Games At Work dot Biz

A Very Special Episode: BCS Webinar

By Michael Martine | December 26, 2022 - 12:06 |December 26, 2022 Podcast

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images of Ian Hughes, Michael Rowe, Andy Piper and Michael Martine from the BCS Webinar YouTube recording. — BCS Webinar with Ian, Michael, Andy and Michael recorded 12 Dec 2022

In A Very Special Episode, Andy, Michael and Michael were thrilled to be the guests of Ian Hughes on an unscripted webinar on the Games At Work podcast. Ian is the Chair of the BCS IT Animation and Games Development Specialist Group. The video webinar was recorded Monday, 12 December, and this is the audio feed of the video for the Games At Work listening audience. If you’d like to see why the cohosts say that they have “faces for radio”, have a look at the YouTube recording in the show notes below!

In this 58 minute free ranging conversation, Ian leads the discussion with the Games At Work cohosts, getting a detailed look at the origin story and what it takes to make a podcast that has continued weekly for nearly a decade. Michael, Andy and Michael each share personal insights about the podcast, guests that have come on the show (such as Ian himself!), and what makes the endeavor tick. Spoiler alert: it is a combination of curiosity, dedication and camaraderie that make the difference for this podcast.

Learn whether there was a radioactive spider somewhere in the distant past. Discover what “pressing the big red button” means in the context of this show. Understand what goes into the audio engineering on a (nearly) weekly basis for over a decade. Engage with the cohosts with your ideas, and get them to talk about news stories you find interesting. Reminisce about the DogearNation podcast – but do not go to the website! All this and more on this Very Special Episode, as the team runs up to major milestone episode 400.

This set of show notes lovingly handcrafted (not by ChatGPT or another bot). Drop us a link or an idea for the upcoming episodes over at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and maybe it will be on the historic episode 400!

Selected Article Links

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT

BCS webinar: Behind the scenes at the Games at Work dot Biz podcast (AGM)

Feeding Edge blog post: What does it take to make the long running Games At Work dot Biz podcast or any other for that matter?

Games at Work e397 – Chatty Bad AI (reflections on the BCS webinar)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:11 — 64.5MB) | Embed

e397 — Chatty Bad AI

By Michael Martine | December 19, 2022 - 06:44 |December 18, 2022 Podcast

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speech bubble — Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

Andy, the continuity cohost, is joined this week by Michael R. After reflecting on the BCS behind the scenes webinar on the podcast, the cohosts get things started with a few games, notably Star Wars Galaxies. Then, continuing on the ChatGPT theme from last week, Andy introduces an article where the subject is a bot, supported by people, who step in from time to time when the bot needs a little human intervention. The surprising thing is that the human assistants to the bot started using the language of the bot in their everyday lives.

In addition to talking about Lensa, the pair also discuss Riffusion, which generates spectrograms from a prompt which may then be played as an audio file. Super cool – give it a try!

The New Stack lists the top 5 internet technologies for 2022. Generative AI, Fediverse, Cloud IDEs (early in the year), Open Metaverse and Decentralized Storage. Of these topics, the Games At Work team have discussed each at some point this year, with the possible exception of storage.

Are you a bot? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!

Selected Article Links

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT webinar: Behind the scenes at the Games at Work dot Biz podcast (AGM)

I love that #StarWarsGalaxies is still going.
Star Wars Galaxies emu Dark Rebellion uses integrated D20 systems for ‘complex and immersive adventures’
https://massivelyop.com/2022/12/11/star-wars-galaxies-emu-dark-rebellion-uses-integrated-d20-systems-for-complex-and-immersive-adventures/

— Theo Priestley (@tdp) 2022-12-13T23:47:09.900Z

Wikipedia article: Star Wars Galaxies

Ars Technica article: Amazon Games branches out, announces it will publish the next Tomb Raider

TechDirt article: Getty Images Watermark Shows Up In Latest Square ‘Final Fantasy’ Game

The Guardian article: Becoming a chatbot: my life as a real estate AI’s human backup

these kids are so used to bots being at the end of the submit button, more so that i was used to experiencing at that age, so i keep that in mind and respond to such reports along the lines of "hey i want to help, but this is not how you talk to people to get it." and they often apologize, genuinely! i get a lot of "i didn't realize this was a person" which is incredibly mature once you get past their original message calling my mom gay because their bot code doesn't work lol 2/5

