[Music]
This is GamesItWork.biz, your weekly podcast about gaming, technology, and play.
Your hosts are Michael Martine, Andy Piper, and Michael Rowe.
The thoughts and opinions on this podcast are those of the hosts and guests alone,
and are not the opinions of any organization which they have been, are, or may be, affiliated with.
This is episode 514, Leroy Jenkins!
[upbeat music]
Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon, Michael Row here on Friday. Friday, when I get to have fun and talk to my friend and co host, Andy Piper here at games that work dot biz. We're missing Michael Martin, who is flapping his wings around summer, who the hell knows. But Andy, how the heck are you?
Hi Michael. Well, I'm good. I'm excited to see some of the topics we've got this week,
particularly since there's a an old classic that has a deep meaning for the show to talk about.
And yeah, the sun is shining. It's a little we're recording a little bit earlier in the day than we regularly do because of schedules and things. So yeah, glad to be here. Let's see what we've
- Yeah, so, you know, we were going through in the pre-show kind of the secret sauce of how we pull a show together.
And I think this week's secret sauce has pulled together an exciting show that begins with AI.
And I think, Andy, you had found this link on Mastodon from RS Tech.
Hmm, yes. Well, it's a story from Ars Technica, just posted on their account, talking about the fact that in the most recent Netflix announcement said it's up front to the things that the big media companies do to tell the advertisers how they're going to help them make money, how, you know, what the new formats that they're going to release on their platforms are going to be and so on. Netflix said yeah.
We're going to do more of these. We like ads. And so do you.
Well, they're gonna like me even more though, right? Or you will like them
So evidently.
So we we pay our subscriptions for all the things to get the things without ads.
And then when the subscription revenue platters off,
then in order to keep the number, the chart coming up into the right,
They have to do something so they can raise price.
And they can add ads. And so they're adding ads. And they are, and I put in new types of ads next year, which is extremely excited interactive mid role and pause ads, which I think we can all get excited about interactive.
I don't want to say there's no ore, it's always AND.
But one thing, I think it happened when you pause, which is great.
And even if you don't pause, which is just fabulous, I'm excited.
And yeah, there are, we can expect to see more of them next year if you're a subscriber.
Well, yeah, so one of the things we've got the Disney plus bundle, which is good, but at the same time it's a joke, right? So we get Disney content with no ads. We pay extra on the bundle to get ESPN, so I can watch my various soccer matches that I want to see. And it also includes like Hulu and national geographic and stuff.
Hulu inclusion is the ad supported version.
So in the bundle, you have the right to have ad supported Hulu.
And which, you know, that was the first thing.
It's like, but I'm paying for this bundle that include--
OK, fine.
So they do, depending on the show, one, two, five,
or more ad breaks per show.
and the add.
And then the other thing that I read this week is that you have two seconds before an ad overlays the entire screen with some stupid ad, which is really, really annoying.
Well, that sounds super friendly.
And yeah, and then the other thing that I read this week,
about this Netflix ad is most, um, I'll call it traditional network television has TV shows with ad breaks defined, so there's a logical point in the show where they'll like dimmed a black and come back out as they're switching segments, and that's where you put the ad break. Netflix ignores those and just says boom and throws have like mid sentence.
in a scene and other stuff and I'm like the the the in certification of these shows through ad insertion without taking contextual awareness.
What would be great is if the AI powered ads were contextually aware and actually paid attention to the show that you're watching and said here's an appropriate place of place in that that might be okay except for the fact that it's in that.
So, there's two details that we should also briefly drop in here.
One of them is that these Netflix has their own ad business in the US, which is launched last month and they're rolling it out globally through JUO, May and June.
So I'm excited to see it arriving.
But the other thing to notice here that you just hinted at, which I didn't mention at
the top of the story was, and it's very, very, briefly mentioned in this understanding piece, is that these pause ads are going to incorporate generative AI.
There's no information at all in this story about what that means, how it will incorporate generative AI.
