e415 — Pushing Our Buttons

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modern automotive interior with physical buttons
Photo by Nischal Kanishk on Unsplash

Published 8 May 2023

Michael and Michael get things started for this episode with several metaverse musings, beginning with the concept of undercover metaverse moderators.  While this is a new(ish) role, it is also one that seems like it would lend itself well to AI augmentation.  An article describing how one can post content from Horizon Worlds directly to the ‘gram with a virtual cellphone spurs a discussion on skewomorphism.

Continuing on the thread of design going back to the future, a Slate article describes how physical buttons are making a comeback, much to each Michael’s approval.  Another Slate article considers how Americans are misusing temporary paper license plates to circumvent tolls and parking charges.  One would think that this is a simple challenge to resolve with QR code registration for each temporary plate.  Michael R remembers a story we looked at back in episode 200 with California’s digital plates.  Then Michael R gives a summary of a Doom-esque game he played on Steam called “Hell of a Racket”. 

Wrapping up the episode for this week, the team concludes with articles about Dune 2, the Dungeons & Dragons movie, The Guild, and the upcoming animated version of Babylon 5.

What are your thoughts on touchscreens vs buttons?  Are you excited about Babylon 5?  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.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Article Links

metaverse

MIT Technology Review article: Undercover in the metaverse

Tech Radar article: VR is more popular than you think, but no thanks to Meta’s virtual wasteland

The Verge article: Now you can post Horizon Worlds photos to your Instagram Story

Interaction Design Foundation article: Skeuomorphism

Hewlett Packard 15c RPN calculator

automotive innovations

Slate article: The Glorious Return of a Humble Car Feature

Slate article: Why More Americans Are Using Fake License Plates and Getting Away With It

Games at Work episode 200: Eye in the Sky

15 minutes of game

Polygon article: This game is like Doom, but with a tennis racket and burgers

Steam game: Hell of a Racket

Film

Slashfilm article: Watch The First Dune: Part 2 Footage, Including A Peek At Bald Austin Butler

Slashfilm article: How To Watch Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves At Home

IMDB: The Guild

The Verge article: The secret Babylon 5 project is… an animated movie

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e414 — Ed Balls

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Wikipedia article for Ed Balls Day
Wikipedia article for Ed Balls Day, captured 30 April 2023

Published 1 May 2023

Michael, Michael and Andy get things started on Ed Balls Day for this edition of the podcast with a metaverse story about earning NFTs by playing in a derivative Minecraft environment called Critterz.  Critterz describes itself as “The first fully on-chain NFT on the Etherium blockchain to enable P2E on Minecraft”.  Moving on from Minecraft, the co-hosts turn to VR entertainment, this time in the form of a virtual rave by Fatboy Slim.  Then, the team takes a look at the avatar enhancements now available from Meta via a TechCrunch article.  Amazingly, per Meta’s newsroom post, users have created over one billion avatars!

Switching next to the field of games, Michael R gives some insight on his experiences playing Humanity during their demo period.  The team discusses the TechDirt article about the Red Cross’ point of view on employing the Rules of War within games.  

Next up, AI, as the news keeps on coming.  An article considers how the conversational AI in SnapChat was first only available to paid subscribers, and now can only be removed from it’s prominent place by paid subscribers.  

Then the team dives in on an intriguing post by Paul Squires linking the humanities with tech and AI.  Paul writes “We are already aware that AI may become too powerful for engineers to handle alone, and this represents a massive and urgent opportunity for the humanities.”  Michael M mentions how Harvey Mudd builds their curriculum on an integrated liberal arts approach to STEM education.  Andy, Michael and Michael have discussed the importance of a broad education as critical to success in their technical field during other episodes.  The articles from Kent Beck on Tidy Post and Mitchell Hashimoto on prompt engineering reinforce this perspective.  The phrase ‘As an AI language model’ is a significant tell (currently) for where AI models are employed.  In the Verge, fake product reviews are described, and the article concludes with the idea that determining what is AI generated text and what isn’t may be mathematically impossible.

Wrapping up the episode for this week, Andy, Michael and Michael conclude with a very cool article about the new LEGO Indiana Jones sets – the first in quite some time, and a story about iSpace’s lunar landing attempt.

