Published 7 April 2025
e508 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories and discussion on AI Conversational Swarm Intelligence, the Pokétax game and numerous Nintendo stories and much more.
Michael, Andy and Michael get things started with a story about how large groups, well beyond the research ideal of 4-7 people, may have a simultaneous conversation with one another, sharing and evolving ideas. Drawing inspiration from how schools of fish communicate with one another, a Carnegie Mellon and unanimous.ai paper illustrates the architecture behind Conversational Swarm Intelligence. AI agents track groups of 7 humans for novel ideas and pass along those ideas to other groups of humans in order to more quickly propagate the evolution of ideas through an accelerated wisdom of the crowd manner.
Then, the co-hosts turn their attention to the experiences of the Wikimedia Foundation. They note that there have been huge spikes in bandwidth for serving up multimedia files – not from humans seeking information, rather from scraper bots.
Nothing But Nintendo
After an AR segue to look at a slingshot mechanism to change lighting colors (check out the video in the show notes), the team switches (see what we did there?) to all things Nintendo. A story somehow escaped the Games at Work team back in 2012, when the Louvre museum replaced their audio guides with Nintendo 3DS consoles. Well, that story is coming to an end, and those 3DS systems will be replaced by something new. Continuing on the Nintendo theme, the accounting firm Open Ledger has created a game called Pokétax to make filing your taxes fun and exciting with a Pokémon experience. Then, Andy, Michael and Michael talk about the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2. Last, the team reminisces about playing Tetris on the Nintendo Game Boy, in discussing an article about how Tetris is a hack for people to get better at their jobs.
Wrapping things up for this episode, the team continues the Nintendo theme a little more with 3d printed musical fidget toys that play classic Mario (and other) video game tunes. Check out that video below for an example.
Would you like to play a tax game? Or maybe a round of Tetris to improve your problem solving? 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 (Basketball IQ and More)
VentureBeat article: I asked an AI swarm to fill out a March Madness bracket — here’s what happened
ARXiV paper: Large-scale Group Brainstorming using Conversational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) versus Traditional Chat
The Register article: Wikipedia’s overlords bemoan AI bot bandwidth burden
Rachel Lee Nabors – https://toot.cafe/@rachelnabors
AR / VR (for a 3 point Slingshot)
https://techhub.social/@ellenich/114279691712148125
Nothing but Nintendo
The Verge article: The Mona Lisa is saying goodbye to the Nintendo 3DS.
Games at Work e54: She Blinded Me, With Science!
Retrododo article: Accounting Firm Releases ‘Pokétax’ Game To Make Filing Your Tax Fun
Ars Technica article: Nintendo unveils Switch 2 ahead of June 5 launch
Nintendo Switch 2 – How to buy
Business Insider article: The Weird New Work Hack
Hacking (without fouling)
Hackaday article: 3D Print (and Play!) the Super Mario Tune as a Fidget Toy
Your eyes are not deceiving you… I got an Apple TV 1st Gen, the only x86 based model (it uses a Pentium M as its CPU) booting Windows XP Service Pack 3! For reals!
This was possible through a small security flaw in the Apple TV's firmware and boot process… while the Apple TV looks for a boot.efi file on its boot partition and has it load a Mach-O binary to be able to boot, it doesn't actually care about the actual contents of the file! So by that note, you can wrap a kernel or bootloader from another OS into a Mach-O file and name it mach_kernel, and the Apple TV won't care and will happily boot it! So after this little escapade of cursed computing, you know Linux is next! 😁
More deets are in this video, along with a link to grab a premade disk image from the Internet Archive!
https://youtu.be/v2w5MmiRHUoThe entire project was done by distrohopper39b, who chronicles his work on the project from beginning to end here:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:53 — 43.0MB) | Embed
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Great show guys! Sorry I missed the recording.