e488 — Fight. For Your Right. To Pla-aaay!

Neon Pac-Man with neon ghosts Pinky and Inky mounted on a brick wall.
Photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash

Published 4 November 2024

e488 with Andy & Michael M — video game emulation, AI chat with gardens & articles, watch-based translation, an Oregon Trail movie and a whole lot more!

Michael M and Andy start off the show with a couple of stories dealing with the recent ruling by the US Copyright Office to deny an exemption to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to allow video game archivists to share scholarly access to games over the internet.  See the show notes for links to the arguments and make your decision.  

One of the reasons why such access to games is that some of these games are no longer commercially available, and the impact games have on society is enormous.   An article in The Guardian picks up on the importance of playing games and justifies them simply because games “are an invitation to break free from the tyranny of efficiency.”  Andy and Michael were hard pressed to attempt to disagree.  Spoiler alert – they did not disagree. The co-hosts also note the reference in the article to Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken. Check out a short video of her explanation for why games matter in the show notes below.

Moving right along to AI and spatial collaboration, the co-hosts pick up an article discussing the recently wrapped WebexOne conference from Cisco, taking a closer look at the AI and spatial computing enhancements included in Cisco’s web conferencing software. 

Turning from conversing with people, next up is a conversation with a garden.  Andy and Michael consider a Small Garden Model (vs a Large Language Model), which will be included in the Chelsea Flower Show in 2025.  This AI enhanced garden will allow the visitor to interact with the plants and a myriad of sensors in the garden in an entirely new way.  Coming back to interacting with people, Andy shares a bit about his upcoming trip to Japan, and how he might use the translation app on his Apple Watch.  One of the features of this application is the ability to download languages to the watch in case he does not have an internet connection when he needs the real-time translation functionality.  

Switching to another app, Andy shares his experience in beta testing Particle.news, an AI powered news aggregator that writes an overview of multiple articles on a topic.  Particle also allows you to “chat” with the articles and even have it create an “opposite side” summary.  As an example for the episode, one of the stories surfaced via Particle deals with an upcoming comedy movie based on the 1970s computer game, the Oregon Trail.  Another historic game surfaces in the conversation – Speedball.

The team wraps up the episode with the planned spin down of botsin-space, which has been the home of the Games at Work fediverse bot.  Michael M shares that he will be on an AI panel for the Business of Healthcare conference next Friday at the University of North Carolina.

Should the US Copyright Office allow internet accessible video game software emulation?  How would you hold your wrist to have a translation conversation with your watch and another person?  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.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

Emulation & Preservation

Ars Technica article: Video game libraries lose legal appeal to emulate physical game collections online

Engadget article: The Video Game History Foundation’s fight for game preservation isn’t over

Video Game History statement: STATEMENT ON THE DMCA 2024 TRIENNIAL REVIEW RULING

The Guardian article: The big idea: how games can change your life

Games at Work e272: Serenity Meow

AI & Spatial Collaboration

ZD Net article: WebexOne 2024: Cisco’s vision for the future of immersive collaboration

WebexOne

The Guardian article: Talk to your plants? Now the first AI-powered garden will allow them to talk back

RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2025

ZD Net article: Apple Watch lets you translate your conversations in real time. Here’s how

Entertainment

Particle News

Particle News: Apple to Develop ‘Oregon Trail’ Action-Comedy Film

The Hollywood Reporter article: ‘Oregon Trail’ Action-Comedy Movie In Development at Apple (Exclusive)

Wikipedia article: The Oregon Trail (series)

Games at Work e282: Machine in the Machine

PC Gamer article: Rebellion’s just surprise rebooted a ’90s classic and released it on Steam

Sunrise, Sunset

Muffinlabs post: RIP botsin.space

Next Week

2024 UNC Business of Healthcare Conference: Strategic Healthcare Workforce of the Future

e487 – Data Privacy and you, NOT!

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash

This week Andy, Michael, and Michael have a location based show, with discussion on FourSquare, data Privacy, and fast moving robots. Now that Four Square has announced they are shutting down their FourSquare Places site, the team discusses their prior use and how it has tapered off over the years. The guys then pivot from the identification of places/points of interests, using location data, to how companies are using location based data for tracking individuals.

