Luke talks RAM Pricing, Tech Youtube and LTT Developer hiring process

Today, we have a very special episode of the stand-up. We have with us Luke from Linus Tech Tips. Say hi

All right, there he is right there. We have a Luke Tech tips

No, if he confused with LTT he has LTT. This is LTT not okay different LTT God different

Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. There's some other guy who no one knows who's like a co-host or something on that the main channel

I think I don't know but Luke's the main dude. Luke's does the heavy lifting. That's yeah, all right. Thanks for the intro interruption

Yeah

Anyway, I sorry also with us is teach and I

Thinks. Yeah. Oh, thank you. Yep. Uh, TJ. You're wearing a sweater that can no longer be bought. It must be very exclusive

Arch by the way arch forever

TJ already has children so it's okay. Um, all right. Well anyways today

We're gonna be talking about ramp. You have to can I just say though you have to get married and have kids before you install

Otherwise, it's gg boys. You're lying. Your family line is finished. Okay, ancestors are disappointed

They hunted and gathered for nothing you ended the line just because of your operating system

Wait till you have kids before you start arch. Thanks. It's just the PSA for today. That's a good PSA. Honestly

I think more people need to hear that

All right, so today we're gonna be talking about ram prices get some thoughts where we think it's going along with probably SSDs

And some other things is there any other unknown cost coming in and then after that

I'm gonna probably ask Luke a little bit about running Linus tech tips. What it's like hiring people all the good stuff

What does he kind of experience in today's age of AI and such especially in the YouTube scene?

Just because it's a much different set of technology and how you develop stuff and kind of the software you run for

Very curious about all that stuff. So let's start off obviously with the maiden flag ship topic, which is ram prices

I don't know about you, but the moment I heard that AI loves ram the first thing I did is went out and bought MU

Which is a stock micron which exclusively does ram and guess what it was my best investment

I have ever made in my entire lifetime

Well, there's there must be something there if the stock market says there's something there

There must be a there there and so number go up

The number does go up now

There's only one person in this call that I know for a fact can not only build the PC

But also knows how to order a GPU from the internet, which is an impossible task these days

I have no idea how to order a GPU

So I figured that we'd bring Luke on and he could kind of give us some of his thoughts about this whole ram price

debacle and where he kind of thinks it going or where he thinks it's kind of going and maybe inform us

Uneducated non GPU buyers about the hardware market the permanent underclass permanent underclass right here

Sure, yeah, I um, I'm not surprised by certain moves like

like microns

Crucials so it was crucial is owned by micro

Crucial stepped out of the ram market that was not too surprising

I think they've honestly wanted to do that for a long time if you look at how honestly

somewhat specifically ddr5 was even designed it was not designed from a consumer standpoint it was designed from a

Enterprise standpoint the goal has been enterprise for a long time

this is

mostly a convenient and high-profit exit from the consumer space or crucial

um, and I don't

Personally suspect that prices are going to come down from supply being super high for a pretty considerable amount of time

It takes a really long time to get fabs online

um, and they are also going to resist to the fall of the price

Because they want it to be high some of the like most collusion in

Effectively like any market anywhere has been in ram

These companies love working together to price fix they love working together to

Key prices not too high to not increase fab capacity too much. That's another thing they do to

I don't know if you can say artificially or not there you have nice

I'm listening. I'm listening

Documented if you're if you're interested in it

If there's been a lot of legal suits over it

It's it's not even a secret at this point let alone an open secret so you can it's yeah, you can

dive into it if you're interested

Komish you got to listen to me. Oh, no now one more comment from you. I'm dummy basing your mistakes

You're on junior CSS duty until further notice you miss you can't do this to me. He's talking

You'll be doing store procedures for a month now get out of here take him with you

Fun fact CSS is actually touring complete

Larry Gary tango Mary. I just pulling your request. It looks good to me. You're clear to ship

Thanks, you're welcome next

It's an awfully big PR

For an intern. Oh, I just bumped some dependencies. It's nothing major

Hey, can I get a quick stamp on this?

Yeah, don't worry about

Quick approval. Oh, not on my watch. I'm on your diff like a penis on site

Not this again. It's literally just a hex co-change. Just approve it. Just approve it. Squish per persisting review

Oh, I know you're the tip where I've seen five coding but that ain't it

I hate merge cop. He always makes reviewing take forever. We have code rabbit

Oh, come on. I wasn't even merging the prod. It was a hex co-change. We have code rabbit

We don't need real people reviewing such simple changes. Code rabbit can do it for us

Our engineers time is better spent solving problems for customers

You can try it too at code rabbit dot AI next week on merge cop now my plan to merge it so big you're the different. I always doing

They have also worked together to yeah, not increase fab capacity now right now

There is enough demand that yeah, they're looking into fabs. There's partnerships from from at least one brand to

Work with a much smaller fab company to try to increase their capacity and in throughput. There's one happening in Taiwan

But it's going to take a while for us to really see the benefits of that

I think the thing that might happen first and I could be wrong here is a

slowing down of investment in

In data centers and the need for RAM

I don't see that coming any time soon. I don't personally necessarily see a like massive market crash

That some people are predicting for AI happening super soon

Due to a lot of the companies that are really driving this forward being hugely profitable regardless of AI

But

Yeah, I guess that's my like my quick thoughts

Quick question you said that ddr5 was designed more for enterprise less for consumer

I have no idea what that could possibly mean

A little bit more about that for me like what yeah, there's like parental controls or what like I also just to be fair

I think ddr stands for dance dance revolutions. So like that's how much I know about RAM

So I'm like I'm very far behind five six. I thought they'd have more additions out by now, but that makes sense

Very popular game

It is disappointing that they don't have more dance dance revolution additions

And no, I guess there's a there's a really good video from

Sorry

From Wendell from level one text if you check out his YouTube channel and scroll down a bit because it's not very new

Where is it hold on?

It's not that old either

It's it's called your ddr5 memory could be at risk although ddr5

20 minutes long deep diving what the heck is going on with ddr5

I think it's interesting that he has that video about issues that we're fighting especially in the consumer space

But definitely enterprise space with with ddr5 and also

Lightest Torvalds was on our channel not that long ago and he was mentioning that he thinks a lot of the problems that users have with windows

Is actually users with bad RAM

Which was which was very interesting and part of these two discussions in my opinion merged together because of one of the points

That come from

It being designed enterprise first is it's not really designed for what most of us have in our like desktop chassies

Which is honestly

Not a ton of airflow especially compared to a like server environment where you don't care about fan noise. You don't care about

Much to be honest. You just want the performance and ideally low power draw, but that's all often a an afterthought

So a lot of desktop ddr5 is like overheating or having various other problems and

Wendell and some of the level one techs forum crew and whatnot have designed these like

I don't know if you were into desktops back in the like ddr3 corsair dominator era where they had those metal fan brackets read out of those little tiny fans

That would go over your RAM

Well, those might actually like matter now

um

And they're the communities making 3d printed

Shrouds for their RAM so that they can then mount like small

I think it's 80 millimeter, but it's been while since I've looked into this

Little tiny fans and point them directly at the RAM up close

To get more airflow on there than they're getting

less errors less problems

because if

If it's doing error correction like

On the actual stick before it gets to the cbu all that type of stuff and it's overheating

That's not going to perform as well and you might have more issues is my like

Fairly not amazing understanding of what's going on there

So

Juan I just want to rewind that for a second

You were telling me that some of the windows issues. I have not before you say that though

It's the stand-up. Can you say we're gonna circle back on that? That's a little bit more

Work appropriate. You don't rewind here. Please. I don't want to boil the ocean right now

But okay because I I can't my uh my ability to maximize windows decided that no longer work anymore

And so that's my life as a windows user right now is the ability to only have windows one size

Uh, so that's RAM. Yeah, that's all that's all room. That's all ram

Yeah, it's probably not or bad. Yeah

This is crazy. I thought again. I thought I was a good programmer. No, it's just bad. Okay. Okay. There's only so much we could do

Yeah, all right

I do like that though. I like I like microsoft coming out and saying actually what you guys need is little fans on your RAM

That's gonna be the windows

Yeah, figure it out yourself

Yeah, I know I think it's more like crashes blue screens

Application crashes application errors

If you look into stuff in event log and there's like things going wrong

It might be related to that

But it's it shouldn't be like a random function not working like be able to full screen windows

Then obviously have you asked Cortana and or copilot to full screen it it might work that way instead

I actually haven't but I am very curious about doing it. I did it. Please record it

Please

Yesterday I actually did give my first AI swing of like a of of an application and I noticed that Gemini has been added to all Google Chrome's in

Windows, so I was like oh my gosh

I can't log into frame IO and so I want to delete this site's cookies

So I clicked on Gemini and said delete this site's cookies and instead of can't do that

And that was like my that's been my only

So

And it's one of the cookies God, so then I had to go and ask Gemini on

On what's it called on Google?

