e509 — Maverick and Marbles

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two brown llamas in a field
Photo by Josiah Farrow on Unsplash

Published 14 April 2025

e509 with Michael and Michael – stories and discussion all around AI, LLMs, llamas, generated Quake, grokking, generalization and much more.

Michael and Michael get things rolling while Andy is away with a series of AI stories, beginning with Siri, continuing on to the latest iteration of Meta’s Llama 4 models, Scout and Maverick.  Following on the llama theme, Michael R is reminded of the intro credits from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  After reflecting on an AI generated version of Quake, Michael and Michael turn to an article from the MIT Technology Review, which explores how models would all of a sudden be able to complete a task without a clear explanation as to why.  This made Michael M think about a Ted Talk describing how some polyglots acquire languages – check out Lýdia Machová’s talk below for more.

The team touches on the latest app from IconFactory called Tapestry.  Tapestry allows users to follow people across a multiplicity of social services, and eliminate duplicate posts.  Then, they consider the AR capabilities of the Zeiss Holographic Transparent Display technology.  Last up, is the Busy Bar, a device to help others know that you are not in an interruptible state.  Check out the bonus links below to find the Rube Goldberg marbles-powered device that influenced the name of the episode.

What information would you most like to see in your airplane window?  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

AI

9 to 5 Mac article: Craig Federighi’s leadership has already resulted in this major Siri pivot, per report

Visual Studio IDE: AI-assisted development in Visual Studio

The Verge article: Meta got caught gaming AI benchmarks

Intro Credits from Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The Verge article: Microsoft has created an AI-generated version of Quake

Wikipedia article: Quake

MIT Technology Review article: Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

arXiv paper: DEEP DOUBLE DESCENT: WHERE BIGGER MODELS AND MORE DATA HURT

arXiV paper: UNDERSTANDING DEEP LEARNING REQUIRES RE-THINKING GENERALIZATION

Boy Genius Report article: This is the difference between how humans and AI ‘think’

OpenReview: Evaluating the Robustness of Analogical Reasoning in Large Language Models

Cool Stuff

:tapestry_app: Tapestry 1.1 brings a host of great new features: Follow individual accounts & lists on Bluesky & Mastodon, automatically remove duplicates from the timeline with Crosstalk, and quickly switch your timelines with Tapestry’s redesigned navigation.

Learn more about these features plus dozens of other improvements in today's FREE update of Tapestry – Your personal timeline app.

blog.iconfactory.com/2025/04/t

— The Iconfactory (@Iconfactory) 2025-04-08T15:33:42.712Z

Iconfactory blog post: Tapestry: What’s New? No Déjà Vu!

Popular Science article: Smart glass windows would beam in-flight info over scenic views

Busy Bar

Bonus Links: More Cool Stuff 

The Verge article: Samsung is finally releasing Ballie

The Verge article: You can build these marble runs and connect them to your smart home over Wi-Fi

Wikipedia article: Rube Goldberg

The Verge article: 22 years later, modders are keeping SimCity 4 alive

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

Michael Martine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:10 — 44.8MB) | Embed

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e508 — Taxes and Tetris

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transparent grey Nintendo Game Boy Pocket booted up with the Tetris game home screen with copyright 1989
Photo by Ben Griffiths on Unsplash

Published 7 April 2025

e508 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories and discussion on AI Conversational Swarm Intelligence, the Pokétax game and numerous Nintendo stories and much more.

Michael, Andy and Michael get things started with a story about how large groups, well beyond the research ideal of 4-7 people, may have a simultaneous conversation with one another, sharing and evolving ideas.  Drawing inspiration from how schools of fish communicate with one another, a Carnegie Mellon and unanimous.ai paper illustrates the architecture behind Conversational Swarm Intelligence.  AI agents track groups of 7 humans for novel ideas and pass along those ideas to other groups of humans in order to more quickly propagate the evolution of ideas through an accelerated wisdom of the crowd manner. 

Then, the co-hosts turn their attention to the experiences of the Wikimedia Foundation.  They note that there have been huge spikes in bandwidth for serving up multimedia files – not from humans seeking information, rather from scraper bots.  

Nothing But Nintendo

After an AR segue to look at a slingshot mechanism to change lighting colors (check out the video in the show notes), the team switches (see what we did there?) to all things Nintendo.  A story somehow escaped the Games at Work team back in 2012, when the Louvre museum replaced their audio guides with Nintendo 3DS consoles.  Well, that story is coming to an end, and those 3DS systems will be replaced by something new.  Continuing on the Nintendo theme, the accounting firm Open Ledger has created a game called Pokétax to make filing your taxes fun and exciting with a Pokémon experience.  Then, Andy, Michael and Michael talk about the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2.  Last, the team reminisces about playing Tetris on the Nintendo Game Boy, in discussing an article about how Tetris is a hack for people to get better at their jobs.

