Is Cloud Gaming the Future

0:00 I had to switch to Starlink for all those that are curious. Oh, my God. And so I'm in Starlink land. Thank you, Elon. And so I'll drop every now and then. So sorry, everybody. I thought Starlink was good. Starlink is good, but every now and then I get a couple dropped frames. So I don't really know when it's going to happen or how it's going to happen. Just at some point, it just goes, okay, I'm going to drop for a second.

0:23 That's where, okay, well, so Starlink is satellite's prime. Yes, yes. So what's happening there is that's when the dinosaur laser fight happens. Because remember, in space, there's constant dinosaur laser fights in the upper, you know, when you're in outer space. And so there's, like, they just have to deal with that. And you lose some packets. Okay. How else do you think we got the bones down here, Trash? They die and they fall down. They die and they fall down. And then we find them later and put them in a museum. Duh.

0:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyways, sorry. Okay. This all makes sense. Now that you say it that way, this somehow makes sense. It all makes sense. It's all just one big circle. See, before that didn't make any sense. Now it just makes sense. This is how, because I do my own research. So I've got, I know this stuff, right? A lot of people don't know about the dinosaur laser fights in space. Okay.

1:19 It's true. I did. I mean, I personally didn't know about it. All right. We should probably get started, you know, because it is time to get started. So before we actually get started, get started. We got to talk about this right here. Now, you guys can't really see my screen because I or maybe you can. I can't tell. So tiny. So tiny.

1:37 Okay. Anyways, it is a comment from our last video, and it goes along the lines of this. Wow, this was so unexpected. Thank you, Casey, for the shout out. You really did do better than my simple Instagram photo. The spike of random orders from out of state made me think they were fraudulent. Ha ha ha.

1:54 Was so confused until someone notified me of this podcast. Thanks for all the support. Orders will ship next week. P.S. I don't think it's pretentious. Just really good. Because I asked if the snack was pretentious or not. You did. Yes. Because I got to know. Like, do I get looked down on people or not? I just need to know this. Anyways, Casey, just FYI, nobody during Trash's entire snack time ever was like, oh my gosh, you caused orders. But you, Casey, you alone. We don't know that. We don't know that. Well, we know.

2:24 We don't know that. That's true. You don't know how many people are buying. It's because of trash. Okay? Yeah, you don't know that. We know at least one order. It wasn't to the levels of making them think it was fraudulent. All I know is that when Casey says something, we get comments in the section. Okay. We get comments being like, hey, we thought fraud was happening, but it turns out it was just Casey. That's right. Or maybe Casey caused the fraud. We don't know. Nobody knows. Nobody knows. All right. Did anybody on? I actually have a quick poll. So what was the name of the snack? And what was the name of the beef jerky?

2:59 It was Kobo, K-H-O-B-O. And I like the spicy one. I don't know if Trash was saying that maybe he's too sensitive to spicy. So maybe he would go original. But I go spicy because that's the way I roll. Super spicy. I think the spicy one tastes better as well. So it's just like if you can handle spice, go spice. If you can't, you can't. Yeah, I believe. I believe in that.

3:27 Look at all these engineers sitting at their neat little desks. It takes dirty work to keep a code base clean. Every day sickos are out there committing unreviewed code. And when that happens, linters won't save you. You need someone like me. Feature-free, scrumbag! Who are you calling scrumbag? What's this slop you're trying to push? Unnecessary comments? Global state? Nested ternaries? Oh, my bad. I didn't even read the code yet. You disgust me. Step away from the keyboard. Just let me explain. Is that a mouse? He's a merchant of prod! You have the right to remain silent. Anything you push to GitHub can and will be used against you. You have the right to a debugger, but if you cannot afford one, a public stack trace will be made available to you.

4:15 and one more code criminal off the streets where they belong. HR. Look, I didn't... I know I didn't review any of the code, but I was going to have CodeRabbit review it from the start. With one-click fixes and style enforcement, I don't need MergeCop. I would never merge I reviewed Code, but a first pass with CodeRabbit always makes things go faster. Actually, you can try it too at CodeRabbit.ai.

4:42 Next week on Merge Cop. The Diffler's out there, and I'm going to be the one to deprecate them. Did anyone, by the way, did anybody from chat, did anybody out there order some delicious? My internet's kind of wonky right now, so I can't tell if anything's working. But did anybody from chat right now order some of these? Of these, because I actually want to know. The spice must flow. The spice must flow. Yes, the spice must flow.

5:10 Through the anus. What? Sorry. I'm sorry. You're not sorry. That is the next book in the Dune series. I did. Order in Como. Nice. Okay, we did get somebody to do it. Okay, awesome. That's what happens now. Dune. Everyone on Arrakis has terrible diarrhea, like 24-7. I always wonder when I watch the hot ones. Blue eyes and blue poop. Like, it's just blue poop. Liquid-y blue poop. I'm sure in one of the books he talked about it.

5:41 Because doesn't it turn your eyes blue in Dune? That's like the classic sign that you're spice addicted. That you're trapped on Arrakis. Spoiler alert. I think the people on Arrakis can't avoid it, right? Because it's just in the air, basically. They don't have to take it, right? It just infects them. They naturally have it. I've only seen the fight scenes in that movie.

6:02 Okay, well, there's a lot more to the book. Well, look at the eyes. Look at their eyes. Then you should see the blue eyes. Trash didn't notice. I don't remember. Trash, their eyes are up here, okay? Trash, their eyes are up here. Okay, got it, got it. I'm not a big Chalamet guy. I don't know. I didn't particularly like the movie. I saw the first one. I was like, meh. I watched the second one, so then naturally I watched the fight scene. All right, TJ, you...

6:31 have this thing that just simply says explain cmf well i didn't want to do any spoilers you can't put spoilers in your blockers okay well you didn't put the proper labeling like everybody else had a label of blocker so i didn't even know what this was because it doesn't have the word blocker on it it's a block market oh my gosh okay well here let me help you trash you're way ahead of trash what do you think it's going to be then trash you're you're two out of three already correct my first guess was chocolate We don't have chocolate market fit, but we are working on that. Chocolate market fit. Crypto, I don't know. Crypto market fit, guys. We got a new coin, the stand-up coin. Yeah, yeah. I like it. It's not a rug pull. Pump it. Pump it. Yet. Yet. No, so when I was in San Francisco, the real ones say SF for short. Yeah.

7:29 I thought it was the Bay. I thought they called it the Bay. They call it the city. They don't call it the Bay. It stands for San Francisco. It's like the OC. The OC. They call it the city. Right. Don't say San Fran, though. Don't say San Fran. Oh, they hate that. I love saying San Fran. That's my favorite of them all. Okay, I'm going to start saying that more often, then. That's good to know. So I was there recently and met some fans of the podcast, and they told us that, hey, This podcast, it found content market fit. And so I just wanted to share that I really liked that acronym and that I enjoyed hearing that we really know our audience. We know what they like hearing. So that was fun. That's all. That's it. It was just I wanted to give a shout out to them. So thanks for bringing the content market fit. It was at a thing just before Compile Cursors Conference. Wow. I should have with the Compile. I'm kind of sad. How is CMF? I know. I should have.

8:26 is that how is that pronounced is it c-muff would you say this this podcast has c-muff on this podcast ever again i'm gonna say this this podcast kind of has c-muff no based on what the people from sf said oh no we are not seeing this podcast okay how about kumpf What do you think, guys? I would say this podcast has some comf. It's got a bit of comf to it. That's a good list of words I don't like. Thank you for that. But I guess it's a little bit comf. It got a little comfy. Leave all those in post, please. I don't know, but I guess we just have CMF, guys. We just have CMF. It sounds like some kind of disease you talk to your doctor about. Or maybe a treatment for a disease. Like, ask your doctor if CMF is right for you. I just feel like that is some statistics function that people use. Like, hey, have you checked the CMF on this?

9:19 Yep. Because it's like, you know, it just feels like a word that could be. It's statistically significant. Yeah, because I know there is something that is close sounding to that, which is the distribution. It's like cumulative something something. Or like the Clouchy Morwitz function or formula or something. Like it's a mathematical. Yeah.

9:39 I kind of liked more as the disease one where it comes on with an ad for something like, are you or other podcast hosts that you know lacking CMF? Are they having a hard time? Do you have low CMF? Do you have low CMF? Oh, low CMF. Right. We recommend having a host who doesn't know how to start the episode. That's an art experience. Well, I had to get the blockers out of the way. I didn't want to start today's episode without the blockers, you know?

