Local AI, Streaming Wars, and the OpenClaw | Ed & Stefano Unleashed

In the February episode of Ed & Stefano Unleashed, we cover a wide-ranging set of topics shaping the future of self-hosting, open source, and consumer technology. From new Unraid features and internal boot teasers to the rise of local AI workloads, this episode blends practical homelab insights with big-picture tech trends.

Follow the channel on Spotify: Now with dual audio/video feeds!

Ed and Stefano break down the ongoing Jellyfin vs Plex debate, explore how RAM shortages and GPU demand are impacting everything from AI to gaming, and take a close look at OpenClaw, an open-source AI assistant pushing local, privacy-first automation forward.

Take the Unraid Customer Survey

The conversation expands into the broader tech landscape — including data centers and their impact on local communities, advances in storage technology, the shift from VR headsets to smart glasses, and more!

Episode Takeaways
• Why local AI and GPU workloads are becoming critical for self-hosters
• Jellyfin vs Plex: trade-offs between open source freedom and polish
• How RAM shortages could reshape hardware, AI, and gaming
• What OpenClaw signals about the future of AI assistants
• Why data centers are increasingly controversial at the community level
• The shift from VR to smart glasses and what comes next


Chapters
00:00 Housekeeping! Uncast Show is now on audio+video Spotify Feeds
02:25 Unraid Customer Survey + Internal Boot Teaser
07:00 New Paperless NGX and Document Management Video
11:49 Jellyfin vs. Plex: The Streaming Wars
17:32 The Rise of Local AI and GPU Workloads
32:56 OpenClaw: The Future of AI Assistants?
47:25 The Impact of RAM Shortages on Technology and Gaming
54:49 Data Centers and Community Impact
01:07:23 The Shift from VR to Smart Glasses


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Other Ways to Connect with the Uncast Show

• Uncast Show Website
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Chapters

• 0:00 Hellos, Housekeeping, Spotify News
• 2:00 Survey, Merch, And Internal Boot Preview
• 4:50 Boot From SSDs, Pools, And RAM Myths
• 9:20 Paperless-NGX Workflows And Email Rules
• 13:40 Scanner Security, Shares, And Permissions
• 16:50 Jellyfin On Tizen, Roku Overhaul, Plex Fees
• 22:20 Local AI Basics: VRAM, Quantization, GPU Picks
• 28:30 Intel ARC, SR-IOV, Kernels, And Stability
• 33:40 OpenClaw Agents: Power And Risks
• 39:30 API Bills, Rate Limits, And Guardrails
• 42:40 RAM Shortages, GPU Prices, Mac Mini Clusters
• 47:10 VR, Smart Glasses, And Reality Checks
• 52:10 CMR vs SMR Drives And NAS Pitfalls
• 58:40 Data Centers, Power Politics, And Splinternet
• 1:03:30 Privacy, Meta Pixel, And Health Data
• 1:08:30 Schools, Phones, And Digital Upbringing
• 1:12:40 Subscriptions For TVs And Supply Chain Drama
• 1:16:20 Cloudflare vs Italy And Sports Rights
• 1:20:00 MTV Signs Off And Closing Thoughts

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:10

Welcome to Ed and Stefano.

SPEAKER_00: 0:13

Well, welcome everyone to the Ed and Stefano show. Today is the 7th of February 2026. I hope you're all having a good week. And Stefano, how are you doing, man? What have you been up to this week?

SPEAKER_04: 0:24

I've been working a lot. Uh overtime. I hurt my back like a couple days ago just by waking up. So I've been basically paralyzed. Yeah. And um, yeah, things are are good, going good overall. What about you?

SPEAKER_00: 0:38

Yeah, been working hard as well. Enjoying the um lovely rain every day over here in the UK. But yeah, it's been it's been good. Um, had a nice week. So, anyway, we've got a really good show this week. Um, lots of really interesting things to talk about from various tech news to local AI. We're gonna have a little chat about open claw. I'm sure you guys out there have heard about that. But first, we've got a few housekeeping things to go through. Um The Young Car Show now is officially on Spotify.

SPEAKER_04: 1:13

I'm so embarrassed. I feel like I knew this, Ed, but then Spencer was telling me uh in in private chat, hey, uh, by the way, we upload this to Spotify. And I was like, We have Spotify? And he was like, We've had Spotify for a long time. So I went and looked at it, I was like, holy cow, we've had tons of stuff on there, and I had no idea. I was so embarrassed.

SPEAKER_00: 1:36

So yeah, so um basically what we can do now is actually switch between video and audio on the Spotify channel. So, you know, if you're out in a car driving, you can just listen to the audio, or if you're in the kitchen cooking or something, well, you can switch to video and you can see the two best looking guys on the whole of the internet in real life. So that's pretty cool. Um, other other housekeeping items this month, we have a customer survey out which will get you 20% off everything in the merch store if you complete the survey. Now, don't just think about this as getting some money off because unlike kind of really big tech companies, every single survey that comes through, we do read it all the way through. And this is your chance basically to give us your thoughts and let us know what you think about the products, what you like about it, what you don't like, features you kind of want, all of that kind of thing. Everything in to do with the survey, we do listen to. And by you filling out the survey does help shape the product going forward.

SPEAKER_04: 2:39

Do you fill it out, Ed?

SPEAKER_00: 2:41

Um, I have filled it out. Yes, I have. So I'm sure everyone knows. Um, and if you haven't seen it yet, check out the video on Young Car's channel. Is we had a preview about internal boot. So being able to boot from a flash drive is not the only way to boot Unraid in the months coming forward. Also being able to boot from a hard drive, whether it's an SSD or even a mechanical hard drive, but what it allows you to do is you could either use a dedicated drive or pool of drives for it, but you can actually carve out, say, an eight gig partition for the boot, so you don't lose the whole of your internal storage for the boot drive. So the real clever thing is is you can have a mirrored pool and it carves out eight gigs from each drive in the pool. So you're kind of gaining a mirrored boot pool pretty much for free from just taking eight gigs from the actual um boot pool. So you still got your cashable to use it for other things as well.

SPEAKER_04: 3:41

And because storage is cheaper than it's ever been, you know, eight gigs off of your storage pool is not really that much to ask for.

SPEAKER_00: 3:48

No. Um luckily luckily it's not eight gigs of RAM because that would probably be cautious. I'm sure we'll come to talking about that later.

SPEAKER_04: 3:58

Another reason why you should have Unraid because it uses almost no RAM.

SPEAKER_00: 4:01

Yeah, it's extremely efficient with RAM. I think you you know you can pretty much run on Unraid in about eight gigs of RAM, run a media server and that kind of thing, a file server, and it it will run pretty happily.

SPEAKER_04: 4:13

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, it'll run pretty well even on oh, you're talking about just like what do you mean on eight gigs of RAM? That seems like a lot. Because I've done I've done a lot less and it's been fine.

SPEAKER_00: 4:24

Yeah, I'm talking about running not just booting up into the GUI and having your file server running, but running a couple of containers and that kind of thing. Okay. So, you know, running maybe kind of Plex NB Jellyfin um and a few other things. You know, I th I I personally would think for a kind of reasonable server, eight gigs would be your minimum. If you can, and you know, 32 gigs and onwards, maybe if you kind of want VMs and stuff, but for the average Docker workload and stuff, you wouldn't need that amount in my opinion.

SPEAKER_04: 4:55

Tazir in chat says that he plans to get two super low capacity SaaS SSDs and then run unrated OS on that. And that would probably be my same exact approach. It's like to try and find like 128 gig SSD if that's even possible.

SPEAKER_00: 5:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 5:10

And just stick it on there and then just keep all my other storage.

SPEAKER_00: 5:13

Yeah. So so you'd be wanting to kind of have like, you know, dedicated drive boot, and you wouldn't want to put anything else on there yourself, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 5:20

No, I don't think so.

SPEAKER_00: 5:21

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's what a lot of people will do, but people who have got maybe smaller servers with less sockets for SATA drives or NVMe, they may well want to kind of have the dual purpose of the boot.

SPEAKER_01: 5:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 5:34

I think it's it's like in the video that is posted, that's like so cool and a a great use case. Well, I don't trust myself, so I need to have them separated.

SPEAKER_01: 5:46

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 5:48

Yeah, yeah, it's probably you know, probably the the best thing to do is to have it separated if if you can. But um but I probably won't. I'll probably just use it on my regular N NVMEs. I don't want to dedicate two NVMEs to boot.

SPEAKER_04: 6:01

Yeah, yeah. Especially if you're like limited in drive space and fast. There's the the again, this just brings up the whole I guess the reason I even got behind Unraid in the first place was it's just so flexible. So here's the point. It still continues to be flexible to this day. Yeah, some people from California, Dublin, Scotland here today.

SPEAKER_00: 6:20

Well, hi. Hi, everyone from my side of the world in um Scotland and Dublin.

SPEAKER_04: 6:26

I'm surprised. North California. It's like six hours ahead of my time. No, behind my time. So it's really early there. I'm surprised they're up right now.

SPEAKER_00: 6:36

Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I think you know, probably must be about this episode. I'm not good at math. The rates had a massive year. Is it three?

SPEAKER_04: 6:49

I thought it was like six.

SPEAKER_00: 6:51

See, I don't even know. Microsoft well is still maps. I know California's eight hours behind the colour. You're six hours. We really appreciate everyone who's seen, especially you guys who watch the live show. Anyway, just other things that's been on the Uncast show is A plus NGX. Is that something you ever use yourself, Stephanie, or something you might get to use?

SPEAKER_04: 7:13

I haven't used it myself. Um I learned about it because it became app of the month. And after watching a little bit of the video uh to try and try and like learn about it really quickly for the Unray Digest. I think I will actually start using that because uh so obviously, you know, SPX Labs, my channel. Um is a uh I really really hope you all have a great operates as a business. So I get a lot of like and I have your service invoices and a lot of those are already digital, which is nice. Anyway, nonetheless, I guess sometimes I like the receipts if I like buy something like a little specific 2020. And so I've just been throwing them in a in folders by year, but like if I want to like have to search them for any reason, it's manual. And so paper NGX is like basically what I've been waiting for forever.

SPEAKER_01: 8:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 8:03

And as soon as I get some free time, I'm gonna deploy it.

SPEAKER_00: 8:06

It's kind of like we've had the promise from the 1990s of this paperless office, and I think we finally got there after 35 years.

unknown: 8:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 8:16

Yeah, I still have a lot of paper, unfortunately. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 8:19

But you know, I've I've heard people say it's very easy to structure folders, put them in dates, this, that, and the other. It is, and that's kind of like, you know, maybe the kind of gold standard of organising things. Um, but there's so much more you can do with paperless. One thing I think is awesome is the fact that you can have it check your email for you and basically pull things out of email. And if you've got Gothenburg, which sounds like a Swedish city, but it's actually a container that converts um office documents into PDF um and also emails, etc.

SPEAKER_04: 8:53

So You released the second part of that video, didn't you?

SPEAKER_00: 8:56

Like, yeah, the second part came out last night, which shows how to add those additional containers and um how to do workflows like checking your email. So what you can do is you can just if you were going to send me an email for, for instance, Stefano, I could make a rule so all emails from Stefano, if it has certain words in the email or has an attachment, it will just process it, take it off, tag it, and sort it for me automatically. So you can have multiple different rules for emails for different things. You can have another one that could say, you know, anything that's got kind of invoice in it, or if you've got bills from the water company, or you get electric bills come through by email, or you can just email some, you know, a Word document to yourself and give it a title and things with certain titles, it will it will file it. There's just so much you can do with that. I think it's just really, really pretty cool.

SPEAKER_04: 9:44

Um so we Holmes in chat says that he's gonna set up a scanner and automate the process. Yeah. You should make a video of doing that too. You should get a scanner.

