e406 — AI Lemmings

By | |
Comments Off on e406 — AI Lemmings
multiple exposure photo of a chess pawn
Photo by Elia Pellegrini on Unsplash

Published 27 Feb 2023

Michael, Michael and Andy start things off for this edition of Games at Work with an 25 year old example of the metaverse: Ultima Online.  The MIT Technology Review article on UO describes some of the experiment in the massively online world and likens the developers to a government that created laws through code and in-game economics.  

Then the co-hosts into a discussion on Andy’s recent experiment with ChatGPT.  Andy asked ChatGPT to write a professional bio, and as in many other well documented examples, the initial examples were filled with inaccuracies.  Patiently and politely, Andy corrected those inaccuracies through the conversational experience, and landed with something quite good after several iterations.  This kind of was the subject of a recent Washington Post article as well.  A Wired article focused on how AI is employed to author more believable phishing email – so watch out for more sophisticated, grammatically correct scams in your inbox.  And Midjourney was used to create realistic images of Gaudí architecture that was never built.  

Next up is Andy’s recent AR acquisition, the Brilliant Monocle.  This device has a small screen to provide information through a lens that attaches to an eyeglass frame.  Speaking of small screens, James Brown (no, not the Godfather of Soul) made a functional Doom-playing computer using one of LEGO’s computer bricks.  This reminded the co-hosts of e372 where another such example of a functioning LEGO-sized computer was discussed. 

Then, the co-hosts talk about Humanity, a Lemmings-esque game that will be released in May.  The currently available demo (available 23 Feb through 6 Mar) shows the interesting gameplay alongside a level builder.  Wrapping things up for this episode, the co-hosts take a look at the latest edition of Gran Turismo, which features a VR mode. 

What other games should the LEGO computer brick be able 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.  That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Selected Article Links

Metaverse OG

MIT Technology Review: Welcome to the oldest part of the metaverse

Ultima Online

fun with AI

Andy’s fun with ChatGPT – multiple versions of his bio

The Washington Post article: Tech’s hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required.

@drewharwell an intriguing concept, especially when secondary education is so focused on the technical that literature, history and the arts are in fact quite intertwined and necessary for this kind of work. Much has been said about uncommon expertise in search being a differentiating skill set. is a natural extension. Also discussed on the episode of gamesatwork.Biz that will be published on Monday.

— Michael Martine (@michaelmartine) 2023-02-25T16:47:35.966Z

Wired article: AI Wrote Better Phishing Emails Than Humans in a Recent Test

Architectural Digest article: See the Fantastical World Antoni Gaudí Never Built

hacking

Brilliant Monocle

hackster.io article: James Brown’s Tiny LEGO Brick Computer Is Now Truly Self-Contained, with a Playable Doom Port

Games At Work e372 – Metaverse & LEGO Standards

games

The Verge article: Humanity tasks you, a Shiba Inu, with guiding humans through Lemmings-like puzzles

Humanity

Wikipedia article: Lemmings (video game)

Wikipedia article: Lemming

Wikipedia article: Shiba Inu

The Verge article: Sony shares details on Gran Turismo 7’s VR mode and 10 new PSVR 2 launch games

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:33 — 33.3MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Podcast Index | Youtube Music | RSS | More

e405 — New Tech in Old Skins

By | |
Comments Off on e405 — New Tech in Old Skins
steampunk light fixture
Photo by Johnny Briggs on Unsplash

Published 20 Feb 2023

Michael, Michael and Andy start things off for this edition of Games at Work with a follow up listener link on ChatGPT drawing a self portrait.  Is it a chin or is it a frown?  You decide!

The co-hosts then launch into a discussion on the new Bigscreen Beyond personalized VR headset.  Next, they discuss Snap’s ray tracing technology to enhance their AR experience to enable even more realism.  

Then, there’s a post about an Atari 510 pen plotter used to create a cursive Apple “hello” and the famous Macintosh Picasso line art. This is followed by an ingenious implementation of Windows running on a floppy disk.  Check out the show notes below to see these creative implementations.  Geoff Green writes an amusing gasoline car review from the perspective of a world where nearly all cars are electric.  This reminds Michael M of the Andy Griffith monologue “What it Was, Was Football”.  Michael M was inspired by this and wrote a version of the monologue for basketball in 2013.

