e486 — Miss AI Manners

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thank you message on an iPad screen
Photo by PNW Production: https://www.pexels.com/photo/thank-you-message-on-the-ipad-screen-8250827/

Published 21 October 2024

e486 with Andy, Michael and Michael — proper AI engagement etiquette, OpenAI’s GPT Store, invisible unicode prompt injection, disappearing Chief Metaverse Officers, ingesting everything for digital twin world creation and a whole lot more!

Back once more to full co-host power, Andy, Michael and Michael start off the show with a callback to the last episode – a reimagining of the Nintendo N64 that will run with the old cartridges.  

Next up is an article from the Wall Street Journal dealing with proper etiquette in interactions with chatbots.  Some interesting research from Japan referenced in the show notes below, finds that impolite prompts may lead to a deterioration in model performance, including increased bias, incorrect answers or refusal of answers.  Then the team turns their attention to the use of unicode tags for prompt injection from an Ars Technica article.  This concept of invisible characters reminded the cohosts of a discussion from August 2023 dealing with white characters on a white page, while invisible to the human eye are picked up by the AI model.  Continuing with the AI theme, the team considers the Wired article on the OpenAI GPT store and a generative AI use case with TruGolf creating color commentary on the player’s golf swing.

Switching to augmented reality, the cohosts discuss where have all the Chief Metaverse Officers  gone, prompted by another Wired article.  Then they have a spirited conversation about the idea of ingesting all the available data to construct a digital twin world, using the WorldsNQ concept as a starting point.  This reminds the team of the NVIDIA Omniverse.  

The team wraps up the episode with an article about preserving the Earth’s biodiversity to store cells from endangered animals on the Moon.  This reminds Andy of the Star Trek episode Space Seed, and Michael M of the Svalbard seed vault in the arctic.  Michael R rounds out this week’s episode with a remembrance of Ward Christensen.

Have you always been polite to your chatbots and robots?  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

Follow on

Games at Work e485: Barbarians at the Rhubarb Bar

Analogue 3D

AI

Wall Street Journal article: Should You Be Nice to Your Chatbot?

ARXIV published paper: Should We Respect LLMs? A Cross-Lingual Study on the Influence of Prompt Politeness on LLM Performance

Ars Technica article: Invisible text that AI chatbots understand and humans can’t? Yep, it’s a thing.

Games at Work e427: DeepBarbie Fakery

Wired article: OpenAI’s GPT Store Has Left Some Developers in the Lurch

Roger Premo’s LinkedIn post on TruGolf’s use of generative AI

Wikipedia article: Jones Angell, the voice of the Tar Heels

AR

Wired article: Where Have All the Chief Metaverse Officers Gone?

Dallas Innovates article: Dallas-Based Worlds’ Pioneering ‘Large World Model’ Platform Could Be the Next Leap Forward in AI’s Evolution

worlds.io press release: Worlds Unveils WorldsNQ: A Large World Model (LWM) Platform that Accelerates AI Training 1000X over Current Systems 

NVIDIA Omniverse

Games at Work e345: Icelandverse

Science

BBC article: Scientists want to send endangered animals to the Moon… sort of!

Wikipedia article: Space Seed, the 22nd episode of Star Trek

Wikipedia article: Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Honestly we should have stopped after BBSes

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/1

— Rod Hilton (@rodhilton) 2024-10-15T15:23:51.426Z

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

Michael Martine

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e485 — Barbarians at the Rhubarb Bar

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a rhubarb - strawberry cocktail with a curly rhubarb, strawberry and lime wedge garnish
Photo by Svitlana on Unsplash

Published 14 October 2024

e485 with Michael and Michael — flow, focus & distraction, waking up with Nintendo’s Alarmo, Wartke & Fischer’s song about Barbara, her rhubarb bar and the barbarians, the disappearing .io domain suffix and a whole lot more!

Co-hosts Michael and Michael start off the show with the retirement of Apple executive Dan Riccio, who headed up the Vision Products Group.  This spurs a lively discussion about the advantages that the VisionPro brings to reduce distractions and foster concentration on the task at hand, and how other visual computing solutions from Magic Leap, Meta and others are more additive in nature, providing additional contextual information to the user through their augmented reality experiences.

Longtime listeners will know that Andy, who was away at OggCamp, Michael and Michael all have an affinity for the German language.  While the work of Bodo Wartke and Marti Fischer was more well known on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean, it was new to Michael and Michael, who each enjoyed listening to the musical styles of Wartke and Fischer.  They shared through rhyme how a woman named Barbara got to know some barbarians, their barber, and others through a shared love for rhubarb.  Have a listen to the videos below.  They are wirklich ausgezeichnet.