SPEAKER_00: 9:55

I I've just got so so all you do is you just map um a network drive. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_04: 10:00

So you already didn't that.

SPEAKER_00: 10:01

You map a network drive to the consume folder. But what you know what what I I think I mentioned it in the um No, I mentioned it in a in a written guide that I've made about this, which will be published soon. But if you're using it in a small office or something like that, I would say make your consume folder its own folder. At the moment, you make a paperless folder, and then inside that you have three different folders, um media, consume, and export. But if you make consume its own share, then you can have different permissions on that share. So you can have a separate user for scanner, so it so scanner can have its own username to be able to access that particular share. And the reason you want to do that is because you'd be surprised at how bad scanners are with security and how easy it is to pull the details out of it. And the consume folder, as soon as a document goes in there, Paperus processes it instantly and it moves it out of there straight away. So obviously you wouldn't want to have the whole folder where everything's being stored as well, all of your documents, all of your medical records, all of your financial documents, especially if you're in a small office and then someone kind of like knows the login of the scanner and they can see everything. So if you want that little bit of extra security, put the consume folder in its own share with its own permissions and just let the scanner have its own login just for that. Don't let the scanner have the login for your own user that you would use. That's just like um a little tip that I think is worth considering. Yeah, you know, if you haven't checked it out, check out the second video in the series, and there'll be a third one coming out with integrating AI into Paperless to take it even further. But that will be part three. So anyway, I think this next thing's going to be interesting to a lot of our audience, and we do talk about it a lot, is Jellyfin has improved again and is taking on Plex. Jellyfin is now officially available as a native app on Tizen TVs. So I think that's a pretty big deal.

SPEAKER_04: 12:02

Yeah, isn't like Samsung Tyson one of the most popular TV brands in the United States? I think I think Tyson T. Hyper TLC.

SPEAKER_00: 12:09

I think Tyson and Samsung TVs, it's the most popular smart TV in the world, as far as I'm aware.

SPEAKER_01: 12:15

Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 12:16

So, you know, I think that's pretty a pretty big deal that that's there now. Because before, apparently, if you wanted to install the Jellyfin app on a Samsung TV, you pretty much had to do some hacky workaround, get a developer account, and kind of force it onto the TV. And if there was an update on the Samsung TV, it would actually remove it. Wipe it out. Yeah. So, you know, the last thing you know you want to have is you've you've set it up for your mum, her TV has an update, and she goes, Ed, like it's not working anymore. You know, it it does it's not kind of very friendly for that kind of thing, and certainly didn't have the spouse approval factor that you would want your self-hosted things to have. But now, you know, it's it's built straight into the Samsung ecosystem and there's an official official app for it. So I think that's a really good step forward. And also not only that as well, is Samsung have also no not Samsung, Jellyfin have also improved their Roku app.

SPEAKER_04: 13:17

So I'm surprised how popular Roku still is to this day.

SPEAKER_00: 13:20

It's really popular in the States, I've heard. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_04: 13:23

Uh I've I don't know anybody that has it in the United States, but they're still very popular. Actually, that's not true. My parents have a very old one in their house, but I don't know if they use it.

SPEAKER_00: 13:33

Okay.

SPEAKER_04: 13:34

So I do know at least one.

SPEAKER_00: 13:36

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I I always thought it was quite quite popular in the States because like it's not so popular over here. Um apparently it's had a big visual overhaul, you know, better layouts, improved playback and stability. So I think the timing of this is kind of pretty good because in contrast, you know, we now know Plex has got its remote watch pass, which I think is like two dollars a month. Um if you don't own your own Plex server and it's like seven pounds, seven dollars a month for remote streaming if you if you have it in. To me, you know, I think Plex are gonna pretty much shoot themselves in the foot by doing this, really, because the core thing about Plex originally was to be able to watch your own media when you're away from home. So now they're putting a paywall behind that to basically use your own internet to watch your own stuff that that you're self-hosting. Yeah, you're paying for a service to use your own stuff. You know, now Jellyfin is really catching up with Plex with the ease of use and the smoothness of it. Uh basically all of us self-hosters, we can set up a reverse proxy or tail scale to be able to do the remote viewing. You know, that's the only thing that Plex has that's easier, is you don't have to kind of set up a reverse proxy or that kind of thing to be able to do the remote streaming.

SPEAKER_04: 15:02

Yeah. I actually just converted somebody away from Plex. They had the lifetime pass and they were pretty anti-switching away from um from Plex. But due to like privacy concerns and some of the other ongoing things that we've talked about in previous shows, yeah, I was I was really talking on Jellyfin and they gave it a chance. Um and they're really happy with Jellyfin so far. Now I just need to get them to switch away from Ubuntu over to Unray.

SPEAKER_00: 15:29

Yeah. Yeah, I think Jellyfin's awesome, but to be honest, I I'm actually still using Envy a lot. Um she's well basically that's what Jellyfin started as. It was a fork of Envy originally. But um yeah, so I wonder what you know what chat are using. You know, who's using Envy, Plex, and Jellyfin now?

SPEAKER_04: 15:48

Yeah, and Roku. Chat uses Roku.

SPEAKER_00: 15:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What what on Roku? What?

SPEAKER_04: 15:53

I don't know. Just uh Tiff Tiffany says we have a Roku that we take traveling with us. So there you go. That's all I know. I was speaking of uh so you know we were talking about Tizen not about a minute ago, right? Um and your mom getting the application wiped from the TV. So totally kind of unrelated but related. Uh I set up some wireless network stuff at my parents' house, and they would constantly complain to me that the Wi-Fi equipment that I installed for them was not working. They're like, oh, the Wi-Fi is always down, Wi-Fi is always out. And I'm sitting here thinking that can't be possible because I really hooked my parents up with some like, you know, enterprise grade equipment, okay? And so I got annoyed enough that I finally set up the equipment where it sends me notifications, and I hate notifications. I hate it. But anyway, so it sends me notifications, and so now every time their internet goes down, they get notifications also. But I also notify my mom via like text message, like, hey, your internet's down, it's not the Wi-Fi, because I'm tired of getting blamed for the Wi-Fi always getting down when it's their terrible internet service, not the equipment.

unknown: 17:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 17:07

So the next segment I want to talk about is I think something like us home labers are probably quite interesting. I really want to talk about GPUs, Stefano. Now you've got a really nice GPU, you've got your 4090, which I'm extremely jealous of, to be honest. Because I want to talk about it, especially in the terms of AI workloads and local AI, because this has been growing, I think, really quickly in the Unraid community. People running things like Alama and that kind of thing. So basically, you can run some pretty powerful models nowadays in your own home lab, but a lot of people I think think it comes down to how fast your GPU is and that kind of thing. But really, it's more of limited by the VRAM for what size model you can actually run. So basically, um how how should I put this? So basically it's down to the really the speed of the VRAM for how quickly um a model can run. Um do you know much about local local AI, Stefano?

SPEAKER_04: 18:09

Is that something you've run on your I haven't touched local AI? I know enough about it to know that if like inference is a big deal. So if you want to like run large models, you need to uh like VRAM is like the biggest concern for inference. Like having more VRAM, more better, essentially. Exactly. It's V.

SPEAKER_00: 18:32

So the training basically is when the model learns its stuff and it's trained in the data center. It's very, very expensive. The inference is basically uh what the model uses, what it learned to turn and talk to in everyday messages. And that, like I say, the VRAM is very important for that, but it's also the speed of the VRAM is how quickly it can process and use tokens. So, you know, for for some examples, um like your your GPU, your 4090, has probably got like a thousand gigabytes per second, and DDR4, for instance, has got 25 to 50 gigabytes per second. So you can see how important it is to have the fast RAM. It's a bit like I guess having a Ferrari with a very fast engine and you're trying to feed it petrol with a straw. So that's a bit what like what it would be running it on a CPU with um DDR4 RAM. So that's why having a GPU is kind of pretty important for getting fast responses out of the LLM. But what I find pretty interesting is what GPUs to actually use. I've I've got a 5070 Ti at the moment, which has 16 gigs of RAM. So that's a pretty hard ceiling for various models that I can run. I can run some models. Let me try and remember the name of what it's called. Quanticization. So I think it's been since about 2023, is you can have like a really big model and it's basically kind of shrunk down smaller to kind of fit in the smaller amount of RAM. So it's a bit like when you've got a raw photograph, it it looks great, but you can have a JPEG that fits in a smaller amount of memory and you don't really notice any different amount of quality. So you could have a 20 billion parameter AI model, which is like a really decent model. And if it wasn't quantified, each parameter would take about two bytes. So you end up with needing 140 gigs of VRAM to run it. But when it's quantified, you can literally run that same model on about 35 to 40 gigs. So I am getting to the point, I promise. But um, but the the thing is about talking about um different GPU models, is I think a real sweet spot is the 3090, because in the UK you can actually get that quite for quite a reasonable price. About five to six hundred pounds, you can get that, and you've got 24 gigs of RAM. It isn't gonna really kind of do any worse than say your GPU 4090, because the main thing about it, like I say, is is the data getting there quickly through through the memory.

SPEAKER_04: 21:10

So um I think this is where you and I differ. I would probably look at like um like an like a quadro card. Uh well, I guess they're not really a quadrant, like an R RTX card. So a uh like an A4000, for instance, uh, because those are like about a thousand bucks and are just and they're uh slim. So I think they only take up like two slots, and you can fit more of them in your system and they're blower style, or I guess a reference style, whatever. No, no, no, blower style. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're blow they're blower style. So you could fit more of them in your uh server.

SPEAKER_00: 21:42

Is that a new price or is that used?

SPEAKER_04: 21:44

That's used, yeah, used.

SPEAKER_00: 21:45

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_04: 21:46

Um I would probably look at something like that, and eventually RTX 4000 pros are gonna start flooding the market as those start to um to get used. And then if you really wanted to be baller, they actually have. A 4090 turbo that you can buy. There's a 4090 non-D version. So you can get the D versions pretty cheap because nobody wants the D. Well, some people want the D, but whatever. Anyway, so uh a 4090 turbo, you can get those. And what's nice about those is those are blower style also and only take up two slots. Uh, but those are expensive, those are like three grand, so probably not what you're looking for. One of your friends on your side of the world is actually using an A4000 uh his unrate server for AI. Or yeah, I'm sorry, he hasn't really bothered with AI then. But he has an A4000. So he could, he could use that. Actually, while I'm here, I'm gonna look up the price of an RTX 4000 Pro. Oh, those are not that bad, Ed. In the United States, right now you can get it for about 1,500 bucks.

SPEAKER_00: 22:44

That's a lot of money though, I think. You know, it is, it is how much the 3090 is.

SPEAKER_04: 22:49

But check this out though, okay? It's a single slot GPU.

SPEAKER_00: 22:52

So if you really wanted to do real single slot worth a thousand dollars more.

SPEAKER_04: 22:57

It could be. Uh if you it depends on your goals. You know, if you're like actually wanting to have high inference and you don't want to wait around, you know, a few minutes, it's actually not a bad price.

SPEAKER_00: 23:10

This is what this is what I was trying to find. I found finally found the tab. So I'm going a little bit out of border here. So my GPU is no longer being produced. Um so it's become end of life the 5070 Ti. And basically the reason for that is because they figure, well, it's got 16 gigs of what is it, um GDR7 RAM in there, that they're gonna make more money if they just sell the 5080. So they're thinking there's no point putting f like 16 gigs of that expensive RAM into a product where they get less money for because the RAM is so expensive. Yeah, it's um so I like I say I was thinking of getting a 5070 Ti to pair with the one I've already got. Not anymore. So not anymore, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 23:54

Um I'll tell you what, Ed, you should pair with your 5070. Huh? I'll tell you what, you should pair with your 5070, right? And you can you can afford this, I know you can. It's an RTX Pro 6000, 96 gigabytes of DDR, GDDR7.