As you mentioned, perhaps it would help if the AI was to use contextually, but evidently I mean, it's just, just says generative AI because buzzword.
Buzzword
It's important to mention it because that means that this fits into the AI segment of our show and we can now move on to the next story.
Yes, we're just something that we both enjoy,
which is Lego GBT.
Well, I don't know if we both enjoy it.
We both enjoy Lego.
Lego GBT, what is it?
LEGO GPT is a new app or new model, an AI model, that essentially lets you point your phone at a bunch of bricks.
And it will now create designs that your phone can build, your phone can build, that can be built a bigger pardon.
It can be filled with your pieces.
So the idea is that instead of just saying, well, you know, it will actually come up with the need, there's been apps before that you've been able to point out
which are pretty amazing apps, that you can point out a pile of bricks and it would suggest some designs that you can make with them.
But those have to be kind of pre-built, pre-determined designs.
What this is doing is actually generating a LEGO structure from a text prompt and then figuring out structurally how that should look, how that should be built, how that should be made up.
So I believe that there's an element where you can point your phone as well or you can give it an image of the bricks available as well.
But the point of this is really that you'll be able to create physically stable models which is challenging, because you know, otherwise, and this is the problem with a lot of the 3D text to 3D models for 3D printing, they don't take how a lot of thought about the practicalities of 3D printing.
So I can make that solid three-dimensional shape and here it is. And then you try and 3D print that and it's not practical at all because it's got either incredibly fine detail that just can't be printed, or it's just got this huge dense segment which makes no sense at all.
If you think about that in the context of LEGO bricks, you need to know that there are physical bricks that can go together and snap together in quote unquote "legal" ways that can fit together in the way that LEGO bricks do.
And then the final structure is not going to be top-heavy, side-heavy, so on.
Well, the thing that I was thinking about as you were describing it was I would love to write an app that allowed you to create
Really cool things with Legos by taking a picture and every one of them if I wrote it would be a
Katamari event
So remember the game with the just rolls up these big balls of crud
That would be the perfect Lego Katamari
generator. Yeah.
The article is quite worth looking at because it does have some examples of stable versus unstable and what happened when this model was prompted with different versions.
So for example, there's a prompt here, compact chair with a tall backrest and serrated seat,
and the stable version it comes up with is very much like I guess a dining room
wooden, uh, four-legged chair, the honest
stable version that attempts to model one of the unstable versions is one of the kind of air on office chairs with the, you know, the spider, uh, base and the single pole and then, you know, the fancy headrest and everything. And you just can't easily make something stable like that out of Lego. You'd have to do a lot of very clever stuff with Lego technique and expect to make that kind of thing, uh, physically work. So, um.
Yes, kind of interesting.
So you mentioned building stable things with 3D printing and this will tie back again later in the show but early on there used to be this really cool tool called the WOW Viewer that would allow you to point at your World Warcraft install and pull the models out and turn them into 3D printable models And so I printed a dragon from
wow and you can see that it was not a stable print because the wings of the dragon were so fine that they basically just fell apart but yeah I love the idea of generating stable prints and stable designs and I think this is a really
for our audio listeners. First of all, do not go and look for the video version of the show because it does not exist even though we're on YouTube. But second of all, Michael just held up to the camera a little red dragon that looked reasonably impressive, but it also looked relatively flat in terms of light. No, no, no. That's fine. It does look, I agree, it looks 3D, but it kind of looks to me like it's almost like it's three segments.
Yeah, that's, it's pretty 3D. I'm actually going to take a picture and maybe we'll put it in the show notes.
With a body kind of flatish body and two flatish porches that are kind of sandwiched together.
That's how it appears to me. But he's currently, as we speak, he's taking a photo of his rare dragon on his desk.
So hopefully it'll show up somewhere in the show.