It truly is a futuristic AI then though because it's like it is denying your requests

Yeah, the big thing is for AI right, so they've they achieved it. They achieved. Yeah lore accurate for

So we are like

We're year one effectively into the the great ramming

I'm not so great. Oh my god. That's a great title

Thank you. I just made that up right now, but anyways the great ramming is happening right now

How long do you think this can go before ram prices level out because I was looking at it and

MU and western digital, which is SSDs they are up

300% in their stock price so like people are obviously pricing in what they think this you know

This value is going to be and it has not looked like it's slowing down at all on the stock market

Is this reflective of what ram prices will be? Are we gonna see a 3x cost?

Are they already pretty much at that?

As per usual, this is not financial advice, but of course, yeah

Is the stock market predictive of anything these days?

I mean you had you had a good guess with with investing in MU early, which is why you own the office building

You're sitting in right now. Thank you. Thank you

But but it's like he's leasing. Okay, Luke. Don't don't let him get out of my money. Okay, I lease

Commercial real estate. It's terrible

Yeah, yeah

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think I think the demand and price is going to be high for a long time

I think that's one of the main things that I meant with my like little intro thing there

Um, is that I don't think it's just gonna randomly come down um, I think

For the last few years we've been seeing a general

All computer hardware shift towards enterprise and when you do that and and consumer becomes more and more of an afterthought

consumer gear is going to be

more price-performance expensive for what you're getting

We saw Intel recently talk about this where they're like

Intel just openly was like, you know what? We've been giving the consumer market like too much attention

We're gonna focus more on hyperscalers

We're we're not interested in that anymore. You're seeing crucial step out of the market. You're seeing in video like

Almost like begrudgingly still talk about GeForce cards. There's like these these companies are are seeing the bag that is

Working with enterprise. It was actually I mean even

For me like being in the hardware space predominantly it was it was fascinating not that long ago to find out that like

A lot of these water cooling companies that I thought of as these like scrappy little

consumer water cooling grants

sold the vast majority of their revenue of products through enterprise doing water cooling for servers and data centers

um, it's it's an interesting world and there's a lot more money in it than like

um, you know

Us like waiting for deals on freaking new egg or whatever

It's yeah, it's a it's a totally different thing when you when you're willing to buy like just some incredible amount of

of

Of money worth of like if I don't know some of these reservations for even during

coin mining

So some of these massive operations were buying palettes and palettes and palettes of GPUs

And if they had issues with them kind of like almost charging it off

um

Whereas consumers like you know if you have an issue with it

There's a there's a reddit thread with 7,000 upvotes and you're screaming from the mountains and all this kind of stuff

Like why why deal with us annoying low

People who lack money when you can deal with the the hyperscaler

Boys with all of the money and and less of the problems

Yeah, you know, it's funny. You should say that because if you have looked at open a eyes kind of or a Boris investing

Uh and video has promised they're going to pay them a progressive amount up to one or a hundred billion dollars

And open a eyes apparently one of their agreements

I was really trying to confuse trying to find out the exact number

And the only number I found was they're going to pay them back 10 gigawatts worth of purchases

And I was like I don't know what that number means because typically I use USD

I'm not used to whatever this AI money currency is but a gig a lot a pair again

This is a chat GPT. I'd ask like what the hell's a gig a lot? What what the hell's a gig a lot?

And it said one nuclear power plant worth of energy

Those are like oh yeah, so that's how much they're going to be buying is 10 nuclear power plants

And then I was like did they make this deal elsewhere?

And then apparently with Oracle their 300 billion will also result in six gigawatts

Of data center or six nuclear power and I was sitting there like 16 nuclear power like that's first off

That sounds like a metal band second off the United States has 39 total like that's hat

That's like 50% of the entire power grid worth of

New nuclear power plants and I'm probably not even saying nuclear correct

So it's nuclear nuclear nuclear it's nuclear power yeah nuclear nuclear power

Nuclear nuclear nuclear

There's a lot of nuclear yeah

I don't know if you want me to inject some random technical stuff in here or not

Yes, please. Yes, certainly can okay, so

I don't study any of this stuff like hardware is definitely not my monkeys and not my zoo

I just look at it and go like look the worst the hardware is the better is for people like me who like to talk about programming performance

Because it's just means you have to be better, right?

So I'm fine with like good great if there's a if you have to start programming for a 10 year old lap

I'm happy about that

but

Yeah, actually so a typical data center my understanding is that you're in the like 100 to 200 megawatt range for the data center

Like like a typical modern data center

That's what you would be looking at for the total number of megawatts

Whereas AI data centers are like 10x that for power consumption

So when they're building those they're looking at things like gigawatt or you know

Multi-multf like up to over one gigawatt worth of inflow of power to this data center, right?

That's how much you consume so when they talk about gigawatts

They're literally talking about like okay 10 gigawatts might be five data centers or something like that five new data center

Buildouts worth or something like this right if I'm just like ballparking those numbers based on what I've seen

So

When you think about that when they're guaranteeing that kind of purchase

I mean, that's an ungodly number of GPUs, right?

You'll think think literally five data centers or something or more worth of these

Racks upon racks of Nvidia Rubin like you know slotted things or whatever you know, they're on at that point

And so that's just I mean, I don't know

We'd have to go break out a calculator to even try to figure out what kind of a outlay that is for Nvidia

But it's massive right like it's a massive amount

Um tying that back though to the thing we're actually talking about which is memory

My understanding was that open AI actually signed some kind of nuts so deal where they were gonna buy

Up to 900,000 wafers a month of DDR

Memory what's a wafer and how much memory is on a waf

That's okay. So again

Not my monkey's not my zoo. I'm doing my best. It's classified Brian. It's classified. And so and you can

It is if you actually want to know the the yield per wafer

Like they have the number of like bits per wafer

These are things you pay analyst firms to get and they there they they are constantly moving around because people are trying to increase their yield and so on

A wafer is a piece of silicon. It's circular. You've seen them. There's that a circular one that we talked about

Yep

So they're just buying circles

Yep, uh, they're buying this you're buying the output of the circles. Yeah, okay

I don't know how to take a circle and turn it into a stick like that's very difficult

Casey, I've never seen a GPU that's round. So I don't know if I believe this

There are some uh the the there's people who make wait for who make wafer scale

They're kind of prototypes, but they make wafer scale AI accelerators and they are circular

That's pretty cool. Yeah, but that's just not so stuff. I mean, I don't know. There's no one ever Sam Altman's orb

Yeah, so it's like it's circular. You can only do it. I think technically

Technically prime. You're more right. You were trying to make a joke

But you're more right than you think you are

I believe the open AI deal is literally for uncut wafers

They have been patterned

But they are uncut and they are going to be like controlling where that gets shipped to

And how it ends up getting stacked and packaged was that like the last time I read it

They were uncut patterned wafers not cut and packaged which is very unusual

I could be wrong to say it my recollection. No, it sounds like you're right. I didn't actually believe I am. Yeah

Oh, I'm thinking about a Sam Altman as Scarface right now

Yep

Wafers all over his neck

So again to give a really bad explanation because I'm the wrong guy to give this exercise you you really want to get like you know

Dev Patel

Dylan Patel Dylan Patel from

Somebody announced or something you want to get him he would know right

Yeah, like we're more on the consumer side of things like I don't get way into this too often

I do know that like the the difficult part is making the wafer

Like there's there's somebody online who made their own stick of of computer memory

Using using chips they got from you know somebody else

So it's not like it's not

Crazy surprising that they bought just the wafers

I just thought they would you know cut to the chase and get them to actually hand them over like a functioning sticks, but

Well, they're not sticks is the problem right because they are using hbm. So oh right. Yeah, I mean what happens

Yeah, so like for us normies. Okay, so uh whoo

This is again way out of my league. You and I both have to guess. I think it would stay for yet

So what it is?

