Published 25 May 2026
e555 with Andy, Michael and Michael – Ploopy’s The Bean and Lenovo’s TrackPoint, The Guild, The Movie, AI in commencement speeches, AI in podcasts, Virtual Worlds and Virtual OS museums and a whole lot more!
Andy, Michael and Michael get things started with an appreciation of Andy’s work to migrate the Games at Work hosting site to a new service in uninterrupted fashion for our listeners. Next, a new piece of open source hardware that Andy’s purchased, the Ploopy The Bean. After the cohosts wax poetic on the awesome sauce that is the TrackPoint, they turn their attention to The Guild. Felicia Day and the team from The Guild are planning to launch a movie. Andy, Michael and Michael are very excited about this!
Switching to AI, and all of the recent stories about how university commencement audiences have been booing speakers extolling the virtues of AI, the team considers Woz’s take on AI being “Actual Intelligence”. This reference is cheered and not booed. Continuing on the theme, the cohosts discuss a recent play by Spotify of providing an authentication for podcasts recorded by actual humans (with actual intelligence). This spurs a lively conversation on what that validation might entail, and what it means, especially given the prevalence of AI generated audio content.
The team wraps up the show with a couple of virtual museums – one shared by friend of the show Ian Hughes – the Virtual Worlds Museum. The cohosts all agree that Ian would make a fantastic spokesperson for this museum. The other is a virtual OS museum.
Finally, Andy shares a tremendous social networking graph that traces letters sent between 285 cities during the years from 1363 to 1412, Check it out, and give a listen to the song from Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 for how the Russians would write letters in the links below.
What would be a good name for AI generated podcast content? Podslop? 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
Shiny new things
Updated GamesAtWork.biz courtesy of Andy – you rock, Andy!
Ploopy, The Bean
Lenovo ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II
The Guild
Games at Work e415: Pushing our Buttons (for The Guild)
Games at Work e96: The Professional Line Sitter (for the Guild’s Zaboo’s seat saving network idea)
AI
Fast Company article: This sentence about AI got Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak applause—not boos—for his commencement speech
Variety article: Spotify Officially Bans AI-Generated Podcasts That Impersonate Someone Else, Adds Verification Badges for Podcasts
Playlist Push blog post: How Spotify’s New Verification System Works for Artists
TechCrunch article: Google goes for the glitter with disco-ball icons: ‘Are y’all sure you still want this?’
Variety article: Spotify Says Disco-Ball Icon, Which Prompted Massive User Backlash, Will Go Away Next Week as Planned
The Verge article: Amazon Alexa Plus can now create AI-generated podcasts
Google’s NotebookLM
TechDirt article: Amazon Gets Into The AI Podcast Slop Business
Sixcolors post: New Apple accessibility updates focus on Apple Intelligence
The Atlantic article: Everything You Do Is Being Recorded
Virtual Worlds
Kickstarter project: Virtual Worlds Museum™
Real World
Datini Letters Geospatial Explorer
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:27 — 17.3MB) | Embed
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