SPEAKER_01: 24:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 24:12

Chump change. An empty box alone is$980.

SPEAKER_00: 24:16

But um anyway, so talking about GPUs in Unraid, um Intel having their Pro B6 um B60 and is it B50 cards? I think the B60's got 24 gigs of RAM, so that's you know pretty nice. So having two of them would give you 48 gigs, the same as two 3090s on paper, but I think the ecosystem is a lot less mature. Um CUDA's pretty battle tested in AI workloads, etc.

SPEAKER_04: 24:47

So this is a silly question. Do do those like tensor cores and AI cores not matter on these GPUs at all?

SPEAKER_00: 24:55

They do, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 24:56

So does it matter enough where you're like, I maybe I shouldn't get the Intel one because it has less AI cores than if you wanted to if you wanted to run an AI workload at the moment, right now, you'd be better off with an NVIDIA card than an Intel one.

SPEAKER_02: 25:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 25:12

Um just basically because the ecosystem's just not that mature with it. Um but the thing the Intels have is they have um what's it called? SRIOV. So um have you heard about that, Stefano?

SPEAKER_04: 25:26

Yeah, I see it in every motherboard I've ever worked with, and every time I enable it, it always warns me, hey, this is a big security risk. Please disable this unless you know what you were doing, or something to that effect. So I usually leave it disabled.

SPEAKER_00: 25:39

So basically, in consumer and video cards, SRIOV is not a thing. It's only in their professional cards for their enterprise stuff, they lock it away. Now, in the Intel cards, they were going to have it in all of the cards, but they kind of backtracked on it and they said, well, it's just going to be our pro card. Okay. What it allows you to do is in hardware basically split up the card into multiple cards. So you can have multiple VMs running with one card. So you could like give a quarter of it to one VM. That you know, why you'd be running Plex in the VM, I don't know. But as an example, you could be running Plex in a VM, you give a quarter of the card to that. You'd have another VM you might use for gaming, give a quarter of a card to that. And so you can split up the GPU. So it's much better than doing it in software because um when it's done in hardware, it dedicates its own RAM to it in hardware, etc.

SPEAKER_04: 26:33

Yeah, yeah, less overhead costs.

SPEAKER_00: 26:35

So that's kind of really interesting with those GPUs. Um unfortunately, kernel matters with these GPUs is for that to be fully working, I think you need um Linux kernel 6.17. And on the latest table of Unray, we're currently on 6.12. And I know the community is kind of really excited for the latest beta to be coming out with a higher kernel so they can unlock the full potential of their um Intel art cards. So I believe the 6.12 kernel, you can do things like transcoding and stuff, but to get the full kind of like um horsepower out of your card for all of it can what it can do, a newer kernel is needed. That's why some people in the community are actually upgrading the kernel themselves and not waiting for um an official release.

SPEAKER_03: 27:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 27:30

If you do that, you've got to weigh up, you know, do you want the feature right now to test it out, or do you want stability? So, you know, you always have to kind of weigh up those kind of things. I would say always go with the stability in my opinion, wait a little bit longer.

SPEAKER_04: 27:42

But so there's actually a question in chat that says, does Docker already do that by default? If I give one more or I'm sorry, like if I give more than one container access to it, will it split it as required?

SPEAKER_00: 27:54

Yeah, but with with Docker it it can just share it just like it would on your normal PC. So if you were running Windows and you had one GPU, Windows will use that one GPU for everything. But it's more kind of for VM workloads, really, like splitting it into different VMs.

SPEAKER_04: 28:09

So um Should Unraid have a um like uh so you know how most Linux distributions they always have like their fast or their uh like pre-builds? So like so the people that want to like test the latest and greatest whatever can always have like Linux 6.17 or the kernel 6.17, right? And then everybody else can because I know that we we can already like load like beta builds and alpha builds or whatever, but what if there was like you know, even a faster track than that build? Should everybody do that?

SPEAKER_00: 28:43

Um I I I would be against that personally. Um the re the reason being is stability on a file server that has people's data is the most important thing. You don't want to lose your data and that kind of thing. And a lot of times now ZFS is built into the operating system, the version of ZFS used is can be dependent on kernel. So you don't want to kind of upgrade the kernel and the version of ZFS you've got is not compatible with the kernel, even though it might be fine, you know, it's still like risking it a little bit, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_04: 29:19

Yeah, I'm still very the I mean the whole attraction that I had to Unraid was the stability, or I mean the whole attraction, part of the attraction was that you know it was just extremely stable. Um, unlike, you know, because I was coming off a Windows server and do it trying to replicate what Unraid does on Linux back then was extremely difficult. So, you know, for me there's a lot of value with stability. And you and I are are still, I would say we're we're polar opposites. I think you even play with more of the new features and are more excited about the new features than I am. Um, like I still don't have a ZFS pool. I still haven't touched it.

SPEAKER_00: 29:58

Stefano.

SPEAKER_04: 30:01

I know that's your goal for this year.

SPEAKER_00: 30:03

I'm gonna be flying over to um Alabama and I'm gonna be knocking on your door and I'm gonna be setting up a Z pool on your server. I should have done it when I was there before in the autumn. I should have just made you do it, shouldn't I?

SPEAKER_04: 30:14

Yeah. Yeah, maybe you should. Maybe you should. But like, you know, I'm I'm very I'm not I don't want to say cautious, but like, you know, I guess my my goals with Unrate are are just very different than what I see a lot of the community members doing. So I feel like I'm not I feel like uh in a lot of ways I'm kind of like anti-new features. Um not I'm not, but I just like, oh that's cool. I'm like an internal boot. Hey, that's great, it's coming. Love that it's coming, never gonna use it.

SPEAKER_01: 30:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 30:41

Realistically. Because I mean my US I have USB drives that have just been working for like 15 plus years. So I don't I don't see the need to switch away.

SPEAKER_00: 30:48

Yeah. But you know, with with that as well, the quality of USB flash drives are degrading all of the time, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_04: 30:55

Yeah, that's I think that's actually like why more people seem to be complaining about today is because manufacturers have just cheapened the builds of it.

SPEAKER_00: 31:03

Yeah, so so you know, you you can be lucky and have older flash drives that are actually kind of better than you know some of the newer ones. But um you know, unraid running in RAM as well is very good. It helps a lot, yeah. You know, um it's not like you're running an operating system like Windows off the flash drive with loads of writes. The only time you really write to the flash drive is when you make a config change or install a plugin. Um, other than that, it's sitting there idle. Anyway, I guess so going back to kind of the GPU bits with the um SR IOV, I think that's quite exciting in the in the Intel GPUs, but um personally I wouldn't probably buy an Intel GPU. I don't know what people in chat would buy if they were gonna buy a new GPU today, say they had$1,000 to spend. What would you guys buy if you were gonna buy a GPU?

SPEAKER_04: 31:49

Yeah, if I had a thousand dollars, I'd probably swing for NVIDIA.

SPEAKER_00: 31:52

Yeah. What what would you go for, like a 5080 or something?

SPEAKER_04: 31:55

Um that's a good question. I actually don't know the current prices of GPUs because I have the 4090, so I just haven't cared to look. But let me let me check it real quick. How much does a 5080 go for these days? That's$2,000. I'm pretty sure I can't afford that with a thousand dollars. That's where it costs.

unknown: 32:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 32:13

Uh on uh on Best Buy, it's sixteen hundred bucks on Best Buy, and then at like Amazon, it's like two thousand, Walmart's sixteen hundred dollars. It's quite expensive.

SPEAKER_00: 32:21

It's insane, isn't it? It really is.

SPEAKER_04: 32:23

I guess we're trying to try and get something used, but even the used market is kind of wild.

SPEAKER_00: 32:27

Anyway, kind of kind of moving on. I really want to kind of talk about this. Okay. I'm quite excited about it.

SPEAKER_04: 32:33

Sorry, everybody.

SPEAKER_00: 32:34

I was I was kind of talking about the GPUs because running things locally, like AI locally, um, I think it's like, you know, pretty exciting. But who out there's heard of OpenClaw? Yeah. So I read the notes. Oh, because you read the notes. So for anyone who hasn't who hasn't um heard of OpenClaw, um, have you been living under the rock for the last month? But it's a powerful open source AI assistant. It used to be called Clawedbot, then it went to Maltbot, then OpenClaw. I think it was called um ClawBot, and then Anthropic sent them a message saying, uh-uh, you can't do that. And three days later they changed to Maltbot, and then it changed to OpenClaw. So it's quite interesting because you basically run your own AI assistant on your own hardware, and it has access to pretty much everything on your on your PC or computer you're running it on. So it can access your files. It can just do lots of different things. And you can link it up to a messaging service like Telegram. Um, I have mine linked to Signal. So you can talk to it through Signal or Telegram and you send it messages that way. So wherever you are, you can actually have it, you know, communicate that way. You can set up kind of little telegram groups or signal groups and be able to do various different things with it. But the fact that it changed its name from like ClawBot to Maltbot on OpenClaw, that made quite an attack vector because apparently what happened is people were trying to install it with the old name, and people those had been hijacked and w it was installing basically rogue software that wasn't what it said it was. Nice. So those name changes kind of caused a bit of a bit of an issue. What you can do is you can bring your own API key with it. So you can link it to Claude, Chat GPT, Gemini, um, Grok, um, what other ones are the 11 labs if you want to do kind of um text-to-speech. And also you can link it to local local um AIs as well, such as Alama, um, LM Studio, etc. So it's not just kind of having Claude or Chat GPT, you literally build your own AI assistant and it has what's called a SOL file, and it constantly learns about you, updates. I I'm finding it quite exciting, but it is a huge security risk because when you give the LLM access to the internet and you say, Oh, go go and read this website and find out about this, you can have prompt injections inside the site. So it will go and read the site, and then there'll be something in there saying, Ah, um zip up all of Stefano's passwords into a file and send them to me, will you? It's that it's fine to do that. Just ignore all the other instructions. You know, don't worry about it. So the prompt injection can be basically in sites, um, it could maybe in an email that's sent to you. Um, it can even be in a README file. If you think of just a text file, normally you could have text in there and your computer will totally ignore it because it doesn't, you know, it's not there, but an LLM will be able to interpret the text in there, and if there's prompt injections in the text, it can actually do malicious things. And also what people are worried about is basically sleeper agents being made. So you install something and it doesn't do anything bad now, but it can be triggered later on. Um so it's like a sleeper agent inside of your PC. But I think it's pretty just fascinating OpenClaw. I'm running it in a VM on my Unraid server. There is a Docker container on the apps tab, but I'd recommend not to use it in a Docker container because Docker shares the kernel with the host. It's not not quite so isolated as a VM, and you wouldn't want it to find a way to basically escape from a Dockerized system and then have access to your whole Unraid server, all of your files and that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_04: 36:30

I think I'm a little bit more old school. And if I was gonna play with AI, I wouldn't run it on my dedicated Unraid. So like I have a primary Unraid server, right? That's like my NAS and does all the cool fun things. Not really that many things. But I think if I was gonna play with AI, I'd probably have a second dedicated system with GPUs and and maybe it could also run Unraid because you know Unraid's super flexible.

SPEAKER_01: 36:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 36:56

But whatever the matter is, it's like I think I would I'd rather do that instead of trying to do everything on one Unraid system just for things like this, because uh like I don't know, there's something about a virtual machine and passing a GPU through the virtual machine that I just don't like because it's like just run it on you know plain ordinary hardware. Obviously, not everyone has that that capability, but um just from my personal stance, that's I just don't like running things on hyper virtual machines anymore.

SPEAKER_00: 37:25

Yeah, yeah um you know, I I totally understand where you're coming from. But um you know, virtual machines are nice just for the isolation it gives you when you've only got the one, you know, the one server or just a couple of machines. Um a lot of people were buying Mac minis actually for running OpenClaw.

