
57:28SPEAKERI can kind of see upgrading it every year, every two years.
57:31SPEAKER- Sure, yeah.
57:32SPEAKER- I don't find that particularly offensive.
57:33SPEAKERSame thing like Gina,
57:35SPEAKERwe have Gina on the upgrade plan for the phones
57:37SPEAKERbecause like it's literally the main camera
57:40SPEAKERfor the house at this point.
57:41SPEAKERAnd she takes pictures of our kid and our family doing stuff.
57:43SPEAKER- That's fair.
57:45SPEAKER- And those, but also at the same time,
57:47SPEAKERthe performance jump between my iPhone 10
57:50SPEAKERand her iPhone 11 is such that like there's a measure,
57:54SPEAKERthere's a market difference in the quality
57:56SPEAKERof the photos she takes and I take.
57:57SPEAKER- Yeah, like phones, mobile devices are now
57:59SPEAKERwhere the PCs were 20, 25 years ago, right?
58:02SPEAKER- Yeah, well, I think the phones are actually now
58:05SPEAKERat the point where the PCs were 10 years ago.
58:08SPEAKER- So they're starting to hit that plateau, right?
58:10SPEAKER- I think we're at that point of diminishing returns.
58:11SPEAKERIf you buy a thousand dollar phone this year,
58:13SPEAKERyou're probably good for three years at least
58:15SPEAKERand probably five if you,
58:17SPEAKERespecially if you are careful about upgrading
58:19SPEAKERwhen you get towards upgrading software,
58:21SPEAKERwhen you get toward the end of that cycle.
58:22SPEAKER- Right, like this is actually the reason I,
58:24SPEAKERit's been a couple of months, I think,
58:26SPEAKERor more than I was talking about replacing this iPhone 8
58:28SPEAKERwith an SE, like that's, it's the same form factor,
58:30SPEAKERthe same screen, like my hands-on experience
58:33SPEAKERwith this phone will not change one iota if I get an SE.
58:36SPEAKER- You get a better camera and it'll be way faster,
58:38SPEAKERthat's the two differences.
58:39SPEAKER- But that's the thing, the guts of that thing
58:40SPEAKERare so much faster than what I've got in this phone now
58:42SPEAKERand the price is so cheap that it's like,
58:44SPEAKERthat is actually a long-term, like kind of,
58:48SPEAKERthat's like a long-term play, basically.
58:49SPEAKERThat's like, this is the least amount of money
58:52SPEAKERI can invest in my phone to get the maximum amount
58:54SPEAKERof longevity out of it, right?
58:56SPEAKER- Yeah.
58:57SPEAKER- That's why I wanted to replace it,
58:58SPEAKERwas if I buy an SE right now,
58:59SPEAKERthat phone is probably good for three or four years.
59:02SPEAKER- Well, this is one of those things, like,
59:06SPEAKERthis is why when we started testing,
59:07SPEAKERwe were focusing on what the upgrade gives you, right?
59:10SPEAKERLike if the camera's a lot better
59:11SPEAKERand you use the camera a lot, it makes sense to upgrade.
59:13SPEAKERIf the processor's faster, the internet connection's faster
59:15SPEAKERand you're away from wifi,
59:17SPEAKERor you're doing heavy lifting on that thing,
59:19SPEAKERyeah, it makes sense.
59:20SPEAKERI feel like, and it's dangerous 'cause you come into the,
59:26SPEAKERwhen something new hits
59:27SPEAKERthat actually is a significant improvement,
59:29SPEAKERlike the jump from 3080, 1080 to 3080,
59:32SPEAKERor even 2080 to 3080 in a lot of cases,
59:35SPEAKERis such that if you do like ray tracing workloads,
59:39SPEAKERthat's a huge upgrade.
59:41SPEAKERThere's maybe two games that have ray tracing workloads
59:44SPEAKERright now that are worth playing.