What is your point of view on intersection between the humanities and technology?  Do you believe that AI language models should have to disclose that they are AI language models?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.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Article Links

Wikipedia article: Ed Balls Day

New York Times article: Ten Years Ago, Ed Balls Tweeted ‘Ed Balls’.  How Is It Still Funny?

Metaverse

Hackernoon post: How to Earn NFTs by Playing Minecraft

Critterz

TechCrunch article: I actually had fun at Fatboy Slim’s metaverse rave

Wikipedia article: Fatboy Slim

The Verge article: Meta’s avatars are getting new body shapes and improved hair

Meta newsroom post: Customize Your Meta Avatar With New Body Shapes, Hair and Clothing

Games

Polygon article: It’s a miracle this game exists — and maybe fate

Humanity

Games at Work e406: AI Lemmings

Techdirt article: Red Cross Continues To Want To Pretend That Video Game Wars Are IRL Wars

AI

9 to 5 Mac article: Snapchat users are furious over recent My AI update, flooding the App Store with 1-star reviews

Paul Squires article: With AI, the humanities find their place in tech

Harvey Mudd Common Core Curriculum

photo of slide describing Harvey Mudd Humanities, Social Science, & Arts curriculum
Harvey Mudd Humanities, Social Science, & Arts curriculum

Software Design: Tidy First post: 90% of My Skills Are Now Worth $0

Michell Hashimoto article: Prompt Engineering vs. Blind Prompting

The Verge article: ‘As an AI language model’: the phrase that shows how AI is polluting the web

LEGO and SPACE!

SlashFilm article: LEGO Brings Indiana Jones And Raiders Of The Lost Ark To Life With Incredible Engineering And Detail

New York Times article: Japanese Company’s Spacecraft Likely Crashed During Moon Landing Attempt

ispace news: Status Update on ispace HAKUTO-R Mission 1 Lunar Lander

Bonus links

The Verge article: Grimes says anyone can use her voice for AI-generated songs

Fast Company article: These wild AI-powered glasses can read your own lips

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e413 — AI, your way

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visual representation of data in the form of points of light
Photo by Ross Stone on Unsplash

Published 24 April 2023

Andy, Michael and Michael get things started for this edition of the podcast with several stories about AI.  The first from the Washington Post deals with the dataset that makes up Google’s C4 – the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus.  The data ingested into the large language models has an impact on the systems that use them, and in the case of C4, Andy noticed that his blog was included, and also noted that the Games at Work site was not.  Many large language models do not disclose the websites incorporated in their models.  The Washington Post article goes into more details about the provenance of the data, as well as the ownership of the websites ingested as it relates to how large language models are trained and challenges that may arise from that selection and training.  Have a look in the show notes below to see if your favorite website was included in the C4 model.  After a quick note about Microsoft’s SwiftKey keyboard including AI and a cool video of a BMO-AI robot demo, the team turns to the Turing test website aptly called “human or not”.  This website randomly pairs the user with a human or an AI and allows for a 2 minute conversation concluding with the user voting whether the conversation partner was a human, or not a human (an AI).  

Switching to television, the new show Mrs. Davis just out on the Peacock streaming service features an AI as a central character.  Well, the show is just out in the US – the launch date in the UK is still to be announced – sorry, UK listeners!  It will be interesting to see how this AI is treated in the show, even if the AI does not have an entry in imdb.  

With such the focus on AI in the recent weeks, an article by Alex Murrell captures the attention of the co-hosts in multiple ways.  There is a thought that AI will continue to accelerate the convergence of design toward what Alex describes as “the age of average”.  Citing examples such as “Instagram face”, “AirSpace” (international AirBnB style), architecture and advertising, Alex highlights the trending toward the homogenization of style.  Michael R points out that breaking from the average is a way of establishing distinctiveness, because it is avant garde and breaks from the popular.  The advertising tagline of “X, your way” is another example that Alex points out, which then inspired the naming of this episode.  Concluding the article with “When the world zigs.  Zag.” reminded Michael M of the Cadillac advertisements from some years ago – see below for an example.  Take some time to read this very interesting article in full.