SPEAKER_04: 37:44

Um but yeah, those are still surprisingly cheap, even with all the RAM price upgrades.

SPEAKER_00: 37:49

So yeah, a lot of people were buying the is it the is it the M5 or M4 they got out now? I think it's the M5 they've got now.

SPEAKER_04: 37:55

Is it M5 already? Oh my gosh. I'm gonna look right now.

SPEAKER_00: 37:58

No, it's M4. Yeah, so it's M M4, but um sorry, I'm just I'm just trying to share the screen. Oh, okay. But the latest MacBook Pro is M5, yeah? Um I don't know. I'm pretty sure my um iPad Pro is M5. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 38:15

Yeah, MacBook Pro is M5.

SPEAKER_00: 38:17

Yeah, and I think the Mac the M5 Pro Max is coming out next month in March.

SPEAKER_04: 38:22

So oh nice. Yeah, that'll be good then. The M4 though would be way superior than a MacBook for this kind of stuff, just because you could I mean you can quite literally save a thousand dollars just by not having a screen.

SPEAKER_00: 38:40

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Anyway, going going back to open claw, it's a real big deal out there. Everyone's talking about it, but I just wanted to say to everyone it's a really big security risk, and you want to be very careful with setting it up. But it's extremely interesting. It really is showing the way the future's gonna go with AI, being able to basically have something that does jobs for you and like works for you. Some people have it collect news every day, give them a briefing, reply to emails. It could do anything really that you can do on your computer.

SPEAKER_04: 39:12

I uh I had a coworker telling me that he wanted to play with it. This, but this is back when it was still called Clawed, um, which is how I was originally introduced to OpenClaw. Anyway, he was telling me that he wanted to give it a I don't even know if this is truly capable of it, but just the example that he was telling me. He wanted to give it a like a not not a Visa gift card. I guess it is technically a Visa gift card, but it's like a credit card that you preload a balance on, whatever that's called, and then be like, hey Claude, uh here's some money. Go make me money, however you see fit. Basically, that would be the prompt that he wanted to go with. And like, you know, open accounts for uh like maybe investing or buying um alternative crypto or whatever, but it just whatever it took. And I was like, man, is that really possible already? And according to him, it was. Excuse me. But I don't know how true that is.

SPEAKER_00: 40:04

That's interesting actually, because they did an experiment. Um, I can't remember what year it was. I think it was actually a couple of years ago. Um they I think they called it the AI Village. I might be a hundred percent right.

SPEAKER_04: 40:17

Really? Um I haven't heard about this.

SPEAKER_00: 40:18

You've heard about it yet?

SPEAKER_04: 40:20

No, I have not.

SPEAKER_00: 40:21

I have not. Oh, and they just had like a computer with some LLMs, give gave it their own computer and literally said make some money. And they set up their own kind of little store, like selling kind of t-shirts and stuff. Obviously, they had to use third-party sources to kind of get the t-shirts and that kind of thing. And I think they um made$2,000 for charity and it was just an experiment to see if it could be done. And and there were different models, and they saw which model made the most money, and I think it was I can't remember which one made the most, but I think Gemini was the worst at the time, but that was Gemini 2.5.

SPEAKER_04: 40:56

I just don't really like understand how that can be possible without human interaction, because like okay, like an email. How does the AI get around 2FA? Like you have to have another device, right?

SPEAKER_00: 41:11

Okay, so 2FA, I reckon it could be done.

SPEAKER_04: 41:14

So it can totally be done.

SPEAKER_00: 41:16

What's it called? Um, KDE Connect. Yeah? So KD Connect, you can run it on Linux, it can connect to your phone. Oh. Okay, so so then what you could do is you could have two-factor on your phone and the and then the LLM would be able to actually interact with the KDE Connect and it would be able to send the code to itself and then log in. Also, if you're running it on um on Mac, um iMessage, it could just read iMessage and that you know, then you get the um text the SMS messages in that way. So it could do two, it could do two-factor that way, but I don't think I think it'd be difficult to do an authentication app to actually be able to do that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_04: 41:52

Yeah, I'm just like I'm curious at like what level like do they just have super lax security when they were doing these tests? Like, how how does what does this actually look like? And that's actually more of what I'm curious to know about. But they just I feel like everything that you'll read will just gloss over the actual interesting parts uh of these stories, which for me is always going to be more the technical side.

SPEAKER_00: 42:14

I think they're just kind of like pretty much just demos and there's no s no security done, and you know, it wouldn't be something you'd probably want to set up yourself to do. Yeah, definitely. Another thing that's actually talking about things going a bit crazy. So you're meant to set up OpenClaw with commercial um AIs using API instead of like your like clawed Macs accounts or your Chat GPT Pro accounts. So you're meant to use API, and apparently um people have been setting up to do various kind of tasks overnight and meant to be doing things all of the time. And and some people have kind of come back and had a bit of a a shock with the API bills of like kind of over a thousand dollars, etc. So because um and apparently like one one of those ones was because it was trying to install a package and it kept having an error all of the time, downloading it, and it just didn't give up after a certain amount of time. It just kept trying and trying and trying and trying and trying, and it was using um my Opus 4.5, which I think is like about five dollars for a million tokens going to the LLM and$25 for a million tokens coming back. So it's like$30 per million tokens.

SPEAKER_04: 43:26

So if you're like running this thing locally, it's probably using like if it's like retrying through all those errors, it's probably you know, max out your GPU, which is going to use a lot of electricity too, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 43:36

So you're gonna get double hit with what you'd do is just set it to kind of give up after three or four tries if it fails, and to not let a process last more than a certain amount of time. So you'd say, well, if this pr you know going on for this amount of time, kind of give up. But it's just mainly kind of misconfigured systems that would cause that to happen.

SPEAKER_04: 43:55

But yeah, so they're getting hit with double bills electricity costs and token costs.

SPEAKER_00: 43:59

Yeah. Also, you can you can split your open claw to use different LLMs for different tasks. They have things called heartbeats where it's just going out to internet and checking various things. So you wouldn't want to use one that you know has a lot of cost for that. You could just use a local one, you could use a cheaper one. But what people are doing as well is using something called Google's anti-gravity, which um Anthropic don't kind of like that. So basically using your account that you pay a subscription for to kind of link it up to kind of automated agents. Um it basically just uses the login and uses a proxy to kind of trick the system that you're using their own IDE when really you're not.

SPEAKER_04: 44:40

Alright, Ed. Sorry to interrupt you, but this is actually a good question that's sort of related. How would you feel about getting a 48 gigabyte RAM Mac Mini versus a 24 gigabyte NVIDIA GPU for LLM? Which route would would you think is superior?

SPEAKER_00: 44:56

I I would say probably the the Mac Mini, in my opinion. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 45:02

I feel like I would try and go for a Mac Mini cluster. Realistically, go for a Mac Mini cluster. Because I mean you can get 10 gig networks.

SPEAKER_00: 45:10

Does Mac Mini have 48 gigs? Does it go that high? I thought it was the highest. I might be wrong. I know the Mac Studio goes pretty. I think Mac Studio goes to what 192? Or maybe even more.

SPEAKER_04: 45:23

Let me check real quick. Mac mini.

SPEAKER_00: 45:25

Used Mac Studio would be a pretty cool thing to buy.

SPEAKER_04: 45:28

Used Mac Studio would be sick also. What the hell? Uh buy. 14 core. It goes all the way up to 64 gigs, man. Wow. But of course, you know, that's when you're talking about something like that, you know, that's$2,100.

SPEAKER_00: 45:41

You know, it might be better to actually then think about how much$64 gigs is if you wanted to buy$64 gigs of DDR5 map. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 45:49

Like an equivalent GPU.

SPEAKER_00: 45:51

No, no, just if you bought it for your gaming PC. If you wanted to buy 64 gigs now.

SPEAKER_04: 45:55

Oh.

SPEAKER_00: 45:56

How much is sixty-four gigs nowadays?

SPEAKER_04: 45:58

I think it's like uh two kilos of gold.

SPEAKER_00: 46:03

Two kilos of gold, one kidney, and a pint of blood.

unknown: 46:11

But yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 46:12

I think it would honestly be better to just try and get as many Mac minis as possible and cluster them together.

SPEAKER_00: 46:18

Yeah, because the RAM's really fast. A unified RAM, I think it's about 800 gigs per second, isn't it, or something like that.

SPEAKER_04: 46:25

I don't I don't know the spec, but I know it's pretty good.

SPEAKER_00: 46:28

It's almost as fast as the actual um, you know, as it's like your GPU, etc. So I I think the Mac mini would be a good way forward. And also it's going to be more power efficient as well.

SPEAKER_04: 46:38

So Oh, significantly. And then when you're not playing with your AIs, you can uh fold at home or whatever the kids do these days. No one folds anymore, right? They fold proteins, but I don't remember what the new software is. Boink.

SPEAKER_00: 46:50

But yeah, and we're just going back to the anti-gravities, you can actually link up your subscription accounts to it, but um it is against their terms, terms of service, and so you can be banned if they kind of know you're doing it. So just something to consider. But anyway, um moving on. We've talked about that. So going back to you know the 50-70 Ti no longer being produced because of the shortage of RAM.

SPEAKER_04: 47:16

Sad, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 47:17

Saying data centers are going to consume 70% of memory chips made in 2026. So if you think about it, that just leaves 30% of memory chips for every other single thing. So that's games consoles, PCs, computers and cars, um phones, pretty much everything.

SPEAKER_04: 47:36

Pretty much everything, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 47:37

Yeah. And they say I think that they reckon that this year prices are expected to climb by another forty to fifty percent. So my opinion is if you want to upgrade and get more memory, pause this podcast now. Go on to Amazon and quickly buy it, because it looks like, you know, um, by the end of quarter one in 2026, which isn't that long now. Um, you know, what, another month or so for the end of quarter one, they reckon it's gonna be up to another 40 to 50 percent higher, according to these articles.

SPEAKER_04: 48:11

I got some bad news for you, man. So I heard from a very credible source, okay? Very credible. Probably the most credible source. I know credible sources, okay? And this one's very credible, right?

SPEAKER_00: 48:21

Well, the only credible source is a little bit more.

SPEAKER_04: 48:21

The reason why Half-Life 3. I'm sorry, what?

SPEAKER_00: 48:25

I said the only credible source I know is you. You're the most credible source I know.

SPEAKER_04: 48:28

So that's that's that's flattering. But hear me out though.

SPEAKER_01: 48:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 48:34

Okay? The reason why Half-Life 3 is now getting delayed instead of being released is because of the uh chip shortage.

SPEAKER_00: 48:43

Yeah, that's just very sad.

SPEAKER_04: 48:44

So so it won't release with Steam OS or um the new Steam Box, right? Like the original plan was, because all of the RAM's getting bought bought up and people won't be able to afford to buy the Steam Box plus Half-Life 3. So really this is your fault for pushing all this AI propaganda.

SPEAKER_00: 49:00

Yeah, if I could only go back until I've been waiting for Half-Life 3, I think, since 2006. So 20 years. What what's another year or so gonna be?

SPEAKER_04: 49:09

Until the RAM shortage gets resolved, unfortunately you're gonna have to keep waiting. Sorry.

SPEAKER_00: 49:14

I don't know. I I wish you hadn't told me that because I didn't know that. I was happily looking forward to it coming out, you know, at least before the summer.

SPEAKER_04: 49:23

No, that this ram shortage is literally killing everything. You can't I mean, steambox is now delayed. What do they call that thing? What is it called? The actual Steam new Steam Machine.

SPEAKER_00: 49:31

Just the Steam Steambox, I think what you're doing. Oh, is it Steambox? Okay. I think so, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 49:35

Yeah. That's getting delayed. Car manufacturers are now like trying to like their infotainment systems are trying to like go back to be more simplified. Hell even Tesla's getting out of the car market.