Switching (see what we did there) to a more nostalgic set of topics, the co-hosts discuss the just released Nintendo Alarmo alarm clock.  The Alarmo has a sensor that recognizes when you move, and reacts to those movements, such as when you stretch or roll over.  One the user is out of bed, the alarm automatically ceases.  Can you imagine a scenario for Nintendo gamifying waking up like Pokemon Go did for walking around?  Earning digital Nintendo currency for getting up or getting sufficient rest perhaps?  After a story about Green Day re-releasing their dookie album on diverse hardware such as a Game Boy cartridge or Teddy Ruxpin, the co-hosts   discuss a post pointing to the Furby source code on archive.org.  

Michael and Michael wrap up the episode with an article from every.to on how geopolitical changes have an impact on the digital world with the example of the British government transferring sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.  

What German rhymes have you been listening to (or creating)?  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

This is not an Apple Podcast

The Verge article: Apple’s Vision Pro leader, Dan Riccio, is retiring

Games at Work e486: Future Frames

Submerged

OggCamp 2024 in Manchester, UK

Barbaras Rhabarberbar

The Guardian article: ‘Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungs-aufgabenübertragungsgesetz’: how viral tongue-twisters lightened up German language

Bodo Wartke (auf Englisch)

Trading on Nostalgia 

Nintendo Sound Clock Alarmo

acquired.fm season 12, episode 3 Nintendo’s Origins

acquired.fm season 12, episode 4 Nintendo: The Console Wars

Dookie Demastered

just in case someone needs it, the internet archive has the source code for furbies archive.org/details/furby-sour

— Harp :wigglytuff: (@wigglytuffitout) 2024-10-05T15:37:54.478Z

Ars Technica article: archive.org, a repository of the history of the Internet, has a data breach

All the World’s a Game

Wired article: Tim Walz Rally Goes Live on World of Warcraft Twitch Stream

PC Gamer article: Duake lets you play Quake as the Doomguy

Tom’s Hardware article: Deckintosh has Apple’s latest macOS Sequoia running on the Steam Deck

Every.to article: The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

earth.org article: Tuvalu’s Sinking Reality: How Climate Change Is Threatening the Small Island Nation

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

Michael Martine

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e484 — n Card Monty

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set of face down playing cards, with the queen of hearts showing
Photo by Laine Cooper on Unsplash

Published 7 October 2024

Co-hosts Andy, Michael and Michael start off the show with a follow on discussion from last week’s episode on the future of work and AR glasses.  This theme is not new at all to the Games at Work crew – many examples of the future of augmented reality coming through glasses can be found in the back catalogue – and some from more than a decade ago are included in the show notes.  Michael M brings up a recent interview with Mark Zuckerberg by the Acquired.FM team where the Meta CEO contrasts an open technology ecosystem vs a closed system operated by competitors that hinder innovation and speed.  Michael M further postulates that at some point, there will be a cultural norm of taking glasses off, just like cellphones face down, to signal that people are really in the moment with one another, without technology helping/interfering with how people communicate. 

A privacy problem for an AR use case?

One of the superb use cases for AR the Games at Work co-hosts have discussed many times is the ability to recollect name of the person you are looking at and details of previous interactions.  Michael R brings up a timely Apple Intelligence television advertisement dealing with this topic – see the show notes for the video.  A couple of articles put the focus on how this may go awry, with facial recognition quickly identifying a person, allowing a nefarious actor to feign and exploit a non-existent relationship.  These stories include examples of how one may opt out of facial recognition databases, however, new databases will crop up every day to replace them.  In a similar vein, the advances in AI photographic and video editing can provide an opportunity to trick people into alter memories.

Who owns your data?

Next up, the team takes on the thorny topics of OpenAI changing to a for profit business, and 23 and Me about to sell the company.  Both of these topics bring with them the notion of how the data accumulated by these entities may be used in the future.  And with such future use, what are the appropriate protections that individuals may take in the meantime.

NC in the News

Wrapping up the episode this week is a series of technological and supply chain stories stemming from the ongoing challenges stemming from hurricane Helene’s damaging wind and water across the southeast United States.  The team focuses in particular on the impacts to western North Carolina, where the rainfall and subsequent flooding have caused immense damage to people, homes, businesses, hospitals, schools, universities and so much more.  The team discusses stories of exacerbating these challenges by malicious actors operating across social media, extolling conspiracy theories and deliberate misinformation, hampering rescue and recovery efforts.  Andy brings into the conversation how changes in how stories and news are prioritized contributes to these problems. 

It is clear that the world is a small, small place, and the lives of people are interconnected in ways that we can clearly see and so many ways that are not immediately visible, yet just as vital.

Will you be taking action with PimEyes or 23 and Me?  What cultural norms do you expect to emerge from AR technological advances?  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

Glasses are the future of computing?

Six Colors blog post: Meta and Apple: Same game, different rules

Games at Work e81: One Step Beyond

Games at Work e87: Squeezing out some value

Games at Work e180: Augmented Beer Goggles

Games at Work e190: Crazy to the Macs

acquired.fm The Mark Zuckerberg Interview

The Verge article: Microsoft to end its Android apps on Windows 11 subsystem in 2025

Ars Technica article: Meta smart glasses can be used to dox anyone in seconds, study finds

The Verge article: College students used Meta’s smart glasses to dox people in real time

PimEyes 

PimEyes opt out process

New MIT research has found that AI-edited photos can reliably induce false memories of events personally experienced.