Wrapping up the episode for this week, Andy, Michael and Michael conclude with a couple of notes about the Apple HomePod listening for smoke alarms and some rumors about the as yet unannounced mixed reality headset.  An intriguing interview with Tim Cook in GQ gives some further color on the future for AR and VR.

Andy noticed that there is an upcoming LEGO exhibition in Raleigh for the local North Carolina listenership, which will interestingly be in the same space as the Van Gogh exhibit from last year.

Is your favorite website in C4?  Do you feel that AI will accelerate the move to “the age of average”, or will it help people zag faster?  Will the university in Spokane, Washington be happy with more zags?  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.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Article Links

AI

Washington Post article: Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart

Allen Institute for AI C4 Search

Microsoft SwiftKey Keyboard

Diode Zone video: BMO-AI Companion Robot AI Demo

human or not? 

imdb entry Mrs. Davis

The Guardian article: Mrs Davis review – fun yet frustrating series mixes religion with raucousness

The flattening of design

Alex Murrell article: The age of averages

An Apple a day

The Verge article: Apple HomePods can now listen for your smoke alarms

The Verge article: Everything we know about Apple’s mixed reality headset

GQ article: Tim Cook on Shaping the Future of Apple

Art & Culture

WRAL article: LEGO art show coming to Raleigh

Games at Work e394: Immersive Ronto Experiences

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e412 — 3D or not 3D

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3D picture of a book with a silhouette of a face due to the folds of the paper and light shining on it
Photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash

summary

Published 17 April 2023

Michael, Andy and Michael are back at it again for another edition of Games at Work after taking a much needed break.  After starting off with a few of the current features in film in theater, the co-hosts kick off this episode with a set of stories about 3D vision that does not require a headset.  One example uses holographic technology to render objects in 3D, and another example from Sony shows objects in 3D in a television style screen.  

Then, shifting gears, the team considers a recently published paper and accompanying RPG simulation of a town populated with 25 AIs.  Looking at similarities and differences with the Sims and Simlish, some intriguing ideas are floated about how generative conversational AI could be employed to continue the storyline of a game where NPCs (non-player characters) could be powered by the conversational AI in a non proscriptive manner to further the story of the game.  This follows on the show notes from e410 and gives an interesting idea of how 25 AIs could be seeded into an environment with social rules in a GAN way to see what happens.

Continuing on the theme of AI, the co-hosts discuss a GPT4-powered program that is designed to correct bugs automatically, codenamed Wolverine.  This in turn spurs a thought about self-healing concrete.  An amazing Medium post explores how ChatGPT and GPT4 was used to play the role of a dungeon master in a game of Dungeons and Dragons.  You have to read through this post to experience just how good this interaction was.  Frederico Viticci of MacStories introduces S-GPT on MacStories.  S-GPT is an iOS Shortcut that connects ChatGPT with the native iOS features in an amazing way.  This reminded Andy of Short Circuit (the app, not the movie).  Wrapping things up for this episode, the team concludes with the prompt library called Jailbreak Chat.

How many AIs would you want to put in your version of a small RPG Minecraft town?  Would you want to have your digital assistant on your phone access GPT4, and if so, what would you ask?  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.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.  We even talked about this during the show!

Selected Article Links

Current Theater & Film

Wikipedia article: The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Wikipedia article: Beetlejuice the Musical

Wikipedia article: Air (the movie)

3D spaces

StudyFinds article: Next generation of 3D virtual reality is here and won’t require a headset

Mixed News article: New 27-inch display from Sony offers 3D without VR headset

TechCrunch article: A decade later, this VR treadmill is finally ready to ship

AI

Ars Technica article: Surprising things happen when you put 25 AI agents together in an RPG town

Pre-computed replay of a simulation that accompanies the paper entitled “Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior.“

Ars Technica article: Developer creates “regenerative” AI program that fixes bugs on the fly

Interesting Engineering: DARPA is exploring self-healing concrete for military installations

The Register article: Turns out people don’t like it when they suspect a machine’s talking to them

Medium post by Obie Fernandez: My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM

MacStories article: Introducing S-GPT, A Shortcut to Connect OpenAI’s ChatGPT with Native Features of Apple’s Operating Systems

Short Circuit: An AI Assistant

Jailbreak Chat

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