e512 — Sounds Good, On Paper

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Cartoon renditions of Andy and Michael M with headphones and microphones, arm wrestling, generated by ChatGPT May 2025
Cartoon versions of Andy and Michael M, generated by ChatGPT

Published 5 May 2025

e512 with Andy and Michael – E Ink monitors, Agent run companies & towns, winning arguments with AI assistants, pixellating reality and much more.

While Michael R is away, Andy and Michael start off this episode continuing the E Ink theme from last week before shifting to AI and wrapping up with several cool makes.  

It seems that there was a great deal of discussion on E Ink in the past couple of days, and the team touch on the BOOX Mira and Dashing Paperlike displays.  Andy also mentions being on a recent episode of the Bootloader podcast, where he talked about Glance – see the links below for more.  

Moving along to AI, the co-hosts talk through the multiple themes embedded in the TechCrunch article dealing with Perplexity, the divestiture of Chrome, and the business of advertising.  Andy brings up a phrase giving a different name for AI, namely, Computational Text Generation Devices, and Michael shares a link to the Crystal Knows service he heard about during a recent interview.  Then, the co-hosts have a spirited, while still family friendly, conversation spurred on by an automobile journalist’s frustrating experience with a car’s assistant.  Next up was an article about how Carnegie Mellon professors staffed a virtual company solely with AI agents, which reminded Michael about Smallville – check out e428 and e412 from 2023 for more on AI agent interaction in a town setting.  Then, Andy touches on the Meta Ray-Bans story from Gizmodo.

Wrapping up the show for this week, Andy and Michael take a look at a couple of really intriguing makes: PixLens for pixellating reality using a specifically machined acrylic lens, a cassette emulator, and a Sony Watchman brought back to life by a Raspberry Pi.

What would you like to pixellate with the PixLens?  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

E Ink, continued

The Verge article: Boox launches its first color E Ink monitor

BOOX Mira Pro E Ink Monitor

Liliputing article: Dasung Paperlike 13K is a 13.3 inch E Ink color monitor

Dasung Paperlike 13K E Ink Monitor

grocery store price display for the Salisbury, North Carolina classic cherry flavored soft drink Cheerwine
grocery store price display for the Salisbury, North Carolina classic cherry flavored soft drink, Cheerwine

The Bootloader podcast, e19 Welcome Andy Piper for Glance

Glance

Who’s chatting with whom? 

TechCrunch article: Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell ‘hyper personalized’ ads

Amardeep Singh blog post: Humanities AI in 2025: Brief Reflections After a Conference

CrystalKnows.com 

USA Today article: Scolded by a car? My battle with an EV assistant going rogue

Futurism article: Professors Staffed a Fake Company Entirely With AI Agents, and You’ll Never Guess What Happened

Games at Work e428: Is you is, or is you AIn’t my AI? For Smallville

ARXIV paper: Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior

Games at Work e412: 3D or not 3D also for Smallville and NPCs

Gizmodo article: Meta Is Turning Its Ray-Bans Into a Surveillance Machine for AI

Hacks & Makes

AdaFruit blog post: PixLens: Reality into 8-bit

PixLens

I've adorned my cassette emulator device with a hand whittled label. The top panel has some bumps from through-board solder pads, so nothing I can do about that. But overall it's alright, if you don't look too closely and/or judge too harshly.

— electron.greg (@electron_greg) 2025-04-29T19:51:00.721Z

hackster.io post: A Sony Watchman Lives Again as the Display for a Dinky Raspberry Pi 3 Cyberdeck

Wikipedia article: Sony Watchman

Game preservation bonus links

GOG Dreamlist

The Verge article: GOG is adding some classic Star Wars games to its preservation program

Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own.

Michael Martine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:58 — 37.7MB) | Embed

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e511 — Vibing in London

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time lapse photo of the Thames, the London Eye ferris wheel, Parliament and Big Ben
Photo by bill emrich from Pexels:

Published 28 April 2025

e511 with Michael, Andy and Michael – Vibe coding with the Vision Pro, E Ink, ePaper, multi and single player MMORPGs, Minecraft London and much more.

Michael, Andy and Michael get things off to a fast start continuing the vibe coding conversation.  The Vision Pro features prominently, with the idea that Siri was intended to allow for calling virtual objects into being in the Vision Pro environment without requiring the user to write code.  Then, the team discusses the different algorithms used by quantified self devices such as the Oura Ring and Apple Watch.  Next up, an intriguing concept of storing deleted data, with timestamps and user information for future potential use.