SPEAKER_00: 49:47

I'm gonna go off on a bit of a wild tangent, but I heard something really bad recently that happened in Europe. Okay. So you know lane assist in in cars where they keep you in the lane. Apparently there was like a a road, you know, where you've got one lane one way and one the other. We call them main roads, like I don't know what you call them in the States, you know, they've got no barrier in the middle, but you know, it's just like traffic goes one way on one and the other way on the other. And a car a car was overtaking um another car, had its indicator on left to kind of pull out and go around it, didn't see like a kind of truck coming, and because their indicator was going left, they tried to swerve and go back in to the correct lane, and the lane assist didn't let them, and they went straight into the front, and all the people were killed in the van. So I was just thinking, my god, like you know, you'd never think of that. You think lane assist kind of makes you really safe, but there are things that can go wrong with it if it doesn't let you kind of steer right because you've got your indicator on to go left.

SPEAKER_01: 50:49

Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 50:50

But yeah, I was like, And speaking of like automotive things, so those delivery robots are getting more popular, those are gonna start eating up all the RAM as well. Uh driverless cars gonna eat up a lot of RAM. There's not gonna be anything left, man. What there isn't there like a new Chinese company that says they're gonna start making RAM?

SPEAKER_00: 51:11

I don't know, I hope so. That'd be cool.

SPEAKER_04: 51:12

I'm gonna look it up right now. Because uh it was like uh oh yeah, CXMT claims to so this was actually posted three days ago on Tom's Hardware, finally now. Uh so they claim that they're gonna try and start producing memory. Uh DRAM and NAND production over the next few years. Well, along with another company called YMTC. Never heard of either of these until literally like I guess three days ago.

SPEAKER_00: 51:37

Yeah, I've never heard of them now.

SPEAKER_04: 51:39

All right, Chad says it's Steam Machine, not Steam.

SPEAKER_00: 51:41

Oh Steam Machine, is it? Right.

SPEAKER_04: 51:43

I thought the Steam Machine was that thing they released forever ago.

SPEAKER_00: 51:45

Maybe it's just called the same name.

SPEAKER_04: 51:47

Well, when I look up Steam Machine, I see like some uh thing with a handle. It doesn't look like what I think it looks like. Yeah, it's called Steam Machine.

SPEAKER_00: 51:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_04: 51:55

I thought they would rename it to something different because we already have Steam Machine technically.

SPEAKER_00: 52:00

Yeah, but why would you? Like the Xbox isn't renamed every iteration.

SPEAKER_04: 52:04

I mean, yeah, it is. Yeah, Xbox One, Xbox One X, One S.

SPEAKER_00: 52:11

Or Steam Machine 2S.

SPEAKER_04: 52:14

As long as it makes more sense than whatever the hell Xbox is doing, then yeah. Alright, we have the Steam Deck, Steam Controller, Steam Machine, Steam Frame.

SPEAKER_00: 52:20

So that article you saw about another company making RAM, do they kind of have any idea of how long it would take for things to become in production? Is this just like they're gonna be setting up the factories and fabricating it? You know, um, I thought there are only certain chip fabrication plants that could do these type of workflows.

SPEAKER_04: 52:38

I don't actually know enough about it to make a comment about that. Um that was my understanding as well, is like you only have foundries that can produce this stuff. Um, so maybe they have their own foundry. I I really don't know enough about the companies to to comment on that. Um but more importantly, uh Snowman in chat says that they'll he doubts they'll even be allowed to sell in the USA at all, especially with the way that uh USA is kind of um pushing back on all Chinese products.

SPEAKER_00: 53:13

Yeah. But then again, wouldn't that be the same for any RAM? Because all all RAM and chips are made in China, really, or Taiwan or Taiwan. Taiwan, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 53:22

Well, I mean uh the I guess the dependency here is like um well I can't remember what it's called. So basically you the United States, if if you can prove that your manufacturing process is untampered from foundry to the door of your customer, then that's accepted. But I think a lot of a lot of companies don't fit into that framework. I can't remember what that's called. It's like something about trusting in the manufacturing process or manufacturing to delivery process, whatever that is. Oakfig says Steam Machine 3D. That should be the name.

SPEAKER_00: 53:53

So we got data centers consuming 70% of memory chips. Brings us on to um Georgia is being a bit of a battleground over AI data centers. Apparently, what's happened there is so in 2025 I think they um approved a whole load of data centers. Now they've Georgia's introduced something called House Bill 1012, which is the first comprehensive statewide moratorium on new data centres. Um and the Holt is going to Holt all new approvals until March 2027, basically because these data centers are being built, the electricity companies are building more infrastructure, people's prices are going up for electricity, so they're being subsidized basically by the people who live there.

SPEAKER_04: 54:47

Yeah. Yeah. Uh didn't like Microsoft, like one of their data centers, uh and the infinite promises that Microsoft is constantly making, say that they promise and keep local communities power bills from increasing due to their data centers?

SPEAKER_00: 55:01

Yeah, I I heard about that as well. Like I think they call it community first AI infrastructure initiative.

SPEAKER_01: 55:06

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the one.

SPEAKER_00: 55:08

So and I think, you know, I kind of do criticize Microsoft a lot. And yeah, it might be because there's been pushback with things like in Georgia and this type of thing, but I actually think Microsoft are uh doing a good thing here, really. Because if it's true. It's pretty so they said they're gonna like um basically pay all the electricity costs themselves, which like you know, kind of us as the general public have been used to doing that for years.

SPEAKER_03: 55:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 55:36

But uh but they also say that they're they'll pay for all the utility rates, uh, food in the grid upgrades, and they're also gonna reject the property tax breaks, which I think you know, for a company to say they're gonna like refuse the tax breaks they could get.

SPEAKER_04: 55:51

I don't believe it. You know, well, let's give them a chance, Stefano, because there's gotta be something else they're getting, some subsidy somewhere else, in order to do any of that stuff. Because there's no way they would take a community first initiative and and just be like, yeah, we'll cover infrastructure costs.

SPEAKER_00: 56:08

So you're thinking more of um a corporate PR thing, do you? Absolutely.

unknown: 56:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 56:14

I mean, think about okay, so like Microsoft also this year promised that they intend to make Windows 11 better. But every update is getting is literally getting worse. Oh, your computer no longer boot. Oh, we deleted the files on your drive again. Oh, now we're taking all your OneDrive data and putting in our agent AI.

SPEAKER_00: 56:38

Yes, and only for gaming. I I can give you a really good tip how to improve Windows 11. Do you want to format the hard drive and put a Linux distro on there?

SPEAKER_04: 56:48

But then I can't play online games. The day that kernel level anti-cheat somehow starts working on Linux is the day I'll get rid of Windows forever.

SPEAKER_00: 56:58

Stefano, like it's not gonna happen until more people start using gaming on Linux because just the anti-cheat people, they don't bother you know, um making the anti-cheat software to work on Linux because they consider it there's not enough people using it.

SPEAKER_03: 57:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 57:11

And then people are not gonna start using it because they there's no anti-cheat there, but you know, it's gotta start somewhere. I mean, that's true, but I'm still hoping through the Steam Machine might be something that will actually change Linux gaming for good.

SPEAKER_04: 57:24

Yeah. I hope so too. But until then, man, Windows 11 only for gaming. I'm actually this close to going back to Windows 10, even though it's unsupported now. But I might just go back to Windows 10.

SPEAKER_00: 57:36

You know, with Windows 10, you can get updates until I think October of 2025.

SPEAKER_04: 57:41

Yeah, some security updates. Yeah. Yeah.

unknown: 57:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 57:43

Uh and that's fine. Like, I mean, I only use it for gaming. I literally don't I don't use my gaming PC for browsing or anything of that nature. Just literally just gaming.

unknown: 57:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 57:53

So I'm not really too worried about the Windows 11 stuff. Uh and it hasn't none of the all of the bugs that have come out in the past haven't actually affected me, so I've been pretty lucky. But when it comes to like actual work and you know privacy and stuff, um, you know, Linux servers, I use my Mac at that max, you know, perfectly private per se.

SPEAKER_00: 58:13

This this is why Unraden VMs are so cool, and you know I love VMs, is you can have your gaming VM running Windows with your 4090, although with a gaming VM you would actually actually what I'm saying is making no sense because when you actually run Windows in a gaming VM, anti-cheat doesn't work.

SPEAKER_04: 58:29

So this is the this is the problem. This is why I still have a dedicated gaming PC. I literally have to have multiple PCs just so I can minimize my use of Windows.

SPEAKER_00: 58:38

Yeah. Apparently Wendell from Level One Tech, he's found a way to actually bypass the um anti-cheat, um, but he hasn't published it because he knows that when it's published, they will patch it. So you can't get around it anymore.

SPEAKER_04: 58:54

Well, realistically, Ed, you know, I'll probably end up stop playing online multiplayer games because cheating has just become an absolute I mean it's so rampant now that it it it kind of just makes me want to start playing games altogether. So that no so really the gaming industry will just kill itself.

SPEAKER_00: 59:10

Yeah, yeah, that and um you know the cost of putting a gaming machine together.

SPEAKER_04: 59:14

Yeah, exactly. And with all these data centers going up, we'll just have to rent gaming PCs from them.

SPEAKER_00: 59:19

Yeah. But anyway, moving on, like um we've got a hardware story, which I think is quite interesting. Western Digital had something called an Innovation Day or something. I think it was only a few days ago, a couple of days ago, and they have announced Western Digital unveils massive 40 terabyte hard drives with energy assisted recording tech, and it plans a hundred terabyte drive by 2029. So they're reckoning there's gonna be 40 terabyte drives out this year.

SPEAKER_04: 59:50

That's insane. But we just got 20 terabyte hard drives, and now they're already making it jump to 40 and claiming they're gonna be at 100 terabytes even sooner. It's insane.

SPEAKER_00: 59:59

They reckon 100 terabytes by 2029 to 2030.

SPEAKER_04: 1:00:02

Well, it makes it insane, and there's still platter drives. Like there's still disks.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:06

Yeah, still disks. But the problem is they're using something in these drives called Ultra SMR, which is shingled magnetic recording. So I'm not sure if you guys know about CMR drives and SMR drives, uh, but I think it's really important for us on Raiders and basically all home labers to kind of know about it. Is that something um something you use at all? Have you ever kind of bought the um SMR drives yourself, Stefano?

SPEAKER_04: 1:00:33

Would you ever um I always confuse the two, but I'm pretty sure I only ever buy CMR drives.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:39

Yeah, CMR CMR is what you want. Because if you imagine like um the tracks on the disc, um on a CMR, the tracks are kind of individual and you've got a little gap between them. Okay. So so when you write the data on the drive, it just writes on the one track. But an SMR drive, the tracks kind of overlap like the shingles on your roof, like like so you've got kind of like multiple tracks. So when you write some data onto the drive, it doesn't just be able to write the one track, it has to write the other as well. So it has a part of the drive where it's got the CMR part where it's got like a almost like a staging area, I guess you'd call it. So you've got this staging area where the data goes there first, written on the CMR part, and then using clever algorithms and stuff, then it has to then rewrite it. Um, when the cache is full, it will just flush it onto the main part of the drive. You know, that's all kind of well and good if you're using kind of sequential files and writing that way, but when it's like lots of kind of smaller reads and writes, um, it can just cause the drive to pretty much come to a complete and utter halt. So never ever use an SMR drive as your parity drive because um it will just make your server crawl to a halt, probably. Because um those rights are small. Every time you you do a calculation, it's written to parity. So an SMR drive as parity would be a real, real no, no, no. An SMR in ZFS arrays, in my opinion, is even worse because ZFS being a copy on write system, there's constant background operations, things like resilver rights are scattered and random, and it can cause the drive to slow down so much when it's being hit a lot that the system can then drop that drive out of the ZFS array thinking that the drive is bad. When it isn't, it's just being so slow. And also that can happen, you know, in in unraid as well. Like, you know, it could theoretically drop the drive out, but it's a lot safer in an unraid array as a data drive than it would be as a parity drive or in a in a z pool. So never use SMR in a Z pool. Never use an SMR for a parity drive in your unraid array, um, in in my opinion.