This week Krebs on Security, 404 Media, and others break the story of how global surveillance has become pervasive with mobile ad data. While the examples given our primarily driving by US law and the variety of different data privacy laws by state, there are groups in other countries also looking at data privacy considerations, such as the Open Rights Group. The second order impacts of data privacy for people not in the IT industry, only makes it harder for most people to understand. We also briefly discuss the First Amendment and Amazon’s union busting tactics.

Leaving the legal portion of the show we look at some cool tech: Fast walking robots in China are wearing sneakers, Lego is showcasing the x-men Marvel 97 set, and Coperni shows off gel-based 3D printing!

Selective show links:

Location based content

Farewell to FourSquare Placeshttps://techcrunch.com/2024/10/22/farewell-to-foursquares-app/ 

Security / legal

Krebs on Global Data Free for Allhttps://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/10/the-global-surveillance-free-for-all-in-mobile-ad-data/

Amazon 1st Amendment Claimshttps://www.404media.co/amazon-says-it-has-a-first-amendment-right-to-union-bust/ 

Cool Tech

7’30”/mi. Article didn’t name the sneakers though.

Chinese scientists build fastest in the world — it can run at 8 mph | Live Science livescience.com/technology/rob

— Benjamin Han (@BenjaminHan) 2024-10-24T15:02:49.263Z

Chinese robot is fastest with sneakershttps://www.livescience.com/technology/robotics/chinese-scientists-build-fastest-humanoid-robot-in-the-world-watch-it-run-across-the-gobi-desert

Disney and Lego Release x-men 97 sethttps://kotaku.com/lego-x-men-marvel-97-disney-beast-gambit-release-date-1851675348 

Coperni Prints Gel Baghttps://3dprintingindustry.com/news/coperni-showcases-3d-printed-gel-bag-using-mits-rapid-liquid-printing-233380/

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e486 — Miss AI Manners

thank you message on an iPad screen
Photo by PNW Production: https://www.pexels.com/photo/thank-you-message-on-the-ipad-screen-8250827/

Published 21 October 2024

e486 with Andy, Michael and Michael — proper AI engagement etiquette, OpenAI’s GPT Store, invisible unicode prompt injection, disappearing Chief Metaverse Officers, ingesting everything for digital twin world creation and a whole lot more!

Back once more to full co-host power, Andy, Michael and Michael start off the show with a callback to the last episode – a reimagining of the Nintendo N64 that will run with the old cartridges.  

Next up is an article from the Wall Street Journal dealing with proper etiquette in interactions with chatbots.  Some interesting research from Japan referenced in the show notes below, finds that impolite prompts may lead to a deterioration in model performance, including increased bias, incorrect answers or refusal of answers.  Then the team turns their attention to the use of unicode tags for prompt injection from an Ars Technica article.  This concept of invisible characters reminded the cohosts of a discussion from August 2023 dealing with white characters on a white page, while invisible to the human eye are picked up by the AI model.  Continuing with the AI theme, the team considers the Wired article on the OpenAI GPT store and a generative AI use case with TruGolf creating color commentary on the player’s golf swing.

Switching to augmented reality, the cohosts discuss where have all the Chief Metaverse Officers  gone, prompted by another Wired article.  Then they have a spirited conversation about the idea of ingesting all the available data to construct a digital twin world, using the WorldsNQ concept as a starting point.  This reminds the team of the NVIDIA Omniverse.  

The team wraps up the episode with an article about preserving the Earth’s biodiversity to store cells from endangered animals on the Moon.  This reminds Andy of the Star Trek episode Space Seed, and Michael M of the Svalbard seed vault in the arctic.  Michael R rounds out this week’s episode with a remembrance of Ward Christensen.

Have you always been polite to your chatbots and robots?  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.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

Follow on

Games at Work e485: Barbarians at the Rhubarb Bar

Analogue 3D

AI

Wall Street Journal article: Should You Be Nice to Your Chatbot?

ARXIV published paper: Should We Respect LLMs? A Cross-Lingual Study on the Influence of Prompt Politeness on LLM Performance

Ars Technica article: Invisible text that AI chatbots understand and humans can’t? Yep, it’s a thing.

Games at Work e427: DeepBarbie Fakery

Wired article: OpenAI’s GPT Store Has Left Some Developers in the Lurch

Roger Premo’s LinkedIn post on TruGolf’s use of generative AI

Wikipedia article: Jones Angell, the voice of the Tar Heels

AR

Wired article: Where Have All the Chief Metaverse Officers Gone?

