e445 — Paper Thin Transparency | Games At Work dot Biz

shadowy images of vases behind a frosted or paper window — Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Published 18 December 2023

Michael, Andy and Michael are back – and have a great show on transparency, AI, VR, E3, NASA and more.

This episode starts chugging out of the station with a follow on story from e444 focused on the reported bricked trains in Poland. According to the article, the trains’ manufacturer is now threatening legal action against the hackers who were hired by the independent repair company to fix the trains.

Moving forward on the transparency theme, the co-hosts move into the world of materials science and consider a story about transparent wood. According to the article, the cells of the wood provide an extremely strong structure, even stronger than carbon fiber. Continuing on the transparency theme, an article in Nature highlights the record breaking number of retractions in scientific papers. The conversation continues, thinking through the ramifications of a retracted paper cited by many other papers, as well as the potential uses of generative AI to create papers in the first place.

Next up is a discussion on the privacy implications of smart TVs, and the onerous steps necessary to opt out of the default settings which capture tons of data about the consumer’s viewing habits. Michael R reminds the team that a Raspberry Pi Pi Hole would help with this. Andy remembers the Hymm of Acxiom (see links below).

Then, moving to the VR world, the co-hosts discuss a couple of articles about Second Life’s private alpha mobile experience and how Xbox Cloud Gaming is now supported on Meta Quest headsets. An intriguing story about one of bitHuman’s agents allows Michael M to speculate how generative AI might be used to harvest a company’s ethos in a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) fashion.

Wrapping things up for this episode, the co-hosts touch on E3 ending (both in person and virtual) and the NASA + Johns Hopkins collaboration on Dragonfly to explore Titan.

Have you gone through the data harvesting opt out process on your smart TV? Why or why not? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!