10:08 Good point. Good point. Okay. All right. Are you guys ready? Are you guys going to keep on complaining about the situation going on? Keep on complaining seems likely. All right. Wow. Okay. Well, let us start the podcast today, shall we? Let's. Yes. Okay. I just want to make sure I'm setting up the right thing to Riverside, just so that way you can also get this. Because what happened if I wasn't setting that up? You know, if I had programmed to fall, if I had, like, just my desk, you would get that. And that would be bad. Yep.

10:38 All right. I like that. This time you interrupted yourself on the intro. That's pretty nice. I don't even have to do anything today. Oh, you know what we're talking about today. All right. All right. So standard trash day. All right. Here we go. Trash ready to be surprised again. Yep. All right. All right. Welcome to the most attended stand-up in the world. Right? That's right. All the interns of the world are now here. We're ready for the stand-up. And today we are going to be talking about a topic that made Jonathan Blow go sigh. That is what we're talking about today. I was not expecting. Yes. I got a thousand likes just saying that word. I've never seen it before in my lifetime.

11:18 Also, is this a complete sentence? Do you end with a period? Because I don't think there's an implied you there. Anyways, nonetheless, this is what we are talking about today. Should you own hardware? Is renting hardware really the future? Let me read the tweet in completion, and then we can discuss. You'll get mad at me for saying this, but cloud gaming is so obviously more economically efficient than physical hardware. I think it's going to be the default soon. Your home console PC is idle 90% of the day.

11:48 Meanwhile, by the way, clearly doesn't know about agents running in the little hands. Meanwhile, data centers target at what? 5%? Maybe worse, 10% idle? Every second a cloud gamer isn't gaming, that hardware is being used for someone else, training, etc. I think there should be a new measurement, something like cost per effective flop hour, that takes into account the TCO plus effective utilization. If a gamer spends $500 on a GPU...

12:13 uses it for three years, but it's only fully active 5% of that period. The cost per relative flop hour is crazy high. Meanwhile, a $50,000 data center GPU might have a lower cost per flop hour just because of the effective utilization is 90 plus percent. And then there's this lovely graph right here, which effectively just shows the different frame rates and effective kind of from processing to pixel from click to pixel latency. So somewhere between 50 milliseconds all the way up to 200 plus milliseconds on a UHD laptop PC with less than 30 frames per second.

12:47 That is what we're talking about. I think this is kind of a neat topic because right before I quit my previous job, the one that Trash still works out right now, Netflix, I think is what it's called. I was working on cloud gaming and latency was something that was very interesting because I figured that I would feel every single drop of latency as I was playing. And then I realized I'm old and it doesn't actually feel the same as I thought it was going to feel.

13:10 And I was able to play a lot of the games, and I was actually shocked at how smooth it really did feel in practice and all that. So this is quite the interesting bit of topic for me. But that is me. That is me saying a lot of words. I'll open up the floor to somebody because I'm sure we have a lot of strong opinions about this. I have a lot of ideas, but I don't want to just control it all yet. I mean, I think you were controlling it just fine if you want to go a little bit. I want to hear Trash's opinion. Yeah, I want to hear Trash's opinion.

13:39 So I tried GFN yesterday because I never really tried it. And I was just curious, like what the Lancie would feel like. GFN, is that also like a market fit? Is that gaming market fit? It's GeForce Now, I think. That's the thing that's been talked about in that picture you just showed. Yeah, so the top two bars are like the GFN Lancie or whatever. So I was like, okay.

14:00 So as someone who used to take gaming very seriously, I was very curious what the latency would feel like. Actually, the only one with professional gaming experience on this podcast. As an ex-professional gamer, this is my opinion. That's good. That's a good point, Trash. So I tried two different kinds of games. I tried an FPS game, Counter-Strike, because latency matters a lot. And then I tried a casual game. I think I tried Genshin Impact, which is like an RPG or something. A gotcha game. Yeah, Trash isn't super familiar. He hasn't spent like $10,000 on it. He doesn't know for sure.

14:33 it's like Genshine Genshine Impact I could be anything yeah it looks like Japanese we all know you have a favorite character okay we all know you have a favorite character yeah I played a game that anime lovers like I don't know it's kind of weird is Ether or Lumin Lumin your favorite character Trash yeah Is that based on a manja? I don't even know what their names are. It's based on a manja. Wait, what? Oh, yeah, manja? I love reading a manja. A manja. I'm sorry, a manja. Yeah. Is that based on a manja? I like a manja. Like where Jesus was born. Jesus was born in a manja. In a manger? In a manger. Jesus was born in a manga. Is that like a Boston accent? In a manja. Oh, my God. That's amazing. Ah, Jesus in a manger. I can't do a Boston accent. But so what was your experience like, Trash? I'm very interested to hear. I think, so my stance is going to be less about should I own hardware or rent hardware

15:22 like what the target audience would probably be or what the audience would probably be. I feel like for serious gamers that play FPS or fighting games or anything competitive, I don't think cloud gaming, at least at the moment, is at that point or where it needs to be. Yeah, basically for casuals, that's some of the sense that it's for casuals. So when I was playing the FPS game Counter-Strike, The sensitivity configuration was just so off. I'm used to using my DPI button on my mouse because I'll often switch it depending on what situation I am. That didn't have any response. Yeah, real gaming. And then I went to the actual menu, changed mouse sensitivity. Absolutely nothing. Then not to mention, I'm playing in a Chrome browser

16:02 So I couldn't tell if it was like the hardware itself, like the streaming was choppy or if it was just my browser chopping, being choppy, but I was getting stutters everywhere. So for like those kinds of games, it didn't feel good. And I don't see like if I had like a low budget computer, if it was running on Chrome, I can imagine it's probably gonna be even worse because I was running this on a pretty strong machine.

16:21 But for games like Genshin Impact, more of like the chill, casual, laid-back games, I can see it being super viable. But, yeah. More money to spend on characters. Yeah. Right? Yeah. But you know what I was really confused about? The GFN thing? I thought it was like a Netflix to where all the games came in a catalog. I actually have to buy the game.

16:45 and then just leverage their hardware to play the game. Well, so you don't own the game physically and you don't own the hardware? So it goes in your Steam library. You would buy it, add it to your Steam library, and then it would just connect your Steam library and then you can do it. So I didn't buy any games. I was super shocked. But there's a lot of free games you can play, so that's where Genshin and CS2 came into play.

17:05 But the user experience was just so confusing. Like I didn't even know what I was doing. It was like, do you want the game? I was like, yes. And then I was on a Mac, so I went to, it took me to the Steam client, and it was like, you need to install it. So then I hit install, then it was like, you're on Mac. And I was like, well, what am I supposed to do? I was like, I was like, I want to install it on your machine. You're supposed to let me play. And I went through that for like 30 minutes to the point where I opened up ChatGPT and I was like, I don't know what to do. It was like, oh. So then they walked me through and I was like, I can't. I was just so confused because again, my mental model was a Netflix kind of thing. It's like, oh, I want to play Cyberpunk. Let's click that. And I was like, I'm not paying that much money for that. Screw that. But if it's for casual gaming, I would love to play Cyberpunk and I'm not going to buy a crazy expensive video card to play it. So like in that situation, I think it makes sense.

17:49 But I don't know. As a competitive gamer, I don't think it's right for me. You didn't even play StarCraft? That was an option. I didn't. I didn't have time. But I think the FPS StarCraft, or StarCraft, Counter-Strike would have been a better kind of gauge on if it felt realistic to me. It felt super kind of laggy, like the input latency was kind of... So, for those reasons, I'm out.

18:15 Shark Tank. I'm out. But I'm going to try it. I'm going to play Genshin Impact now that I have it. I'm going to play a little bit of it. Okay, okay. I'm going to play those casual games. Oh, no. Trash. Don't do it, buddy. Don't do it. Based on your Pokemon card collection behind you, Genshin Impact will not be the right fit for you. He's about to have content perfect fits, TJ. Okay, Genshin Impact content is going to fit right into his wallet. I've been wanting to play it for a while, so, you know, I'm in it now.

18:47 Anyways, we're going to get in trouble. We're going to get a call from your wife being like, what happened to trash? This is your guys' fault. He said he was doing research for the podcast. Yeah. Why do I have a $25,000 bill? I said to my wife last night. From the receipt app and be like, hey, got receipts? I got receipts. What have you done to my husband?