Wrapping things up for this episode, the team continues the Nintendo theme a little more with 3d printed musical fidget toys that play classic Mario (and other) video game tunes.  Check out that video below for an example.

Would you like to play a tax game?  Or maybe a round of Tetris to improve your problem solving?  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

AI (Basketball IQ and More)

VentureBeat article: I asked an AI swarm to fill out a March Madness bracket — here’s what happened

ARXiV paper: Large-scale Group Brainstorming using Conversational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) versus Traditional Chat

Unanimous.ai 

Thinkscape.ai

The Register article: Wikipedia’s overlords bemoan AI bot bandwidth burden

Rachel Lee Nabors – https://toot.cafe/@rachelnabors 

AR / VR (for a 3 point Slingshot)

https://techhub.social/@ellenich/114279691712148125

Nothing but Nintendo

The Verge article: The Mona Lisa is saying goodbye to the Nintendo 3DS.

Games at Work e54: She Blinded Me, With Science!

Retrododo article: Accounting Firm Releases ‘Pokétax’ Game To Make Filing Your Tax Fun

The Pokétax Challenge

Open Ledger

Ars Technica article: Nintendo unveils Switch 2 ahead of June 5 launch

Nintendo Switch 2 – How to buy 

Business Insider article: The Weird New Work Hack

Hacking (without fouling)

Hackaday article: 3D Print (and Play!) the Super Mario Tune as a Fidget Toy

Your eyes are not deceiving you… I got an Apple TV 1st Gen, the only x86 based model (it uses a Pentium M as its CPU) booting Windows XP Service Pack 3! For reals!

This was possible through a small security flaw in the Apple TV's firmware and boot process… while the Apple TV looks for a boot.efi file on its boot partition and has it load a Mach-O binary to be able to boot, it doesn't actually care about the actual contents of the file! So by that note, you can wrap a kernel or bootloader from another OS into a Mach-O file and name it mach_kernel, and the Apple TV won't care and will happily boot it! So after this little escapade of cursed computing, you know Linux is next! 😁

More deets are in this video, along with a link to grab a premade disk image from the Internet Archive!
youtu.be/v2w5MmiRHUo

The entire project was done by distrohopper39b, who chronicles his work on the project from beginning to end here:

youtu.be/YkjrEXtZoWM

— The 500 Hats of LambdaCalculus (@LambdaCalculus) 2025-04-03T21:56:27.849Z

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

Michael Martine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:53 — 43.0MB) | Embed

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e507 — VR is Dead?  Let’s Play!

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red and green bocce balls on a grassy field
Photo by Braedon McLeod on Unsplash

Published 31 March 2025

e507 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories and discussion on AIs training humans, non-serindipious searching, doomed VR gaming, playlist portability and much more.

Michael, Andy and Michael get things started with a couple of AI articles dealing with how AI is training humans, and AI search results are impacting serendipity.  Michael R points out that search engines used to bring people to you – and now, search engines are summarizing to the point where there’s not a need to bring users to the content.  

After touching on a few of the Indy games from GDC2025, the cohosts talk about the latest article declaring that VR gaming is doomed.  And not Doom – doomed.  There are plenty of examples to the contrary, such as Civilization 7.

The team discusses the new LEGO Lord of the Rings set for Bilbo Baggins birthday party.  It should be noted that there will be a designer signing event at the London flagship LEGO store at Leicester Square, next Saturday, 5 April for anyone who happens to be in town.

For the last main topic of this episode, the co-hosts unpack some stories on music sharing and playlist portability.  First up is Napster, and the news that it will enable concerts in the metaverse.  Andy noted that in 506 episodes, we have not ever brought up Napster (or at least tagged or put in the show notes).   Last, the team discusses a couple of methods for moving your playlist from one streaming service to another.