59:46SPEAKERAnd presumably that'll change in the spring
59:48SPEAKERwhen like Cyberpunk comes out
59:49SPEAKERand rolls out ray tracing and stuff like that.
59:50SPEAKERBut it's a really,
59:55SPEAKERlike if you're playing,
59:57SPEAKERthe TLDR on this is if you're playing
59:59SPEAKERon a 7700 Intel processor and you have 1080p monitors,
1:00:04SPEAKERprobably you're not gonna see much of a difference
1:00:06SPEAKERbetween a 1080 TI and a 3080.
1:00:09SPEAKERYour frames will go up, but you're not gonna notice
1:00:12SPEAKERunless you're running a really high-end monitor
1:00:14SPEAKERor competitive esports player or something like that.
1:00:19SPEAKERAnd I always, like you should spend the money
1:00:23SPEAKERthat's right for you and that's it.
1:00:26SPEAKERLike you don't have to have a 3090 and a I10900
1:00:31SPEAKERor whatever it is to like play PC games.
1:00:34SPEAKERI know a ton of people who play,
1:00:36SPEAKERI know like competitive PUBG streamers
1:00:40SPEAKERwho are very good and are playing on like 1070s
1:00:42SPEAKERand stuff like that.
1:00:43SPEAKER- Yeah, totally.
1:00:44SPEAKER- Like, yeah.
1:00:45SPEAKER- I have always, my whole life I have been,
1:00:46SPEAKERI have always bought the mid range two budget graphics card,
1:00:49SPEAKERnot the, never, never the high-end.
1:00:51SPEAKER- Well, and the other thing to remember, especially,
1:00:54SPEAKERI say this as somebody who streams on Twitch
1:00:56SPEAKERlike five nights a week.
1:00:57SPEAKERWhen you do that, you get access to hardware
1:01:00SPEAKERthat you would not, that you do not have to pay for.
1:01:03SPEAKERAnd that changes, like do not,
1:01:05SPEAKERdo not look at what your favorite streamer does
1:01:07SPEAKERwith the PC they have listed in the box below the stream
1:01:11SPEAKERas, well, shit, this is what I have to do
1:01:12SPEAKERif I wanna play Call of Duty or this is what I need
1:01:16SPEAKERfor Fall Guys or Among Us
1:01:18SPEAKERor whatever people are watching at any given moment.
1:01:20SPEAKERLike be aware that, A, if there's something on their screen
1:01:23SPEAKERthat has a logo on it, that they're getting paid.
1:01:26SPEAKERBut like, yeah, worst case,
1:01:30SPEAKERthey're probably not paying for hardware
1:01:31SPEAKERif they have a few hundred people watching,
1:01:33SPEAKERfew thousand people watching, definitely.
1:01:34SPEAKER- Sure.
1:01:36SPEAKERYeah, just to the emailer's point,
1:01:40SPEAKERmy girlfriend hates this,
1:01:41SPEAKERbut I hang on to everything I can.
1:01:43SPEAKERLike if I get a new, I get a new router,
1:01:45SPEAKERI keep the old router goes in the drawer.
1:01:46SPEAKERIt doesn't get tossed out because--
1:01:48SPEAKER- I keep one generation back just in case something breaks
1:01:50SPEAKERso I don't have to go to Best Buy to replace it.
1:01:51SPEAKER- Or there's been cases where like,
1:01:52SPEAKERoh, the previous WiFi router I was using,
1:01:54SPEAKERI turned into a bridge that I could use to hook up,
1:01:57SPEAKERhook up a Netflix box in a room
1:01:59SPEAKERthat didn't have good WiFi signal otherwise
1:02:01SPEAKERor something like that.
1:02:02SPEAKERYou know, like there's always like finding a use
1:02:04SPEAKERfor something old that I've had lying around.
1:02:06SPEAKERLike the longer I've had it without using it,
1:02:08SPEAKERthe more satisfied I feel
1:02:10SPEAKERwhen I actually find something to do with it.