19:10 so my wife came into my office last night because my son was watching me play Genshin Impact she's like what are you doing because it was like right before bedtime I was like she's like what are you playing I was like I'm doing research for the podcast and I'm just like naming my character, dashing around and fighting things I'm like you only understand very important work no no I'm doing research feed egg the podcast the thing that i do during the day when i'm supposed to be working for netflix uh i have a marked off of my calendar thank you very much and i have a personal agent now by the way oh you have a personal agent really i do because my google calendar my slack messages my jeer tickets boom all using just oh we're gonna have to talk about that yeah yeah

19:59 It knows the 1Password. It actually is really easy to use one of these agents when you have 1Password. Yeah. It doesn't need to set up auth or anything. You just put it in the agent's MD file and you say, hey, navigate to the website. I haven't typed in the Murdo password. Whatever it is, no matter which site, this is the password. Okay.

20:23 Think of how many tokens you saved by only having to send one password. Put it in a markdown so it remembers all the time. He doesn't even need MCP or anything. He just has one password. It's amazing. all right anyways okay back to the cloud gaming so uh i actually i think i i know i have at least one short from 2013 or 2023 and i've said this for a while that i think that the future is going to be this whether we like it or not that we're going to have hardware as the rentable unit i just wasn't prepared that it was going to probably be ai that caused this to become the economically viable way for you to be able to use hardware I just wasn't prepared for that being the thing that was the catalyst. I always thought it was going to be something to do with battery life, where when your phone's off and it has nothing to do with, like, there's not even an operating system. It just receives, like, it's just such a thin thing. It just, like, pipes frames directly into a buffer, and that's all you use. I just figured that's what we were going to be getting. But I was a little bit shocked by this being that cloud gaming to this level was going to be the one that...

21:25 is going to be where we start at. I don't know. I was not prepared for that. But I, okay, so I was talking to my son last night. And I was explaining to him why Bamboo, the printing place, why they're bad. And he didn't really get it because he's just like, well, who cares if they look at what we're printing? And I'm like, well, you like to print like little guns and stuff, right? And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, well, what happens if they decide one day that you're not allowed to print little guns? He's like, well, but they can't. It's my printer. And I'm like, well, that's how owning works, son.

21:51 It's not your printer because they have to approve what you can and can't print. So, therefore, it's not yours. Even though you purchased it, it's not yours. And I could just see him kind of, like, start slowly working the things out. I didn't know that. What the hell is going on here? Hey, you could see it kind of start happening where he's just about to be like, that took our jabs. And so he's getting very – it was very exciting to watch. But I just – theoretically from a peer, like my own emotional, not from a theoretical stance, but from a principal stance. I hate this future. I hate the idea of renting everything. I don't want to rent everything. I don't want that at all, ever for any reason. Put my stance out there.

22:29 Quick aside, because Trash doesn't know about the bamboo thing. I think you want to give him a quick rundown on that? So there's an extreme – the printer, to be all completely fair, I've used both Prusa and bamboo. And I will have to say that as far as Prusa goes, I would prefer Prusa, the people. But bamboo is such an amazingly simple printer.

22:53 And it is so good. And it has like, it's just a 3D printer in which they call like the iPhone and printing. I'm not sure if that's actually true because I hate iPhones. So it doesn't really matter. It doesn't really track with me. But you set it up. Trash is interested. I know, Trash is like, oh, yeah. It's an iPhone product.

23:10 What it does is you just like press a button and then an hour and a half later, it's like, hey, I'm good to go. You can just start printing. And then they have just like a lot of really good integrations with the web. You can just go on and start pressing stuff and just start printing. Like you don't – it's just really simple to use.

23:25 But the problem with it is that you can't actually print anything without going off and sending it off to a server and all that. I think the general rule is that, oh, we don't want people 3D printing guns, right? Like that's the dangerous future, so therefore we need to control everything you're able to do. We need to be able to inspect everything that you're actually doing, so that way we are a nice, safe future and nobody can ever possibly get hurt.

23:48 And so there's ways around it. You can get around this with doing some, I think I forget the exact slicer. And the funny part is that Dolphin, their slicer, which is the program that puts everything together to be put onto the 3D printer, is actually a forked from Prusa, if I'm not mistaken. And so it's like they're not only using Prusa stuff, but they're then putting it behind this kind of like wall of control. And so that's kind of this big debate that's going on, which is, do you actually own your own printer if you can't determine what you're printing?

24:15 If you have to get a yes from Daddy Prusa, or not Daddy Prusa, but Daddy Bamboo, then do you really actually own it? Yeah. And there's a lot of laws coming down and people trying to push more and more into this whole 3D printing space. And so, anyways, I really enjoyed, I've enjoyed the use of Bamboo. It's very, very nice. But just talking to my son about this, which was very interesting because he's never thought about the idea that you don't own things.

24:44 And then we started talking about Switch games. Like, we bought Final Fantasy. In Final Fantasy, you get the little red card now for the Switch 2. You don't actually get the game anymore. You get a little red card that contains a little chip. And then if you want to play it, you have to put it in. And then Nintendo, the online place, goes, okay, yes, you are allowed to play. And then you can download it. And so this is kind of what that GeForce Now slash this hardware thing is, is that you have to get approved by Jeff Bezos to be able to play. Or Jensen has to approve of who you are to be able to play on their device. So...

25:13 Theoretically, I do not like this one bit. I guess I would ask the question, like there's, there's way too many like issues kind of wrapped up in this thing because there's sort of, there's the question of whether cloud gaming makes sense on some level. There's the question of like ownership versus renting and so on. And so I guess like, because you just teed up the ownership part of things, I think I'd just like to add something to that.

25:43 which is that it really doesn't have much to do with ownership or renting or any of those things. What really we're talking about here is just what's normally called digital sovereignty. The idea that you have control over your own sort of digital domain, like you would if, you know, the same way that we think about if I buy a house, like...

26:04 In law, there's something often referred to as castle doctrine, for example, which is this idea that, like, the state in general needs sort of, like, extraordinary circumstances in order to, like, intrude upon your home. Like, this is why we have things like they have to have a warrant. They can't just, you know, walk into your house and start looking around and so on. And so I guess I would say, like...

26:27 All of the things that you were talking about, Prime, are really part of a larger issue, which just has to do with who is in control of what you can do with your computer. And it's almost something you can separate from renting versus owning, because we could imagine a future in which I rented my computer hardware, but had complete control over what I did with it as long as I was paying for it.

26:53 And we could also imagine a future in which I literally purchased the device and own it and no one can take it away from me, but I can't do anything with it without the government's permission or without a corporation's permission. Right. And so I just want to kind of underscore the point that digital sovereignty is a separate idea. It's an idea about what rights, what like sort of.

27:18 I'm not going to use the word inalienable, but like what sort of rights you have in the digital domain that it requires extraordinary effort for people to deprive you of? Like you have to go to a court of law or you have to do something to take those rights away. And... Along the same lines about what you were talking about with your son, I think the reason it's so important to keep those kinds of things in mind is because most people don't realize when they have lost their digital rights until it becomes obvious to them by bumping up against that situation, right?

28:04 Most people just haven't internalized that fact. And I think it would be worth people internalizing that fact because that is kind of the way that a lot of your computing is today without you knowing it. Like you don't probably have any digital sovereignty over your email right now. Most people out there. It's unlikely. Someone wants to take your email away from you, they just can't.

28:22 A corporation could take it away from you. The government could take it away from you trivially. It just really wouldn't require very much work because you haven't really been promised anything. You're just using a service at the discretion of the terms of service, and some corporations doing that, right? Similarly reading it, like reading that email. Anyone can really do that. Whoever the people are listed in the terms of service that they can share your email with, they just can, right?

28:53 Acting with the belief that a lot of things that they use as if they were theirs were theirs and they're not. Like they don't actually have that digital sovereignty. And so that, I think, is an absolutely huge issue. I wish it got more attention. I would point you to some organizations that do work in that domain. For example, there's one called FUTO, F-U-T-O, that I try to point people to, whose entire, like, they're basically just an organization that tries to fund projects that give you your digital sovereignty back.

29:29 like trying to give you software that you can have where you control the data or hardware that you can buy where you control the hardware, right? And I would like people to have more awareness of that. So that's my little, like, you know, public service announcement, which is really just echoing the things you were saying, Prime, but I'm just trying to put it in terms that I think people should think about broadly, if that makes sense. That's Rossman, right, is with Futo? Louis Rossman actually works with Futo, for example. Okay, that's what I thought. I thought that was the same one, but I didn't want to get those confused. Yeah, the keyboard. I just remember reviewing the keyboard. I used it for a couple weeks.

30:06 Louis Rossman is, you know, he's separate. He does his own thing, right? But he kind of got together with them because they have common interests, right? His big thing was right to repair, which is right in line with that, right? And this right to repair is this idea that if you buy a piece of hardware, you should be able to repair it yourself if you want to. You should be able to order replacement parts for it. You should be able to fix it. And there are so many good reasons for this.

