e547 — Bricktastic

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LEGO SmartBrick and charger
Photo by Michael Martine, Chapel Hill, NC March 2026

Published 16 March 2026

e547 with Michael and Michael – Stories and discussion on bot to bot communications, 50 years of Apple, LEGO SmartPlay SmartBricks and a whole lot more.

Michael and Michael get things rolling while Andy is away on an article about Meta’s acquisition of Moltbook.  This agent to agent conversational environment reminds the pair of the Google Homes chatting with one another from back in June 2017.  Have a look at the short description in the YouTube video below and hear the conversation from 2017 in e173: Babel Fish.  

Next up: Apple’s announcement on the celebrations surrounding their 50th anniversary.  The intersection of technology and the liberal arts continues to resonate across the years.  A tremendous hack by Paul Staal’s design for a Mac mini case that mimics the 2×2 sloped computer brick.

This, of course, allows the co-hosts get into the heart of this episode: LEGO!   First, a Duke alumni magazine article about Ruthie Chen Ousley, who works at LEGO Education.  Then, a discussion about the battery and new uses for the SmartBrick.  A video from Brick Fanatics highlights who these sets and bricks are really for (spoiler, not AFOL) and how this provides a new degree of play with surprises and future possibilities as new sensors and experiences are unlocked.  

How do you imagine these SmartBricks may be used in the future?  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

AI

Ars Technica article: Meta acquires Moltbook, the AI agent social network

Games at Work e173: Babel Fish (for two Google Homes talking with one another @seebotschat)

HEADLINE: "Study Finds That Execs Are Outsourcing Their Thinking to AI"

ALT HEADLINE: "Execs Worry They'll Be Replaced By AI, But They're Doing It Themselves"

futurism.com/artificial-intell

— Mike Elgan (@MikeElgan) 2026-03-08T18:20:28.916Z

Apple

MacStories article: Apple Announces 50th Anniversary Celebration

Gizmodo article: This Custom Lego-Inspired Mac Mini Case Is Retrofuturism Done Right

Games at Work e406: AI Lemmings (for James Brown’s LEGO-sized computer)

LEGO

Duke Magazine article: Brick By Brick

The Verge article: You can’t replace the battery in Lego’s Smart Bricks — and many of its sensors aren’t active yet

BrickFanatics article: LEGO fans are already finding better uses for the SMART Brick

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 .

➡️ youtube.com/shorts/kbI0hHGysUM

— Mäh W. (@maehw) 2026-03-08T19:14:04.937Z

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:00 — 39.1MB) | Embed

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e546 — Smart Play Doom Brain Brick

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the new LEGO #StarWars #SmartPlay set 75423, Luke's Red Five X-Wing

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

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 .

➡️ youtube.com/shorts/kbI0hHGysUM

— Mäh W. (@maehw) 2026-03-08T19:14:04.937Z

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

https://www.sheetz.com

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)

Michael Martine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:12 — 40.7MB) | Embed

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e545 – Cyberpunk pot holes

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Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

Published 2 March 2026

e545 with Andy and Michael – Get to talk about mostly non-AI topics this week, as we look at a cool kickstarter, Titan, that is building out a futuristic gauntlet. Do you want a forearm mounted drone? Is so, go check it out, along with the opportunity for community modules. Very cool!

We then dip back into the world of AR and VR, as people speculate how Apple’s rumored AR glasses may benefit from the recent acquisition of Q.AI. We spend some time thinking of how a new App can help identify if you are around someone who has smart glasses on. (Even if Michael get’s the TV show reference wrong – and after an exhaustive search he can’t find the right one). We also discuss Disney’s deal to relaunch the Muppets in VR Ride as a VR app.

Moving on to some cool artistic visions we look at both video and photographic way of seeing the world. Before moving back to tech with amazing upgrades to robots on Mars. Millions of miles away NASA is repurposing a chip on a robotic helicopter to improve the location information of a rover. While closer to home, robots are fixing potholes.

We end with a story about a fellow geek accidentally hacking over 7,000 home based vacuum robots.

Selected Links

AR / VR

Art

Dave

Please mind the small train inside the little train

February 25, 2026, 17:42 114 boosts 214 favorites

Robots

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:42 — 40.0MB) | Embed

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e544 — Are We Bananas?

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Photo by Masahiro Naruse on Unsplash

Published 23 February 2026

e544 with Andy, Michael and Michael – Stories and discussion on rumoured AI devices, addictive predictives, listening through bananas (or mud), and what happens when VR platforms die? Plus the usual assortment or other things.

This week’s episode kicks off with a check in on which tech giants are working on what devices, now? Apple stepping back from headsets but working on glasses and pendants, and OpenAI making some kind of smart Pod for your dumb Home?

Then, there’s discussion of the challenges of privacy when LLMs get access to private email and chats. Oh, and if you’re not sure if your AI is an LLM or a sentience, then Anthropic can’t answer that.

We hope you’re listening to the show in perfect digital quality, but we’re also interested to know if you’ve tried piping it to your ears through any kind of fruit – let us know.

Meta’s fully backing away from VR for Horizon Worlds, and in case Blizzard ever stops making the client software for World of Warcraft, Michael tried an open source version.

Finally, don’t let hackers get hold of your brainwaves! (it could happen)

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

AI

Thank god Microsoft is shoving Copilot AI crap into everything. One gets the sense this isn't going to be an isolated occurrence. From Bleeping Computer:

"Microsoft says a Microsoft 365 Copilot bug has been causing the AI assistant to summarize confidential emails since late January, bypassing data loss prevention (DLP) policies that organizations rely on to protect sensitive information."

bleepingcomputer.com/news/micr

— BrianKrebs (@briankrebs) 2026-02-18T18:24:34.707Z

HEADLINE: "Prediction Markets Are Sucking Huge Numbers of Young People Into Gambling"

ALT HEADLINE: "All Our Incentives Lead to Bad Outcomes, and Prediction Markets Are Just One Example"

futurism.com/future-society/pr

— Mike Elgan (@MikeElgan) 2026-02-16T17:06:59.555Z

Audio

AR/VR

Makers

Bonus link

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:35 — 39.9MB) | Embed

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