Then the co-hosts take the Figment E Ink hardware and run with it on a journey of other E Ink devices.  While the Kindle provides an easy launch point, other E Ink / ePaper devices such as the Daylight computer, the ePaper Name Badge, the Remarkable 2, Air Lab, the Poem/1 (hail poetry!) and even grocery store price displays get their proverbial day in the sun.

Switching gears to massive multi (and single) player games, Andy shares a story about the Minecraft digital twin of London built over the past 5 years.  In an MMORPG twist, the co-hosts discuss the simulated players in Erenshor, a single player version of an MMO.  

Wrapping things up for the week, the team concludes with a couple of Nintendo stories repurposing older GameBoy and Wii hardware for fun experiments.

If you could have a Windows enabled GameBoy, what would you most like to run on it?  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

Wearables and Coding

9 to 5 Mac article: Apple wanted people to vibe code Vision Pro apps with Siri

The Information article: Apple Devising Software to Help Anyone Build AR Apps, to Drive Headset Sales

Tom’s Guide article: I wore my Oura Ring vs Apple Watch 10 to track my steps for a week — and this device was way off

Scott Antipa blog post: YAGRI: You are gonna read it

Wikipedia article: YAGNI

Spilling e ink

Liliputing article: Figment is another E Ink handheld game console made for text adventures (and maybe more)

Games at Work article: e467- Total Recall for the Daylight computer and slow computing

Daylight Computer

Terrence Eden blog post: Gadget Review: 6-Colour ePaper Name Badge

Remarkable 2

CrowdSupply post: Air Lab – A playful and portable air quality measuring device

Kickstarter project: Poem/1: AI rhyming clock

Poem/1 AI rhyming clock

Wikipedia article: E Ink

Games at Work e453 – Vision Pro a Pro-Pro for the Poem/1

Single and Multiplayer MMORPGs

BBC article: Minecraft: ‘We’ve spent five years rebuilding London’

Build the Earth

GamesRadar article: “I’ve had this idea for 25 years”: Solo dev behind single-player MMO with fake simulated players insists “I do not plan to add multiplayer” as it soars on Steam

GamesRadar article: Erenshor, the ‘MMORPG’ with fake players that’s not actually an MMO at all, gets an imminent release date

Erenshor on Steam

Repurposed Nintendo Hardware

Time Extension article: Someone Has Created A Version Of Windows For Game Boy, And Yes, It Includes Minesweeper

Alex Haydock blog post: This blog is hosted on a Nintendo Wii

Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own.

Michael Martine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:36 — 39.9MB) | Embed

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e510 — Singing To the Dolphins

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dolphin in the water
Photo by Ádám Berkecz on Unsplash

Published 21 April 2025

e510 with Andy, Michael and Michael – AI stories ranging from privacy, dolphin communication, open source models for robots, Game Transfer Phenomenon and much more.

Andy, Michael and Michael get things off to a fast start with all things AI with a Bloomberg article reporting on Apple “analyzing data on customer’s devices in a bid to improve its artificial intelligence platform”.  Apple shares a deeper take on the differential privacy and how it is employed to improve on the synthetic data used to train Apple Intelligence.  Then, the team turns to a different way of training LLMs without forcing human language, which they found to be much more efficient, and potentially may unlock new chain of reasoning operations.  Andy’s “autocomplete for stuff” description of AI is amazing.  Next, is an intriguing AI model being developed to better understand dolphin communications.  The chain of thought from this article leads to the camera only recently recovered from Loch Ness, Star Trek, Star Wars and of course, Douglas Adam’s fictional treatment of dolphins.  After discussing open source AI robots and the challenges / benefits posed by AI geolocation sophistication, the team turns to OpenAI’s work on a social media platform.  

After an article on Game Transfer Phenomenon, which describes how games and gameplay leak into the real world, the co-hosts wrap up with a PICO-8 demake of Warcraft III and a hearty endorsement of the Mythic Quest tv show.  Both Michael R and Andy have watched the entirety of Mythic Quest, and Michael M has put it on the list to watch.