30:36 like they always do try to sort of create these arguments for why that shouldn't be the case. And I very rarely find those arguments compelling at all. But what is an argument? I'm just curious if you have an argument offhand that like a common one that would I'm confused why there's even an argument against like why you should be able to fix something.

30:56 So the arguments typically that I have heard go along the lines. There's two separate lines. One of them is like very equivalent to the like butt child pornography line that you always hear whenever they're trying to take away something completely unrelated from you. And that is the butt safety. It's like we can't allow people to repair things themselves because there are these safety concerns with either repairing them or not, you know, having those go back on the market after someone's repaired them, not knowing whether it was repaired by someone or repaired by, you know, the an official licensed repair shop for the thing. So safety is often cited as a concern. Yeah.

31:38 I essentially never have found that as a compelling argument. And the reason for that is because I have had, like, if you've ever brought your car to a dealership officially licensed by the people who make your car, you will know that it is equally likely that you will get people who have absolutely no idea how to service that car as if you took it to a random shop down the street. I actually like the random shop down the street. Typically, I find that they actually do a really good job.

32:08 And so the argument that somehow the safety has increased seems to me like a hypothetical. It's them saying, well, maybe this would cause... But my experience in the real world says, well, having things controlled by a central source doesn't seem to increase the safety very much in my experience, right? So I don't find that very compelling.

32:33 the other thing for it is they're saying well someone might repair it and then sell it to you like it's the original and you're like oh so commit fraud we already have the law for that one that's called fraud like you can't just say it's an iphone with 32 gigs of ram well i switched it out to be four Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're like, that's illegal. We already have the law for that, guys. We just say that's called fraud, and it's not okay. Also, mind you, right to repair, as far as I know, does not have any kind of...

33:08 provision in it that suggests you can't have such a thing as like a tamper-proof seal. Meaning, right-to-repair advocates generally don't try to advocate for preventing like the ability to know that this thing was repaired. Right. They just want to be able to repair it. And so a manufacturer could, you know, an argument back to me, like, fine, put a little seal on that thing so everyone can see if this thing has ever been, you know, accessed or changed. Go right ahead. Right. That is not right. Because they're saying, like, I want to be able to repair my own hardware. I want to run a shop that repairs hardware for people. And we're not trying to lie to anybody. Right. And so that's one another one.

33:49 that I've heard before is like that somehow repairability is just like not possible anyway, right? And this is like the iPhone, like we can't have a replaceable battery because we need the thing to be waterproof or whatever else it is, right? And those arguments don't tend to work very well with right to repair because you're kind of like, well...

34:08 A lot of times right to repair advocates also aren't advocating that you have to change the way you do your hardware design. They're just saying to whatever extent this device could be repaired, we should have access to the same materials that you have to repair it or stuff like that. Right. The same schematics. There shouldn't be software lockout. Those sorts of things.

34:28 So I've never really heard a fairly, like a really coherent argument that I could like buy into about why right to repair is bad. But then again, it's not my domain. Like, in fact, I would, we should have Louis Rossman on this podcast sometime. I would love to have him. Open invitation, by the way, if anyone has a word.

34:45 I've already emailed him, and he already says he would be down to come jump on. That'd be great. I love him. That's good to know, Prime. I was at a FUTO event. I met him. He's a great guy. I would love to have him on the podcast if he's interested. And he could probably say what some of the other... Because he's heard them all. The steel manning of the other side. He's heard them all. I'm sure he's heard ones that are so ridiculous that we would laugh at them. And then he's also heard whatever the best ones are, right? And so, you know. I would actually, yes. I would actually, I actually am very, very curious. What are the arguments? Because I can't think of one that even makes it, like, in real practice. Like, other than the waterproof one, okay, maybe you can sell it to me that you have to do something super magical. But I...

35:24 still can't foresee why that would be the case. Like if you put, if you already did it once, why can't it happen again? Like, well, what kind of magic happens to where it can only, it's a one-time deal. Well, also, it's like it's not really related. Like, usually those things are like, okay, then this is a hard device to repair. No one's telling you you can't make it a hard device. We're just saying that whatever repairability it could have, you have to let third parties do it, right? And so, you know, that's just sort of a separate issue to me.

35:55 And like I said, Rossman would be the best person to talk about this because he's heard it all. He's been in the legislative sessions and stuff like that where he's tried to advocate for bills for right to repair. He's heard everything, and he would be the best person to talk about that. So, yeah, that would be great. I'd love to have that as a future episode. I think that would be fantastic if we could. We'll set that up.

36:15 um so so separate from digital sovereignty i think there's another uh there's sort of the other part of it that i mean do we want to just talk about like computer hardware for gaming versus cloud i mean is that i don't know if that's yes i mean that's that's what okay i think that that's a that's is a more fun one because i also have a lot of thoughts on that one as well and so it's fun too plus because it's like is it actually really possible is this technically possible So I guess a couple of things about that. The first thing that I would say is I don't actually know. So the tweet that you read at the beginning is from Lori Wired, right? The one I read at the beginning is John. He said, sigh. He also said, ha ha, no. He also said, ha ha, no. That also happened too. Mm-hmm.

37:04 Right, yes. What I was going to say about that is I just kind of wanted to draw a little distinction here because I've definitely had this experience before, which is there's a difference between when someone makes like an offhand tweet about something and when they like actually take a position on something.

37:28 And I only want to bring that up because, like, I don't actually know which one Lori Wired was doing here. And I don't have a ton of knowledge about, like, her content generally, but I've seen, like, her video on Tail Slayer, and I thought it was, like, very well-researched. She makes awesome videos. Yeah, she's, like, one of the best tech YouTubers out there. For sure. Yeah, she's really good. So the only thing I would say is, This was not a video by her where she like spent a ton of time deciding exactly what she thought about it and all that sort of stuff. And then like made this very long argument for this is the future for all these reasons or whatever. This is her posting a thing that she was thinking about probably. Right. And like that screenshot. I mean, that screenshot's from like 2008.

38:17 21 or something like that's a five-year-old screenshot and it's it's a completely data-free screenshots from it's from nvidia's like marketing stuff so so like i just i just want to say like i don't really know i don't know where she would fall down on this issue exactly where she would go if she actually was like i'm all in on this and i want to like make the complete thing this would probably not be the image she would tweet if she were doing that either. So since I'm someone who's definitely posted things before where I just had an offhand thought about something and then suddenly everyone is talking about that thing because it happens to hit a nerve or whatever...

38:56 I can think of one. I just want to draw that distinction, right? I just want to draw that distinction. Maybe she's 100% in on cloud gaming, or maybe this was just something she randomly happened to be thinking about for five minutes. And you don't know which one of those two things it is, right? That's the only thing I wanted to say about that. And that you guys should go watch her videos, because they're really cool. And very informative and well-researched. Everything I've seen has been great from her.

39:24 There you go. So that said, I do think it's kind of weird... I do think it's kind of weird... To not have more. The reason I'm saying all that is because the things that are being talked about, right, like the cost-benefit analysis and the utilization level and the degree to which networking is able to do low latency in certain places and things like that, all of that was true when, say, like, Lori Wired's own company, which is Google, launched Stadia, right? And it did not work. They shut it down.

40:05 So what you would expect here if this were a position someone was actually going to take in detail would be an explanation of why all previous cloud gaming things have failed as businesses, right? Not all of them. Go on. Oh, go on. Obviously, Netflix has one. GeForce Now is still up and running. It's been running since Stadia. But I think that it is definitely- Those are not businesses, correct? Like, GeForce Now is not a profit center, and neither is Netflix Gaming, if I'm not mistaken.

40:39 uh netflix gaming i am positive that netflix would not create an entire vertical just to think it's not worth anything i assume that the goal is is that gaming is one of the single most in interacted interacted with pieces of content on earth and being able to capture some value of that will make a direct impact on the bottom line as time goes forward and so this is a this is a goal of making money and this is Well, it's a goal of making money. I'm just saying they like there has never been, to the best of my knowledge, even those ones you listed are not actually successful, meaning they don't they do not end up being things where if this was a business, it would be able to sustain itself. They are generally sustained by corporations that that don't need those businesses to actually be profitable.

41:29 But I could be wrong about that. I'm sure in the GeForce one, I would assume that's correct based on what GeForce now is doing. But for the Netflix one, I actually assume the opposite. I assume that this one... You think that they are making more money? That they are attributing more subscriber revenue and retention to Netflix gaming than it costs them? I would assume that as far as like – because they're obviously still in the very – they're in the very baby phases of everything. And so they're in the high research, high amount of employees side of things. So I would assume that that cost is negative. But they have it mapped out. And they're like, this is going to be this good. Like this is a –

42:06 Fight worth fighting for. But you also got to remember, the fundamental premise is so much different. When you play GeForce now or you play Stadia, it was like, yo, let's play Apex. It's like, that's crazy to slice out. But what's the other one? It's like, hey, let's play Tetris. Let's play these party games. Let's play couch games. Things that don't require...