1:02:12SPEAKERLike that is way more satisfying to me
1:02:13SPEAKERthan buying something new always.
1:02:15SPEAKER- Brad, I have a kin phone in the garage
1:02:17SPEAKERthat's calling your name.
1:02:18SPEAKERI think you should just fire that thing up.
1:02:19SPEAKERIt's on Verizon.
1:02:20SPEAKERYou can hook it up.
1:02:21SPEAKERYou'll be good to go.
1:02:22SPEAKERYou're gonna love it.
1:02:23SPEAKER- I'll figure something out.
1:02:24SPEAKER- It spins open, I think.
1:02:25SPEAKERI can't remember.
1:02:26SPEAKERIt has a weird, weird, yeah.
1:02:28SPEAKER- I'll find a use for it.
1:02:29SPEAKERIt's my specialty.
1:02:31SPEAKERAll right, that's it.
1:02:32SPEAKERIt's all the emails.
1:02:33SPEAKER- Yeah, don't celebrate consumerism, yo.
1:02:35SPEAKERIt's bad.
1:02:36SPEAKER- Yeah, you know, the only other thing I was gonna say
1:02:39SPEAKERis like, as long as you're disposing
1:02:41SPEAKERof your electronics responsibly,
1:02:42SPEAKERlike it's not the worst thing, you know?
1:02:44SPEAKER- Like if you just, you flush them down the toilet
1:02:46SPEAKERor something, what's the strategy?
1:02:47SPEAKER- As long as you're donating them
1:02:48SPEAKERor like finding another home for them,
1:02:50SPEAKERlike just don't chuck stuff in the trash or whatever,
1:02:53SPEAKERyou know, or like take it to an e-waste recycling place
1:02:55SPEAKERif you absolutely need to just toss it out, you know?
1:02:59SPEAKER- Yeah, or give it to like, like I, for a long time,
1:03:02SPEAKERI don't do it anymore because my parents have,
1:03:05SPEAKERare hooked on that iPhone life
1:03:07SPEAKERand are regular upgraders now.
1:03:09SPEAKERBut yeah, give them to friends, family, kids.
1:03:12SPEAKER- Yeah, yes.
1:03:13SPEAKERYes, find a home for them, maybe a library or something?
1:03:17SPEAKEROr, you know, there's-
1:03:18SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't think libraries take that stuff anymore.
1:03:19SPEAKERI think it's become too much of a problem.
1:03:21SPEAKER- Yeah, I could see that, so.
1:03:24SPEAKER- But this is, so this is the part of the show.
1:03:27SPEAKERHey, first off, if you have questions,
1:03:30SPEAKERyou can send them to techpod@content.town.
1:03:33SPEAKERWe answered them in the last episode of Very Month Usually.
1:03:35SPEAKERNext week is, we hit a thousand patrons last month,
1:03:40SPEAKERand we're reading, as a result,
1:03:42SPEAKERThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
1:03:43SPEAKERwhich is one of my favorite books
1:03:45SPEAKERthat I hadn't read in a long time, I realize.
1:03:46SPEAKER- I was gonna ask, are you in fact rereading it,
1:03:48SPEAKEReven though you've read it numerous times?
1:03:50SPEAKER- Oh yeah, of course.
1:03:51SPEAKERIt's funny though, 'cause it's like, you know,
1:03:54SPEAKERdo you have any movies that you've watched so many times,
1:03:56SPEAKERyou kind of don't have to watch them anymore
1:03:57SPEAKERand you can just see them?
1:03:58SPEAKER- Totally.
1:03:59SPEAKER- It's like that, like I remember the jokes.
1:04:02SPEAKERThe funny thing is that some things land differently now,
1:04:04SPEAKER'cause I definitely haven't read it since I had a kid,
1:04:07SPEAKERand really probably haven't read it
1:04:08SPEAKERsince I was like a working adult.