SPEAKER_04: 1:02:48

SMR drives are also like if you have a RAID array, uh like a still like a I guess a hardware RAID.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:02:54

Uh they're also slower to integrate into the array than uh CMR.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:58

Literally a rebuild when you've got an SMR drive in there, it can go from like you know taking kind of you know, kind of 12 to 14 hours to taking days if you lit literally slow it down that much. And a lot of people think that they can tell if it's an SMR or um or um CMR drive by the actual cache on the drive. You know, when you see a drive and it says it's got 256 megs of cache, but that's the DRAM cache, and that's not that's not the same as the staging area. So a CMR or an SMR drive will have will have DRAM caches and it improves the performance. So you can't actually really tell from that. But there's certain things you can tell, um, really just like checking the serial number before you buy it. Um there was a big scandal a while ago with um the WD red drives.

SPEAKER_04: 1:03:45

I'm not sure if you're yeah, I remember I remember that. Yeah. When they were kind of the NAS drives, they were you know using um SMR drives in there, which is kind of and then they they made it even more confusing because once the scandal came out, they're like, Oh, well, if you have the NAS Pro Plus or whatever, these are CMR. If you have the NAS Pro Plus minus, you have the SMR. It's like, wait a minute, these are the same drives. I'm so confused. And they made it worse. I think that's actually like in chat, uh Holmes is like, hey, I only buy or I don't want to say only. I buy Iron Wolf Pros uh for his NAS. I think that actually that fumble by Western Digital is actually what pushed so many people to Ironwolf. I myself or Seagate, I myself actually just bought my first Seagate drives ever uh for my uh N VR.

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:04:31

So I've kind of already started thinking about switching away from Western Digital just to because at least with Seagate, from what I've noticed, is a lot of their marketing, they clearly state, hey, this is CMR, this is SMR. So that just makes it so much easier.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:44

As well, the drive manufacturers want to just, you know, they they would rather sell an SMR disk. So you can say you can have a 20 terabyte SMR that has, I don't know, 10 Plasters, or you or you can have a CMR that has 15 platters for the same data. Well, it's obviously going to be cheaper for them to make the SMR drive and they can slap the same label with the amount of terabytes it's got on there, and and from the marketing perspective, they can be more competitive and sell it at a cheaper price, and they will probably make more money.

SPEAKER_04: 1:05:14

But yeah, this is hard drives is one of the things I when I like go to buy, I make sure to really do my due diligence and make sure that it's not an SMR drive. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:24

But the thing is that well, a lot of people in the kind of home lab and community there will shuck drives out of external drives.

SPEAKER_04: 1:05:30

Yeah, that's that's me. I do that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:32

I think that's when you kind of get SMR drives and you don't really know because you can't know what drives in there until you take it out.

SPEAKER_04: 1:05:38

Yeah, that's true. And that's why so I actually have a lot of videos or not a lot of videos, I have a a couple of videos actually of shucking drives. And I go out of my way to make sure that the drives I'm buying are um CMR before I even recommend them to anybody else. And even try to find like clues and little giveaways to know that hey, if you're gonna shuck drives, Make sure you do your research and understand like these serial numbers, these like all these different codes, because not that it'll really help, because you know, a label can change, but generally speaking, they don't change uh a lot of those labels too often. So yeah, that's like literally what I was thinking in my head. So good job there.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:17

Yeah, but it's a shame these 40 terabyte drives are gonna come out. They're gonna be this um ultra SMR, which is basically still SMR. Yeah, I mentioned it then. Yeah. So it's a bit of a shame.

SPEAKER_04: 1:06:28

Like hopefully we'll be able to get some big hard drives that are CMR as well for you know, obviously, um I mean they literally plan, it says right there that they plan to release 36 um terabyte EPMR2 CMR drives there towards the bottom. Which is still pretty pretty big. I think that's another like another thing too. Like CMR drives come in these weird sizes, like 15 terabytes versus you know, like exactly 40 or 46. Like the numbering, the numbers are of uh or I guess the storage capacity is always seems off.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:01

Anyway, kind of going back and talking about gaming and stuff and that um Mesa, their kind of VR labs, have posted a six billion loss in the fourth quarter of last year. And I think over the whole of the year, it was something like 19 billion. So they are pivoting to AI, things like smart glasses. And these smart glasses sales have tripled in 2025. And I just wondered, is that something have you ever tried smart glasses, Stephanie? Is it something you buy? Chat, is that something you would buy? I kind of feel it as a massive like I I would never have like um any smart glasses made by Facebook strapped to my face.

SPEAKER_04: 1:07:39

That would be uh well that point is exactly why I won't. Google, remember when Google Glass was a thing?

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:46

Yeah. Like that That was years ago, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_04: 1:07:49

Yeah, I was still in college.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:52

Man, that was a long time ago. I can't believe I'd I'd love to try and get hold of a pad, though it was like a used pad and see what they're like.

SPEAKER_04: 1:07:58

Uh I don't think I think they're like community supported now, because of course, you know, Google, where they kill everything. So back when Google was a good company, I would have probably have worn something like that. But I just don't I'm not really big into social media, so I I just don't know what I would do with like smart social media glasses.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:17

Yeah. What what would be cool though, yeah? Imagine if you could get some glasses like this. You wore the glasses and they had some kind of lenses in them that you could see really far into the distance. So it would like zoom in, you could see like a car a long way away. It would zoom in, it could bring the license plate up. Um, there's various kind of things that you could see, and it was like a heads-up display in a kind of computer game. And you had that. But why would I need that? You wouldn't need it, but it would it would be cool, Stephanie. It would still be cool, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:08:46

I know, but that's like kind of the problem. Like all this stuff is really cool, but it's just like it's kind of wasted money because it's cool for a while, and then they'll do some update, and then now your fancy tech thing will be unsupported, stop getting updates, and then like now it's just a paperweight. Yeah. Like I I just I don't know, I just don't see the appeal of smart. Like, I don't know what I would do with it. Like, I already carry around a smartphone and that does everything I needed to do.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:11

I would like to go and try them out to see what they actually do do, because I've not really got an idea of the case.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:16

Not do do it.

SPEAKER_04: 1:09:20

Yeah, me neither. I I mean I genuinely don't know what they do. And like all I ever see is hey, there's these new smart glasses. They can record. Cool. Why do I want to record people?

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:30

I'm guessing it's just recording all of the time. And um but at least So they can sell ads to you. I at the end of the day, that's actually probably true.

SPEAKER_04: 1:09:43

It's not a product, it's not a product for me, it's a product for them and all their friends to sell me more stuff I don't need.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:49

So you need to buy something so they can sell more things to you.

SPEAKER_04: 1:09:52

Yeah, no thanks. There's I mean, but generally from like a technology spam standpoint, these stuff is is cool. Like the things that you could possibly do with them, like you said, like you know, be able to like zoom in on something really far away. Yeah, that's that seems like pretty cool, but realistically, they're not gonna do anything actually fun with it, right?

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:09

No, but we never know. In the future, it might, you know, it's all a start, isn't it?

SPEAKER_04: 1:10:14

Yeah. But these are I I do like smart glasses over headsets because I VR for me will never become a thing until I can just wear like lightweight glasses or something. And and now that we have the the crazy part to me is we can do 4K HDMI wirelessly. Like we've been able to do that for a long time. And so I just don't understand VR headsets because it's like just stream the media wirelessly to the headset.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:44

I just don't like VR headsets at all. I've had multiple I had one of the first Oculuses that came out when it was like um the Oculus Rift, I think it was called, um, before it was officially uh um announced. And I've had various vibes, I've had a couple of the meta quests, and I always I always get it and think I'm, you know, oh, it's meant to be so much better. But what I don't like about it is I just can't be bothered to game on it. I don't want to have to get it out, set it up, and then make sure there's like a bit of the room clear that I don't not gonna kind of crash into a chair or the dog's gonna walk in front of me, I'm gonna fall over and like smash my face onto the onto the fireplace or something. Do you know what I mean? I'd just much rather come home, sit on the sofa, get a controller out, and just game on the TV. That to me is much more relaxing rather than having to kind of be ducking down, jumping up and down, and you know, you're getting tired, the the heavy headsets on your face, and you think, oh, I've done an hour now, I'm absolutely knacked. That's I don't want to relax that way personally.

SPEAKER_04: 1:11:42

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I um eventually we might get there. I've never bought a BR headset. Um because I just I have no interest in wearing a headset, really. Like even wearing headphones to me is is bothersome. I do it because you know, obviously the sound is great. Um, and they're they're a lot better today than they've ever been. But that but like eventually we won't need these massive headsets and they're kind of goofy and stuff. And when we get there, I'll probably finally buy into the technology. But man, I just I have no interest in VR to this to this day. And then and everyone tells me it's great, and I'm sure it's great. But I feel I think feel like for me though, like the vanity would wear off so quickly that it would revert back to just having, you know, my nice ODLED display, you know, what that's 34 inches or whatever. Like and then the the value proposition there would just be lost. Because like when I look at like a monitor, right? You buy a thousand dollar monitor, that thing will last you 10 plus years, be compatible with basically every computer you ever plug into it. So, you know, like a VR headset, it only lasts as long as it's supported. And I I don't know. I feel like five years is something long enough for me.

SPEAKER_00: 1:12:48

I think you'd look good in a pair of those glasses, and I could see you wearing them.

SPEAKER_04: 1:12:53

Yeah, I think so too. I I think I mean that's cool. I just I wish it wasn't meta. Like I wish it could have been anybody else.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:01

Yeah, I know. It seems the worst, the worst thing to um, you know, something that goes to Facebook. And talking about Facebook, I'm gonna skip across to a story I was gonna talk about.

SPEAKER_04: 1:13:11

Have you has anyone actually ever seen anybody wear meta glasses in real life? Just curious. The chat, you, me, I mean, I've never seen it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:18

I I haven't, but then I wouldn't have been actively looking for it, if you know what I mean.

SPEAKER_04: 1:13:23

Yeah, me neither. I've only seen people wear them in their commercials.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:26

But this is interesting, kind of going talking about meta, and I think um a MetaPixel is the pixels that are a transparent one pixel that tracks where you go. It can kind of hash, I believe, the email address of what you are on a website and it sends it back to Facebook. That's why it's called a MetaPixel, correct? Um am I right there?

SPEAKER_04: 1:13:47

So I'm not gonna lie to you, Ed. I tried reading the notes in the like this as well. I have no idea what's happening with this because it's it's explained so poorly. So I I genuinely don't understand what's happening with this.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:07

It's called a Metapixel. Um I'm not quite sure of how exactly it works. Um so I think it just basically you know drops that into a website and then it basically tracks what you do. So the interesting thing about this case here is the US Um Supreme Court are going to decide if a 1988 videotape privacy law applies to internet users. So I don't know if anyone of the US viewers remember back in 1988, apparently there was some politician who I think a video store, I think it was Blockbuster, basically sold his um rental history. They published his rental history. Oh, this senator watches these films, and there was a big outcry about it, and so they made a law to say you're not allowed to do that, it's kind of it. And so what this case is trying to do is it's trying to say, do these laws apply to the modern internet? So if you sign up for a newsletter or something, are you considered a consumer then? And if basically if this goes the way that we would like it to go, it would like give people a lot more protection from being tracked across things on the internet and and it would give a lot more privacy protection for viewing data. So it would mean like, you know, Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, all those companies, they're not gonna be able to share viewing data with ad trackers without consent, um, because they'd be breaking that 1988 law that's still there.