42:24 a world-class GPU to have a good experience. It said, it's like, hey, these are things that you can bring a bunch of people together to have fun without the universe. And I think the economics of that is just vastly different than the GeForce Now's, the Stadia's. And so I just wanted to make that quick distinction that I think the economics of it is just, it's fundamentally different.

42:44 Well, again, so the reason that I asked for this is because I would like to see someone actually lay out the actual case, right? Because as far as I know about Netflix, I thought their uptake on actually streaming games was basically minimal. Like hardly anyone was using it. Because remember, Netflix gaming is two things. One is local gaming.

43:05 Where you get on your phone and you actually just play the local version of the game, but you get it for free. So that doesn't count. So we're talking about just the one where you play on your television using your phone as the controller currently? Yes, yes. I don't think people are doing that. I mean, maybe a few people are, but I don't think their uptake is very good. I don't know if there's any public information about the usage numbers or anything. Yeah.

43:26 And all of my information is two plus years old right at the very onset of it all. So I would be very – I'm very out of the loop of what is currently happening. Yeah. Don't look at me either. Trash, can you spell it? I'm not saying anything. Why don't you just say – Trash. That number is Trash. I am – Yeah, Trash, why don't you just say something that will get you in big trouble so this episode can go viral. That would be sick, bro.

43:46 Staying out of this conversation. And so the only one that I know of that actually has any uptake at all that's A, still around, and B, nominally has paying customers, depending on how you want to look at it, is GeForce Now. And, of course, that's by the company that literally makes the video cards and has to maintain these data centers for other reasons as well, right? So, like...

44:12 I'm totally willing to be presented the case of like, here's why Stadia didn't work, here's why these other cloud, there's many of them, there's been like OnLive, there's been tons of cloud gaming services. None of them could seem to stand up and become profitable on their own on a five-year even horizon. Why? Because none of the same, like everything was the same.

44:34 Network latency has not gone down dramatically since 2020, like in any particular sense. The like situation with the data centers having a more favorable sort of utilization level, that has not changed at all, right? And so, you know, maybe you're making an argument that, like, well, because consumers are going to soon be priced out of the market for hardware, this has to end up succeeding. That's maybe a valid argument, but it's not a real argument from the form this was actually an efficient thing to do or that the public wanted it, right? And so...

45:11 I would have expected to see, if someone was taking a serious position in this, more. More information about what actually is going to be different. And I do think like gamers Nexus kind of had the best follow-up tweet to this one in terms of like maybe putting their finger a little bit on why the data utilize, why, you know, an executive sees data, like an executive sees like GPU utilization and goes, oh, there's money to be made here because this is an efficiency thing. They all start these services because there's been so many of them throughout time and they don't get uptake.

45:48 And people don't seem to realize that looking at those efficiency metrics doesn't tell you what the public actually wants in this thing. Correct. Right. And so I think Gamers Nexus had a great response. I mean, I like Gamers Nexus. They're very feisty. And basically the reply was, I'll read it. It says, I mean, yeah, that's literally just how businesses work, though. If a taxi company in New York City buys a car, it's probably using it constantly. Right.

46:12 If you buy a car for normal commuting reasons, it sits for more than half the day. The difference is the taxi company isn't actively scheming to figure out how to convert all car drivers into taxi users while depriving them of supply. Although maybe you could say eventually something else of a company like Uber or Waymo or Waymo or something would do that. It isn't revolutionary that the goal of a business is to have its expensive equipment constantly generating money. It's not unique to GPUs or data centers.

46:38 If I buy a paint roller to paint the walls of my house, it's going to sit in a shelf for possibly a decade before I use it again. A painting company will use the paint roller all day. But that doesn't mean we should come up with a new metric like cost per effective gallon hour of paint or whatever. It's not that complex. Businesses try to use their GPUs to generate money. Consumers use their GPUs to play video games to have fun and escape our fucked reality. And I'm like...

47:03 It's a semi-data-free response to a fairly data-free post, so I'm not suggesting that anyone is winning an argument here on details. But I feel like it kind of nailed the sentiment. It was like, yeah, who cares? Efficiency or utilization or cost per hour of utilization isn't how people are making these buying decisions, right? Correct. It's a meaningless metric to an individual.

47:30 It's a meaningless metric to an individual, and while it does tell you something about the amount of extra money that a consumer might have to pay to own a thing versus to rent it from somebody... There are all these like there is a priced in premium that every person kind of instinctively knows that they are willing to spend when they buy something. And the reason they're willing to do that is because of that control and that convenience and also that status symbol sometimes.

48:03 I mean, what is the effective, like, what is the utilization or the effective cost of RGB lighting and a glass all-around case and an LCD screen on your CPU that says the temperature? These things are worthless for the actual metrics, right? Casey, the GPU runs faster when it looks good. It knows, dude. Casey, haven't you been listening?

48:29 AI is alive. AI runs on GPUs. If you look good, you feel good, you play good, you play good. Okay? That's how it goes. Okay? I'm fully on TJ's team. You look good, you play good, you feel good. Everybody knows this. Exactly. Why does someone buy a GTI instead of a Volkswagen Golf? Right? Why? There's no reason for it. We look at the actual expense to the person. The car encompasses exactly the same thing. We all know the speed limit is 60 miles an hour. You can't really go any faster anyway. Say all the stuff you want, so many people buy GTIs. Those things look cool. The thing you have to remember here is that is not the equation. It's already...

49:13 a frivolous thing, right? It's already a thing that you're not doing to survive. No one literally needs to play Fortnite to exist in the world. So you're already talking about, well, okay, some people do. Thank you. So you're already talking about something that people – they're doing it because it derives them some sort of pleasure or meaning or something. They're doing it as an optional activity. And so I think all that stuff has to be considered. And you can't just look at utilization and say, well, this eventually should cost the least and therefore economics says this is what everyone will do. It's like – We'd all be eating and drinking Soylent for all of our meals if that was the case. And fortunately, that only happens in San Fran. So I would say that I'm totally willing to have the argument made to me that somehow that has changed.

50:05 or whatever it is, but I just, I want to see a very coherent argument laid out. Like, here's why these other services failed. Here's why it won't fail in the future. Here's what's different about consumer sentiment here, you know, this, this, this, and this or whatever. I just like to see that. I feel like I do can make at least a somewhat of an argument in favor of what Laurie was saying. Even not necessarily. I think the efficiency part is a really kind of silly way to approach it. Because I don't think anybody, generally speaking, cares about efficiency. They don't think about things of efficiency. Even approaching the stroking of the paintbrush one. The thing is, even with paint rollers, yes, we leave them for 10 years and come back to them. Then realize they're broken. I have to throw them away and get a new one. So it's like...

50:47 We actually pay for cost of storage without actually even a second use on them. Yes. But the reality, I think the thing that's important is that users will buy what is cheap that gives them the same value. And I think that's the argument she was trying to make, which is you theoretically on most games for most people could get a very good experience. Yes.

51:08 people that play the competitive side of things or all that they are, they're going to want their own local versions. They're going to want to pay more because they want to be able to save the few milliseconds. But for me and the boys going on fortnight and getting just, you know, just absolutely stomped by some 13 year olds. Like that's not, we don't need high end hardware to get stomped by 30, like that. Nothing's changing. The equation's all the same for us. And so I think there's a large amount of people that, um, would fall into this category if it's super convenient to the point where they because they don't have a philosophical argument against not owning something. They don't have a they don't care about having the RGB lighting. They just simply want to play the game and they don't they don't care. I don't know what that percentage of people is, but I think that that argument makes a lot of sense. And at some point, I would assume that economically that would work out.

51:58 Yeah, and I just want to see it. I want to see what is the argument for why it didn't already. Because everything else Cloud has, and this one hasn't, so why? Right. Like, and that's why the whole Soylent one I wanted to throw on there. Soylent is the reason I don't like those two arguments because theoretically, if you're playing Diablo, uh, your experience on cloud versus not is the same. I know. I know nobody's actually playing Diablo, but I, like you're generally speaking is that you're getting the same experience.