The scientists called them "synthetic human memories."

machinesociety.ai/p/new-ai-tri

— Mike Elgan (@MikeElgan) 2024-09-28T08:32:12.956Z

Machine | Society blog post: New AI trick: ‘synthetic human memories’

Data – who owns it?

Vox article: OpenAI as we knew it is dead

The Atlantic: Remember That DNA You Gave 23andMe?

23andMe

23andMe: Downloading & deleting your 23andMe data

North Carolina in the News

Ars Technica article: Helene takes ultrapure quartz mines offline, threatens tech supply chains

@mpesce turned up this Wired article from 2018 about the quartz in Spruce Pine wired.com/story/book-excerpt-s

— Michael Martine (@michaelmartine) 2024-09-30T03:09:32.688Z

Wired article: The Ultra-Pure, Super-Secret Sand That Makes Your Phone Possible

North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality: Gold of NC

NPR article: Politically charged rumors and conspiracy theories about Helene flourish on X

Hikari’s blog: the algorithm is killing twitter and it’s driving me insane

@hikari thank you for writing that and I’m sorry you have been through that emotional journey. I had a similar but different one (see buttondown.com/andypiper/archi and buttondown.com/andypiper/archi and andypiper.co.uk/2023/07/31/goo)

I completely agree with your conclusions; but, it is and was Musk and everything he brought about, that killed Twitter.

— Andy Piper (@andypiper) 2024-10-02T20:19:16.825Z

WUNC article: To combat misinformation, start with connection, not correction

Washington Post article: Helene response hampered by misinformation, conspiracy theories

CBS News article: In Finland, classes in recognizing fake news, disinformation

Wikipedia article: Subliminal stimuli

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

Michael Martine

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e483 — Future Frames

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thick framed eyeglasses on top of a newspaper
Photo by Eyekeeper Eyekeeper on Unsplash

Published 30 September 2024

Co-hosts Andy, Michael and Michael are reunited and start things off with thorough discussion on the “Clark Kent-esque” Meta Orion augmented reality glasses.  The Verge article on this subject brings several perspectives into focus from the cohosts.  One observation drew attention to the “neural wristband” used to capture gestures like fingers pinching to represent a click.  Another saw the puck as another object to keep track of, when in theory a phone may serve the same purpose to deliver the off-glasses compute power.  The team drew comparisons to the Ray-Ban Meta discussed on previous episodes, and used by Andy while recording this show.  While the Ray-Ban edition does not have the augmented reality capabilities, it does provide an on-the-go connection with an AI agent to ask questions.  Harkening back to prior episodes, this kind of human augmentation will most certainly have societal and behavioral changes in how people interact with one another.  Check out e192 from 2018 for one such example.  Interestingly enough, the point of Zuckerberg and Alex Heath using the Orion glasses to play an Augmented Reality version of Pong was not mentioned on this Games at Work episode!  Check out e400 for another story on AR Pong in the show notes!

The co-hosts discuss the repairability of the newest iPhone, the Halide and Panels apps before rounding out the episode with a conversation on how touchscreen kiosks have changed the nature of fast food ordering in some unexpected ways.

How do you expect new instances of AI and AR hardware to change how people interact with one another?  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

Hardware

The Verge article: Meta’s Big Tease

@viticci yep. Also Meta admitting that they tried to make this a product but it's "years" away… is strikingly similar to Gurman's reports about Apple doing the same thing. Apple just doesn't show its prototypes.

It does make me think this is happening sooner than I expected, though.

— Jason Snell (@jsnell) 2024-09-25T19:30:03.394Z

Games At Work e192: PVP-Y with Mr. Mumbles

Meta Quest 3S

Games at Work e400: Quadringenti (for AR Pong)

ZD Net article: The iPhone 16 is the most-repairable iPhone yet, according to iFixit

Hackaday article: Hands-On With New iPhone’s Electrically-Released Adhesive

Ebay: Travel case for the 27” iMac

Software

9 to 5 Mac article: Halide rejected from the App Store because it doesn’t explain why the camera takes photos

The latest Halide update was rejected because, after seven years, a random reviewer decided our permission prompt wasn't descriptive enough.

I don't know how to explain why a camera app needs camera permissions.

— Ben Sandofsky (@sandofsky) 2024-09-22T13:14:28.170Z

The Verge article: Marques Brownlee says ‘I hear you’ after fans criticize his new wallpaper app

Time Flies by Koen van Gilst

The Lost Outpost blog post: The Web, made by Humans

The Lost Outpost blog post: I love the Web

Unexpected Technology Outcomes

CNN article: McDonald’s touchscreen kiosks were feared as job killers. Instead, something surprising happened

Michael Martine

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