1:04:10SPEAKERI probably, the last time I read it
1:04:11SPEAKERwas when I was at Maximum PC, so yeah,
1:04:14SPEAKERit's been interesting, but we're gonna be doing that
1:04:17SPEAKERnext week or the week after,
1:04:19SPEAKERand I think, I mean, I think that's it,
1:04:23SPEAKERbut this is the, we hit a thousand patrons.
1:04:25SPEAKERWe're already at 1100 patrons now,
1:04:27SPEAKER'cause a lot of people like The Hitchhiker's Guide,
1:04:29SPEAKERso we have to come up with a 2000-patron stretch goal now,
1:04:31SPEAKERI guess.
1:04:32SPEAKER- You did name another book.
1:04:33SPEAKERI don't know if we're ready to go down that road yet or not.
1:04:35SPEAKER- I think we should talk,
1:04:36SPEAKERI think we need to have a conversation first,
1:04:39SPEAKER'cause it's a lot.
1:04:40SPEAKER- Yes.
1:04:41SPEAKER- But this is the part where we think our patrons,
1:04:44SPEAKERyou know, if you wanna get access to the TechPod Discord,
1:04:46SPEAKERwhere a thousand beautiful, brilliant people
1:04:50SPEAKERshare the stuff that they're interested in,
1:04:52SPEAKERand talk to each other on the day-to-day,
1:04:55SPEAKERit is a fabulous, fabulous community.
1:04:57SPEAKERI'm like, we both had the benefit of being part
1:05:01SPEAKERof a lot of communities that are amazing,
1:05:04SPEAKERbut this one's special.
1:05:05SPEAKER- Yeah, I feel enriched every day I look at that server.
1:05:08SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:05:09SPEAKER- The other day in the Coding Channel,
1:05:10SPEAKERthey had a long conversation
1:05:11SPEAKERabout pseudo-random number generators in games,
1:05:14SPEAKERand they were literally linking off to specific files
1:05:18SPEAKERfrom the Doom source code,
1:05:19SPEAKERand mocking the ridiculously poor random number generator
1:05:24SPEAKERthat Carmack came up with.
1:05:25SPEAKER- What did they use random number generators for in Doom?
1:05:28SPEAKER- I think it was, it may have been multiple things, I think.
1:05:31SPEAKERI think the only example I saw was it might affect
1:05:33SPEAKERhow the BFG behaves as the projectile travels
1:05:36SPEAKERor something like that.
1:05:37SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
1:05:39SPEAKER- But if I read correctly,
1:05:41SPEAKERhe just defined like a variable with like 256 values
1:05:44SPEAKERfrom one to 256, and it just cycled through them
1:05:46SPEAKERor something like that.
1:05:48SPEAKER- Jesus.
1:05:48SPEAKER- It was like a very poor, anyway.
1:05:51SPEAKER- Did they talk about Perlin noise?
1:05:52SPEAKERDid that come out?
1:05:53SPEAKER- The term didn't come up,
1:05:54SPEAKERbut they did mention like sampling entropy off of like
1:05:56SPEAKERbuffers and other like hardware elements
1:05:58SPEAKERthat might be able to pull some like decent randomness
1:06:00SPEAKERoff of, like completely fascinating stuff.
1:06:03SPEAKER- One of my favorite ones is that you can use
1:06:05SPEAKERthe shitty nature of the quartz clock on most computers
1:06:09SPEAKERto generate some randomness,
1:06:10SPEAKER'cause they bounce around constantly.
1:06:12SPEAKER- That's not bad.
1:06:14SPEAKER- Anyway, but yeah, if you wanna join that,
1:06:15SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techpod
1:06:18SPEAKERand sign up for two bucks a month
1:06:20SPEAKERto get access to the Discord.
1:06:22SPEAKERWe do a monthly patron exclusive episode.
1:06:26SPEAKERLast month we talked about projects that we were working on.