52:28 both ways it's not like you're going oh i have to drink soylent to save money you're like oh no i get to play the game i want to play and my reflexes are now 200 plus milliseconds so i actually can't even tell which way it's actually happening so therefore this experience is good enough for me so it's like i'm not drinking soylent i'm still eating the steak i just get the steak cheaper is i think what the argument is i'm just trying to still end the argument Yeah, and like I said, I'm not really trying to even refute the argument. I'm not even trying to argue it. I'm trying to say, I'm not really seeing a presentation. Like, that's all been true for at least five years, arguably ten. And so why did all these services that tried to happen to that time, why did they fail? Right? And so I just kind of want to, like, I don't even necessarily disagree with the arguments on some kind of factual basis. I just, I...

53:19 You can't really state a bunch of things that conflict with reality and then go, but here they are. So we know that reality is it didn't work. What's the reasoning? And there may be some very good reasons that could be fixed. And then it's like, okay, so this is why it's going to work this time. And I'd be like, okay, yeah, sure, that sounds good.

53:37 Or I might be like, I don't really buy that. That sounds hand-wavy, right? So I just want to see the argument. I want to see the actual argument. Like, what is the real argument? Not just like, well, it probably is good enough. And let me add some things to that, though. I think that you might be overstating the case a little bit there in terms of the experience, though, Prime. Because there's two things that I think are worth noting. One is that I do, at least for me...

54:06 I don't think my reaction time is particularly good. Like, if I was to play a first-person shooter, I'm not going to win or anything like that. I mean, I don't really even play them that often. You and me both, Casey. Right. Yes, I'm not competitive. If my monitor is running at 60 hertz versus 30, it feels way better mouse response. If it's running at 120 versus 60, it feels way better mouse response. Right. It just feels way better. Like it moves so much faster to me perceptively when I move the mouse. It's like, oh, wow, like that feels amazing.

54:42 And I notice, even though it has nothing to do with my reaction time, which is probably fairly poor at this point, might have always been poor, right? Like, I don't even know that I had good reaction time when I was younger. So there's, I do think that latency, when it gets down low enough, has a certain feel to it. That's rather remarkable and that you do absolutely notice. I'm curious if you're describing visual, like the visual feel of frames versus the actual latency that you're seeing. Like, I do think that there's something there because when you're moving your mouse and it's running at 60, you can see it does visually look different than if you're running it at 120. But is that a latency problem?

55:20 Or is that a visual problem and the cues coming to you feel natural? Like, could we simulate dropping two frames in that? And would you go, oh, I can't really tell the difference? But it still visually looks so good, right? Like if you could somehow just like, you know, you're just buffering those two frames. You put them in a buffer. You put two blank ones. You know, so everything's just two frames behind or three frames behind. Oh, okay. So not dropping, just lagging. Like two frames of lag. Intentionally putting everything behind, you know, two frames on 120 hertz. Like would you actually experience that? Or is the visual smoothness of it the thing that's cueing your brain going, oh, this is so much better? Because I can tell a strong difference between those. But I think it's the visual feel of it, not the actual...

56:02 click to latency feel? Well, it's both, right? And it's not click. It's continuous motion, right? Like, click latency is harder to perceive at a lot of times, largely because... Well, okay, there's a couple things. So first of all, one reason why some of these arguments can even be made at all today versus, say, in 1985, when they wouldn't have flown at all, is because nowadays there's so much extra latency stacked on top that you can sort of say, like, well, if we're only adding an extra 8 milliseconds or an extra 10 milliseconds, who cares, right?

56:41 And previously when it was like if you hit the button, it was like literally a 60th of a second before you saw the result in like an arcade monitor or something like that. Beautiful days. Then suddenly it's like, well, wow, that was like 50% of the, you know, less responsive all of a sudden. And you really do notice it, right? And so I'm totally willing to believe that like, well, we can get away with adding this extra latency because we've let things get so bad.

57:06 That, to me, also is not a very good argument, though, because what we should be doing is making those things better. You should be taking the frame delays out of the frickin' TVs, which they have been, you know, ironically, G-Forced themselves, did that really nice sort of new sync model for, you know, for the strobing. I don't know if you guys saw this. It doesn't matter.

57:24 Um, but we should be taking it out of like the sort of, we should be trying to keep the graphics card pipeline as short as possible. We should be trying to, you know, get the latency of the USB processing down as low. Like it should, we should get it to where it like responds in a few milliseconds rather than what it's currently doing. Right. And all, and inside the game itself, like animation delay and all this stuff, like all that stuff's bad in my opinion, and we should be working on it.

57:47 So saying we're going to take advantage of all of that and lock that in is just like, yeah, the experience should be like playing Red Dead Redemption 2 where you push the stick and like seven minutes later the guy decides to start running. That's not a good outcome. Like taking advantage of the fact that people are delivering bad experiences now is not a good reason to lock that in. So there's that.

58:10 The other thing that I would say is I would have concerns about video quality. So a lot of people, myself included, already are not very happy with the video quality that we're getting in games due to temporal anti-alising or DLSS upscaling or things like this. And that's best case. That's when you are running the thing locally.

58:33 So now we're talking about running this thing in the cloud, compressing it with a video codec, right? And then sending it down and decompressing it. So now we're taking another image quality hit, right? Right off the bat. From that, that also doesn't sound great to me. And so there's, I think there's a lot of like...

58:53 There's a lot of taking advantage of things already being bad and saying, well, rather than talking about the future being we're going to make these things better, we're going to have more powerful hardware that can actually render at 4K, and we're not going to upscale, we're not going to do all this temporally, we're going to have better game experiences. We're like, no, what we're going to do is say the current thing is the best we'll ever do, and then we're going to degrade that by putting it over a network. That's not the future to me.

59:20 That sounds like the past. That's like what we're going to do is accept failure and double down on the failure, right? And that to me also sucks. That's not the future. That's people talking about the past like it's the future because it's more efficient. And I don't like that. I'll quote Jensen Huang back to himself, right? It's like, what does he say? Like, you weren't talking to someone who woke up a loser. I wasn't born a loser. Do you remember this clip from him, right? I don't. Okay.

59:49 the premise that even if we competed in China, that we're going to lose that market anyways. You're not talking to somebody who woke up a loser. And that loser attitude, that loser premise makes no sense to me. We are not, we're not a car. We are not a car. It, the fact that I can buy a car, this car brand one day and use another car brand another day, easy. Computing is not like that.

1:00:19 There's a reason why the x86 still exists. There's a reason why ARM is so sticky. These ecosystems are hard to replace. It costs an enormous amount of time and energy and most people don't want to do it. And so it's our job to continue to nurture that ecosystem, to keep advancing the technology, so that we could compete in the marketplace. Conceding a marketplace based on the premise you described, I simply can't acknowledge that. It makes no sense because I don't think the United States is a loser. I don't want us to feel like we're losers. I don't want to just accept that we're losers. I don't like that as the future shouldn't be about going, we'll continue to be losers and like it. I don't like that. It sounds bad to me. It sounds defeatist.

1:01:03 Yeah, there was something Prime said that I didn't like. He was like, well, I'm old and my reaction time is like 200 milliseconds. Well, now it's even twice that because now you have the delay and all this. Now it just looks even worse. So that's just not even fun to begin with. I know. It's okay. This is why I'm talking about it now. Oh, good. Yeah, we can say all the things we didn't like about him. But the other argument I think is – I don't even think people really care. Just decide not to be a loser anymore. Yeah, my boy. Yeah, baby. Oh, my goodness. Get used to the leather jacket. It's a good prop show today. It's a very good prop show today. Honestly, I don't even think people care about great graphics. If you think about the games that are popping off right now, like that Mecha Chameleon game where you just paint a dude in a room. Have you guys seen that game? I've been told I need to play this.

1:01:49 I want to play it so bad. We should play it. Us together. Yeah, dude, we should play it. But we think about all these polygamy games. There's that game. Minecraft. Literally, Minecraft's the ugliest game I've ever seen in my life. Yeah. Slay the Spire. They're not all high-quality things. The thing from my experience of trying GFN last night, I think they're failing because the user experience is just so dog shit. For me to just even get a game up and running was just so confusing. I don't know. I couldn't imagine...

1:02:18 any like casual person being able to figure it out. It was like to the point where I had to use ChatGPT like I said before, right? Yeah, that was kind of the thing where I feel like it's interesting because along with your point there, Trash, I feel like for people who are really serious about playing games, they're always going to want the most serious best option they can get. So then those people are going to want to have it insofar as they're able to afford it, like the best local version of something that they can have with the least latency, with the most frame rate and the, you know, best everything local. Right. So it's like, okay, so that makes sense. And then like casual people want to play usually like casual games. Like if I imagine like what, I don't know, like just a random person you'd pick off the street would want to play. But those games don't. Well, yeah, of course everyone wants to play the game because it's awesome. Um,

1:03:16 But they don't need to rent hardware because it's like your phone can play the game, bro. Like, it's a game that literally you can already play locally. So it's weird because it kind of feels like if I think of who's my target market for the kind of thing that I'm trying to do, it's like this weird...