What do you expect the dolphins have to say to each other, and to humankind?  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

Bloomberg article: Apple to Analyze User Data on Devices to Bolster AI Technology

Apple’s Machine Learning Research Blog post: Understanding Aggregate Trends for Apple Intelligence Using Differential Privacy

Quanta Magazine article: To Make Language Models Work Better, Researchers Sidestep Language

ZD Net article: Google is talking to dolphins using Pixel phones and AI – and the video is delightful

BBC article: Camera set up to catch Loch Ness Monster discovered

Games At Work e495: Personal Planetarium for use of AI in translating animal communications

The Hitchhiker’s Wiki entry: Dolphins

The Hitchhiker’s Wiki entry: Mice

IMdB: Star Trek: Lower Decks (dolphin navigators)

Wookipedia entry: Purrgil (space whales)

Wired article: An Open Source Pioneer Wants to Unleash Open Source AI Robots

Huggingface: closed-vs-open-arena-elo

ChatGPT's o3 model can pinpoint a location from a photo, and give a pretty good deduction as to the point the photo was taken from. It's no Rainbolt, but any photos taken at or near your home, even with stripped metadata, are no longer safe
flausch.social/@piegames/11435

— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) 2025-04-17T15:11:54.594Z

Reuters article: OpenAI is working on X-like social media network, the Verge reports

Games Carrying Over IRL

BBC article: Health bars and power ups: The ‘freaky and unpleasant’ world when video games leak into the physical realm

Taylor and Francis Online article: Prevalence and Characteristics of Game Transfer Phenomena: A Descriptive Survey Study

Making

lexaloffle.com blog post: Picocraft – demake of Warcraft III

itch.io Top Rated Games tagged Demake and PICO-8

Wikipedia article: PICO-8

Media

The Verge article: Apple’s Mythic Quest has come to an end

IMdB: Mythic Quest

Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own.

Michael Martine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:28 — 43.8MB) | Embed

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e509 — Maverick and Marbles

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two brown llamas in a field
Photo by Josiah Farrow on Unsplash

Published 14 April 2025

e509 with Michael and Michael – stories and discussion all around AI, LLMs, llamas, generated Quake, grokking, generalization and much more.

Michael and Michael get things rolling while Andy is away with a series of AI stories, beginning with Siri, continuing on to the latest iteration of Meta’s Llama 4 models, Scout and Maverick.  Following on the llama theme, Michael R is reminded of the intro credits from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  After reflecting on an AI generated version of Quake, Michael and Michael turn to an article from the MIT Technology Review, which explores how models would all of a sudden be able to complete a task without a clear explanation as to why.  This made Michael M think about a Ted Talk describing how some polyglots acquire languages – check out Lýdia Machová’s talk below for more.

The team touches on the latest app from IconFactory called Tapestry.  Tapestry allows users to follow people across a multiplicity of social services, and eliminate duplicate posts.  Then, they consider the AR capabilities of the Zeiss Holographic Transparent Display technology.  Last up, is the Busy Bar, a device to help others know that you are not in an interruptible state.  Check out the bonus links below to find the Rube Goldberg marbles-powered device that influenced the name of the episode.

What information would you most like to see in your airplane window?  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

9 to 5 Mac article: Craig Federighi’s leadership has already resulted in this major Siri pivot, per report

Visual Studio IDE: AI-assisted development in Visual Studio

The Verge article: Meta got caught gaming AI benchmarks

Intro Credits from Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The Verge article: Microsoft has created an AI-generated version of Quake

Wikipedia article: Quake

MIT Technology Review article: Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

arXiv paper: DEEP DOUBLE DESCENT: WHERE BIGGER MODELS AND MORE DATA HURT

arXiV paper: UNDERSTANDING DEEP LEARNING REQUIRES RE-THINKING GENERALIZATION

Boy Genius Report article: This is the difference between how humans and AI ‘think’

OpenReview: Evaluating the Robustness of Analogical Reasoning in Large Language Models

Cool Stuff

:tapestry_app: Tapestry 1.1 brings a host of great new features: Follow individual accounts & lists on Bluesky & Mastodon, automatically remove duplicates from the timeline with Crosstalk, and quickly switch your timelines with Tapestry’s redesigned navigation.

Learn more about these features plus dozens of other improvements in today's FREE update of Tapestry – Your personal timeline app.

blog.iconfactory.com/2025/04/t

— The Iconfactory (@Iconfactory) 2025-04-08T15:33:42.712Z

Iconfactory blog post: Tapestry: What’s New? No Déjà Vu!

Popular Science article: Smart glass windows would beam in-flight info over scenic views

Busy Bar

Bonus Links: More Cool Stuff 

The Verge article: Samsung is finally releasing Ballie

The Verge article: You can build these marble runs and connect them to your smart home over Wi-Fi

Wikipedia article: Rube Goldberg

The Verge article: 22 years later, modders are keeping SimCity 4 alive

Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own.

Michael Martine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:10 — 44.8MB) | Embed

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