Games At Work dot Biz

Published 1 April 2024

Andy and both Michaels get together to talk tech — focusing on AI generated music, wearable etiquette and AR user experience with a dollop of security & privacy.  

Starting off with a reprise from last week’s episode, the co-hosts enjoy a discussion about music sparked by Suno, which uses GenAI to create new songs.  This harkens back to the conversation from last week, and extends with Andy raising the Rock Family Trees documentary and Michael R bringing up the Pandora Music Genome Project.  Michael M remembers the discussion on Alex Murell’s The age of average, and how this might apply toward generating music.

Next up, the team takes a look at Harper Reed’s post on using an LLM to parse information captured from a variety of sensors in an office setting and post it to the office discord channel.  This is pretty familiar to the co-hosts, and it brings Andy joy knowing that MQTT still surfaces in context like this one.

The Heinz Remix allows the conversation to flow to creating custom condiments.  Then, the discussion turns to wearables and etiquette of when and how to wear them.  An article from The Verge takes on all manner of potential discretions and indiscretions when it comes to the use of technology.  Passive wearables such as the Oura Ring, to smart watches and other machines that go “bing” get their deserved attention.  Devices with cameras pose special challenges, especially for people that are not familiar with the device and don’t know whether they are being recorded.  

Next up after the etiquette discussion are some further ideas for augmented reality user experiences.  An article from BGR describes how the Apple Pencil could be used by a Vision Pro wearer, and this reminded Michael R of the 3Doodler.  This led directly to a game called Screenbound which presents a sidescroller game combined with a 3D experience – have a look at the link below to see how this works.  

The team wraps up the episode with a couple of stories on security, and retro Flight Simulator & Commodore 64 topics.

What wearables would you wear to a wedding?  Which would you leave home, and why?   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

AI

The Verge article: AI-generated blues misses a human touch — and a metronome

Games at Work e459: Pendulums in the Stack

BBC article: Rock Family Trees

Wikipedia article: Music Genome Project

Alex Murell article: The age of average

Games at Work e413: AI, your way

Harper Reed’s blog post: Our Office Avatar pt 1: The office is talking s*** again

Games at Work e60: Bubbly Bubblers in Gamified Buildings

Fast Company article: Kraft Heinz, king of condiments, is now letting you make your own concoctions

Kraft-Heinz press release: Kraft Heinz Unveils HEINZ REMIX™, The First Customizable Digital Sauce Dispenser

AR etiquette

The Verge article: The principles of wearable etiquette

AR UX

Boy Genius Report article: New Apple Pencil might work with Vision Pro, which sounds weird but is actually genius

Post by @tomwarrenuk

View on Threads

Security

Interesting and scary thread over at Xitter describing what appears to be a series of targeted attacks designed to hijack iCloud accounts by doing something that causes the user's device to be inundated with push OTP requests. The idea seems to be that if they send enough requests, the target might eventually click yes — either by accident after denying it the 59th time, or because they just want to make the prompts stop.

It's worth noting that in the end game of this attack, the scammers apparently relied on data from people-search services to gather the target's data and contact the user directly posing as Apple. And when you ask them info about yourself to verify you, they can usually read off enough details to fool people into thinking they're actually talking to Apple. And then they ask you to verify a one-time code, and if you do that, your account is toast.

https://twitter.com/parth220_/status/1771589795334287844

— BrianKrebs (@briankrebs) 2024-03-24T16:56:12.867Z

Games

I mean, it's just a #microcontroller but you can actually run #DOS and #FlightSimulator 4 on a bloody microcontroller! 😮​

.oO(and it's literally the same experience I had back in the day on my 10MHz PC XT clone)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwWX2_GvtDs

— Wintermute_BBS (@Wintermute_BBS) 2024-03-22T07:37:43.767Z

Steam: Screenbound

The Verge article: 8BitDo’s latest retro keyboard is an ode to the Commodore 64

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:32 — 39.0MB) | Embed

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