1:03:36 in between of like people who want to play games that they can't like you still have to buy a computer to play g-force now you know just like still have to have a computer some computer it is not like internet you need internet too and internet right so it's it's not like you just you know magically have a way to play it and they send you a box and then you pay the ten dollars a month or whatever to them you still have to have a computer and everything else and it's like met by their current like thing right either they're a serious gamer they spend a bunch of money on their setup or they're like casual and like the only games i play anymore i literally the only game i play is slay the spider 2 i can't like i i don't i don't it can run on probably anything i don't know it seems like it should be to run on like

1:04:26 any computer that I pull out in this room, you know what I mean? So it's like, I don't really, I don't get who it's for in that sense. Like I don't get who they're trying to target. And that seems to me to be one of the big failures is like, I'm trying to imagine the ideal person that's going to do this. And I don't get it. Imagine your friend coming over and they're like, dude, I'm going to buy the shittiest PC so I could play on GFN.

1:04:50 It's like, I don't think that ever existed. Well, and to that point, Teej, I also think like if you look at, you know, the types of people who are selling hardware right now, I mean, I think like Apple Computer, right, is the primary vendor of a lot of these devices like an iPhone. Yeah. they are shipping absolutely incredible hardware in those devices. I mean, unbelievable. I mean, the, the, the GPU capabilities of something like an iPhone are just kind of incredible. When you think about, you know, this tiny little thing, right. With like, with passive cooling, you charge it in once a day.

1:05:28 Unbelievable. And so, like, you know, they don't have a lot of incentive to start shipping way worse hardware all of a sudden because their whole business model is that the new phone has to be more powerful than the old phone so that you'll buy it. And so it's like the kinds of people who are like, yeah, I'm cash. I'm just playing Candy Crush or whatever. It's like, what do they need this service for? They've got their phone. They're done. The iPhone will take care of it. I don't see Apple shipping a dog of an A-series chip anytime soon. They seem pretty on the ball. And like you said, the chips they're already shipping are...

1:06:12 are more than capable of playing casual games. So it doesn't seem like there's a lot of space there. There's not a big in-between between the person who actually does know that 240 hertz is giving them better headshot rates and the person who's like, I don't know, man, I just matched three all day. There's not a huge gap there to fill, I don't think.

1:06:37 Yeah, I'm actually curious about the tan there, okay? Do they actually have CMF? He puts on the Jensen jacket. Yeah, he puts on the Jensen jacket, and he's locked in. He's already a business max. I'm business max out of my mind. Where's my shot at? Anyways, that seems to be the thing that I don't – the actual target market is the thing I don't really get. I do think it is there's a chance, which I think some of the stuff Brian was alluding to at the beginning, of maybe we're going to see – People who more people get priced out of the high end serious things for gaming due to Sammy Altman buying up data centers left and right. And so then maybe, you know, maybe we're not able to.

1:07:25 Just people can't build newer computers or whatever. You know what I'm saying? There's literally like we're kind of getting priced out as like, you know, the plebs. So in that sense, like I could see, I could see that happening and then people turning to cloud game, but then it still seems like. people would want to switch back to local if the market ever cools down and they say, okay, cool, we put in as many data centers as we have power plants. We're going to take a break for a few years while we're waiting for this. And then I could buy RAM again. While we're waiting for Fusion to take off? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:08:02 Right. They're like, we're going to let Fable figure out nuclear fusion. Give us a few weeks, the latest models. It's going to solve it. And then we'll have unlimited energy for all of you. uh um i'm actually curious because i i don't know when it happens but how much more pressure can actually happen on hardware like i i don't know what the numbers are like our computers really going to become like good gaming computers can become ten thousand dollars like is that uh is that an actual future that we're approaching because if that's the case i could see these type of services obviously becoming much much more popular I think it's kind of an interesting question because, in principle, there's nothing really stopping expansion of supply. Like, there's nothing in principle stopping it.

1:08:52 I think the biggest hurdle right now is actually, I would almost classify it as a disbelief that this condition will continue anyway. Meaning, TSMC is not going to massively expand their capacity anymore. If they don't believe that this is a sustained desire for silicon, right? If they believe that the build-out might be limited because otherwise they burn a crap ton of capital. Because these standing up new chip facilities, right, is incredibly expensive. Yeah. Skynix and Samsung just did, what, $800 billion?

1:09:36 Like they're going to do an $800 build in South Korea starting now-ish? I mean, I have not followed the memory side of this, so I'm not sure, but certainly. I mean, it's incredibly expensive, right? And so it's kind of just a situation where... In principle, the supply could be increased quite a bit. In practice, it will be limited to basically forecasts of what is sustainable, right? And so I don't know. I don't know what insiders are really predicting will be done. Memory is obviously the current crunch. But the crunches kind of move around as different things become bottlenecks, right?

1:10:21 Yeah, and I mean, even if they decided, too, that, hey, we think, well, one, it's really hard to predict what OpenAI is going to be buying in five years from now, which might be how long it takes to build a plan. Or pretending they're buying. Right, yeah, yeah, right, yes. Great point. How much they say they're going to buy, how much they're actually going to buy, predicting both of those things. But also it's like...

1:10:45 I feel like sometimes software developers forget that like, hey guys, there's like a physical world. They got to like build a building to start selling the thing. They don't just like upload it on a website and put it behind a Stripe link and say like, hey, look, you can start buying more RAM today. Like they actually have to go build a whole place to build the RAM. Download more RAM.com seems to think differently. Yeah.

1:11:11 Well, I know. I've lost a lot of money on that site. They keep saying it's in the mail. I'm going to get here soon. Well, we talked about the HBM stuff before, and obviously, like, that is, like, all these things create, like, basically a bubble in the supply chain, right? Because HBM has lower yield for a bunch of reasons. Right.

1:11:29 It requires this sort of logic die at the bottom, which now comes from TSMC. So now you've got this sort of co-packaging thing that has to happen and all this other nonsense. So supply chain's working that stuff out and also needing to sort of have a model for like... how much capacity they will need and when and for how long that capacity, you know, like ramp has to occur and all this stuff. Yeah, it's just like we don't really know. But it's entirely possible that five years from now, you know, we'll be sitting here going like, oh, ramp's cheap again.

1:12:01 Guys, have you considered the fact that you're completely discounting that crypto is going to come and even eat more RAM and computing here soon? Why would crypto eat RAM? Does crypto still work? Because, I don't know. Crypto is crazy, right? I don't know what's going on. I don't know what the hell is going on. They're going to be like, we need to run computers on an append-only database. And so they're going to need stuff. They're going to need a lot of RAM out there. How much is Bitcoin now? Prime.

1:12:26 Prime, I thought for sure you were going to say, have we considered the distinct lack and supply tightening on RGB markets? And maybe that's why we're not getting cheaper computers. It's that we can't get the fast enough RAM because it doesn't have the RGB. And we're just waiting for them to manufacture enough of them. That's kind of where I was thinking like we were getting blocked on.

1:12:50 true it's like look look we we could build a lot of very low-cost gaming computers right now if we just could eliminate the problems with cryo sheet supply cryo sheets and liquid metal like we can't get enough of it we're so close but it's like we're just that's the only problem yeah that's like the the meme of like could someone who knows economics help me with my budget and $2,000 for mortgage, $1,000 for food, $800 on activities, $12,000 for RGB. Like what went wrong?

1:13:30 Anyway, so... Trash literally has that as a budget with Pokemon. Actually true. Actually true. I don't have no budget. That's actually the issue, yeah. I think, like, wrapping all of that... Like, the digital sovereignty thing, I think, is the more important thing. It's what we talked about last, but I think that's the most important aspect of all of this that hopefully people will think about more as part of this, certainly. But...

1:13:57 Just to wrap this part up, I would just say in closing, yeah, like I I'm totally willing to believe that somehow there's an argument for how this is actually going to work, quote unquote, this time. But that argument needs to include for me explanations of why it failed all the other times. And and, you know, and maybe one of those explanations is to trash this point that the things always just sucked. Like maybe Google Stadia just really sucked to use. I don't know. Is it?

1:14:27 So, yeah, us and everyone else. Turns out I'm not one of this category. That was actually the key problem. So, you know, I just, I feel like that should be forthcoming. So, like, I'd like to see anyone who wants to take an actual, you know, stance on this is the future. Like, this is coming in five years. We're all going to be gaming on the cloud.