Dallas Innovates article: Dallas-Based Worlds’ Pioneering ‘Large World Model’ Platform Could Be the Next Leap Forward in AI’s Evolution

worlds.io press release: Worlds Unveils WorldsNQ: A Large World Model (LWM) Platform that Accelerates AI Training 1000X over Current Systems 

NVIDIA Omniverse

Games at Work e345: Icelandverse

Science

BBC article: Scientists want to send endangered animals to the Moon… sort of!

Wikipedia article: Space Seed, the 22nd episode of Star Trek

Wikipedia article: Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Honestly we should have stopped after BBSes

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/1

— Rod Hilton (@rodhilton) 2024-10-15T15:23:51.426Z

e485 — Barbarians at the Rhubarb Bar

a rhubarb - strawberry cocktail with a curly rhubarb, strawberry and lime wedge garnish
Photo by Svitlana on Unsplash

Published 14 October 2024

e485 with Michael and Michael — flow, focus & distraction, waking up with Nintendo’s Alarmo, Wartke & Fischer’s song about Barbara, her rhubarb bar and the barbarians, the disappearing .io domain suffix and a whole lot more!

Co-hosts Michael and Michael start off the show with the retirement of Apple executive Dan Riccio, who headed up the Vision Products Group.  This spurs a lively discussion about the advantages that the VisionPro brings to reduce distractions and foster concentration on the task at hand, and how other visual computing solutions from Magic Leap, Meta and others are more additive in nature, providing additional contextual information to the user through their augmented reality experiences.

Longtime listeners will know that Andy, who was away at OggCamp, Michael and Michael all have an affinity for the German language.  While the work of Bodo Wartke and Marti Fischer was more well known on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean, it was new to Michael and Michael, who each enjoyed listening to the musical styles of Wartke and Fischer.  They shared through rhyme how a woman named Barbara got to know some barbarians, their barber, and others through a shared love for rhubarb.  Have a listen to the videos below.  They are wirklich ausgezeichnet.

Switching (see what we did there) to a more nostalgic set of topics, the co-hosts discuss the just released Nintendo Alarmo alarm clock.  The Alarmo has a sensor that recognizes when you move, and reacts to those movements, such as when you stretch or roll over.  One the user is out of bed, the alarm automatically ceases.  Can you imagine a scenario for Nintendo gamifying waking up like Pokemon Go did for walking around?  Earning digital Nintendo currency for getting up or getting sufficient rest perhaps?  After a story about Green Day re-releasing their dookie album on diverse hardware such as a Game Boy cartridge or Teddy Ruxpin, the co-hosts   discuss a post pointing to the Furby source code on archive.org.  

Michael and Michael wrap up the episode with an article from every.to on how geopolitical changes have an impact on the digital world with the example of the British government transferring sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.  

What German rhymes have you been listening to (or creating)?  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.  All rights reserved.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Links

This is not an Apple Podcast

The Verge article: Apple’s Vision Pro leader, Dan Riccio, is retiring

Games at Work e486: Future Frames

Submerged

OggCamp 2024 in Manchester, UK

Barbaras Rhabarberbar

The Guardian article: ‘Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungs-aufgabenübertragungsgesetz’: how viral tongue-twisters lightened up German language

Bodo Wartke (auf Englisch)

Trading on Nostalgia 

Nintendo Sound Clock Alarmo

acquired.fm season 12, episode 3 Nintendo’s Origins

acquired.fm season 12, episode 4 Nintendo: The Console Wars

Dookie Demastered

just in case someone needs it, the internet archive has the source code for furbies archive.org/details/furby-sour

— Harp :wigglytuff: (@wigglytuffitout) 2024-10-05T15:37:54.478Z

Ars Technica article: archive.org, a repository of the history of the Internet, has a data breach

All the World’s a Game

Wired article: Tim Walz Rally Goes Live on World of Warcraft Twitch Stream

PC Gamer article: Duake lets you play Quake as the Doomguy

Tom’s Hardware article: Deckintosh has Apple’s latest macOS Sequoia running on the Steam Deck

Every.to article: The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

earth.org article: Tuvalu’s Sinking Reality: How Climate Change Is Threatening the Small Island Nation