This week Andy, Michael, and Michael have a location based show, with discussion on FourSquare, data Privacy, and fast moving robots. Now that Four Square has announced they are shutting down their FourSquare Places site, the team discusses their prior use and how it has tapered off over the years. The guys then pivot from the identification of places/points of interests, using location data, to how companies are using location based data for tracking individuals.
This week Krebs on Security, 404 Media, and others break the story of how global surveillance has become pervasive with mobile ad data. While the examples given our primarily driving by US law and the variety of different data privacy laws by state, there are groups in other countries also looking at data privacy considerations, such as the Open Rights Group. The second order impacts of data privacy for people not in the IT industry, only makes it harder for most people to understand. We also briefly discuss the First Amendment and Amazon’s union busting tactics.
Leaving the legal portion of the show we look at some cool tech: Fast walking robots in China are wearing sneakers, Lego is showcasing the x-men Marvel 97 set, and Coperni shows off gel-based 3D printing!
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.
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.
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.
drop our bots 