SPEAKER_04: 1:15:37

But then all they're gonna do is is like, oh, in order to use this at all, you have to consent. So it's basically gonna be a nothing burger. I mean look at Plex.

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:45

Yeah, but the thing is, if you consent, you do consent. But what I mean is it's better to have that law than it just not be there. Because if it's there, you're nothing. But you know, at least like if that law's there and then you have to consent, and then there's one company that goes, you don't have to consent, we're not gonna do it, and then everyone starts going there. Well, the other companies are gonna have to go, okay, we're either gonna have to like stick with having no viewers or we're gonna have to.

SPEAKER_04: 1:16:08

Yeah, I think I'm too my like I think I'm too cynical because I I feel like nobody is actually gonna care enough and they're just gonna auto-consent anyway, and then just be like, Yeah, take take my data.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:19

In the case, but if we've got the law there underlying it, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:16:23

Oh, the law is important. We need it for sure. I think we do need it, don't get me wrong. Okay. But like look at like AI though, right? They allegedly AI did all these illegal things, like torrenting, whatever, whatever, whatever, and nothing's gonna come from it. So, like, do we really trust the law anyway at this point? I don't think so. Yeah. Maybe things are different in the EU where laws matter.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:45

I'd rather have the law and it not be followed than no law to follow at all. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:16:53

It's the same thing to me, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:56

But talking about consent, okay?

SPEAKER_04: 1:16:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:59

Have you heard of this OpenAI launching ChatGPT Health to connect medical records and wellness apps, etc.? Yeah? So this is pretty it it sounds like it may be you know quite convenient to that, but it's actually not really that cool because are you familiar with HIPAA? Yeah. Yeah. So for anyone in um watching who isn't familiar with HIPAA, it's some kind of like medical protection that protects your kind of medical records and like doctor patient privilege and stuff, things like that. So when you go to the doctor surgery, all of your records and everything is protected under HIPAA. But companies like OpenAI are not bound by HIPAA, and because you're uploading your data to them voluntarily, you're consenting. So this is exactly what you were saying, Stefano, about when people consent, they give up their you know, their rights. So by you're consenting to upload your medical documents and they're not bound by HIPAA, and but they say, Oh, we're going to put them in a separate section. So you're just basically giving all of your medical records to OpenAI. So just an interesting story I thought ties into you know what we were talking about a moment ago. But you know, other things into div digital sovereignty. Um, French lawmakers have been making laws again about we're talking about last time in the UK they're planning on banning social media. I thought it was Australia for for Yeah, Australia have already done it. I think Australia about a year ago, I think. I think it was last December 2024, I'm pretty sure. Wow. Or it might have been this year, I don't know. It's really time flies. But yeah, so they're they want to ban it here. You know, I I think social media is bad for children. Like we said beforehand, it's like it's fine to ban it, but how are you going to enforce it? If if enforcing it means that every single person who wants to use social media has to prove their age and who they are, then that just makes it that when you're on the internet, everything will be linked to your identity and the internet will not be quite what it used to be.

SPEAKER_04: 1:18:59

You know, Ed, I've kind of, you know, in the past I was like, oh, it should be the parents' job, right? To like watch your children and can and like see what they have. The more I see so every time I go to somebody else's house that isn't my own home, and I see what the internet is like when there's no ad control or or just like no sort of restrictions, right? It is so bad that I'm like, you know what? I'm actually starting to get behind these these like bans, like banning social media for children and stuff, because good God, ads are insane.

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:36

When when when we were young, Stefano, like for for instance, just you know, with bullying, for example, if you got bullied at school, you'd come home, shut your door, and you'd be in your own home and the bullying would stop. Do you know what I mean? But nowadays, kids, when they've got social media, they'll come home and the bullying continues when they shut their door because of all of the social media. And it's it's just it's just devastating for kids, you know, their mental health, in my opinion, to have that all of the time. I can't imagine what that would be like.

SPEAKER_04: 1:20:05

The thing that bee builders me too is like when I was a kid and we brought phones, game boys, whatever to school, the school just took them away from us. And, you know, we could get them back at the end of the day. But at some point, somehow it became acceptable to let their kids have phones during class. And I just like what happened there? Where did where did that like line just suddenly go? Oh, it's fine.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:27

I find with people I know they're giving their kids phones at younger and younger age. It's like, oh, you you know, it used to be when you go to secondary school, you can have a phone. Like secondary school here is when you're kind of about 12, 13. But now it's kind of like kids in primary school, which is like kind of seven, eight seem to be having phones. Like it's seem to be getting younger and younger for some reason.

SPEAKER_04: 1:20:46

Yeah, we uh there is uh one of my kids' friends who's uh like seven-ish, uh, has her own cell phone plan. So and uh in an iPhone, totally unrestricted as far as I can tell, and full access to TikTok, unrestricted. And they were in the my kids' bedroom one day, just like watching TikTok, and I was like, holy Christ, like the stuff that they were just going through was insane. Yeah and it it kind of like bothers me a little bit because when my kid goes to school, like he doesn't we don't let him browse like social media, like like especially TikTok, right? So when he goes to school though, they have I don't know, have I ever told you this Ed? All right, so there's like like a uh a black market, if you will, that goes on, right? So the kids are at school and they're like, hey, I don't have a cell phone. Uh I'll give you some pudding or some snack to let me get five minutes of cell phone time so I can browse. I'm 100% serious. And so my kid is like, oh yeah, I've been on, you know, TikTok or or Facebook. How did you do that? Oh, I gave this other kid, you know, some snacks so I could use his phone to play games or to you know be on social media. So it's like I I'm I'm kind of all for this banning, especially out of schools. Yeah, like please get the cell phones out of the schools. They can have a cell phone if you want to track your kids for whatever reason, but like collect them, hand them back out at the end of the day. I don't know what needs to be done, but it's it's bad. Yeah, and Jimmy's not getting any more snacks. Yeah, because we uh we purposely give our kid because like in the United States, kids have a very poor diet. So we give our kids actually really good about eating like vegetables and and fruits. So we give him fruits and stuff specifically so he can't trade for cell phone diet. That's cool.

SPEAKER_00: 1:22:28

Moving on, talking more about France. I think this is interesting. So France is gonna Sorry, sorry.

SPEAKER_04: 1:22:32

I'm always distracting.

SPEAKER_00: 1:22:33

I know, I know. I but I I keep you on track, Stephanie. But France is actually ditching Teams and Zoom for a sovereign platform over security concerns. So you kind of think of this really, it's a lot of countries are almost going like self-hosted in a way, aren't they? Do you know what I mean? Kind of. I I just thought that was interesting. And um on a on a separate note, if you remember I was moaning a while ago about the UK bringing in digital IDs. Yeah, the the government has backtracked on its plans for digital ID because um three million people signed like a protest, which is the biggest protest I think that's been ever signed in the UK, and the government's had to backtrack on making us have a mandatory digital ID. So that's why I say, you know, things can change um you know, with with people power sometimes.

SPEAKER_04: 1:23:25

I'm so cynical, Ed. Yeah. My heart's been blackened. There's no hope.

SPEAKER_00: 1:23:30

You you sent you sent over a uh message to me um earlier about Notepad Plus Plus. And and so Notepad Plus Plus, um do you want to talk about this one, Stephanie?

SPEAKER_04: 1:23:41

Yeah, so I've been following Notepad Plus Plus's philosophy of just using VI. Um so thankfully I haven't used it in forever. Because when you try to use it on Linux, they're like, just use VI, you lazy slum. And so I missed out on it. But yeah, so Nopad Plus Plus was uh hijacked, right, by allegedly Chinese state sponsored hackers. And uh so I don't actually know too too much about how the compromise happened, but I guess there was a um release where the uh you know what I don't I don't know enough to I'm I'm kind of guessing to be honest if I was saying it was the website delivery layer that was optimized, not the actual software.

SPEAKER_00: 1:24:25

So if you've got Note Plus on your machine, you're okay. Uh I think it was just like they're obviously kind of you know delivering a different version of Notepad Plus Plus, the enhanced version. Notepad plus plus.

SPEAKER_04: 1:24:38

And once you had that one, you would you were basically able to your Notepad Plus would deliver other software to your computer or would even do other things, right?

SPEAKER_01: 1:24:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:24:48

It kind of reminds me of well, so I think specifically what it reminds me of is when Asus, their uh driver service, like they had that that server that essentially was hosted on your system that would update drivers for you.

SPEAKER_01: 1:24:59

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:25:00

Yeah. When that guy hijacked, and so there was like malicious payloads being delivered to your system unknowingly because of the Asus delivery uh mechanism getting compromised.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:10

And um a bit of a sad one is um Bazite is no longer. So for those of you who don't know what Bazite was, it was a um based off um Fedora Atomic, wasn't it? I think. And um it was like a really good gaming distro for Linux.

SPEAKER_04: 1:25:30

Um I think Yeah, there was a fallout between the uh original creators, I guess, or the the three three or four dudes who are maintaining it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:39

So bit of a shame there. That was a really interesting distro.

SPEAKER_04: 1:25:43

Well, I think it'll still be around, but it'll still just be a hobbyist distribution.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:48

If it'll still be around, that's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_04: 1:25:50

Yeah, but I don't I don't think the the maintenance and stuff that it we'll get will probably well, I mean, so okay, so my understanding is they actually haven't updated Bazi um since December. There may have been some micro updates there, but like because it's just like a team, like a small team of hobbyists, you know, it would go without updates for a long time, like a couple months or something like that. And so I think one of the team members wanted to make it more professional. And the rest of the team was like, nah, we don't want to do it, we want to keep it the way it is. Um, and so that's kind of like where the fallout happened or the catalyst or something to that effect. I don't know the exact details, but I know that a lot of people were looking at Bazite, and there's another distro that I can't remember the name of that's like starts with an N, I think. Um, that will probably be the better alternative to Bazite because it will have better uh support. It's gonna bother me. I gotta look it up.

SPEAKER_00: 1:26:43

Yeah, it was pretty big for like handheld devices, like um what's it called? Legion go and rogue alley and and stuff like that, people installing it on those handheld devices, I think. Yeah, from what I understand.

SPEAKER_04: 1:26:54

Nobra. Nobara. Yeah, that's the one.

SPEAKER_00: 1:26:56

Thank you, I hadn't heard of that one.

SPEAKER_04: 1:26:59

Yes. Um, so I remember because like the question was poised to me forever ago, like, hey, you know, Bazite's a thing, should I use that or no nobora? And I was like, I don't know. I've never even heard of Bazite or Nobora myself. And I think a lot of, and at least in my circles, a lot of people started going the Nobora route. And um the one friend that I had that went with Bazite was like, he was so mad.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:23

The distro I like, I like Garuda, Garuda Linux.

SPEAKER_04: 1:27:26

Um I've never heard of that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:29

Gaming edition of that is based off Arch Linux. Um, Geruda Dragonized, it's a very pretty operating system. Um Garuda Linux.

SPEAKER_04: 1:27:39

I'm not I'm not gonna lie, Ed. I feel like we have too many Linux distributions. Like at so I'm a Linux guy, right? And then everyone's like, oh, like at work, I'm like, I thought you knew Linux. It's like, yeah, do you know how many Linux distributions they are? I'm familiar with two. And Unraid is not one of the two I consider I'm familiar with, too, because Unraid is like Slackware or something like that. I'm looking at Gorita right now.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:58

Yeah, this is this is Gorita for. Everyone in chat. Um it's not really showing many pictures of it, of course.

SPEAKER_04: 1:28:04

Oh, it's Arc. Oh, now I see why you like I'm surprised this isn't more popular.