— jenn schiffer (@jenn) 2022-12-02T20:45:16.757Z

"Out of 100 avatars I generated, 16 were topless, and in another 14 it had put me in extremely skimpy clothes… I have Asian heritage…My white female colleague got significantly fewer sexualized images. Another colleague with Chinese heritage got results similar to mine."
Incredibly important story from Melissa Heikkilä about how the viral AI avatar app Lensa repeatedly undressed her without her consent, and its grotesque fetish for Asian women.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/12/1064751/the-viral-ai-avatar-app-lensa-undressed-me-without-my-consent/

— Karen Hao 郝珂灵 (@karenhao) 2022-12-13T01:10:25.596Z

TechCrunch article: UPDATED: It’s way too easy to trick Lensa AI into making NSFW images

Riffusion

https://www.riffusion.com/?&prompt=madonna+and+elton+john+lullaby+duet&seed=51211&denoising=0.75&seedImageId=og_beat

The New Stack article: Top 5 Internet Technologies of 2022

Corel Gallery Clipart Mastodon Bot

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:54 — 32.1MB) | Embed

e396 — GAN vs GAN

By Michael Martine | December 12, 2022 - 06:03 |December 11, 2022 Podcast

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three robotic hands typing on a typewriter - does not appear realistic. image generated by www.crAIyon.com with the following prompt "silver robot hands typing on a typewriter" — image generated by www.crAIyon.com 11 Dec 22 with the following prompt “silver robot hands typing on a typewriter”

Andy, the continuity cohost, is joined this week by Michael M. The cohosts get things started with all things ChatGPT, which has been all over the news in the past few days. The concept of generating text that could then be fed into an image generator, which in turn may be used to create a virtual world experience in a project workflow. This could easily create a tailored, randomized and customized experience for the user, especially those that are expert in seeding the prompt for ChatGPT, and then in turn, the image generating software. In these early days, expertise in writing the proper prompt is highly valuable, much as is the expertise that Andy has developed in being expert in wielding search engines. Critical thinking and analysis of what is presented to validate the “truthiness” of generated text, images, worlds will be more and more important in the future. Michael and Andy muse on how there may be in the not too distant future bots / AI that can do such expert analysis.

The pair talk about a recent news story about an AI vision invisibility cloak. Going back to the archives, there was a Games At Work discussion about an invisibility cloak designed Duke University researchers — see the show notes for a link.

In a reversal of a previous board decision to allow the San Francisco police department to allow remote controlled robots to use deadly force, the city’s board of supervisors have voted against such use. Related to the San Francisco article is Daniel Suarez’s fictional novel Kill Decision, which has been discussed in several prior episodes — see the notes below for two of them. Incidentally, the notion of making yourself “invisible” to AI is also a subject in the novel.

Waze is in the news for a couple of reasons. Andy and Michael talk about Waze getting an in-car app in Renault vehicles and the further integration with the Google Maps team. They also remember the early days of the app when users competed to map new (to Waze) roads by “road munching”.

Winding up this episode, the cohosts touch on Dungeons of Daggorath and cyber security challenges in Vanuatu.

What would you have ChatGPT write/assemble for you? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz and let us know!

Selected Article Links

1) #GPTchat, dream me a city ✨
2) #midjourney, take me there 🤩

This #AI stuff is the real multiverse. pic.twitter.com/o9MneR9EZe
— Guy Parsons (@GuyP) December 5, 2022

TechCrunch article: UPDATED: It’s way too easy to trick Lensa AI into making NSFW images

Mashable article: People will ask ChatGPT anything

DoNotPay is building a chrome extension where you can specify something like “negotiate my Comcast bill down,” and it will use the Comcast online chat to lower your bill with GPT-3.

Over time, Comcast will also use LLMs. So robots will just be negotiating with each other!
— Joshua Browder (@jbrowder1) December 6, 2022

DoNotPay.com

Wikipedia article: OpenAI

OpenAI.com

ChatGPT

Ian Hughes’ novels Reconfigure and Cont3xt

Wikipedia article: Generative adversarial network

Games at Work e163 — Chat Me Maybe?

