e446 — Laser Light Show

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

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 Article Links

You Say ‘Lasers’, I Say ‘Taters’

CNN article: NASA laser message beams video of a cat named Taters back to Earth, and it’s a big deal

Ars Technica article: Turquoise taillights tell you this Mercedes is driving autonomously

Paper from the Proceedings of the Human Factors & Ergonomics Society 2019 Annual Meeting: Light-Based External Human Machine Interface: Color Evaluation for Self-Driving Vehicle and Pedestrian Interaction

AI

Rolling Stone article: Elon Musk’s Big Lie About Tesla Is Finally Exposed

MacRumors article: Apple Develops Breakthrough Method for Running LLMs on iPhones

Paper published on ARXIV: LLM in a flash: Efficient Large Language Model Inference with Limited Memory

Ars Technica article: Apple wants AI to run directly on its hardware instead of in the cloud

Wikipedia article: Data General

Commercialization of VR

Tom’s Guide article: The Holodeck is here — new AI can generate an entire virtual world with a single prompt

No Man’s Sky

Paper: Holodeck: Language Guided Generation of 3D Embodied AI Environments

Wikipedia article: Holodeck

@than @andypiper @gamesatwork_biz polygon.com/23998884/fortnite-

— Dan Hon (@danhon) 2023-12-18T23:02:44.532Z

Polygon article: Fortnite’s Marriott Bonvoy Land is a ghost town of video game sadness

Vogue Business article: Tommy Hilfiger on AI and his new fashion game

Commercializing Consumer Behavior

The Verge article: 2023 in social media: the case for the fediverse

Games at Work e402: Which ‘verse is worse?

Schneier on Security article: OpenAI Is Not Training on Your Dropbox Documents—Today

Hush Noiseless Browsing by Joel Arvidsson

The Atlantic article: Is This How Amazon Ends?

Vintage Vinyl Mail Order

e445 — Paper Thin Transparency

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! 

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 Article Links

Trains

404 Media article: Polish Hackers Repaired Trains the Manufacturer Artificially Bricked. Now The Train Company Is Threatening Them

Games at Work e444 Glitch in the Matrix

Transparent Paper Chase

Knowable Magazine article: Why scientists are making transparent wood

Nature article: More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 — a new record

TV Knows What You Are Watching

The Markup article: Your Smart TV Knows What You’re Watching

Tom’s Guide article: Vienna Teng Sings about Surveillance in ‘Hymn of Acxiom’

Genius ‘Hymn of Acxiom’ lyrics

AR/VR

New World Notes post: Second Life IOS/Android App Now In Private Alpha For Premium+ Subscribers. Here’s How To Request Access!

The Verge article: Xbox Cloud Gaming is now available on Meta’s Quest VR headsets

Not So Secret Agents

VentureBeat article: BitHuman introduces lifelike AI agents for enterprises

bitHuman.io 

Wrapping Up

VentureBeat article: E3 is deader than ever

E3 homepage

Mashable article: NASA will land daring spacecraft on a world 800 million miles away

Dragonfly Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory

e444 — Glitch in the Matrix

technical difficulties!  a glitch.  or a rug.  or a badly tuned TV.
Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

Published 11 December 2023

Andy and Michael R get together to talk tech – bad, new and fun.  The pair start off with a story out of Poland for the train manufacturer Newag that suddenly broke down during maintenance.  The code supporting the train’s operation had something to do with it according to the article from BadCyber.  In another story, US Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) has asked automotive companies a number of very specific questions related to data privacy.  This is directly related to the Mozilla Foundation’s privacy review of cars from September 2023.  Andy also brings in a European Commission press release for tracking digital services terms and conditions.

The band Kiss, as they wrapped up their final performance in NYC, transformed into Kiss Immortal digital avatars.  The article asks whether fans may pay for concert tickets for “live” shows without live performers in the future.  An article from The Next Web highlights architectural preservation through augmented reality that reminds Michael R of a story about the Queen Anne’s Revenge.  Then, the co-hosts cover a story about how Apple’s panoramic photo exposes what could be a glitch in the matrix.

