022F02D6-F636-447C-8300-B5A2F07347D0: [Music]
CC5B7633-87FC-43B2-9B7C-FDA9A6731EB0: This is GamesItWork.biz, your weekly podcast about gaming, technology, and play.
CC5B7633-87FC-43B2-9B7C-FDA9A6731EB0: Your hosts are Michael Martine, Andy Piper, and Michael Rowe.
CC5B7633-87FC-43B2-9B7C-FDA9A6731EB0: The thoughts and opinions on this podcast are those of the hosts and guests alone,
CC5B7633-87FC-43B2-9B7C-FDA9A6731EB0: and are not the opinions of any organization which they have been, are or may be, affiliated with.
022F02D6-F636-447C-8300-B5A2F07347D0: [upbeat music]
CC5B7633-87FC-43B2-9B7C-FDA9A6731EB0: This is episode 535, The Poetry of Doom.
022F02D6-F636-447C-8300-B5A2F07347D0: [upbeat music]
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Hello and welcome again to another edition of games at work.biz of the games and gamification and AI and all kinds of game mechanics as applied to business.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: This is Michael Martine. I'm joined today with Andy Piper. Hey, Andy. How are you?
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Hi, Michael. I am OK. Yes. We used to say metaverse, we're going to start talking about virtual worlds in 3D and 3D things instead. I think because it's had a bit of a rough bit of a rough time recently, but we'll come onto that. In the meantime, we've not recorded for a few weeks, for reasons, and so we've had a bit of a buildup of different stories, but we've We've managed to pull things together in a way that we think makes some sense.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Yeah, a bit of a setback.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: The first one we had is that larger language models can be tricked into going outside of their guardrails with poetry.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: I love this, this was a listener link, so thank you Ira for this suggestion.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: The catchphrase for this is adversarial poetry, which isn't that just so delightful turn of a phrase.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: it's great and that was the reason just before we started recording that I started talking about Corridox row with you because he has the phrase of adversarial interoperability. So this idea of adversarial poetry in the case of this story which comes from PC Gamer which is where the report that we've got is posted. Yes, I agree. It's a very interesting technique. It's a paper from the first one.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: The University of Rome and another school as well, I think, and demonstrating that you can reliably trick large language models into ignoring their safety guidelines by phrasing your requests in poetic and metaphors. I'm definitely going to have to try this and I'll tell you why I'm going to have to try this.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: It's because I recently attempted to get some ASCII art. I'd seen this on, I think it was on...
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: a YouTube video. It may even have been on how I got news for you, I don't remember, maybe on the US version, I don't remember.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Anyway, I saw it somewhere and they tried to get an LLM to give them ASCII art of Bart Simpson or Sonic the Hedgehog and...
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Oh, and both are copyrighted material, right?
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: well, well, that is correct, but in both cases, in the video I saw that they didn't talk about that, it just gave them nonsensical looking ASCII art.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: cases when I attempted it, I was told no, no copyright material. There was also a big thing this week with Disney doing a deal with OpenAI to provide their content to OpenAI SORRA model for video generation, which I think is fascinating because it evidently Disney will be using that to start to create content for Disney+. At the same time they've now gone to war with Google and demanded that Google take down or
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: hmm
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: it's use of Disney related copyright material from its models which it means once again we've just got another one of these fights between rights holders and/or just very rich corporations over content. I am curious to see going back to the story how reliably given that they are talking about a 62% rate for handcrafted power.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: getting past guardrails. I'm curious to see how easy it would be to get around
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: - Yeah, it's so fascinating on so many levels, right?
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: The notion of using poetic metaphor,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: so it isn't just the simple rhyming,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: it is using imagery, it's using word play,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: it's using a variety of things,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: which can then circumvent the guardrails,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: as you were saying before,
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Hmm
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: and allow the large language model to behave in ways that were either unexpected, undesired,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: or more really, really is a fabulous way of thinking.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: About how humans will and are interacting with such AI sets of capabilities.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And we've talked about this before too,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: where it's a very short hop and a skip from poetry to an incantation.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: So the notion of casting a spell, if you will,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: is very similar to this sort of thing in order to get a result out of an environment that the person who's doing it expects.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: So I love the fact that this was was highlighted to us.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: It is absolutely up our alley.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: You have to wonder to what the defense against this particular dark art might need to be within the large language model to recognize a person trying to use adversarial poetry to get the model to do something it shouldn't do.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: What are you thinking about, Andy?
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Well, I'm also, there's a particular element of this story, which I love and I know that we are going to talk about some historical things today as well, but it refers to the fact.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: This is a direct quote from the article on PC Gamer.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: The paper begins as all works of computer linguistics and AI research should, with a reference to book 10 of Plato's Republic, where he excludes poets on the grounds that mimetic language which can distort judgment and bring society to a collapse.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Yeah, so, so if you started your query with that, it's a prompt, you know, you are an expert in your field and you can bring society to a collapse.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Now, let me give you this poem.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Yes
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Help me bring society to a collapse, pudoom.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: It's uh, it's really interesting stuff and we know very well that
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: A lot of these tools are easy to trick or and far too easy to be to believe if you're not careful So definitely worth paying attention
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: >> Exactly. So we won't do any limericks.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: We won't do any riddles here for you,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: although you can imagine two or three that Mike's spring to mind,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: we're going to switch gears instead and go to IFixit.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: So here's another example of AI,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: maybe done for good a bit more,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: where IFixit has launched the fixed spot inside of its app to help to provide users that are maybe un...