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM)

The Verge article: AI-generated answers temporarily banned on coding Q&A site Stack Overflow

The Register article: Stack Overflow bans ChatGPT as ‘substantially harmful’ for coding issues

Vice World News article: Chinese Students Invent Coat That Makes People Invisible to AI Security Cameras

DukeStories article: From Invisibility Cloaks to Satellite Communications

The Verge article: San Francisco reverses plans to allow police robots to kill suspects

Games at Work e250 — See Clearly Now

Games at Work e150 — Cyber Dementors

We had a lot of second life virtual campfires (often thanks to @timelessp gadgets with a chat interface to spawn them) in 2006. Looking forward to AI powered #metaverse just asking for what we need as per midjourney “a meeting around a campfire for 10 at sunset” but in 3d space.

— Epredator (@epredator) 2022-12-07T11:55:54.997Z

The Verge article: Waze gets built-in car app for the first time

Gizmodo article: Google Is Combining Its Maps and Waze Teams Amid Cost-Cutting Pressure

Some time back I adapted the fantastic PC port of the classic #Tandy #CoCo game Dungeons of Daggorath to run online via #WebAssembly. To play it, point your browser (desktop or mobile) at:
https://daggorath.online/

— Nathan Byrd (@cognitivegears) 2022-12-02T15:53:45.067Z

Dungeons of Daggorath

NPR article: The Pacific island nation of Vanuatu has been knocked offline for more than a month

Tuvalu government

Tuvalu, The First Digital Nation

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:42 — 41.0MB) | Embed

e395 — Breaking Reality

By Michael Martine | December 5, 2022 - 06:03 |December 5, 2022 Podcast

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engravings of quantum discoveries with their respective dates and scientists — Photo by Christian Chomiak on Unsplash

Andy and Michael R build off of last week’s episode of creating reality to breaking reality. They start with an article about the cute Neko cat, and how Evert Pot created a javascript port of it. If you want even more fun playing with cute cats, give Nekoatsume a try (see links below).

Next, a series of science articles, beginning with the commercial (COTS) cameras used on the Orion module of Artemis I. Then, the Alexa integration in Callisto. Just don’t ask about the pod bay doors. Coming up quickly is an experiment that could break Einstein’s theory of special relativity, where researchers at CERN measured neutrinos arriving 60 nanoseconds faster than light would have done.

If that’s not quite enough, a couple of articles about how using duality, a team led by Maria Spiropulu of the California Institute of Technology used a quantum computer to model how an Einstein Rosen bridge between two black holes is related to entanglement. For the quantum curious, please check out the embedded below video. It is an easy to understand treatment for how a wormhole was created in the lab using a quantum computer.

Then we’re on to the prose version of stable diffusion that’s been lighting up the airwaves in the past week or so. Friend of the show Ian Hughes uses GPT3 AI to write an office (The Office) scene where Blackadder and Baldrick hatch a cunning plan to get past the monotony of the mounds of paperwork to be done.

Amazon builds a realistic SimCity, Unreal launches RealityScan, and Apple reportedly renames the mixed reality software to power the as-yet-unannounced headset ‘xrOS’. So much reality in one small entangled episode.

What part of Einstein’s theory of general relativity do you think will be the next to unravel or be reinforced with more spooky action at a distance? Drop us a line at @gamesatwork_biz and let us know!

Selected Article Links

evertpot.com blog post – Neko – A brief history and porting to Javascript

nekoatsume.com NekoAtsume Kitty Collector (English)

Hey, did you know that the Orion module on ARTEMIS I is using (modified) commercial, off-the-shelf cameras? And that those gorgeous exterior shots are being made with GoPros?
Here's an engineering presentation (PDF) from 2017 by Steve Bailey of Deep Space Systems, going into the cameras and what was needed to adapt them.
https://www.asnt.org/~/media/Files/Events-Meetings/Conferences/ISIW/2017/3c_3_Bailey_Deep-Space-Systems_Engineering-Camera-System-for-Orion
#nasa #artemis @orion #imaging #cameras #space #cots #gopro

— Dan Hon (@danhon) 2022-11-29T17:32:31.456Z