e457 — It Looks Like You’re Recording a Podcast…!

11 pink paperclips arranged in a circle — Photo by Tamanna Rumee on Unsplash

Published 11 March 2024

Andy and Michael R get together to talk tech – focusing on LLMs, the return of Clippy, Steam games, physical and virtual user experiences and Cyber 205.

Starting off with an article from Venture Beat where the Claude 3 Opus LLM was subjected to what’s called a “needle-in-a-haystack” test, and reacted with the accurate recognition of the needle as well as a statement that it seemed that the source material seemed so out of place, that it must either be a joke or a deliberate test. The example source material – the needle – was material about pizza toppings, and was included in a corpus consisting of a random set of other documents. Given the discussions from e451 about Nightshade and other tools could be used to disrupt scraping of content, it could be inferred that reactions such as the Opus response could defeat such disruption attempts by recognizing how out of place the disruptions are.

Clippy returns with an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal, and has surfaced many times in the Games at Work podcast over the years. Examples include e329 and e237 among others. The team also brings back Microsoft Bob as part of the discussion.

Turning to games and gaming, Michael R and Andy focus on several Steam games, including Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, Populous and Dungeon Keeper among others. And with all the focus on the next chapter of Dune, the trailer for the Dune Awakening game certainly captures attention with unkillable sandworms.

Next up is all things UX, starting with the recommendation that physical buttons be returned to automobiles (hooray!). Then, an Apple Vision Pro example of the Matrix with Magic Room. Andy and Michael R wrap things up with the Cyber 205.

What would you want to ask Clippy? Should Clippy be in the Matrix? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!