Cool. Well, let's let's let's move right along to the that the next phase the the next generation the next
iteration of really cool tech stories and this is all about Apple's carplay ultra
They didn't call it max because evidently anything called max max has to go now HBO max max is going back to be called HBO max so they got rid of the max they didn't call it plus as you say I guess because plus would imply a paid subscription as it does with you know all of some of their other plus news plus and whatever
Now we talked now no or plus
Met is back. Yeah, I love that
classes I have but yeah max max ultra sorry sorry thank you ultra like the watch
So, yeah, this ultra, ultra, ultra.
So, this is a couple of years ago at WWC.
I took some of the courses on the new carplay design.
And we talked about this a couple of weeks back where Apple was trying to convince car manufacturers to give carplay access to more and more
from the vehicle in order to allow
individuals to render their UI with an Apple design flare.
Let's put it that way.
This came out of Project Titan,
which was their supposed car project.
And at the time, it was announced,
this next gen carplay,
there were probably 1520 major automotive manufacturers listed that were gonna come out last year
with the vehicles.
Nobody came out with them last year.
The list drank a bit.
One of the ones that I would love, Mercedes,
removed their commitment to work this.
And now the first of two car manufacturers who still claim to be working on this has released a vehicle, an actual vehicle with this.
And this is Aston Martin.
I don't have the, let's start.
$200,000 US dollars for the vehicle, and then I think of insurance and everything else and I think that comes to, um, no, I'm not going to do it.
I just know that I don't know that you're very strongly connected with the Apple ecosystem as we'll talk about next. I'm disappointed in you. I'm disappointed that to hear that you're not going to be acquiring this vehicle. This is the closest you may get to the Apple car.
Yeah. But this looks, this looks cool. It actually does, yeah. Well, I'm not a big Aston Martin fan. One, two, it's way too damn expensive. But yeah, what they demonstrated in the developer sessions has been realized with this. And what this means is you can now get things off the canvas, which is
the car area network bus. So you can get things like odometer controls to the HVAC system,
speedometer information, etc., fuel tank, and you can render it in a format that you prefer within the Apple design language. Yeah, and we talked about that recently a lot too, right? But the cool thing is,
and you can control it on your touch screen.
Oops.
So.
if you have multiple vehicles.
And they all had this, it would actually store your preferences in your phone and when you got into another car, it would render your UI the way you wanted it, which is kind of neat.
Again, user-friendly, customer-focused, not manufacturer-focused.
Very cool. Take a look at it. I enjoyed it.
I think it's used a focused up to a point and it does look cool, but I think that when you get to the actual difficulties of operating a car with a touch screen and also some of the other yeah exactly safety consideration, some of the other things and then of course, yeah, to the point about manufacturer friendly versus you know Apple friendly.
and safety considerations.
Yeah, there's going to be that push and pull who owns the technology in the car so I know it looks listen it looks cool I do think that the.
comment on the YouTube video that I want first one that I saw was hey, I've got I've got the the phone now I just need my master mark and Martin and I'm just thinking.
Hey well given given us tariffs you might need get a free ashen martin with the agreement that we cut with the great Britain when you get your iPhone from China. Anyway so it's an Apple ecosystem. Yes. Yes. Do that one first. Yeah go - Go ahead.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah exactly exactly so talking of talking of expensive things.
There's two sets of stories.
I'm going to pull one of them.
I'm going to pull one of them up first so that we can get it out of the way.
So a story I saw this week was a Sheldon Freud story from the Wall Street Journal.
About people who dropped their $3,500 on the Vision Prairie last year.
And now are having regrets.
They've used it as often as they thought they might haven't found as many apps coming out as they...
thought were going to happen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And it's a bit of it.
I won't call it a hatchet job.
I can certainly see that it focuses on the negatives.
And they've been able to find some people who have not used it as much as they thought they might.
So they were able to write convincingly about how it's sort of gathered dust in the corner.
So I know that my friend and co-host really loves his Vision Pro and uses it, has used it.
And to recently, for, you know, big screen usage on the Mac and so on as well.
[laughs]
So I totally understand that there must be some people, or there are some people who do use it day to day or on a more regular basis.
And I have got more value from it.