1:14:48 I just want to see the explanation for why we're not already gaming on the cloud. Like, what was the problem with all of these previous attempts that prevented them from being successful? Because no one shuts down a business that's running great, right? They shut down businesses where they look and they go like, how much did you lose last quarter? Why are we still funding your, you know, eventual profitability in this division? Go away, right? So I just want to kind of see that explanation.

1:15:15 so that I can understand it, right? So I can understand where they're coming from. And it can't just be the GPU utilization numbers say this will be more cost effective. It's like, that's been true for a while. All right. Well, I agree. Looks like we're at this time of the year where we go, hey, thank you everybody for watching the stand-up. Trash, I want some last thoughts here. Or any thoughts from you. Okay, I'm going to talk about Netflix real quick, and I'm going to start off with opinions on my own.

1:15:44 Smart. Thank you, Trash. That's good. I do have some faith in Netflix gaming, specifically because the users are there already, versus GFN or whatever you kind of have to onboard. So I do believe if Netflix can somehow make that onboarding experience to actual gaming good, since they already have so many users already, I think that could be a big win. I think obviously the hard problem is...

1:16:07 making a good game in addition to making the cloud gaming aspect work. So if I had my horse on any, or if I was betting on any of those horses, I'd bet on them, not just because I work there, but just because I just think the user base is there already. Are they gamers? I don't know. So that's the other aspect of it as well. But I also just don't think there's enough people in this world that want to play games so bad that they feel like they need to rent hardware. I just don't think that target market, that market is huge. I don't know. Just like, does anyone have thoughts on that? Does anyone know anyone where they're like, man, I wish my machine was so much better. I guess I'll go play in the cloud because the graphics just look so much cooler or something.

1:16:49 No, I don't know anyone. I don't know. I know a lot of gamers. I know a lot of gamers. I think there exists an entire, you know, there exists entire countries where saying, I'm going to go drop $5,000 on a gaming rig is very not practical and not feasible. Whereas saying I could go rent, you know, I could go have this experience for $20 a month on my lower end laptop is much more approachable. So I do think that that like that whole world of like, hey, I wish I could play games, but I don't have the money to be able to buy the things that I need.

1:17:18 I think that that is real. I also think the internet aspect eliminates a lot of these users, too. You need good internet, too, to stream it back. Yep. All right? Yep. Well, wait, but Prime, I have a question about that, though. Yes. Like, if... So, nowadays, I would argue that if you're just trying to have a gaming PC, you can use it for probably five years. Right.

1:17:43 Yeah, because people still, like, 2070 Supers are still, like, part of the specifications a lot, so... And five years times, I think you used the $20 a month, right? That's $1,200. That's actually not an insignificant amount of money that supposedly these people who don't have any money to consider buying a low-end gaming PC would use, right? Like, it's... And I... So, I mean, to Trash's point, I think, like, this cost is not insignificant. If that cost were...

1:18:18 $3 a month, sure, right? Or to Trash's previous point, if you're already paying for another subscription and you just get this for free, sure, right? If it's part of a value add, maybe Netflix does it, maybe Amazon does it. That seems a little more plausible, right? Maybe Disney could do it as another example, right?

1:18:40 Uh, but it just doesn't quite add up to me that it's like, well, this is going to be a separate thing. Someone's going to do it. We're going to maintain these, these data centers for it or something like, and, and we're going to be charging, you know, $20 a month for it or whatever that cost is like, I don't know, man. It's really, the numbers don't look great to me, but maybe I'm wrong about that.

1:19:04 All right. I can. I mean, I don't have a strong actual opinion on this. Yeah. I just assume these. I assume these economies do exist where people wish they had X, but they don't. I mean, you see this with cars, like people buy really expensive cars they can't afford, but they can get really ridiculous and stupid loans. And people get stupid loans to go do that because they can enjoy the car itself. So I assume this world does exist somewhere where there's people that can't afford the whole thing, but they would be willing to pay some sort of amount of money to experience it.

1:19:31 high enough end where that'd be out of reach or out of, or not so tenable. I mean, just look at it this way. Um, I hate to keep dragging it out, but I hadn't thought about this point earlier. You could actually say the same thing about phones. And actually, it's pretty interesting what ended up happening there. So a lot of people don't have $1,200 to buy an iPhone high-end either. But what did they do? Well, they basically turned it into a monthly payment that you do, and you still get the phone. You get it from the provider, and you pay them the monthly fee, right?

1:20:05 That's exactly another way that this same sort of thing could work without needing any kind of cloud gaming, right? It's like, hey, someone comes to you and says, hey, for $20 a month, you can have this cloud gaming service. It's like if I paid my phone provider an extra $20 a month, I'd get this much higher end iPhone and I just play the games locally.

1:20:22 And you're like, right. It's like, so that, that money is actually fungible in an, in a like sort of in terms of where you're putting it per month as well. So you can't just say, well, they're going to pay this, this magic money is going to come out of pocket. And just because it's only $20 a month, they'll just pay it. It's like, well, they have other options for that $20 a month and some of them are involved getting better hardware. Right. And maybe they'll just do that. So I don't know. Just, just throwing that out there too. The flip side of that too is like, at a lot of the prices, it seems like people are offering, I don't know for sure, I haven't dug it into the thing, but it seems like relatively low margin off of the hardware that they're getting from these, like at the data center. Like for doing $20 a month, it's not like, oh, we're gonna super quickly pay back the GPUs that we bought. You know, that doesn't, even if you have multiple people using them, blah, blah, blah, et cetera. So it's like,

1:21:17 So then wouldn't you just start a business with better margins? You would try and do a business that like could make more money, which would be like selling to open AI or do you know what I mean? Like, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense as opposed to like cars where like the car doesn't have Like, it's values that it gets you from point A to point B, or that it's really cool, and sometimes a combination of both, right? But you can't, like... They're not going to make a bunch of money off of the expensive car for it sitting in the lot, as compared to, like, a GPU at a data center, where they're like, oh, well, we could keep on making, like, really crappy money with this off of, like...

1:21:55 low rent gaming subscription things or we could just like put it on aws and charge businesses money to run this and like they pay more money because it's an enterprise thing you know what i'm saying like that part of it doesn't really add up for me either where you like you could be making money even off of it but like that doesn't mean that it's an efficient use of like the business resources either right yeah I would also add that if you look at people who have done this before, oftentimes it didn't look like sort of what's being described. So previous attempts like Google Stadia, they were not buying the highest end NVIDIA GPUs and doing a build out of that for the data center, right? What they were doing is using effectively like what would be console hardware. They were using integrated AMD, like, you know, single chip hardware.

1:22:44 PCs, if I recall. And so, again, I'd want to hear the explanation for, like, why did they go that route? Because that's like, they're not even offering the premium experience. They're offering a mid-tier experience, right? So if the argument was like, no, this is so much more efficient and you can buy these high-end GPUs and they'll be, you know, like, well, they didn't do that, so they must have thought that this was the, that they needed to have it be fairly mid in order for this to make business sense. Why was that, right? And so...

1:23:11 I don't know. Maybe the argument is like, well, because AI now you can rent the spare time, but you can't because AI is very specialized infrastructure. So I don't know. I don't get it. Again, I don't want to try to make too strong a case against it. I'm just trying to bring up all these things. I want to see the presentation where someone lays out a convincing argument that assuages all of these things that seem to come to mind. If you don't study this for a living, which I don't, show me, show me the work and then maybe I'd believe it more.

1:23:39 you know all right well we're gonna have to end it here we're way over time everybody this is a this was a yapping episode tj uh based on the comments people did not hear you enough so tj i know it's really late yeah it's really late if you'd like to make the paint joke now you can make the joke or we could end the episode Well, I just was pretty happy that I happened to have some paint, like, ready to go sitting here, not currently being effectively used. But I'm thinking about painting this sidewalk.

1:24:10 I have some carpet in a roll over there that also needs to be used. Thinking about painting this wall so I can have this camera turned a little bit more like this. I see. But fortunately, I saved this. So it was getting zero gallons per hour of use for five years. And guess what, guys? It might come back in handy. So take...

1:24:33 that actually my wife likes it when i keep stuff stored there so that we don't throw it away so she's happy with me i was gonna say take that kayleen but she actually likes it when i don't throw stuff away so that wouldn't have worked bad argument how many dollars a month would i pay to have paint on demand instead of storing my own paint at home Well, it's P-A-A-S, paint as a service, I believe. Paint as a service. Yeah. Yeah, that's what they're trying to do for printers. Okay, sorry. We got to go. We got to go. Yeah, bye-bye. Bye, everybody. Bye, everyone. GG. Go check out Lori Wired. She's awesome, though. Boot up the day. Vibe caught in errors on my screen. Terminal coffee. Oh, my God.