Okay, what it is is like if you think about normally how memory works, right?

It's it's honestic and you basically have these the the individual

DRAM chips that have been fabricated are like on a line of the chip and then the like you know the connection

Is the look the little pins slots in and that's how it's talking to CPU

So if you think about it, you've got like essentially the CPU is on a package the DDR is on a package on a little thing

You've got those connections

They go through the PCB right your motherboard and there's like some small number of connections connecting them, right?

So that there's like traces on the PCB that are going to drive over to those like you know places you slot them in

so

GDDR

Right, which is the graphics

Graphics DDR not the kind you slot into your thing, right? So the kind that goes on a on a on a GPU

Is a little bit different that one is like welded right on like it's like

Soldered onto the motherboard and directly connected and the read and closer and the reason for that is they

It's basically the same kind of memory for all intents and purposes as far as I know

But the signaling is much much faster. So they they drive the data rate up the the band total bandwidth

They drive up by increasing the speed at which it can transfer things back and forth

And so it has like basically higher quality

Physical signaling to get things back and forth, but otherwise same basic idea as the kind you would slot

Into your motherboard otherwise not a huge difference beyond that

Some people are asking for a representation and if you if you look up if you if you wiki

I don't know if I can share my screen on this thing

But if you wiki high bandwidth memory there is a very good

Photo if you scroll down to the interface section

That shows how it's like 3d stacked as well

So you can have what we haven't gotten hbm yet

Okay, it's totally different than both of these totally different than these two things

So hbm is completely different from those two things completely different

It's the same

Sort of memory like it's still the idea is still that there's a capacitor and a transistor per cell of memory

Like so the actual thing you're fabbing is somewhat similar

But it's very different in two very important ways one like luke just said it stacked

And in order to stack it it needs to be

Manufactured with this sort of different kind of

Connectivity it's got these things called tsv's or through silicon vi is there like these connections that go through the stacks

So that you can kind of like have each stack is talking to the next stack it like and they tunnel through right

So it's wider right? It's a wider. It's like the actual physical footprint for the same amount of memory is a little bit bigger

Because it's got to have space for this the normal drem can be it doesn't have to have those right

Those tsv's

So that's a thing but the much bigger thing. I mean although that's that's uh obviously

A slight difference there

The much bigger thing is the stacking and packaging is just a way harder problem

So first you have to be able to stack them and this reduces yield apparently for I don't

Know the reasons why but like again. Can you explain yield?

I I forget just like a quick like one liner. Why do you not like percentage of stuff coming out based on what you put in

Like yeah, I think it's some of it's bad. It just comes out like broken. So they're just like this way for his broken bro

We're different. So yeah, yeah, I chip small hard to make

I don't time. Yeah, sometimes bad. That's

Okay, okay, okay, the answer is yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. I need it. Okay. Thank you

The answer is I don't know

Normally when we talk about yield I understood it fairly well from the old like what's the yield on a wafer

Because you figure you make a wafer there are defects on the wafer

So you you know you imagine you're patterning this thing

And you've got defects some of the defects or maybe could be you know some kind of impurity or something went wrong

Or maybe when you're patterning the light just hit something or there was one little speck of dust in there whatever

So you have certain things that didn't quite work as well as they should on this wafer

And so some number of the things that you put on the wafer are are just going to fail

And so normally when you talk about yield

You talk about like all right if there's n number of defects on a wafer

We expect those to fall fairly randomly sometimes they're they're distributed differently like more towards the outside than the center

Because of the way the radicals work or all these other sorts of things who knows

But so you only get a certain number of those chips right a so only a certain number of them will work or

A certain number of them will perform better than others for certain reasons all those sorts of things

And all that goes into what you call your yield right and binning

So binning is right the process where you say like some of these chips work better than others for whatever reasons run at higher clock rates things like that

Others are like they literally don't work

There's like defect on them. We can't get it working at all and yet others are designed to like have certain things

Constructively turned off think GPU where it's like okay

There's this many processing units on the GPU and they're designed to have some of those fail and be turned off

Right, so it's like okay. This just has less cores now and it gets slotted as a different thing blah blah blah

That's the normal way that like I have heard you'll talked about

For this

Apparently when you you have to like grind down the silicon and like stack it on top of each other and all the and I guess

There's a separate yield loss that happens. It has nothing to do with whether the original chips were working or not maybe

But then there's also the fact that I got the sense when I tried to look at this stuff because um

I knew we were doing this podcast, so I was like let me go see like what what are they talking about with some of these memory things

And I wasn't really able to understand it because I wasn't sure if what they were talking about was yield loss from

We stack these wafers on top of each other and that process produces problems

Or if what they were talking about is we can't test the memory

Prior to the stacking for some reason. Let's say I'm making that up. I don't know

And so when we stack eight things on top of each other

We just multiplied our total failure rate by eight because if one of them's bad, they're all bad

Right because the values won't work or who knows what so I don't know which of those are talking about but what I've seen

Put out for numbers is when you're making one of these hbm modules

Your your yield rate is awful compared to normal

They said three times as much weight for space is required for the same amount of hbm memory as for regular

DDR5 or something like that. So

The same number of bits stored if you're storing them in hbm

You required three times the input way for size and patterning to get that out

And that's a huge yield like that's massive, right?

I mean just think about that number it means you're doing all the same work

But you end up with three times more chips for ddr5 if you were producing the other five as if you did hbm

Makes sense, okay, that does make sense

So that sucks, right that that is really really bad and it means that the

Price of those things has to be much higher because you're doing a ton more work for each one

You're doing three times more work to get the same amount of bit storage

So if you want a gigabyte of hbm versus a gigabyte of just the random gdr or ddr that we're sticking in the computer and

It's right

Last thing just to finish this ridiculous tangent on how it works

So the thing about hbm is

But I tried to get to it at the beginning before we went into that yield thing

Is it doesn't go outside the chip it's not connected to the chip in this sort of way that we think of like what gdr

That's like slot on the PCB or dram which is slotted in it's on the package

So the way that it works is you literally you know you think about

I don't know if you guys have ever seen like die shots of something like a modern AMD

Processor where there's chiplets. There's like little chiplets in there

So it's like you delid the processor. There's like two you know CPU dies and something on there, right

That's how hbm works. It's on the package so the CPU and the memory are all together in one module

They're not they don't they're not things you plug in or put on a PCB. Does that make sense?

Is this uh, yeah, like

This could be way off

But some of the stuff with like mac minis and all these some of the new max of where they have like the unified memory

Which is why a bunch of people are using them for running local LLM stuff because they have this

Higher bandwidth connection to cp that actually lets you run like local models at reasonable speeds is is this related at all?