I stand by my position, which is that I didn't have that kind of money to spend on that kind of gadget at that point in my life.
and therefore I'm not regretting, no having one.
But having got that story out of the way, there are some new features being announced.
And this kind of thing happens around this time of year.
So Apple usually holds WWDC in the middle of the year around June.
And just before that, they normally start to say they're getting to the end of the previous or the current versions,
life cycle of all of their operating systems because they know there's going to be a new one in the fall.
And they start to talk about the next set of accessibility features.
For the ecosystem.
- Well, yeah, so there's two things.
One, yes, that's one of the reasons they do it.
They also announce their accessibility features on World Accessibility Day.
And so they pull forward the upcoming features
that are coming out in the typical summer period
of developer releases, right?
and the one.
One that we both found and call out is for the vision pro, which I will say just to kind of follow up on the first story.
I would still love to be using it every day, like I had been, but I accepted a new job recently.
And my machine is locked down to where I can't use it with it, which is a bummer because I still do love it.
And I do think that as a developer is still an ideal development environment.
Is who they should have sold it to people who bought it as a consumer device. It wasn't ready.
Quick question. On that topic, with your new work device, can you plug it into a monitor or any screen you like or are there limitations?
Yes, and so I did take my secondary monitor that I usually use during our podcast recording to put stuff on. It's unplugged, it has a Thunderbolt plug to it, and I use it to plug into my work laptop,
Yeah, but of course you can't use any kind of either side car on your iPad or anything that requires you to be signed in to your Apple account that's going to let you do any of that kind of mirroring, yeah.
give my second screen, because
Correct, because it has its own Apple account, and I can't put my personal Apple account on there, which I wouldn't anyway, but I can't.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So yeah, I mean, it's the corporate world and life is fine, but it's one of those things that I hadn't thought about, especially since the laptop is a 14 inch monitor instead of a normal 16 that I'm used to, yes.
And dare I say, it's a first-world problem for a niche audience.
Oh absolutely, absolutely, and I've described it as such anyway.
So let's get back to the story.
So love my vision pro, there is content coming out, people are developing for it.
It's slow.
If you're going to focus on a large audience or you're going to go for iPhone users, where there's what a billion of them or hundreds of millions, are you going to go for Mac users,
where there are tens of millions, you're going to go for vision pro users where there are less than a million.
Right. All good all understood and maybe that'll change as new devices come out who cares right now.
Let's talk about the feature that I love and there's actually two features.
The one that we saw is they're going to enable a feature to allow you to scroll with your eyes.
So this is kind of cool, I think, because...
The eyes as an input device on the vision pro are significantly more effective, I think, than your hands.
Because if the room is dark, it has trouble finding your hands at times.
But your eyes, you got lasers pointed into your eyes as you're using it.
It's monitoring them, there's cameras, all kinds of stuff.
It knows where you're looking.
Those shocks, those shocks with lasers are sitting in your vision pro, pointing at your eyes.
Now, how they're gonna do it?
Yes. Yeah.
Are sitting on my face, looking at my eyes.
And the other interesting thing that they announced as part of World Accessibility Day is the "C" for you.
Now, what this is, is there's an app on the iPhone called Magnifier.
If you've never used it, go check it out.
It has tons and tons and tons of features.
Not just a magnifying glass.
They're going to enable the magnifying magnifier application on the Mac this year too.
And it'll probably tether or allow you with continuity camera to use your iPhone to do stuff.
And so this is basically allowing you to zoom in on text to address color blindness,
to do descriptions of what it sees.
You can hold your phone up and if you have a setting on it,
that you can point to with your finger and the phone
to identify what your finger is pointing at and describe it to you and things that are very powerful.
They're going to enable a similar accessibility feature on the Vision Pro to where that magnifying capability becomes a viewport in the Vision Pro.
And so as you have your face computer on and you look around, you can imagine pointing at something and having it describe it to you,
zooming in on text that's hard to read a little bit further away, etc.
Okay. So do you think you'll be able to say, hey,
vision pro in harms, in harms, zoom in in harms?
