Published 9 March 2026
e543 with Andy, Michael and Michael – Stories and discussion on LEGO’s new Smart Play brick, this is a human brain (cells) on Doom, orc audio for vibe coding, Liquid Death’s Spotify urn for playlist immortality and a whole lot more.
Michael, Michael and Andy get things rolling with Michael M’s delivery of the newest innovation from LEGO, the Smart Play brick! While Michael’s only had a little bit of time to play with the new brick, it is already sparking some interesting ideas. Check out the show notes below for what others are doing with it, now that the Smart Play brick is out and in the wild! And of course the audio of the podcast for some of the sounds from the brick!
An article about a biocomputing success to play Doom with human brain cells, reminds the cohosts of other biocomputing examples from e504. The Ars Technica article about identifying anonymous users through LLMs likewise reminds the team of other examples for triangulating identity. After a story about using the audio from Warcraft III in vibe coding experiences “work, work”, the team takes a look at “Humanity’s Last Exam”, which likely has already been handled by an enterprising AI research team.
Turning next to a Norwegian PSA (that is NSFW and funny) on the slippery slope of digital products and services getting worse and worse, the team then considers a story about a partnership between Epic and Google for a new set of metaverse applications. In yet another back to the future experience, the Niantic gaming functionality may provide a roadmap to how this partnership may grow.
The team wraps up with a Liquid Death promo for how you may achieve musical immortality with a custom Spotify playlist played via a bluetooth urn.
What songs would be on your postmortem playlist? 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
LEGO Smart Play
r/LegoSmartBrick post: I disassembled a smart brick (note the comments about running Doom on a SmartBrick!)
Adafruit post: Some LEGO Smart Brick – BLE Reverse Engineering
#LEGO #SmartPlay hacking continued: as the Smart Minifigs and Smart Tiles comply with standard ISO 15693 NFC, they can be copied. So this had to be done. The clone works totally fine with the original #SmartBrick.
AI
New Scientist article: Human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom in a week
Games at Work e504: Can You Digg It? for biocomputing
Ars Technica article: LLMs can unmask pseudonymous users at scale with surprising accuracy
PC Magazine article: Sick of Babysitting Claude? 100K Coders Are Asking an Orc to Do It
Texas A&M Stories: Don’t Panic: ‘Humanity’s Last Exam’ has begun
Digital Products & Services
The Verge article: Epic and Google have signed a special deal for a new class of ‘metaverse’ apps
Games at Work e98: Something Sweet in Your Neighborhood (for Niantic examples)
Boy Genius Report article: Keep Playing Your Spotify Playlists After You Die With Liquid Death’s New Bluetooth Urn
Games at Work e26: Business Process Management and Immortality (for digital immortality well before LLMs came on the scene)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:12 — 40.7MB) | Embed
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