I don't know

I am not sure I

I want to say that there may be I thought there was a

I'm not I'm not sure I don't want to say because I'm not sure about that

I know that there's there are some like a series

Chips I think that use on chip memory, which is very different and super duper duper fast way faster than even hbm

But that's a different thing which we could go into later, but it's not relevant to a DRAM shortage at all

Yeah

Yeah, they're they're expanding cash in in a lot of ways, but like you said, that's not really related

Yeah, it's a different type of it's a completely different. It's it's s-ram. It's not that's even the same kind of

Yeah, can I can I ask a dumb question

Yes, please I have been asking dumb questions the entire time because this stuff like I said not my monkey's not my zoo

And you look into it and you're like Jesus Christ like it's just like this huge morass of stuff where you're like oh god

Okay, so

Me the consumer. I don't just want a wafer. I want to like nicely packaged and then have like little LEDs on top of it

And then I want ndx tier someone you don't know story d's

Thrower not an led. I do. I have leds right now baby with my with my little

It's just like you know the whole nine yards right and that's me as a consumer. So

Why in the world as a producer would I ever sell to consumers ever for any reason if

The altman is just like give me the circles. I don't even want like I don't even want you to put LEDs on him

Is what I just want the circles

That's that's that's the short you just described the shirt. Yes. Yeah, that's what's happening, right? Is it you nailed it, Brian? Good job

Done

It's over we can all go home. I mean that's what we're like literally an official was the the consumer specifically consumer side

Of

Micron and they were just like yeah screw it. Why do I want to deal with you guys? I can just sell to the the the hyperskills

There is if you look at the amount of companies that are actually making wafers

Versus the amount of companies that are selling in in you know the most consumer side of things the sticks of ramp

There's an incredible amount of companies selling sticks of ramp

There are very very very few actually making wafers

Um the the hard part is the the making of the wafers not the making of the sticks

Um or in the in the hbm sense

It continues to be hard the whole way through

It were first we're specifically talking in this case about about the sticks

You were talking about putting LEDs. You're not putting LEDs on hbm

So I'm talking about sticks. They're missing now

They're missing out data centers

The things that like you know commonly coolers that go on top of of hbm or something like that, but

That's probably what you might see, but when razor gets into the hbm market

Like when I get my chat gbt subscription

There's an additional tier and I get like a live video feed into the data center

And I have like my rack and as my cool LEDs on it for an additional price like

They're missing out on these secondary effects that they could be selling. You know, I like that. Yeah

So that means the you know the AI future always shows these data centers down like glowing with bright lights

So sam's not going for that style of led future. He's going for like the dark scary one

Yeah, yeah, okay, and we don't need light where we're going. Okay. That's pretty interesting

So does this is there any computer part that's protected from this AI revolution?

Like is there anything that's going to remain normal priced or am I just screwed?

Because I have to buy a new computer here soon. Um, I don't

I should probably buy it sooner than later as it seems like, but also is there like anything that's going to be cheap or is it all is it all gone?

Well, I mean one kind of sort of nice thing is that the whole ram situation

Is sort of creating this nice bottleneck so it's unclear like

It's unclear how much CPU prices would be affected long term because TSMC so TSMC

Okay, so there is a way in which the production

capacity for things like CPUs is implicated by this, but I don't fully know how to what extent so

When you do these hbm modules the stack that stack that we were talking about

The bottom of that stack is not memory

So the things that are like up the whole way don't that's memory

But the bottom is actually a logic die

So it's kind of like one logic layer and then a bunch of like memory cell layers

And that bottom die supposedly is actually

Like an advanced process logic process

So my understanding is that TSMC actually is going to be fabbing a lot of like that for hbm 4 or something

They're actually going to be fabbing the bottom layer

So it's like TSMC fabs the bottom layer of the stack

SK high-necks

Micron and Samsung if their stuff ever works will be fabbing the other layers

And then they get like packaged together

And then stuck on the you know chip that the wafer the

COWS packaging thing or whatever they're going to be using at that point

And so

I suppose that could have some negative consequences in that that adds more stress to the TSMC side

But I don't know like to what extent that competes with things like you know the logic dies for CPUs and stuff

So it seems like if you're sitting around waiting for memory all the time because your memory supply constrained

Then that would mean that like the the fab processes that are used for CPU and GPU dies that aren't the parts that aren't the memory

That part seems like it wouldn't necessarily go up right because they're they just have extra capacity at that point because you can't make new accelerators without the memory

And you need a lot of that memory and they just don't have the fab because but so

That could be someone out there has done that analysis

But again, it's probably something you have to pay for the research

Yeah, there's a lot of analysts. I think like theoretically pretty much everything could be impacted to a certain degree like if we're if we're building

All this stuff basically everything in a consumer computer those brands a lot of them not all of them

Uh are are also in the hyperscaler space but the amount of impact on like a company that makes

Uh, you know server chassis and desktop computer cases is going to be effectively nothing because you can scale it up

No problem um and there's a lot of potential manufacturing in that space. So it's just kind of whatever um the amount of things impacted is going to be

Like a a computer fan for example, uh, they might have lots of fans

But who cares you can make tons of fans all the time basically everywhere there's there's there's not really going to be any actual real impact there

Um, so it'll it will probably stay mostly with um

You know the things on or attached to or very close to the board um, which is mostly in fact that we've already seen but I do agree. I think it's bottlenecked

cases or are you saying?

Since we have to pay a lot of money for memory and where CPUs are just going to be waiting all the time

JavaScript is so back

Is that like CPU doesn't even matter we're just waiting around

We're just waiting around it doesn't even matter how long it takes anymore

Just chilling out in or other way around you'll only be able to like new machines will only have 512 megabytes of memory because that's

We all you'll be able to afford like each year the memory will go down and down and down until eventually you're running like

The Commodore 64 is like roughly what you get you 64k

That's all you you know, you've got to use you don't get ethical you don't get a gigabyte you don't get a gigabyte of memory

What are you talking? What do you think you're you know some kind of

The president so you don't get a gigabyte

Yeah, maybe maybe Bill Gates's old fake quote was actually right

But it wasn't right because it's no so what we need it'll be right because most of what we can actually get

Yeah, it's like that's what we get like this

640k will be enough

For everybody because it is all you will get yeah, yeah, all right

So the follow-on almost nothing and be happy

Okay

All right, so the follow-up question I think is is pretty interesting because

Google Stadia obviously they they killed Google Stadia

Netflix actually went into this whole idea of doing

Games on the server and they're they're doing it quite successfully

A lot of these places it kind of seems like removing more and more to the server

Does this mean that within the next five years?

We could see something along the lines where consumers are getting so priced out that it's better

Just to rent

Your workstation. It's better just to rent your time on some sort of server computer because I know there's a lot of this being pushed with like

BS code and GitHub and everything where you can just you rent out your development environment as opposed to you actually owning your

Development environment you're just like I can program anywhere now on any you know, I just need a terminal and boom

You're up and running and so

Is this like a future that we're kind of forcing people into being like oh you want a computer?

Brother, that's $20,000 like you do you better just go rent one for life

I

Think there's some desire there from a variety of companies, but I think when we're looking at

Um, at least some of the comms that I'm seeing from these like ram wafer companies and stuff like that

Is that they they want to scale up because of this like they would like both markets

um, I

But

I don't know that I mean there's a there's a twitch shadow mentioning Chinese manufacturers covering to the the memory market like there

We might also start seeing competition like that um, I wouldn't be too surprised if the gap between

What the enterprise has available to them and what the consumers have available to them or at least what the consumers reasonably have available to them continues widening

For for a while there the

Unless you're looking at like what was that the name of the CPU like knights

Abel or whatever um unless you're looking at like the extreme end of of server-specific compute hardware

Consumers are pretty interested in that stuff for a long time

And now we have GPUs that are just mind-blowingly expensive and CPUs that are mind-blowingly expensive on the extreme eye and

That just in a lot of cases

While those things are relevant isn't going to be super necessary on the consumer side of things um, so

Yeah, I don't think that's actually going to happen because

There will always be a section of the market where someone could make money so into those people

Um, and I think the the Chinese who are both getting into CPU not both but uh all getting into CPU memory GPU all that type of stuff

Uh, they might come for that market someone else might not sure, but yeah, I don't I don't think that's gonna happen

CXC is supposedly not far behind modern memory standards like right now

Um, and so they're kind of predicted to be able to ship at least like DDR4

Yes, style memory right or something like this so they're they're not

Chinese memory refreshes aren't like way behind and yes, so it's very possible that especially if you start talking about well

You know, no one can afford DDR5 so you know, maybe you could ship a cheaper thing

Or a less good thing and that would be fine, right? And we let you're you're not able to buy as high-performing computers or

Relatively as now or whatever, but maybe Casey's stuff gets more popular and programming goes more

Or more, uh, you know efficiency and performance and stuff like that. We start making rollercoaster tycoon again

Yeah, um, there we go. Yeah

He would be as I said the most you were desktop is just like gone

Uh or case you were compute, I should say

I was gonna say it's actually really uh this this whole kind of crunch on everything and and not being able to buy the next greatest MacBook

Uh MacBook Pro every single six months from the Silicon Valley

Uh, it is actually kind of a positive thing because people might actually start experiencing the uh the crap they make on devices that aren't the premium of the premium

