Andy and Michael R. spend the show discussing advertising, AI, and games.
First up, there’s a shocking story from the excellent 404 Media that covers “the pitch deck” that Cox Media Group (CMG) uses to sell their clients on hyper targeted advertising using audio from our personal smart devices. Michael goes on to encourage us all to disable Automatic Content Recognition on our smart TVs with the help of a story from ZDNet.
In the AI segment, the co-hosts consider Midjourney’s move into hardware. Andy mentions a recent blog post of his own that looks at the good and bad ways that LLMs can be used. Bad folks are farming plays on Spotify and stealing revenue from real artists. And, why play a game that originally required a 33MHz i386 CPU with 4Mb of RAM, when you can use AI and burn megawatts of power to generate small parts of a new level?
To round things out, Michael and Andy talk the latest Star Wars game, a paper version of Oregon Trail, Dungeons and Dragons, and Michael’s desire to get a group together to play games in Demeo in VR.
These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. All rights reserved. Since we post this sentence every week it does look a bit automated, though. Anyway! That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.
Co-hosts Michael, Michael and Andy start things off on a fun note – a website that creates text in Doom, Minecraft and other fonts.
Next up, the team turns to Ian Hughes for two intriguing posts over the Feeding Edge. First up is Ian’s blog and video showing the power of midjourney.com, runway.ml and luma.ai . The second post deals with Ian feeding his two novels Reconfigure and Cont3xt into a local copy of Nomic.ai on his MacBook and conversing with his protagonist. The Games at Work cohosts are all hoping that this jumpstarts the writing of third book. Ian himself imagines how a generated metaverse could be created following the ingestion of the novels.
Sticking with the theme, the team then turns to the symbolism used by many firms to signify the application of AI. According to the Wall Street Journal, sparkles ✨ are used by Google, Slack and more. This sparks (heh!) a discussion on the power of such symbolism, and Andy shares a recent blog post he wrote on the subject, with a specific focus on a symbol for the Fediverse, specifically the asterism ⁂ unicode2042. This reminds Michael M of the symbol for therefore ∴ unicode2234.
Then, the co-hosts discuss the SAG-AFTRA agreement to partner with Narrativ for the use of audio voice replicas, and the arrangement allowing the people whose voices are being used to have a significant amount of control over how and when their voices are ethically used. Michael R points out that this may have some market limiting impacts for new voices.
Once the team completes the AI review, they spend a few moments on the world of games and gaming. A Guinness world record of 444 consoles hooked into a single television is a marvel. Tramsterfam is reminiscent of Townscaper. Other games include the Smithsonian’s partnership with Crayola, the newest Sid Meyer’s CivVII and an upcoming television series called Secret Level.
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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 things off on a quantum note, where a particle can be two places at once. Actually, according to the New Scientist article, the angular momentum could be disembodied from the particle. In related news, the collapsing of the quantum field for whether a player is offsides or not in the Premier League will now be determined by a bevy of iPhone instead of VAR.
Moving right along to the AI theme for the week, the co-hosts take a look at a build your own version of the Rabbit that the team over at Comfyspace have called the Rappit. Then, they bring up the challenges associated with training LLMs, and the solution from ProRata.ai, which aims to compensate creators when GenAI results leverage the creator’s intellectual property. This leads to a recent report in The Verge of ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s comments at a Stanford economics class.
Next up are some examples of non-AI hardware, in the form of a wearable computer which takes advantage of XReal Air AR glasses and a Corne keyboard. And there’s something just wonderful about the Carabiner Collection website.
Wrapping up this week’s episode, the co-hosts discuss the Pluralistic post about the DoJ’s decision on Google, and a browser based version of Diablo.
Do you believe that Andy’s Logitech mouse has it in for him? 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 things off with a couple of callbacks to last week’s episode, including Ian Hughes’ reply on exoframes, the Logitech Forever Mouse and the reports of the rate of returns on the Humane AI pin.
Switching then to a story local to Michael, Michael and Andy, the co-hosts talk about the University of North Carolina using Oxford Medical Simulation to teach nursing students in virtual reality. This reminds Michael M of a rather old iOS game, Surgeon Simulator.
Sticking with the (quasi) medical theme, Andy then shares an experience of one of his recent blog posts going viral Hacker News. Check out the images in the show notes below to see the detailed graphs.
After sharing Ian’s recent talk at the Chartered Institute for IT and Andy’s upcoming appearance on the TechGrumps podcast, the team turns to Mac hardware and software.
Beginning with NotchNook, and the reported challenges with payment systems, the co-hosts quickly turn to the SuperDrive. Not surprisingly, all three co-hosts have a SuperDrive, though Michael M doesn’t know where his is. Michael R shared a note about one of his favorite pieces of software, VinylStudio, which sparks a discussion on what it means to own media in this day and age.
Wrapping things up this episode are several recommendations – Doom and a couple of intriguing podcasts not called Games at Work. When We Were Wizards is a podcast dealing with an oral history of Dungeons & Dragons. Acquired is a podcast that tells the stories and strategies in depth of great companies.
Do you know where Michael M’s SuperDrive is? 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.
@gamesatwork_biz fyi I can confirm I don’t have lots of exoframes filling up office or shed space 🙂 tempted a few times but maybe when I am a little more frail I might bother. Also the Rabbit R1, got it for that precise reason to see how it felt to have physical object doing AI not just an app, but it also looks great next to the playdate game machine. Annoyingly the roaming sim I put in it didn’t work on holiday (for translations etc) and no way to mess with the mobile settings.
I share my screen on Teams all the time, and I think drawing/design apps that want to sample colours outside of their windows with the eyedropper tool also need to use this API, so looks like I’m gonna be seeing this a lot…
Apple have made Mac OS into exactly the thing they made fun of Windows Vista for. After some time, no one is going to be reading these dialogues anyway, people will blindly click on “allow”, effectively working against the intent of better security. https://mastodon.online/@9to5Mac/112916905882020099