The case of Gonzales vs Google which is before the US Supreme Court draws the attention of the cohosts as well.  This case raises significant implications about how Section 230 may be considered in the future.  Articles from the MIT Technology Review and the EFF delve into the subject in detail.  

Rounding out this week’s episode are articles on sustainable building using materials readily available on the surface on the moon, and the theft (and subsequent recovery) of 200,000 stolen Cadbury Creme Eggs in the UK.

What would you do with 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs?  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

The Blog of Ed Ross: ChatGPT draws a self portrait 

New Tech

The Verge article: VR’s $999 Beyond headset is custom-made to fit your face

BigscreenVR.com

Warby Parker

TechCrunch article: Snap introduces ray tracing technology for its AR lenses to enhance realism

Snap newsroom press release: Snap Introduces Ray Tracing Technology

Old Tech

Mac Picasso 👩‍🎨 plotted on my custom 510

— paulrickards (@paulrickards) 2023-02-16T18:09:13.638Z

Can you run windows ON a floppy? This is mostly for the lulz. I designed a snap fit case for adafruit’s pyportal dev board in the shape of a floppy disk 💾

— Noe Ruiz (@ecken) 2023-02-14T13:45:59.075Z

Geoff Greer post: Gasoline Car Review

energy.gov article: The History of the Electric Car

BBC TWO The Secret Genius of Modern Life episode 4: Electric Car

Wikipedia article: What It Was, Was Football by Andy Griffith

End of the Internet as we know it? 

MIT Technology Review article: The Supreme Court may overhaul how you live online

Electronic Frontier Foundation article: EFF Tells Supreme Court: User Speech Must Be Protected

Regolith & Cadbury Creme Eggs Crime

Ars Technica article: Blue Origin makes a big lunar announcement without any fanfare

Wall Street Journal article: U.K. Man Stole Nearly 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:38 — 42.5MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Podcast Index | Youtube Music | RSS | More

e404 — Episode Not Found

By | |
Comments Off on e404 — Episode Not Found
404 web page not found error message
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Published 13 Feb 2023

Michael R and Andy start things off for this edition of Games at Work with a follow up story about smart appliances, this time in the form of comics.  Multiple comics.  Check them out in the show notes below.  Then, the team turns to Cory Doctorow’s recent blog post on the combination play of lock-in, high switching costs or platform exploitation, an example of which is actually the subject of one of the comics from the Marketoonist article.  

Next up, is an article about how Interpol is learning how to police crime in the metaverse.  How are they doing this?  Well, for a start, Interpol has built a VR version of it’s headquarters for training.  Andy and Michael also consider the word soup article from VentureBeat dealing with all things metaverse, including the concept of “metanomics”.  

Wrapping up the episode for this week are a couple of AI articles dealing with AI based voice acting and ChatGPT being asked to draw itself via DALL-E.  Of course, the latest LEGO LoTR announcement of the Rivendell set truly captures the imagination!  

What appliances do you want to connect (or disconnect!) from the Internet?  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

Marketoonist article:  evolution of smart products

Pluralistic blog post: Pluralistic: Podcasts are hearteningly enshittification resistant; Red Team Blues excerpt (27 Jan 2023)

BBC article: Interpol working out how to police the metaverse

VentureBeat article: The current state of metaverse interoperability: Where design framework must go from here

PC Gamer article: Modders are using AI to put voice acting in Morrowind, and I’m impressed and concerned all at once

BGR article: Someone asked ChatGPT to draw its humanoid form with Dall-E AI and this is the result

Gizmodo article: The 6,167-Piece Rivendell Is the One Lego Lord of the Rings Set to Rule Them All

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:20 — 33.0MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Podcast Index | Youtube Music | RSS | More

e403 — Smart Appliances Dumb Companies

By | |
Comments Off on e403 — Smart Appliances Dumb Companies
washing machine spinning
Photo by Engin Akyurt

Published 6 Feb 2023

Michael and Michael start things off for this edition of Games at Work with some follow up stories about smart & connected appliances, as there was a flurry of articles on this topic in the prior week.  First up, is an article from The Atlantic, where the author explores the idea of subscription services for ink, and how this changes the nature of the purchase of the printer to something that is no longer owned, to pages as a service.  Then, there’s a post by Dan Goodin on a self-driving automobile with no safety driver that was causing problems for firefighters in San Francisco.  

