e446 — Laser Light Show | Games At Work dot Biz

green lasers shining across the lake and through the trees at the Chicago Botanic Gardens #LightScapeChicago — Photo by Michael Martine, Chicago Botanic Gardens #LightScapeChicago December 2023

Published 25 December 2023

Michael and Michael are back while Andy is away on holiday – and have a great show on communication, human-computer interfaces and more.

This episode starts with a story about using lasers to transmit data over long distances without a loss in fidelity. The data in question is a video of a cat called Taters chasing a laser, all sent via laser over a distance nearly 19 million miles. Sticking with the communications theme, Mercedes is piloting the use of turquoise colored lights to signal that their car is driving autonomously.

Speaking of autonomous cars, a Rolling Stone article delves into the idea that humans are historically very bad performers when it comes to inattentiveness for an indeterminate period followed by a time sensitive task. This is precisely what is required by the current set of autonomous driving vehicles that require the human to step in at a moment’s notice and become the driver instead of merely a passenger.

Then, Michael and Michael consider how right-sized LLMs (RSLMs?) could be used to speedily employ generative AI on phones. A couple of articles and a referenced paper point to how Apple may be moving in this direction with iPhone hardware, and not leveraging the cloud for speed and privacy.

Moving into VR, the cohosts touch on the ability of LLMs to create entire virtual worlds from a simple prompt – something that games such as No Man’s Sky and many others have done for a long time. Another academic paper spells out how a LLM can create such an environment. Also discussed are VR environments in Fortnite (Bonvoy) and games (Tommy Hilfiger).

Michael and Michael round out the show with an intriguing conversation on commercializing consumer behavior, including a treatment on the fediverse that includes how many capabilities originally on Craigslist have been disintermediated into companies like StubHub and AirBnB. This spurs a thought on how marketplaces themselves might be federated (MarketPub for marketplaces?) which may in turn challenge the Amazons & Alibabas of the world.

Michael M share a bit about the Vintage Vinyl record store in Evanston, IL, which was also made famous in the movie High Fidelity. No doubt there will be a massive increase in traffic both in the in-person store and the mail order website below from the Games at Work bump.

What will you order from Vintage Vinyl? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!