Games At Work dot Biz

Published 25 December 2023

Michael and Michael are back while Andy is away on holiday – and have a great show on communication, human-computer interfaces and more.

This episode starts with a story about using lasers to transmit data over long distances without a loss in fidelity.  The data in question is a video of a cat called Taters chasing a laser, all sent via laser over a distance nearly 19 million miles.  Sticking with the communications theme, Mercedes is piloting the use of turquoise colored lights to signal that their car is driving autonomously.  

Speaking of autonomous cars, a Rolling Stone article delves into the idea that humans are historically very bad performers when it comes to inattentiveness for an indeterminate period followed by a time sensitive task.  This is precisely what is required by the current set of autonomous driving vehicles that require the human to step in at a moment’s notice and become the driver instead of merely a passenger.

Then, Michael and Michael consider how right-sized LLMs (RSLMs?) could be used to speedily employ generative AI on phones.  A couple of articles and a referenced paper point to how Apple may be moving in this direction with iPhone hardware, and not leveraging the cloud for speed and privacy.  

Moving into VR, the cohosts touch on the ability of LLMs to create entire virtual worlds from a simple prompt – something that games such as No Man’s Sky and many others have done for a long time.  Another academic paper spells out how a LLM can create such an environment.  Also discussed are VR environments in Fortnite (Bonvoy) and games (Tommy Hilfiger).

Michael and Michael round out the show with an intriguing conversation on commercializing consumer behavior, including a treatment on the fediverse that includes how many capabilities originally on Craigslist have been disintermediated into companies like StubHub and AirBnB.  This spurs a thought on how marketplaces themselves might be federated (MarketPub for marketplaces?) which may in turn challenge the Amazons & Alibabas of the world.

Michael M share a bit about the Vintage Vinyl record store in Evanston, IL, which was also made famous in the movie High Fidelity.  No doubt there will be a massive increase in traffic both in the in-person store and the mail order website below from the Games at Work bump.

What will you order from Vintage Vinyl?  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 Article Links

You Say ‘Lasers’, I Say ‘Taters’

CNN article: NASA laser message beams video of a cat named Taters back to Earth, and it’s a big deal

Ars Technica article: Turquoise taillights tell you this Mercedes is driving autonomously

Paper from the Proceedings of the Human Factors & Ergonomics Society 2019 Annual Meeting: Light-Based External Human Machine Interface: Color Evaluation for Self-Driving Vehicle and Pedestrian Interaction

AI

Rolling Stone article: Elon Musk’s Big Lie About Tesla Is Finally Exposed

MacRumors article: Apple Develops Breakthrough Method for Running LLMs on iPhones

Paper published on ARXIV: LLM in a flash: Efficient Large Language Model Inference with Limited Memory

Ars Technica article: Apple wants AI to run directly on its hardware instead of in the cloud

Wikipedia article: Data General

Commercialization of VR

Tom’s Guide article: The Holodeck is here — new AI can generate an entire virtual world with a single prompt

No Man’s Sky

Paper: Holodeck: Language Guided Generation of 3D Embodied AI Environments

Wikipedia article: Holodeck

Polygon article: Fortnite’s Marriott Bonvoy Land is a ghost town of video game sadness

Vogue Business article: Tommy Hilfiger on AI and his new fashion game

Commercializing Consumer Behavior

The Verge article: 2023 in social media: the case for the fediverse

Games at Work e402: Which ‘verse is worse?

Schneier on Security article: OpenAI Is Not Training on Your Dropbox Documents—Today

Hush Noiseless Browsing by Joel Arvidsson

The Atlantic article: Is This How Amazon Ends?

Vintage Vinyl Mail Order

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:47 — 49.6MB) | Embed

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