e403 — Smart Appliances Dumb Companies

washing machine spinning
Photo by Engin Akyurt

Published 6 Feb 2023

Michael and Michael start things off for this edition of Games at Work with some follow up stories about smart & connected appliances, as there was a flurry of articles on this topic in the prior week.  First up, is an article from The Atlantic, where the author explores the idea of subscription services for ink, and how this changes the nature of the purchase of the printer to something that is no longer owned, to pages as a service.  Then, there’s a post by Dan Goodin on a self-driving automobile with no safety driver that was causing problems for firefighters in San Francisco.  

Then, turning to all things AI, Michael and Michael launch in with a New York Post article about AI driven Armageddon.  Next up is a story about companies decoding your brainwaves, which causes Michael R to reminisce about the Emotiv headset, and Michael M to remember cameras being used to identify micro expressions (both of which were part of e361, link below!)  There are additional articles about GAN networks for determining vulnerabilities, concerns with uses of ChatGPT that may train the corpus with corporate secrets, ChatGPT word problem problems and running large language models on the new Apple M2 MacBook Pro.

Quite a big episode on AI – with a few links that Michael and Michael did not get a chance to cover in the podcast.  Meta testing members only Horizon Worlds metaverse experiences, a superb jigsaw puzzle web app (thanks, Andy!) and a Super Mario infused random text generator.

What appliances do you want to connect (or disconnect!) from the Internet?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know! 

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Article Links

“Smart” Appliances redux

The Atlantic article: My Printer Is Extorting Me

Self-driving automobiles are a solution in search of a problem. People don't want them, but companies like Uber, Amazon, Cruise and Waymo keep pushing them because there's so much money to be made. I hate the way these companies are compromising our safety and the way government regulators aren't pushing back.

Firefighters were battling a major house fire near the intersection of Hayes and Divisadero streets early in the morning of Jan. 22 when a Cruise vehicle with no safety driver started to creep its way into the emergency scene.

Two firefighters stood in front of the car to prevent the vehicle from driving over hoses used to douse the growing inferno, but that didn’t work. As the car continued to inch forward, one firefighter took quick action and smashed the vehicle’s front window, finally bringing the car to a stop. First responders contacted Cruise, who sent workers to move the vehicle out of the way.

UPDATE: I have already walked back the statement above that no one wants this. Fair enough. Many of you want this.

Lots of you pointed out the number of accidents human drivers have. There is zero evidence that self-driving cars will have a better safety record. And anecdotal evidence like the dangerous incidents in the very limited San Francisco trials suggests AVs may be less safe.

If you want AVs, you should volunteer to have your city be the guinea pigs for this potentially fatal tests. San Francisco ought to ban AVs until there's data they are safe.

sfstandard.com/transportation/

— Dan Goodin (@dangoodin) 2023-01-31T00:29:22.896Z

The San Francisco Standard article: SF Officials Describe Chaos From Cruise, Waymo Cars as They Try To Slow Their Rollout

AI

New York Post article: Rogue AI ‘could kill everyone,’ scientists warn as ChatGPT craze runs rampant

Wikipedia article on The Terminator (movie)

Popular Mechanics article: Companies Already Have the Ability to Decode Your Brainwaves

Games at Work e361 Ancient Games & Ancient Texts 

Emotiv 

Games at Work blog post: Getting All Emotiv(tional)

Schneier on Security article: AIs as Computer Hackers

Amazon Begs Employees Not to Leak Corporate Secrets to ChatGPT

This issue seems to have come to a head recently because Amazon staffers and other tech workers throughout the industry have begun using ChatGPT as a "coding assistant" of sorts to help them write or improve strings of code, the report notes.

futurism.com/the-byte/amazon-b

— Esther Schindler (@estherschindler) 2023-01-30T15:41:31.004Z

The Byte article: Amazon Begs Employees Not To Leak Corporate Secrets To ChatGPT

Wall Street Journal article: ChatGPT Needs Some Help With Math Assignments 

I got this to work! til.simonwillison.net/python/g

— Simon Willison (@simon) 2023-01-31T22:59:53.570Z

I managed to run a language model on my laptop!

I ran huggingface.co/sentence-transf – a sentence transformers model, which can turn sentences of text into a 768 dimension vector, suitable for things like related content searches

Here are my detailed notes: til.simonwillison.net/python/g

See also my explanation of embeddings from a few weeks ago: simonwillison.net/2023/Jan/13/

— Simon Willison (@simon) 2023-01-31T22:59:32.548Z

Bonus links 

TechCrunch article: Meta starts testing ‘members-only worlds’ in Horizon Worlds

Jigidi

Super Mario Ipsum

e402 — Which ‘verse is worse?

stylized human made up of lights, wearing a VR headset and holding controllers in either hand
Photo by julien Tromeur on Unsplash

Andy, Michael and Michael start things off for this edition of Games at Work with stories about the fediverse and the metaverse.  The IT Web article predicts that the fediverse may eclipse the metaverse, and the cohosts use this as the springboard for their conversation.

