Honey Scandal & Theater Tales: The WAN Show Recap

This episode covers a wide range of topics, from controversial sponsorship deals to personal travel stories and tech industry updates.

The Honey Sponsorship Controversy

Context and Transparency

• Linus addresses why LTT stopped working with the browser extension Honey years ago following reports of link hijacking.
• He explains the difficulty of exposing sponsors, noting the expectation of public "exposes" versus standard business practices.
• The discussion moves to whether LTT should join the ongoing class-action lawsuit. Linus remains skeptical, viewing most class actions as beneficial only to lawyers.

Personal Anecdotes & Theater

Europe Travel & Cultural Experiences

• Linus shares his trip to Edinburgh to see the final performance of Donny Osmond in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
• He reflects on his surprise when comparing the production to other stage plays, noting he found Phantom of the Opera overrated compared to other recent Broadway-style productions.

Tech & Gaming News

Hardware & Software Updates

• Apple & Gaming: A debate on the future of gaming on Mac and iPad, with Linus skeptical about Apple's commitment to mainstream gaming.
• Half-Life 3 Rumors: The hosts discuss the persistent (and likely over-hyped) rumors surrounding a new entry, dismissing the idea that it's "confirmed."
• LLM Web Scraping: Discussion on reports that a massive percentage of web traffic comes from LLM training bots that ignore robots.txt.

"I'm spreading the word for the smaller creators. That argument doesn't save me there, and it's not going to save me if I tell people to uninstall this extension that gets them a better deal so that smaller creators can get their affiliate revenue. There is just no way that I make that video, and I don't end up hanging from the nearest tree."