Oh yeah, yeah, zoom all the way down to the microscopic level, but I find this to be kind of cool because I do find the device to be very productive for me and I enjoy a lot of the other usages for it even if I can't use it now for my day-to-day job.
That zoom feature does look super cool and genuinely super useful, so I can't argue with it except to say, don't have £3,500 to spend on a...
Yep, and I spent more because I upgraded to the maximum storage on mine. So
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I appreciate.
So you found a really cool site called 10,000 drum machines. What's this about?
So this is going to be 10,000 drum machines.
It is not currently 10,000 drum machines.
- No.
So the guy was trying to find out a fight,
come up with a name for a collection of drum machines,
and decided on 10,000 drum machines.
So he bought the domain, 10,000 drum machines,
and he now has 11 drum machines listed on there.
[laughs]
And the idea of being that anybody in principle Okay, publish your link.
Okay, a web-based drum machine, drum up drum machine app to it, as a like a prototype, the idea it's going to be like a, it's going to be a, you know, living website that lists these drum machines super simple.
You click through to them, there's a logic gate drum machine, an extremely long term drum machine and all kinds of other ones here, I say all kinds of other ones there are currently 11 drum machines.
11. I thought this was cool. I thought this was really cool. When you first posted it in our weekly discussion, I was like, it's not 10,000, it's only 10 or whatever it was at the time,
But in the future there may be 10,000 drum machines.
And I think the gentleman's ambition is heartwarming.
but with the explanation, I get it. Then I started clicking through and some of these are really,
really neat.
The only thing that I think he needs to correct on the website, right? So he's got a little drop down and you can rotate between original order, most recent and random.
And he needs to correct his randomizer. It should randomize all 10,000 rows, not just the ones that have content.
There you go. So maybe drop them in an email and let them know. So that's a fun suggestion.
Yeah.
Another really interesting thing, they rented the fun stuff section here. Another interesting thing I found this week, and I'm pretty sure it was featured on Webster's and Hacker News,
was human QR, which has a section for you to submit broken QR codes to get repaired. So if you
he's up there, they are asking for you not to deliberately generate broken QR codes. But if you have a QR code that is worn in some way, that is visually not able to be picked up by your phone or whatever device you're using to read it, and curious about it, then you can go submit the image and they will try to figure out how to fix it, and if they can fix it, they'll do so. There's a really interesting. Uh,
story embedded in this which is that they actually put on a show of broken QR codes. Um,
I don't, I don't, I'd like a gallery which I think is super funny as well. Um, so yeah, I just think it's, uh, it's fun and they want to now build like a model based on broken QR codes to automatically fix QR codes, which I think is quite useful. The biggest problem as we have talked about in the past I know, and it's
to be fairly obvious, is that it's less likely that the QR code itself will be broken.
The link that it goes to is no more. It's just being dropped for cost or other reasons, right?
So, yeah, you may be able to get what the QR code used to say in it, but whether or not there's anything on the other end is an entirely different matter.
Or that that domain hasn't been hijacked and been reused for something.
you know when when I first saw the site again before reading it my reaction was they were going to fix the problem of the the target disappearing and they were just going to like reroute it to the internet archive and find the right link and all that stuff and then I read it and I was like okay okay this makes much more sense which is still kind of really cool and and I figured they had to have posted this on Saturday because they have this cool kitten picture at the top for a catar day.
And it's kind of cool from the standpoint of data accessibility, archiving of information, et cetera.
And as you say, building a transformer model that might be able to actually solve these for you at the long run. Very cool.
So.
There's one more fun toy to briefly mention,
which is Neil.fun,
which is a website we talked about before many times,
which is a collection of cool toys.
This got featured on Adafritz blog this week,
and there is a road trip,
an internet road trip where you can all go on there and vote on the direction on Google Maps Street View that you should travel.
Earlier in the week, I was on there,
and everybody was talking about needing to get to Canada with great urgency.
So drive the car to Canada.
So there's a system where you basically have 10 seconds to vote from the options.