But follow a question which is will when do you think or do you think this is gonna hit phones soon because I kind of realize like people buy phones fairly frequently in America

Mm-hmm

Like what point does Verizon say yeah, sorry. We're not giving you a phone with a two-year contract anymore

It's just like too damn expensive now like is there is there a world where this is coming soon because I assume all those parts are equally

susceptible to whatever's happening the rambling

Yeah

It would make sense that it would um, I haven't at least seen it happen yet

You you've seen a lot of other worlds. I don't know if that's because like they have contracts far enough out that it hasn't really

impacted their their available stock at this time

Um, so I don't know when that would happen, but it did yeah, it would absolutely make sense to me that it would

There's also like supposedly and this is kind of

I don't know to what extent they're talking about this, but I guess the

AI build out doesn't only affect DRAM it also affects like NAND flash storage and things like this like

apparently like

You know these machines that they're prepping. I don't know what a typical AI data center machine looks like

But it's not like oh it just has high bandwidth memory

It also has ddr5

regular

And it also has NAND flash like ssd

So they're taking capacity for all of those things and I think

The memory side is

What we talk about probably most because that hbm stuff has such that the bad yield stuff and all that's probably like that hit first

But the other the other sort of storage technologies are also just facing limited supply for the same reason like AI

Just wants to buy a lot of it and there weren't enough people there wasn't enough slack like

To pick that up. So I would imagine that phones will have all of these same problems like

They'll in a year or two when they're pre you know when their allotments have run out

Uh, they will be like oh crap like the flash storage is more expensive

The memory is more expensive about the only thing that won't get more expensive probably is that SRAM

Part that's on ship memory like in a in a bionic like in a

Apple a-series chip or whatever right

But they you know that's just part of their memory actually still have the other parts so they're still gonna have problems with that yeah

The western digital uh, which does a lot of I assume that NAND flash there also up just an absurd amount in the last six months

They're up 300 plus percent

Uh, just today they're up over 10 percent like they're obviously they're actually they actually have risen faster than micron as far as

That was because of the podcast by the way

Huh

That's because of the podcast by the way, I know today's we got the motion

All right, well, I mean

This could be a good time to kind of jump off some of the hardware stuff unless the fluke you have anything else

You want to talk about because I do have some questions about youtube and tech and all that kind of stuff for you as well

Can I make two stupid jokes before we go to the next one because I had some but I just didn't get a chance to put them in people

We're saying smart things when we were talking about yield. I really wanted to ask Luke what his thoughts were about roundabouts

That's pretty good. You have to thank you. I like roundabouts. Okay, cool

Did that didn't that didn't go as well? I was like the yield you don't have that you have to yield at them instead of stop

That's I mean if you're just confident enough you don't know. I like I love

Self-driving cars, baby. They just all they just do the thing

You don't like people stop for me

Stop done. That's just because you put the LTT thing on the side and this coming through

Yeah, I wasn't gonna be able to focus for the rest of the

In my head the roundabout joke mostly so you had to be there

Yeah, yeah

The be there. Well looks like we all got to be there. That was very fantastic. Thanks

Prime ask your next question that'd be sweet

All right, all right

We should shift a little bit of gears and talk more about kind of LTT because you you guys obviously have

Some developers on board and all that and you're doing I assume the tech and the things that you're building is much different

Experience than say something like Netflix where they've just been working on one product and ancillary products for

20 years or Google 20 year right like all these companies have been just working on the thing they're doing

Well Google kills a bunch of projects too, but imagine a company that doesn't kill a bunch of things

They've been doing one thing and that's it

I kind of like even though a eyes had a there's a lot of negative impacts of things. How has it impacted kind of this

Hiring what work looks like do you guys feel like you're doing more things like the positives the negatives. I'm curious

I don't feel like it's changed like

I don't know ironing has gotten really weird

um

Hiring's gotten really strange. I mean being like as

Public as we are I guess

The hiring has always been a little bit odd. I've I've always been fairly open to hiring remote devs

So even like that. I don't know six years ago putting up a position for remote dev would get 2000 applicants

And and a lot of them are

you know

People who are not prepared and are just like I want to put an application. I'll mop your floors

I don't care about what it's like okay, but I actually just need this that they've experienced developer. I'm sorry

I don't know um

Kids the camera pans around and there's like 13 people mopping this one tiny piece of course like guys

We don't need anymore

So you can sift through a lot of them pretty fast, but like it's it has really taken like I think especially over

The last year

The influx of what are like obviously just garbage

Like crapped out AI written

AI submitted applications has gotten crazy

And then sifting through that it was already difficult because we had so many applicants for certain certain positions

If it's like hyper local and specialized it's we don't get that many

Canada doesn't have all that many people

And then this area is quite expensive to live in so it's it's a little bit you know if it's if it's a local position

It's not that much of it's global. It's it's it's a time

Um, but yeah sifting through them trying to find the stuff that's actually real has gotten more difficult and the template you

Like counter sorts basically by okay, well you're spamming me with AI applications. Let me sort through it with AI is high

But then the error rate there would suck if you lose someone who's really good because

They got AI sifted out that would be very unfortunate. So there's some tension there

We have a coding test so that we do for incoming applicants of

Of every type of developer that we've hired which is a decent range. We've had to make different ones

but they're made in house and

We've ran that

Coding tests in a bunch of different models to try to see what that output looks like

um, and we try to

Kind of detect how hard someone leaned on it. I don't personally care like

If you look at the coding test and you get AI assistance and you make the best result out of everyone

I think you made the result out of everyone

Um, it doesn't really matter to me too much

But there is a little bit of suspect that I want to do to figure out like

Did you just take its output and just slap it in and not even

In in tj's situation review it properly

Did you just did you just throw it through?

Oh, and then if that's true then you know, I'm not that interested because the

Even if it did even if it did one shot super effectively um

I'm concerned about your ability to

maintain things and keep them good over time

Um, so yeah hiring is definitely changed

It was difficult and now it's way harder

So I've been reliably informed by sam often that the problems of AI will in fact be solved by AI

And so you're telling me that you you aren't solving your AI problems with AI

No, yeah, not so much. All right now um, you know, we'll see if that happens eventually

But I kind of doubt it. There's there's there's like there's the basically inherent error rate and for certain things that's

Frustrated to deal with all right, so I actually do want to ask a real question here, which is that okay

So I think what we're all we when we're all the other questions eight questions all of those are all fake

You need to care about the answer to get to get

Yeah, she up and going on epic headman rant. Oh god

All right, get wrecked by the way. Oh, okay, so the

I think the obvious elephant now in the room and I'm sure a lot of people to appreciate this in the audience

Which is okay? I am stuck in effectively ELO hell, right?

Like you're playing League of Legends except for it's with your career and your junior

And you're trying to figure out how to get out of ELO hell because everybody is just dog piling in and quitting mid game

So how do I stand out at least in your

process without giving away too many because then the AI will be like god it

But like how would you make yourself stand out in a sense that

When reviewing you go all this is actually really good

Um, the application I guess is how I'll take this instead of the code

I said the application is the beginning of ELO hell, right? That's the bronzer sure

Yeah, that's how I took that

Just for those of us who don't who aren't that familiar with it also what exactly like what kind of people are you trying to hire exactly

These are programming these are primarily programmers and programmers for

What kind of stuff?