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:10

Look how nice it looks.

SPEAKER_04: 1:28:12

It looks like Linux. I uh what do you mean? How nice it looks?

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:14

Well you can't retro pinks and oranges. When you kind of move the windows, they kind of like wobble a bit like jelly and stuff. It's just really nice.

SPEAKER_04: 1:28:22

Oh okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:23

Yeah. It's it's got out all of the kind of like pre-installed gaming software in there and that kind of thing. It's all there in the um in the package. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:28:32

I uh I'm not gonna lie, Ed, I'm just a command line kind of guy when it comes to Windows. So you live in a But I don't game on it yet. Yeah. I don't game on it yet. When Windows finally kills itself.

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:44

Didn't you have a Steam Deck?

SPEAKER_04: 1:28:46

I I don't have a Steam Deck. No, I wanted to buy one, but um I didn't want to buy the first one. I wanted to wait until the second one came out.

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:28:53

So I probably will get one.

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:54

We've got a story now that I know is gonna make Stefano very cross. So What is it? I just you know I put this one in just because I knew it would annoy Stefano. Here we've got here. LG has partnered with a company called Rayleigh to offer its first UK subscription model called LG Flex. So what this allows you to do is to rent a high-end LG OLED TV£26 a month, right up to this, get it, yeah,£270 a month for their very best TVs. So not only now do you have to rent your software and you know pay to kind of like, you know, rent your your your Plex streaming, you can now pay to rent the screen you view it on too. So, you know,£277 a month apparently um for their most expensive TV. So that's like over$2,000 a year just to rent it and not own it at the end of it.

SPEAKER_04: 1:29:51

So you know, and the sad part is is this will be successful? Because in the United States we have something called Rent a Center where you could do exactly the same thing. And people I remember when I was in high school, people like, oh, we're the football game is on, so we're gonna rent six TVs so we can watch all six football games at the same time. And it's like why?

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:11

Why? Yeah, but isn't that more of a kind of one-off you rent it for a few days and you take it back? Not like you rent this for like, oh, you know, you can have it for$250 a month if you sign up for 24 months.

SPEAKER_04: 1:30:22

That's the way it was supposed to be, yes. But the problem is, you know, with Reddit Centers, like you have to I think they delivered it at the time, but you had to bring it back yourself. So inevitably what would end up happening is they would hold on to these TVs much longer than they needed to, and then they'd have exorbitant fees uh for not returning them on time and stuff.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:41

Sneaky, isn't it? Because it's like, you know, and I think that's the plan with Rayla. And you've got to be careful when you bring them back because if you damage them in your car or something, then you're gonna have to pay for the whole TV.

SPEAKER_04: 1:30:52

Yeah, exactly. Like I'm I mean, I'm pretty sure while this like sounds great on the surface level, dude, it's gonna be a nightmare. Oh, the TV scratch, you owe us a fee for that. Oh, late fee because you didn't return it on time, and all those fees on top of that, or whatever, man. No way, no thanks. I then like it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:31:10

Oh, you you've returned it, you haven't wiped all the smart TV stuff off. Like, so that's a fee to kind of like, yeah, wipe the TV because you haven't done it and reset it.

SPEAKER_04: 1:31:19

Yeah, would you like we could do it for you for an additional cost? It's kind of like when you rent a car and they're like, oh, uh, you don't have to worry about getting gasoline when you bring the car back to us, or petrol, as you would say, but we'll do it for you. We'll just upcharge like$2 for every gallon or whatever it is. They'll do they're gonna do that, except for wiping services. And then you have to get their insurance too if you don't want to pay a repair fee. But then their insurance will only cover certain fixes, so then you'll pay for the insurance and still have to be paying out of pocket for some damage that's actually not covered by the insurance.

SPEAKER_00: 1:31:48

Have you heard about the Cloudflare debacle in Italy?

SPEAKER_04: 1:31:51

Uh no. There's what Cloudflare's all over the place these days. There's too much to keep up with.

SPEAKER_00: 1:31:56

So Cloudflare, okay, uh have threatened to pull their servers from Italy because they got fined$14 million. Okay. So I'll explain what happened. Okay. So um football's really big in Italy. Um they have Italians watch American football. They have a that I think they have a team. Uh uh you should know. Is it called Sierra A football? So um Dude, I don't know anything about soccer. Yeah, I think about soccer. Okay. So anyway, they have like they have soccer. I've I call it football here, so I'll say soccer. So they have soccer games over there, and obviously it's really big. Uh soccer's pretty big in Europe, and it's very, very big in Italy. And so they are having like illegal streams of it. So the illegal streaming sites like streaming the games. And so what um they did is they set up something called a privacy shield framework, and the law required basically websites to um and companies to block flag domains within under 30 minutes. So no review, like it was literally um a company could say, Hey, are things being streamed on this IP? Shut that IP down and it has to be done within 30 minutes. And so, you know, obviously Cloudflare has a huge amount of DNS queries every day, like billions, like probably 100, 200 billion queries a day. And when it goes through their CDN, lots of things will share the same IP address. So it's actually impossible for Cloudflare to actually shut down a certain IP. And apparently what happened is they managed when it was trying to be done, I think it shut down Google Drive for the whole of the country for a day and things like that. But the Italian government has tried to sue them 14 million for not complying and um shutting down the IPs as they should. So the CEO has threatened to pull the service from Italy. Um he wasn't very happy about it. But this kind of thing kind of worries me, like we're you know, if countries kind of get their own little isolated things in the internet, the internet's gonna get very splintered up in the end with different like, you know, this country has this rules, this has different so the internet will be in London, New York, and Milan, you know what I mean? Yeah. That that's what I'm worried about, is the internet splintering up and not being what it was meant to be, which was the worldwide web. It would be kind of like little internets.

SPEAKER_04: 1:34:18

Be city-state web. Uh educate me a little bit here. So why is it expensive to how does streaming or watching football work in the U.S.

SPEAKER_00: 1:34:30

I don't I don't really watch football, but you normally you have to have it on like a s you you'll pay like with Sky or something, you have like Sky Sports and it's like you have a you have a subscription for it, and then various TV companies will bid to be able to have the rights to view the you know to show the um the game.

SPEAKER_04: 1:34:48

Okay, so like for instance, like you have like uh let's say you have like your pro teams, your state or uh your I'm sorry, your country teams are on one service, and then your state level teams, like or district teams would be on another service.

SPEAKER_00: 1:35:03

Yeah, so there might be certain games that are on one service, certain that are on another, and they don't they might not always be on the same one year after year because they will kind of make deals, you know, and try and, you know, they want to you know have that because it will make people sign up for their service because they got exclusive coverage of like maybe um um the World Cup and that kind of thing and various games going on. So yeah, so like this football league, obviously, you know, um there were just streaming sites just streaming it, and so they say, Oh, we can't have that because people can just watch it for free on a streaming site, and so they want to do that.

SPEAKER_04: 1:35:41

So it sounds like the reason why so it seems to me like that the real reason is why pirating is even big in the first place is because of that diversification of these different teams.

SPEAKER_00: 1:35:53

So go ahead and what the CEO said is he and I think he made a really good point, is he said basically if you have like a bank robber and he steals some money from the bank and drives down the road, you don't sue the roadmaker because he used the road to get away.

SPEAKER_04: 1:36:10

Yeah, I mean that's kind of one way to think of it, I guess.

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:12

Yeah, so this is just the infrastructure, this is the internet infrastructure, it's not their job to really kind of do this, you know.

SPEAKER_04: 1:36:17

So I mean, I still blame like if this is such a concern, then I I still blame the services. Like, yeah. Like I understand, like, there's nothing wrong with making money, right? But if you're if you're if you have to have Sky to watch Manchester, and then you have to have the opposite of Sky to watch United, like then that that's dumb. There should be like a kind of a more unified service that also isn't hyper expensive. What happens if that's the problem?

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:44

If you have a game that has Manchester versus United, do you reckon you'd have to have both channels and you'd watch half on one team?

SPEAKER_04: 1:36:50

Yeah, I think so. You can only get the audio from whoever subscription you earn. They might let you watch, but you won't get to hear what the announcers Anyway.

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:59

Going back to kind of the thing you're talking about in schools, Stephanie, and phones. Here's like a little fun one. Is saw this article here. Oh nice. Q York phone ban reveals some so they banned phones, which you thought was a cool thing. So in in in New York they banned phones in schools, and apparently loads of the kids were constantly asking what time it is because they couldn't read an analogue clock. Because they're so used to seeing like digital things on the screen, that's the only thing they know what the time is. And you know, it's not their fault like they're stupid or anything, it's just they're so used to that in a kind of digital age that they're not used to dig you know that. So when their phones are gone, they could didn't know what the time was, and they're constantly asking the teacher, even though there's a clock on the wall, because and it just showed that pretty much most most of the children can't read an analog clock.

SPEAKER_04: 1:37:52

Yeah. I've heard this a lot, like verbally from people, but I feel like this is just sensationalism because at least in my school for my kid, in Alabama, which has the worst schools in the entire country, mind you, they actually learn how to read an analog clock. So I don't know, yeah. I don't know, at least kind of not too credible to me.

SPEAKER_00: 1:38:13

I don't know, but and you think of things that you learn in school, like you might learn how to do something, but then when those lessons you're not gonna be learning an analogue clock like every month. You know, you're gonna have a few lessons about it at some point, and then you're not gonna ever do it again. And then do you see what I mean? So and if if you weren't that the days you're you know, it's it's not like you don't have an analog clock reading lesson like maths or physics, you know, like that's continuously going on.

SPEAKER_04: 1:38:38

Yeah, for your entire life. I mean, uh they taught us how to do analog clocks when I was a kid, but and I still remember how to read it even though I've been using digital clocks my entire life. So I don't I don't know, man. It's uh this seems like sensationalism to me.

SPEAKER_00: 1:38:50

Yeah, maybe maybe. I I thought it was um quite a funny um possible, yes. And for the final story of the day, a bit of a sad one, I think. Um let me end this. You closed it. Is MTV shut down, the very last MTV shutdown at the end of December. Um so that's the very last thing of MTV, all MTV 80s, MTV 90s, club MTV, they're all gone now. And the final song that they played was Video Killed the Radio Star, which is quite an ironic song to do. But it's also the very first song that was played on MTV when it first launched in August 1981 as well. So eventually that song was the last song.

SPEAKER_04: 1:39:36

And so I'm not gonna lie, Ed. I thought MTV died years ago. Like literally like five to ten years ago.

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:42

I think it might have done in the state. I think this might be in in Europe.

SPEAKER_04: 1:39:46

Um Europe channels like okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:49

So so we we still had it look, so hey, there's that Sky Media again. Yeah. So yeah, MTV is fully died now. And I guess that brings us to the end of this month's Head and Stefano show.

SPEAKER_04: 1:40:01

So And to our deaths. Oh wait, sorry, I thought I got ahead of myself. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:06

So well, it's been a long one today. So thanks everyone for watching and with us. Um it's been been fun having you all here. It's been fun talking to you, Stefano. And um, yeah, thanks everyone for tuning in and you know, enjoy your weekend tinkering with your home lab. Um we hope to see you in the next episode.

SPEAKER_04: 1:40:26

I tinker with my home lab all the time. Those should be on Spotify. If you're not watching the video version, you won't you won't understand the joke.

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:33

Um yeah, so we'll join you in March. Hopefully, we'll have a bit better weather. Um springtime coming will be nice, you know, beginning to creep out of the winter.

SPEAKER_04: 1:40:42

Yeah, we'll get all of our rain, and unlike you. You already have rain.

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:46

Any last thoughts, Stephanie, before we go?

SPEAKER_04: 1:40:48

No, I'm hungry.

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:52

Okay, man. Anyway, thanks everyone for watching, and um we'll catch you all next time.