As I'm looking at it right now,
they're driving across US Highway 1,
across a bridge in Maine.
But there's a little FM radio you can tune in and listen.
So it's like a little road trip,
shared road trip, this chat as well.
But the big story, and I know we're almost gonna run out of time here that we wanted to talk about this week,
Oh yeah. Yes.
is an anniversary.
A pivotal moment of internet history celebrated its 20th birthday this year.
Yeah, so this year is the 20th anniversary of WOW's Leroy Jenkins, which while World Warcraft, a big World Warcraft player, there's actually multiple of my tunes in the game have the Leroy Jenkins tag assigned to him or title, which was based off of a
an event that occurred. Now, it was stage, and this article takes you to the fact that it was staged at the time it wasn't truly, you know, just a random idiot jumping in and making a mess of one of the raids. But yeah, this is this is hilarious and we were talking before the show how this has become kind of a a meme in everyday work culture.
Well, so the thing that interested me, we were talking about this with friends at the beginning of the week and
One of them had never heard of it, which surprised me and that that person will will be will be fixed before too long
Yeah
but the other person
Who is themselves a sort of a D&D and online gamer?
person is very familiar with with the Leroy Jenkins meme and the Leroy Jenkins video
sequence and it's 20 years old, so
certainly some people won't have come across this before by any means, and it is a fairly niche thing, you know, you might need to sort of happy slightly aware of online culture and gaming and so on.
The things that struck me with these. One of them is that we started this podcast, the two podcasts that we've done together, with a notion of massively multiplayer online gaming and technology related to that, crossing over into workplace and you having, you know,
increasingly rich data dashboards and interactions and the ability, needing the ability to organize them and the idea that as folks who play these kinds of games become familiar with those kind of interfaces, they could be arguably become more effective at organizing their workplace and their work information and making structured team decisions about which direction to go in on our project and so on.
and I thought...
this happened as a moment of internet history, which is obviously recorded in the annals of the internet.
And it has become something like that.
So my friend was saying that she's aware that she said to me,
"Have you ever had someone on a project who's done a Leroy or done a Leroy?"
Have you ever had a Leroy Jenkins moment on a project?
[laughs]
And I thought to myself, "Well, yes, I have, but I've never heard it refer to it, is that?"
Which was really funny, and it really sort of brought home that our kind of original idea,
starting point for all of this, wasn't entirely off the mark.
Yes, you may have had to come from a particular cultural perspective to sort of immediately get it.
But, yeah, this was super cool. And it definitely made me want to go revisit, and...
watch and reread all of the background.
So along that same line, have you watched the side quests yet?
I haven't watched all of the sidecrest.
We've been jumping around between a few different shades we're watching at the moment, so there's--
Okay, okay, let me let me know when you watch the one on on the raid where they do the raid so okay, so so
so no, I haven't seen all of them, so no spoilers.
OK, no, haven't got to that one.
Haven't got to that one.
I think it's only like 4 or 5, and we've watched 2, I think.
So we definitely need to finish them off.
Yeah, yeah, they're short. They're they're they're not really deep. They're fun. They kind of they are true side quests
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, well, again...
The theme came out yesterday, which may be familiar to some of our listeners, it's called DOOM, specifically DOOM the Dark Ages.
Yeah
So, I played a little bit... I played through the first level chapter of that today.
It's pretty awesome. I really enjoyed it. So, I'm looking forward to getting involved.
I don't know that I'll be playing it online very much, but I've enjoyed the first solo chapter.
All right, it does.
Very cool. Well, I think that gives us out of time.
And if you're playing a cool game right now and you want to tell us about it and how you take the learnings from that game and apply it to your day-to-day work,
let us know over at games@work.biz or where else can they find us, Andy?
You can find us on the Federalist's Games of Work underscore Biz at Mastodon.social and let us know what you're up to and try not to do a powered-up shield charge at a bunch of demons while you're at it.
[laughing]
Sounds great.
Everybody, have a great one.
See ya!
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