Fairly surprising to most people a variety of things. Okay, so we have multiple websites

So we have full plane dot com which is the first like thing that we made which is a

Like patreon-esque but video first um

You know creators support

Platform uh where people can upload videos have their own channel to get direct funding from fans

We also have ltt labs dot com which is where a lot of our

I don't even know if I can say a lot some of our testing data from our local

Testing lab gets put up on there and you can do comparison runs and and all these other types of things

Which is kind of neat

Then we have somebody in chat pointed out ltt store that one's a lot more

Basic because it's on top of Shopify. It's not just like our own thing

um

But then we have tied that in with like a system that we have which is currently called merge messages

But it might be renamed where if we are on a live stream and you are buying something on the store

As you're checking out you can leave a message and that message will go to the stream to be you go to a stream dash

So you can be curated and then select it and then

um

The producer can just respond to them in line and then they'll show up in like the the lower third banner at the bottom

Or they can curate them and then lioness or myself or whoever's hosting the stream

Um can respond to them directly through like voice

So we have that tie in we have a couple of things like that

Flowplane and the ltt store link together for like scooser sales and blah blah blah blah

um that's

Most of our web development. We also have internal tools development

um

Which ranges through a bunch of things we've done a bunch of uh, uh, you know

Internal development on top of snipe it or inventory stuff we we

Wrote a gooey for whisper back in the day because our editors didn't like doing command line stuff um

We the helped automate things around the office just look little things like that and then the lab itself

Also has a pile of developers um that work on like data ingest uh both for handling data from

Uh, well, it's entirely for handling data from like benchmarking and testing of computer components

But then also making sure that like the website receives the right stuff and not the embargoed things and whatnot um

And also making a variety of benchmarking tools like mark bench is the the name of one of the the tools that we have

Which does a bunch of automations for testing hardware. So like you you put a new graphics card on a test bench

You run mark bench mark bench will kind of try to verify that everything is set up correctly

And then automatically go through run all the benchmarks. It'll it'll

Is set up the game make sure the settings are correct

Scroll through the settings um and take screenshots so that if something is strange

If we're looking at the results are like this result seems really weird. We can go back through and check

Okay

Was gson enabled on the on the computer? It's a fairly common um

You know when you're trying to test things

Um error vector um is is this random setting in the game wrong

Like is this a game where we had to manually select the settings and and the person click beside the drop down a set of on it

So it didn't actually select the thing that they wanted uh or whatever else because the most frustrating thing is like

Okay, we have five days to like fully test this suite of new graphics cards

We're on day four everything is done. We noticed this one result is super weird

Why right did you just like is it that one result is super weird?

All the other ones are super weird and this one result is the real one so being able to go through and

Figure out like it dives through all the information to figure out make sure everything's all I know

All correct is super valuable

We also do

some amount of like AI checking to verify results

We only use that as an early warning system

So that's running as test results are coming in based on our expectations

Um, and that will try to tell us if it thinks something is wrong early, but that hasn't removed any human checks

Um to to verify all the data as well

Uh, so we have developers working on on that too

So we have a fair bit of range of people that were hiring in the development space

Um, and you asked uh, what stands out for me

It's the same thing personally. It's the same thing that is kind of always stood out

Um, focal point keeps me moving. Sorry about that. Um, I changed my camera setup last night very smart

Um, but it it it it's been portfolio stuff for me always like my my

first major

Specifically developer hire was very very largely off of portfolio

They had no post-secondary experience at all. They had no work experience

But their portfolio was just insane and I gave them a way too difficult project

We've we've drawn this back a lot since back then

But we gave them a way too difficult take home project and they just nailed it my oh man

I am evil for this uh, but my first like take home project was make a game um and and submit it and I had some work

You know, I put it on brutal. It was very brutal and he made a um

It's actually really fun going through those emissions is very fun

But it was if I remember correctly it was it was attempted to tone it out

So it wasn't like way too crazy. Triple A game

One million in sales

No, it's bad

Yeah, I think it was supposed to be an on oh man

Roughly GTI with both level of the party

I know you're not of water levels in GTA. You really didn't try hard enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's I I don't remember these exact details

But it was web based and there was like some some stuff that tried to keep it relatively

Relaxed but my god that was way too crazy of a scope so that yeah, that never happened again, but he made a

competitive asteroids game

Um, and he set up a little bot that set off an alarm in his house when I joined the lobby

Um, so I like loaded the website and joined the lobby and it like went off and he ran to his computer and they like fought against me

And there was chat in the sidebar. So we like talked about the game and I was just like this isn't say this has to be the the guy

This is crazy

So that was the alarm that is so brilliant of him to actually create a physical alarm like that alone is like okay

Yeah, you're hired. That was a great. That's a great thing. The whole thing is just nuts

I'm like I already knew from his portfolio that I was like very sold on this person and then that happened

I was just like oh my god

You are a new and then you said go make a game. I mean

I

You know, I have changed. I've reformed it's

Is he about to get a new lore drop when this thing comes out is gonna really yeah

Do you so I mean strictly out of curiosity you pay well? Can we poach this guy?

It sounds pretty good

Yeah, I'm not looking at schools who it was. Yeah, we we're not yeah

We try to do what we can we're not super competitive with it's it's tough man

The YouTube space is very different than like Silicon Valley. Yeah, if uh if people want to like

Really really push and be in like hyper competitive environments. There's more money out there

Yeah

It's just I've been joking but also seriously. What's his name? But also if you do happen to tell me who it was

My past but also I have a game

I might pass them along to some people. I'm not saying he's still on our team. I'm happy about that

Mm-hmm nice

All right, so uh it's a question. I really am actually very curious about which is I I don't know how to explain this

I send a tj a frantic message last night

I've just been feeling it for months on end about this which is I feel a change coming in the

Specifically more in the tech YouTube space, but I don't know what that change is, but I know it's happening. Wait what

Well, it means like I just feel like

So means in which people consume content what their expectations of a content should look like

What like all those things coming in I just feel like there's a change coming

But I just don't know what it is more in the tech space just because there's a big influx of people

You know, I think there's who knows what's gonna happen and so I'm actually very curious on your thoughts and really

I mean, I don't know how much of the t you can spell on LTT

But if you do it that I think the second t does span for stand for t

But if like what is your guys' thoughts about this next year or these next two years?

Is it business as usual or do you think that there is?

Like some pivots you may have to make or changes you have to make to remain more competitive?

Yeah, I could talk to you about that

One thing question that I'll throw back at you real quick is that I often hear

The software dev space referred to as tech YouTube

Because of you guys talking about being in tech

For us YouTube YouTube is usually like hardware stuff

So when you're talking about the change you're feeling in tech YouTube

Are you talking more on the like development side or the like

consume electronics and and server stuff and whatnot side?

I would say either or honestly because I think I think there is just a general

Gonna be something is gonna happen here in this space that's just gonna kind of change maybe

How people consume information. I'm not really sure yet

Yeah, I mean I can talk to about some of the like history of

LTC and and the the change that we are still going through

Which has been kind of from the beginning

So when when last time I first sort of worked together we were part of a computer shop up in Canada called NCX

We would show up to to like a filming date and in this in the studio in a corner would just be a mountain of products

Like it would it would the the logistics guys would just throw them in the corner

And they would literally like pile up sometimes up like to near the top of the windows

Like it was it was a lot and we could just like old school line of sectors videos and even some of the old school NCX tech videos

were just like

Okay, pull something out of the mountain talk about it while taking it out of the box and video upload

um and back then

We've kind of retroactively defined that as like product driven video where there was so much product is coming out so often

You're getting a new major gaffer's card watch every nine months something like that um

You could really just lean on the products are interesting. Let's talk about the products

Let's show you the products and that that is your content

around

25th in-ish maybe

um

It started we started having these conversations internally about like we kind of have to

Make this story now

um

That's when we started filming things like scrapboard wars, which is like a series. The scrapboard was like 2013

I think um, but we we kind of saw the ready on the wall a little bit early, but that the scrapboard wars is a series where

You have a fixed budget and you go and you try to buy used hardware and you compete against each other to

Who can have the better system and that was us trying to like okay? Let's create a story

Let's create an interesting thing instead of the interesting thing being the name and the title that is the new product that's coming

Um and that was that shift driven by

Necessity or was that just you guys saying we could expand or were you saying like no?

We're like the products aren't that interesting anymore or there's too many people doing this like how did you decide to do that?