The co-hosts cover some intriguing visualizations.  Among them are a graphical way to view LLMs from Brendan Bycroft, a “game of life” 3 dimensional game called Sandpond, time traveling toads and fields of infinite flowers to zen out.

When would you want to travel to with your toads?  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 Article Links

Bad Tech

BadCyber article: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

Wikipedia article: Newag

Ars Technica article: Automakers’ data privacy practices “are unacceptable,” says US senator

Games at Work e432 – Monitoring Pirate Cars

European Commission press release 1 Dec 2023: Commission launches new database to track digital services terms and conditions

Axios article: The first humanoid robot factory is about to open

New Tech

The Verge article: Kiss debuts ‘immortal’ digital avatars and plans to go ‘fully virtual’

The Next Web article: Tech is bringing ancient ruins back to life. Here’s how

MacWorld article: The truth is out there–but it’s not in this viral ‘glitch’ iPhone photo

Fun Tech

Brendan Bycroft’s LLM Visualization

Sandpond.cool

SandPond.cool example screenshot replete with fish, plants & rabbits
SandPond.cool example screenshot

TodePond

InfiniteFlowers.net 

e443 — In the Stone

stone chimney, Pisgah National Forest, NC
Photo by Michael Martine, Pisgah National Forest, NC October 2018

Published 4 December 2023

Back at full co-host strength, Andy, Michael and Michael get together to have a fantastic discussion on AI, 3D printing, retro gaming and emulation solutions.

With the regulations, philosophy and laws dealing with AI evolving so rapidly, it’s a good thing that there is a podcast with real human cohosts to deal with it all.  The first article deals with generated sports articles from Sports Illustrated purported to have been written by real humans.   Next up is a detailed post from Cory Doctorow with many detailed links to other posts & articles dealing with the conflict between “Effective Altruism” and “Effective Accelerationism”.  Then, the cohosts discuss the ramifications of a ruling in the Sarah Silverman case.  A reminder: Andy, Michael and Michael are not attorneys, barristers, judges, solicitors or other members of the legal profession.  Shifting to LLMs, the team take on a couple of articles dealing with ScienceGPT and the attention organizations like Hugging Face have received in the wake of the Sam Altman situation from the past week and a half.

Next up, two Hackaday articles are stacked up against one another – the first dealing with the deconstruction of the first 3D printed house in Iowa.  The concept of 3D printing houses is not new to the podcast. It was something that was discussed in 2014 in e81!  Even more fun was the juxtaposition of another Hackaday article.  This one dealt with an autonomous vehicle that uses computer vision to assemble stone walls.  This reminds Andy of the stone walls across the UK and Michael M of the stone walls in Chapel Hill (slightly more recent than those in the UK!).

The team winds up with a few stories about retro games with DOS_deck, Whisky and Wine.

What retro game would you most like to play?  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 Article Links

AI

Futurism article: Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers

Games at Work e426: Barbenheimer Chic

Pluralistic post from Cory Doctorow: The real AI fight (27 Nov 2023)

NiemanLab article: The legal framework for AI is being built in real time, and a ruling in the Sarah Silverman case should give publishers pause

Games at Work e424: What’s AI got to do with it?

TechRadar article: The GPT to rule them all: Training for one trillion parameter model backed by Intel and US government has just begun

CNBC article: OpenAI rival Hugging Face says it’s seeing more client interest after Sam Altman fiasco

Large Stone Model Demolition & Construction

Hackaday article: Iowa Demolishes Its First 3D Printed House

Games at Work e81: One Step Beyond

Hackaday article: Autonomous Excavator Builds Stone Wall Algorithmically

These Old Stone Walls by Phillips Russell

Retro Gaming

Terence Eden’s Blog post: What would happen if computers never got any faster?

Ars Technica article: DOS_deck offers free, all-timer DOS games in a browser, with controller support

DOS_deck

Whisky

Wine

And Cheese

Wallace and Gromit