Then the co-hosts discuss internet-enabled appliances, starting with an article from Ars Technica.  According to the article, a great many wifi-enabled appliances are not connected to the internet.  Andy shares a story about his IoT dishwasher.

What do you think will be bigger in 2023, the fediverse, the metaverse, or some other ‘verse?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know! 

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Article Links

Fedi- & Metaverse

IT Web article: ‘Fediverse’ predicted to overtake metaverse in 2023

ABI Research article: Tech Trends That WON’T Happen in 2023: The Industrial Metaverse, 5G Wearables, Private 5G, Printed Electronics, and Satellite-to-Cell Services – to Name a Few

furbo.org article:   Twitterific firsts 

CSO Online article: The metaverse brings a new breed of threats to challenge privacy and security gatekeepers

The Drum article: Is this the most important patent ever for gaming and metaverse advertising?

The Futurism article: THE METAVERSE INDUSTRY IS ALREADY GOING BELLY-UP, FOR REASONS WE CAN’T IMAGINE

Internet of Ads

Ars Technica article: Appliance makers sad that 50% of customers won’t connect smart appliances

The Register article: Smart ovens do really dumb stuff to check for Wi-Fi

AI Watch

I don't wanna spook you, but there are these things called 'thanabots' and I think you should know 👀

— Jelena Brankovic (@jelena3121) 2023-01-25T14:50:10.146Z

Wikipedia entry for Black Mirror episode Be Right Back

Games at Work e400 — Quadringenti

Puzzles to Puzzle

Kotaku article: The Masters Of Stealth Tactics Are Back With A New Pirate Game

Slashfilm article: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Trailer: Actual Dungeons, And Puzzles!

e401 — You CAN Go Home(Pod) Again

front door and porch of a house
Photo by Francesca Tosolini on Unsplash

Michael and Michael start things off for this edition of Games at Work with an announcement that a new logo / podcast icon will be coming soon to a podcast with over 400 episodes.  Then, things get rolling in earnest with an article about the forthcoming Open Metaverse Foundation, and the open source software and standards that the Linux Foundation has put into place.  The co-hosts are reminded of a recent discussion on the Metaverse Standards Forum from episode 372.

Next, an intriguing blog post on not believing the hype of ChatGPT by Iris Van Rooij takes center stage.  Michael and Michael also discuss their experiences with OpenAI’s Whisper.

Then, the pair talk about the new HomePod 2nd generation as well as the newly enabled capabilities of the HomePod minis.  Staying on the audio theme, Michael and Michael take a look at the visualizations of the sound from dialup modems.  Amazing that this article is over a decade old!  

Closing out this episode, the co-hosts talk about software, from the new Ice Cubes and Ivory Mastodon clients to a 3D printing innovation: a transplant of a living 3D printed ear.

What are your favorite memories of dial up modems?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know! 

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Article Links

Metaverse Standards Coming

VentureBeat article: Linux Foundation launches Open Metaverse Foundation to move the metaverse to reality 

Open Metaverse Foundation

Games at Work e372 Metaverse LEGO Standards

OpenAI

Iris Van Rooij blog post: Stop feeding the hype and start resisting

OpenAI blog: Introducing Whisper

Github link for OpenAI Whisper

HomePod + more

9 to 5 Mac article: Here’s how HomePod 2 compares to the original and HomePod mini

Apple press release, January 18, 2023: Apple introduces the new HomePod with breakthrough sound and intelligence

The Verge article: Watch Apple’s 19-minute M2 MacBook Pro and Mini intro video

Adventures in sound

absorptions blog post: The sound of the dialup, pictured

Code / developer ecosystems

How to Geek article: Apple Just Released Code for Its 40-Year-Old “Lisa” Computer

Daring Fireball article: App Store Rejection of the Week: Ice Cubes, a Splendid New Mastodon Client

— @ (@@mastodon.cloud)

New Early Access website is up which shows our current roadmap. It’s not a comprehensive list, but it will give you an idea of where our main focus is. We will update the list as we go.

tapbots.com/ivory/

— Ivory by Tapbots :emoji_wink: (@ivory) 2023-01-11T18:58:08.734Z

ZME Science article: A woman receives the first-ever successful transplant of a living, 3D-printed ear

3DBio Therapeutics 

e400 — Quadringenti

Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set color box
Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, photo by Michael Martine Jan 2023

Episode 400!  Michael, Andy and Michael all get together for the four hundredth episode of the podcast.  