It's a good question. It's it was definitely both

So we were detecting a you know a wider release cadence and kind of less interesting product releases both of those things kind of happening at the same time

and also

You know where this is our full-time thing now originally when we're part of NCX this was I was going to school

Linus had a job as a a product manager

um or a

Guy who buys product I don't remember what his

That's a little bit for that a product manager. Yeah. Yeah

It's a YouTube it is you would buy like SSDs and sell them through the store or what else

Got it. Yeah

So this was our part-time thing so there's only so much we could put into it and unboxing stuff was was you know

Approachable now when we're doing this full-time that's that was probably the main

Starter for for something like scrapyard was was like oh we have time. We could do this interesting thing and we always wanted to promote

You know they can buy stuff used you don't have to buy the super flashy things all the time

And it's been a little bit frustrating for us forever that like the the you know the 1590 video is gonna get all of the views

And the card that people are actually buying is not going to get brained any of these all because people want to see the we call it Lamborghini content

We want to see the the big expensive halo products

And from there they'll go like well

This card is really interesting. Therefore I want Nvidia and then they'll go by the thing that they can actually for it

So we wanted to find a way to make it more entertaining

to see content that is about

That not just boil your wallet on everything

So that was the main reason for that

But then the reason why we really continued doing it not only did it get a ton of views

But was because there wasn't a lot of other content we could easily make

GPU timelines for example

I said nine months that was around when I first started doing content now. It's like two years

So that has been a sliding scale the whole time

um, and also it's

I find the releases are getting a lot less interesting um like when the 8800 series GPUs came out like oh

The like performance expansion that happened was mind blowing and then now it's like

Uh, well you're paying 50% more dollar and you're getting 50% more performance hooray um if just even

Yeah, exactly. So it's like it's yeah, it's not nearly as interesting

So now we have to try to yet create stories do weird projects do stuff like that um and I the the competitiveness of it

Maybe a bit um Linus like notoriously just like doesn't watch youtube of almost any form

So like seeing where other people are doing and then do you like prime is not so much of a thing

He'll read comments on videos, but like doesn't really watch them which has done them in trouble a couple of times, but uh, you know

It's I mean I watch a lot of youtube, but um

Yeah, I don't think like what other creators in the tech space are doing has really driven a lot of

A lot of what we do

There are plans for the future. We want to resurrect some channels that we have our paedis

Uh, we want to start making more videos again

um

But a lot of it's like man if the products aren't there we're gonna have to make something

Uh, it just is what it is and if you're trying to release like if we want to get back to

Say six videos a week for example, which is what we did for a decade um

The vast majority of those are gonna have to be not

Uh, you know new product review maybe his product focus, but not

New product review type videos because it just isn't enough interesting stuff very good

I was just thinking about it. I was just like waiting for

I know like the answer did he hate it. I don't know. I can't tell

Well, the mustache did not move. It stayed completely stationary

I identified with a Linus quite a bit because I I too notoriously have been known for not watching youtube

Uh, true is it it is a thing that I and I like watching youtube

I can relate a lot to you Luke I can relate a lot. Yeah, I know

He jays my Luke

Oh, the the important one in the group too. Uh, so

uh

Okay, okay, that's that's interesting um

I'm just I was just curious about it just because

There's so much content now that's getting pumped out and things are even like you know

The so much jippity content that's getting put put out right now that's even getting millions of views

Which is crazy that people are just watching these kind of these I mean, I guess again. I don't watch youtube

So what am I saying? Why am I even saying it's crazy, right? Uh good for them. They're getting all that kind of stuff

But I wonder like how that changes people their perception well how like they're gonna interact with videos

Does it need to be a non-stop flow of factoids? Is it gonna be how does it optimize? What is it gonna be like?

Is you're gonna see something? I don't know. It's just I was just very curious about how you guys are gonna approach that especially more in

You're not tech YouTube. Obviously your hardware YouTube

Thank you

You guys might find tech YouTube. I think we're just YouTube

Yeah, no, it's I mean, it's interesting right like YouTube in my opinion is trending towards extremes

We we've talked about this a little bit publicly where we we feel like

YouTube channels like the the mr. Beast of the world are doing super well the NFL channel on YouTube

Those types of things are doing extremely well and then smaller more specified niche channels are also doing really well because

This does kind of make mess me because if you think about what viewers would go for they're either going for the most like kind of

brain turn off

absorbed fun saying

Content or they want to like learn about something and really really dive into something

and we've

Traditionally kind of floated in the middle which on YouTube was pretty good for a long time

Um, that is getting a little bit less good now

So that's kind of informing some of our choices like I mentioned. We're looking into resurrecting some channels

um

And there is some planning going on of like trying to house

channels that are more

uh

More specialized LTT has always been a generalist channel

Um lightest word rule review a phone and then he'll make a

Seven gamers one CPU computer

Like it's it's a huge range of stuff right and that's just less

Rewarded in the current YouTube ecosystem. We're also finding that channel momentum is less important now than it's like almost ever bit

Uh, which is a very weird space very uh uncertain space to be in

Um, where like back in the day if you did like we would go to CES consumer electronics show we'd release 30 videos

Um, and they would all do a little bit worse than normal because we're just flooding the channel

And the impact of that would be lower views for a while and we'd see our view curve kind of go up over time because we're trying to recovering that

Um, that kind of base and these days that doesn't happen which is

Good and also

Really terrifying. It's it's good because if you release one bad video

It's not going to negatively affect your your future videos as much

But it's really bad because the predictability of how well your videos are going to perform thus your ability to you know

Um, yeah, they have sponsors and and all these other types of things be confident in your like product which is your ability to release videos

Um, it's going to go down and make some monetization less reliable. It makes big companies like ours a little bit more sketched out because you know, we have a hundred and twenty

Mouths to fees so um if if the if the ad rev or whatever

So lips because we have a few videos in a row that don't do super well that can impact us a lot

Which is again one of those reasons why we want to get back to more video releases because

It you know if you release once every two weeks and it really doesn't hit and it forms really really terribly

That impact on you is going to be really high if you're releasing it all the time it can hopefully come out in the wash

Um, but it's difficult to

Release that much content effectively. We have a we have a big team of editors. We have a big team of writers, but um

We get away from product review focused content the content is harder to make um, you have to dive deeper into things

You have to come up with better ideas. You have to come up with ideas that take a lot of work etc. Um

So it's yeah, we're trying to scale towards that, but it's uh, it's a tough problem

YouTube's always been that way though the the landscape is constantly changing what the algorithm favors

Usually changing and and if you want to survive you have to kind of ride that wave

So it is what it is yeah, it is interesting

Yeah, I think like you just sort of see now

On the like uh the momentum for a channel doesn't matter as much like sometimes you just put out a really good video

And it just does really well

And it's like which is awesome and like you're saying terrifying because you're like okay

Well, it's really hard to predict what next week videos are gonna do right in terms of like what's gonna happen next

But it is fun because it does feel a lot of times like when you know a video is gonna be good

It does like hit well, which is fun

Which makes the game pretty pretty fun to do I don't know what I prime

I feel like yesterday though. I'll just say as well. You were just reading too much anthropic blogs, bro

I read through the doorio

Oh my gosh, I guess I'm I'm a big-time mirror and so uh

If I hang out with people that are really sad, I feel more sad

And if I hang out with people that are more like happy, I become more happy

I like hanging out to you. He's always smiling and it makes me always smile too

That's also why I like hanging out with twitch chat they uh

They tend to be like a good retriever

Look at Luke's face right there. Oh my god

And so it's very very exciting. I'm just a simple farmer, right? But uh, yeah, but I started reading on the blog

And then it's just I'm sitting there thinking man like

Also, it's just like I just got blackpilled so hard for like 30 minutes of my life there

I was just like dang man this Dario guy he walked

I just now I have a whole new opinion about everything uh, but that's okay

I sent him a happy message afterwards and he was right back boys. Yeah, I was right back

I just needed a little bit of love great anyways. Yeah, sorry

The day I stuff got me down hard last night, but now I'm back. We're so back

It jumped back to the spiky views topic for a section for a second this section of our channel

I I find very interesting if you if you go to our channel go to videos scroll down a little bit

And you see the the steam machine won't cost what you think video from two months ago. Yeah

That got 2.8 million views

The next video got five hundred and forty-seven thousand

So like boom slam down

And then the next one got eight hundred and forty-eight the next one got five point three million

Next one got one point six next one got nine hundred thousand. It's just like

Oh, like it it really really depends on just how the audience resonated with that video

And there is there's some informing of the algorithm for your channel and what type of content you make and what who they might

First seed it to and all that type of stuff like there is some influence there. So if there's no momentum

But day. Yeah, it's uh

It's really it's a it's a very different world these days. I think they picked the wrong year to release the steam machine