1:06:28SPEAKERIt was stuff like Home Assistant
1:06:30SPEAKERand all of the weird, weird, weird, you know,
1:06:33SPEAKERall the stuff that we do in our free time.
1:06:38SPEAKERAnd this is the episode where we thank all of our
1:06:40SPEAKERexecutive and associate producer level patrons.
1:06:42SPEAKERSo shout outs to our executive producer patrons,
1:06:46SPEAKERAndrew Cotton, David Allen, and Jacob Chappell.
1:06:48SPEAKERThank you all so much.
1:06:50SPEAKERAnd as well, our associate producer level patrons,
1:06:54SPEAKERArthur Geese, Dan Brockman, Dave Ullian, Graham Banks,
1:07:00SPEAKERJad Rita, Sam Buck, Terry Cox, and the Bunny Fiend.
1:07:04SPEAKER- Oh, the Bunny Fiend.
1:07:05SPEAKER- And Thomas Shay.
1:07:06SPEAKER- Cannot forget. - Shout out
1:07:07SPEAKERto the Bunny Fiend, yeah.
1:07:07SPEAKER- Cannot forget the Bunny Fiend.
1:07:09SPEAKER- No, never.
1:07:09SPEAKERLook, you never put the Bunny Fiend in a corner, Brad.
1:07:11SPEAKERThat's important.
1:07:12SPEAKER- I mean, they're a fiend.
1:07:14SPEAKER- I did not know.
1:07:15SPEAKER- You don't want to anger someone who is a fiend.
1:07:17SPEAKER- I mean, for bunnies though,
1:07:19SPEAKERbut like are they made of real bunnies
1:07:20SPEAKERor are they fiending them?
1:07:21SPEAKERI don't actually, I don't want to know.
1:07:23SPEAKERI'm good.
1:07:23SPEAKER- Yeah, it's just, yeah.
1:07:24SPEAKERYes, thank you.
1:07:25SPEAKERThank you so much, everyone.
1:07:27SPEAKER- And thanks to everybody who supports the Patreon
1:07:30SPEAKERand the Tech Pod.
1:07:31SPEAKERWe really appreciate it.
1:07:32SPEAKERAnd yeah, I guess that's it for us this week.
1:07:35SPEAKERSo read Hitchhiker's, we're going to talk about that.
1:07:38SPEAKERAnd then, I don't know, if you have ideas
1:07:41SPEAKERfor things you would like to see us talk about
1:07:43SPEAKERor do after we hit 2000 patrons,
1:07:47SPEAKERI guess post in the Discord, send us a Twitter message.
1:07:50SPEAKER- Or even without a patron goal attached to it,
1:07:52SPEAKERjust like on Twitter or email,
1:07:53SPEAKERor if you're on the Discord there, anywhere's fine.
1:07:56SPEAKERBut yeah, like topic suggestions are always welcome
1:07:58SPEAKERbecause there's tons of stuff out there
1:08:00SPEAKERthat we probably haven't thought of.
1:08:02SPEAKERAnd that would be super helpful to know what people.
1:08:04SPEAKER- Topic idea, oh, the last thing is,
1:08:07SPEAKERpeople had asked about annual, like signing up for a year
1:08:10SPEAKERrather than having to do the month to month.
1:08:11SPEAKERAnd we got the ability to flip that on
1:08:15SPEAKERsince the last time we did an email episode.
1:08:17SPEAKERSo you can sign up for a year
1:08:20SPEAKERat whatever level you would like
1:08:21SPEAKERand just pay it all at once at a little bit of a discount.
1:08:24SPEAKERAnd I think it's 5% off.
1:08:25SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:08:26SPEAKER- So yeah.
1:08:27SPEAKER- Cool.
1:08:28SPEAKER- Thank you all so much.
1:08:29SPEAKER- Yeah, thanks everybody.
1:08:29SPEAKER- Have a good week, Brad.
1:08:30SPEAKERI'll talk to you next week, man.
1:08:32SPEAKER(upbeat music)