Getting right down to business, the co-hosts start off with a novel use of ChatGPT, where Michelle Huang trained her GPT-3 chatbot from her younger self’s diary entries.  This allowed her to converse with a younger version of herself, without all the muss and fuss of time travel.  Check out the show notes for some of the intriguing conversations.  And see e387 for links to four prior episodes dealing with training an AI for immortality, going all the way back to e26.  Sticking with the AI theme, the trio discuss how Furby was a 1998 version of ChatGPT from the @SwiftOnSecurity post.  Next is a conversation about Microsoft’s reported investment in OpenAI for ChatGPT from the recent news.  

Next up is an AR version of Pong, played by two players on a climbing wall with the Pong game superimposed on the wall via AR.  The player’s bodies are the paddles and the virtual ball goes back and forth between the players climbing up or down the wall.  Most intriguingly, this YouTube video was published 6 years ago!  Then Michael, Michael and Andy talk about a much more recent BMW promo video (published last week) for the i Vision DEE, and how the full windshield becomes an AR display, which is possibly too immersive for the driver.  Rounding out this segment is a story about LEGO’s focus on the metaverse and their hiring plans.

Longtime listeners of the podcast know that not only are AR, metaverse, AI and LEGO well-loved topics, but also creative uses of Doom and Minecraft.  The latest Doom story is a VR version of Zelda that combines the Legend of Doom mod that was applied to QuestZDoom which makes Doom playable on a Meta Quest.  This is followed by an Arduino powered project to allow a user to walk around in real life, which simultaneously controls the movement of the associated avatar in the Minecraft world.

Wrapping up this most excellent episode, Andy, Michael and Michael discuss the news about Dungeons and Dragons and the reported/leaked updated version of the Open Gaming License (OGL).  The D&D community has been up in arms about the proposed changes, concerned about the impact on the creative content developed under the current version of the OGL going back 22 years.  After the recording of the episode, there was news from Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons addressing the outrage at the OGL 1.1, and several articles are included in the show notes below reporting on the next steps.

Wrapping up the momentous episode on the lighter side the co-hosts remark on @AlexBlechman’s post about how AI bots in the future will play games for you to free up your valuable time for more work.  We couldn’t say it better ourselves here at Games At Work dot Biz. 

Should the Games at Work team skip episode 404?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know! 

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Article Links

AI

Cnet article: She Brought Her Younger Self Back to Life as an AI Chatbot

Games at Work e387 Meta-Verged for references to earlier episodes on AI training for immortality

Games at Work e26: Business Process Management and Immortality

The Furby source code is public and heavily commented. For example, it turns the microphone off when the motors are running.

Furby was the 1998 version of ChatGPT and tons of people thought it actually slowly learned English words. The NSA was alarmed. However it turned out the "learning" process was just on a timer and the "microphone" only triggers on loud sounds.
archive.org/details/furby-sour

— (@SwiftOnSecurity) 2023-01-08T23:20:33.406Z

Wikipedia article: Furby

Wikipedia article: Teddy Ruxpin

Semafor article: Microsoft eyes $10 billion bet on ChatGPT

needed something to add to the bottom of all my blog posts

— April King (@april) 2023-01-08T15:11:17.482Z

AR

Wikipedia article: Pong

Brickfanatics article: LEGO is hiring staff for its new ‘metaverse experiences’

Wikipedia article: LEGO Universe

Wikipedia article: LEGO Worlds

Doomed, I tell you! 

Polygon article: The original Legend of Zelda in VR is more terrifying than you’d expect

hackster.io article: Controlling Minecraft in Real Life

Hackaday article: Roll-on Deodorant Controller Heats Up Racing Game

Dungeons & Dragons

TechCrunch article: Dungeons & Dragons content creators are fighting to protect their livelihoods

After the roll for initiative (Wizards ‘rolled a 1’)

The Verge article: Dungeons & Dragons finally addresses its new Open Gaming License

Gizmodo article: Cancelled D&D Beyond Subscriptions Forced Hasbro’s Hand

Ars Technica article: Amid widespread backlash, D&D maker scales back “open” license changes

Saving Throw

In the future AI technology will play video games for us. You'll say "Computer, play Doom" and a message will pop up saying "You have won Doom." This will free up valuable time for doing more work

— Alex Blechman (@alexanderblechman) 2023-01-07T01:22:08.423Z