Is your search history an accurate representation of you?  Would you go to a concert in Napster?  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

AI

The New Yorker article: Your A.I. Lover Will Change You

IMDb: Her

Wikipedia article: Replicas

https://replika.com

Paul Stamatiou blog: Browse No More

Ask Jeeves

GDC, Games, and VR

The Verge article: 7 cool indie games from GDC 2025

IMDb: Everything Everywhere All at Once

The Verge article: MainFrames is a charming platformer that takes place inside computers

Retrododo article: Prince Of Prussia Is A Free To Play Tribute To Wolfenstein & Jordan Mechner’s Prince Of Persia

PC World article: Game developers are losing faith in VR as a gaming market

Joseph Simpson, VisionPro blogger on Mastodon

Civilization VII VR coming in Spring 2025 announcement

LEGO

Slashfilm article: New Lord Of The Rings LEGO Set Builds A Brick Version Of The Shire (And The Dragon Firework)

Brickfanatics article: LEGO Icons The Shire designer signing event re-confirmed

Music

Ars Technica article: Napster to become a music-marketing metaverse firm after being sold for $207M

Wikipedia article: Napster

Obdura’s Playlisty

Games at Work e357: Real Reality, or Something for music portability

Last.FM Track My Music by scrobbling 

Andy on Fireside Fedi

Fireside Fedi e7: Andy Piper – Mastodon (audio version)

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

Michael Martine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:09 — 47.5MB) | Embed

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e506 — Make Me A PowerPoint

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screen capture of a presentation agenda with a phot of a painting of a mountain
screen capture of a presentation agenda with a photo of a painting of a mountain

Published 23 March 2025

e506 with Andy and Michael M – stories and discussion on the attention economy, focus, pirated data used in training LLMs, snarky software and much more.

Andy and Michael M get things rolling with an intriguing article dealing with focus and attention.  Part of their reaction was that there are so many competing sources for attention.  And that the pressure to respond with speed to these competing sources compounds the challenge.  The conversation reminded Michael of a memo that Steve Jobs wrote to his team at NeXT 39 years ago imploring them to have time of uninterrupted individual work.  Check that out in the show notes below.  Michael and Andy give a couple examples of what they suggest to bring balance and creativity back to the fore.

Continuing on to the advances made with large language models, Andy and Michael take up the discussion on the data needed to train the LLMs.  The Atlantic article on the use of pirated books to train AI also includes LibGen, their search tool The Atlantic created for their analysis of the Library Genesis data set.  This subject has cropped up in earlier episodes – such as the discussion on the Sarah Silverman example.  Next, the team turns to an AI coding assistant named Cursor.  After a developer had spent an hour of vibe coding with Cursor, the AI reportedly gave feedback to the developer that he should complete the work himself to ensure he understands the logic and can maintain the code.  Computer applications with snark are nothing new – take Carrot Weather or the Talking Moose for example.  Cursor’s reply echos practically every geometry teacher who insists that going through the mathematical proof is crucial to understanding why A^2 + B^2 = C^2 is true.  Not necessarily a bad idea, yet surprisingly comes from an AI assistant.  

After a surprising article about speed runner successes on aging and accelerating Super Nintendo hardware, Andy and Michael reflect on games embedded inside of other games from a How to Geek article.  This appeals greatly to Andy’s love of game preservation, and strikes Michael’s fancy for how art echos through the years, sharing a prior incarnation of this topic with paintings having paintings in them.

Then, a story about the LEGO x Pokémon teaser.  The team wraps up this episode with a couple of stories about the challenges indy software developers face.

What suggestions and techniques do you have for recapturing your time and attention?  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

Attention Economy

Wikipedia article: Daylight Savings Time

ploum.net blog post: A Society That Lost Focus

Games at Work e67: Free Bitcoins! for the attention economy

Wikipedia article: Battle Chess

Edward Tufte

AI

The Atlantic article: The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem

The Atlantic article: Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI

Games at Work e443: In the Stone for the Sarah Silverman discussion

Wired article: An AI Coding Assistant Refused to Write Code—and Suggested the User Learn to Do It Himself

Cursor

Games

404 Media article: Super Nintendo Hardware Is Running Faster as It Ages

How to Geek article: These 15 Games Have Other Games Hidden Inside Them

Daily Art Magazine article: Paintings Within Paintings: Time to Go Meta in the Art World

The Verge article: This watch has Pong and Missile Command instead of apps

Ars Technica article: Sobering revenue stats of 70K mobile apps show why devs beg for subscriptions

Gamesradar article: “Valve knows it, I know it, and you need to know it”: Steam expert tells indie devs to “give away” demos, because actually playing a game beats all other marketing

LEGO

Oh hello, what do we have here? 👀


retrododo.com/pokemon-lego-set

— Daniel (@puresick) 2025-03-18T14:16:13.486Z

Retrododo article: Pokémon LEGO Set Reportedly Leaked By LEGO Mexico

Lego Germany Pokémon 

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

Michael Martine

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:32 — 58.5MB) | Embed

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