If they want to put any RAM in it

I think is like to tie it back to our original topic. It's going to have like 246k

It's going to be like here's the near-sustained machine guys

five hundred dollars

I'll bring your own. I'm hoping that they have their allotment. Maybe they have

Who knows I had no idea but I've really been open. That's true because I want it to do well

I think to like yes, I mean to expect everyone in here is at least a little bit Linux pill

Uh, and it would be it would be nice to have like a

Quite mainstream product like that. Yes, I think steam deck has done like

A measurable good for the like year of the next desktop movement

Yes, it produced PewDiePie which PewDiePie produced a Linux video and that that's huge. That was

That's a sage

But uh, yeah, I mean, I think steam machine can only move that forward. So

Hopefully it's good. Hopefully it's affordable

We'll see

We're actually doing a conference this year about your Linux desktop

I can't say anymore live because there's some details still getting closed

But it's pretty exciting

Cool. Nice. Yeah

All right, Brian. We're gonna that's why I don't want I don't want to say anything more. We're gonna be quiet

No, I'm hoping that you leak and then I can uh, I can yell at you

You'll be like

Gosh dang it. Why did you say this explicit thing right here that I'm now repeating? I'm not gonna do it

Um, all right

Well, thanks for joining us on this. This was an awesome standup learned a lot very curious about the behind the scene

Especially with Linus Tech Tips. I also think it's pretty cool to hear that uh

What we've kind of been preaching for a very very long time on this channel

Which is like building and actually creating things and learning how to have fun with tech

Really goes a long way because obviously the first higher that man must have had a lot of fun with tech to be able to be like

I'm gonna hook up on a alarm. I'm gonna put in live chat. I'm gonna play like thinking through things and having a good time

Just goes to show how valuable it has been and probably will continue to be

Yeah, yeah

Thanks for having me. Yeah, really appreciate it. Thank you Casey for joining us as always and teach

I love the letter

Chat don't let Dario get you down

Don't let the AI think for you and have Dario get his earworms deep in your brain

Use the tools to keep on better in your own life. Don't let Dario make you believe that you have to be a little

Matrix guy hooked up to a clawed and that's the only way to live your life. Don't do that

It's true. It's true. Also, you can't be hooked up to clawed like C. L. A. W. D

Because then you'll get copyright striked or trademark infringed

But you have to be hooked up to the other

How dare someone

Use it in the likeness of a name for an AI company

Sorry, that is still is tilting me that they were like you used a name like our name

I'm like bro you guys stole the internet

Don't have the name clawed guys there wasn't even spelled the same

Whatever

Sorry

Oh, it's beautiful. All right. Well, we do really appreciate you. We really uh

We really appreciate what Linus Tech tip does and so thank you very much for coming on and we should

By the way next stand up. We should talk about we should talk about

Grade mark because I'm actually curious because micro soft. That was a real thing. That sounds the same

There's precedent in soft

Yeah, there's precedent in the uh in the trade we've always had a president

What nice

Thanks, Deji. I

Missed the earlier to I had to make one more shot

I've had a joke that's been dangling around in my head because you're talking about how like these people were like

Off-getting wafers and how

There's these three big companies really controlling the supply of it

And so then I was going to make some sort of like jeweler joke like are they the exact same thing as like blood diamonds

Is that what ram is except for it's

It's mined by these three companies and they don't let anybody else have them

Is that how price controlling works?

You're talking about the cartel aspect of it. Yeah, yeah, they're like

I mean, maybe a better example would be the Canadian maple syrup cartel right where they all

They're all like here's the price of maple syrup

If you want if you want a weird rabbit hole look up the green great Canadian maple syrup heist yes

That's highly recommended so so we do this thing where uh on a lot of the stand-ups we do full-on presentations

Where one person has to come in with slides and we go really we go really hard on the presentation

So Luke if you are interested you can move a presentation on the great Canadian whoa

Maybe

I can get people some some rabbit holes to go down because I yeah, I'm not ready on that one

But there are some we we have one of the coolest wars of all time in my opinion

Um Canada was at war with Denmark until like a few years ago

What oh yeah, it's like a cold war like with Denmark. It's like it's richest. It was like

Casey just because they don't have summer the same way as you

I think it was very special. So there's there's an island off the coast of Canada. Go away. Denmark

uh

Which was which was contested for a long time

Great

No one actually cared about the island itself what they cared about was the the ocean around it effectively the fish

All right. All right. All right. Whatever

and

That was the dispute so we were at actives

war but as like a Canadian active duty military member you could go to Denmark and tour one of their

Military facilities and they'd be happy to have you

So at the island I might get some of this lately wrong doing top-ed but

There was like a bit of a divot in the rocks and there was a rock that could go over it

And the Canadians would put Canadian whiskey in there and plant a Canadian flag and then every once in a while

Uh the people from Denmark would come by in a warship

Debord take the Canadian flag off put a day's flag down

And put snobs in and take the whiskey and then take off and they would they would literally even

Sometimes like let us know they were coming just so we didn't like freak out

So you didn't have an actual war

I don't think we're we're chillin

I if I remember quickly there was one time where it was like supposed to kind of be theirs for a while

But someone shipped wrecked on the island and we were like yo

We're not gonna like take your flags up but can we go get the guy and they're like get him prompt

Uh it was it was it was genuinely I actually really liked that we were at war with ten point

Uh and I was sad when they ended it

But they they did end it relatively recently

Uh who ended up with the island

I think America buy Greenland. I think that's the moral of the story is going

Yeah, maybe that's it if I remember correctly they like split it in half or something which is so boring

Oh my god and after all that okay

They just decided to share

Yeah, it's so lame

Let's see yet ended in June June 14th, 2022

Uh resolve the issue resulting in the creation of a land border on the island. Yeah, boring. Join custody

So who who gets it during Christmas?

Like that's a really question

Yeah

They should have just done it on different days of the week like okay can you guys get weekends and holidays

That would be kind of fun. Yeah

Yeah, I have a random candidate of facts like uh are you aware of uh let me make sure this is even true

No, don't check don't check say it first say it first. Okay, I'll say it first. I'll see it

As far as where Santa goes you don't moose

Mashes and we'll heard of their territory

Uh predators of the moose which you can imagine there wouldn't be that many um is killer ones

That's

Are the moose on like ice or something I understanding as to why and again

I didn't just look it up so part of this is probably wrong

But understanding as to why is they have huge lungs and they can dive

So when they're way up north and they're going from island to island

You can swim and they'll dive to eat like

Uh vegetation

This has to be a lie. I like literally refuse and then this killer wheel comes along and it's just like whoa

Luke I thought you were gonna say the killer whales had really big lungs. So they just hop up on land to grab

Let me see uh these are forbs are because I don't want to use the ai over you. I don't want to I want to feed them um

Yes, sure

Of lutes apparently. Okay. I guess it's like they live for a long time right to be a big predator of moose or me says they say

Like you don't have to kill that many to be like a top predator probably does there really aren't that many

Yeah, yeah, yeah on their Wikipedia page

Uh such as moose swimming between islands off the northwest coast of North America. Yeah

I eat to eat moose

That's so cool

Fun kind of that there aren't that many of them

That's pretty good. Yeah, you got a few the capitals to sketch one. What is it?

Nobody knows

That was a friendship test

That's it the standup is ending hey if you enjoy watching the standup you can enjoy it all you want on youtube

There's a lot of this side banter such as this Canadian fun fact area that will be on

Spotify because it turns out people on youtube don't like to watch people talk about fun Canadian facts for 20 minutes

This is just life on youtube. So if you want the whole thing go to Spotify. We have the data

We have the data. We know it's conclusive

So if you want to enjoy the whole episode go to Spotify for all the extras

But the main store of course is always on youtube. Thanks so much for joining us. Luke. Thank you so much

Is there anywhere special people can find you?

Uh the internet uh, no, yeah line is tech tips great point um when show in general

Um, I'm around. Yeah, all right awesome and of course teach and Casey

Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you everybody for watching

That is the standup. I've never we I don't know. We don't really have like a sign off line

I'll try and get better jokes next time. Sorry Chad. I I missed a few this time. Hey no blockers galactus love galactus.

Bye-bye

You