Then, turning to all things AI, Michael and Michael launch in with a New York Post article about AI driven Armageddon.  Next up is a story about companies decoding your brainwaves, which causes Michael R to reminisce about the Emotiv headset, and Michael M to remember cameras being used to identify micro expressions (both of which were part of e361, link below!)  There are additional articles about GAN networks for determining vulnerabilities, concerns with uses of ChatGPT that may train the corpus with corporate secrets, ChatGPT word problem problems and running large language models on the new Apple M2 MacBook Pro.

Quite a big episode on AI – with a few links that Michael and Michael did not get a chance to cover in the podcast.  Meta testing members only Horizon Worlds metaverse experiences, a superb jigsaw puzzle web app (thanks, Andy!) and a Super Mario infused random text generator.

What appliances do you want to connect (or disconnect!) from the Internet?  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

“Smart” Appliances redux

The Atlantic article: My Printer Is Extorting Me

Self-driving automobiles are a solution in search of a problem. People don't want them, but companies like Uber, Amazon, Cruise and Waymo keep pushing them because there's so much money to be made. I hate the way these companies are compromising our safety and the way government regulators aren't pushing back.

Firefighters were battling a major house fire near the intersection of Hayes and Divisadero streets early in the morning of Jan. 22 when a Cruise vehicle with no safety driver started to creep its way into the emergency scene.

Two firefighters stood in front of the car to prevent the vehicle from driving over hoses used to douse the growing inferno, but that didn’t work. As the car continued to inch forward, one firefighter took quick action and smashed the vehicle’s front window, finally bringing the car to a stop. First responders contacted Cruise, who sent workers to move the vehicle out of the way.

UPDATE: I have already walked back the statement above that no one wants this. Fair enough. Many of you want this.

Lots of you pointed out the number of accidents human drivers have. There is zero evidence that self-driving cars will have a better safety record. And anecdotal evidence like the dangerous incidents in the very limited San Francisco trials suggests AVs may be less safe.

If you want AVs, you should volunteer to have your city be the guinea pigs for this potentially fatal tests. San Francisco ought to ban AVs until there's data they are safe.

sfstandard.com/transportation/

— Dan Goodin (@dangoodin) 2023-01-31T00:29:22.896Z

The San Francisco Standard article: SF Officials Describe Chaos From Cruise, Waymo Cars as They Try To Slow Their Rollout

AI

New York Post article: Rogue AI ‘could kill everyone,’ scientists warn as ChatGPT craze runs rampant

Wikipedia article on The Terminator (movie)

Popular Mechanics article: Companies Already Have the Ability to Decode Your Brainwaves

Games at Work e361 Ancient Games & Ancient Texts 

Emotiv 

Games at Work blog post: Getting All Emotiv(tional)

Schneier on Security article: AIs as Computer Hackers

Amazon Begs Employees Not to Leak Corporate Secrets to ChatGPT

This issue seems to have come to a head recently because Amazon staffers and other tech workers throughout the industry have begun using ChatGPT as a "coding assistant" of sorts to help them write or improve strings of code, the report notes.

futurism.com/the-byte/amazon-b

— Esther Schindler (@estherschindler) 2023-01-30T15:41:31.004Z

The Byte article: Amazon Begs Employees Not To Leak Corporate Secrets To ChatGPT

Wall Street Journal article: ChatGPT Needs Some Help With Math Assignments 

I got this to work! til.simonwillison.net/python/g

— Simon Willison (@simon) 2023-01-31T22:59:53.570Z

I managed to run a language model on my laptop!

I ran huggingface.co/sentence-transf – a sentence transformers model, which can turn sentences of text into a 768 dimension vector, suitable for things like related content searches

Here are my detailed notes: til.simonwillison.net/python/g

See also my explanation of embeddings from a few weeks ago: simonwillison.net/2023/Jan/13/

— Simon Willison (@simon) 2023-01-31T22:59:32.548Z

Bonus links 

TechCrunch article: Meta starts testing ‘members-only worlds’ in Horizon Worlds

Jigidi

Super Mario Ipsum

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:26 — 37.7MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Podcast Index | Youtube Music | RSS | More