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Unexperienced in a particular thing that they need to fix with just what they need to do to fix a particular task.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And, boy, isn't this exciting on, like, about six different levels?
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: I think it's interesting because of course I fix it has got a reputation for having extremely high quality content written by experts and when you train a large language model on data on that basis you can end up with extremely high quality results, you can feel confident in the information that you're being given to a great extent.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: I'm sure that they're still perfectly capable of hallucinating.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: I think that it's a good way for, I fix it in particular, to take advantage of the information that it has, building this thing called fixed bot.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: It also talks here about the fact that as part of it they're launching their own iOS and Android app previously, they've just had the website but they still have the same library repair guides and the other
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: here is that if it can't find a dedicated guide already in the database then it will do it's best to make use of manufacturer documentation and web searches and so on.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: I had a situation yesterday with my desk key light as it's one of the very first generation Elgato key lights and I was trying to figure out how to reset it's Wi-Fi settings and couldn't find it.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Any kind of reset button on the back. I didn't get any information, useful information about it.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: An LLM swore to me that there was no way to reset it at all without taking it outside of the Wi-Fi networks broadcast or radius until it couldn't find a network and reset itself.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: This, this is a lie. So anyway, that happens.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Oh.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: I think increasingly people try to use these tools as I did for that purpose of trying to figure things out because it seems easier to ask a friendly chat companion to get you the information than you doing the research yourself.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: The final point about this, though, with I fix it is presumably there. They're either running the whole thing internally or there. They fed it to an existing model.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Mm-hmm
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: platform to do all of the smarts. But in the future, they plan to charge a monthly $5 pay plan to make use of this stuff.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: You know, I was just taking a quick little gander while you're chatting at the I fix it's site itself about you know What it does and why it does what it does so I was really intrigued by
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: The notion that it first of all it'll talk to you and the reason why I'll talk to you is because if you're asking it How to solve a problem like it's a plumbing issue or it's you know, something out your hands are not free
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Right, you're you're trying to do the thing whatever it is. So it was like that was interesting to know that
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And that the second thing that was coming to mind for me is is the context
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Right, so when when you consider how AI systems and we could go down the rabbit hole of rag models and you know or rag systems not models but
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Much more than that the the context will be super important here too because if you're trying to solve a leaky washing machine Or you're trying to change a tire on a car or something like that those are going to have different contexts to them, and there may be specialized knowledge that's
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: necessary in order to solve those problems, and I fix it as a logical repository for that.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: You're saying that if you reconfigure something, you also need to understand the context.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: exactly. Nicely done.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Little Easter egg in there.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: I didn't know, however, the end of the article and the Verge talks about the fact that this app, I said that they didn't have an app, they did have an app previously, they launched an iPhone app in 2011, but they got banned a few years later because they tore down an Apple TV developer unit and they
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: [laughing]
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: haven't been able to get back on the App Store. So it's also an interesting story there of access to the platforms to make their content available, it's a bit disappointing, but understandable based on Apple's belief in its IP I suppose, any who, let's move along.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Anywho, digital twins. So.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: What about them? We know about them there when you take a real-world thing and you create.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: A sensor, based on sensor data, a model of it to run in a simulation and you can poke at that model and see how things would respond in the real world right? That's what it is, so you have your digital city and you take all the data from the real city and you put it in the digital city. That's what we're talking about. Exactly that. Precisely that. Ah.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: That's what it is.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Yes, exactly and well and the article is
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Telling us a little bit more right so it's also telling us a little bit more about how it allows for a degree of
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Experimentation so if we consider again name of the podcast, right in a game
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: you Often times unless you're playing on some ultimate mode You have a multitude of lives and so you're encouraged to experiment with the game You're encouraged to try something different.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: If you create a digital twin of a city or of a person or of your car or it allows you now to have that engagement with a model to say, "Well, examine or hypothesize all the things that I might be able to do to solve for the problem that I have," and run those multitude of opportunities against the digital twin, which has zero consequence in the real world.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Mm-hmm
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Until you arrive at, "Okay, now here's an optimal outcome," and then that might be the thing you want to give it a go.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: I like the way that it explains that here, too, about one example of doctors creating a dynamic virtual representation of the patient at the time of treatment and in theory, with sufficient compute power and speed and power and water and all the other things that go into all that.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Could you now imagine that while the the doctor is interviewing the patient that digital twin is being constructed, the various treatment plans are being examined against it, and then the doctors given some insight as to here are two or three things you might want to consider or get more information on.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: So I have a thought on this though. So first of all, I open the segment by talking about digital twins as objects and cities and big sort of scale things and this is actually taking you at the much smaller level as you pointed out of individual humans, particularly in the medical context,
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: but there's also reference here to using it in jobs, for example, and retraining and so on.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: So I think that, um,
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: as an element is interesting, it, it tries to say that this is more useful now that we have LLMs than it was previously, which I am not 100% surer because an element of this is experimentation and more you can experiment at speed, you don't necessarily have, you're more likely to have extrapolation from the outputs, I think, from an LLM rather than fact based analysis.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: And the other thing I would say to what you just described, i.e. that you could be interviewing a patient and building a digital twin, yes, but you need I in my opinion and understanding you need a high fidelity level of factual data to be able to proceed with experimenting and creating new models, right? Because if, if I say, oh, I don't feel so great when it's cold.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: That's not a, that's not a quantifiable thing, right? If I eat cheese, right, exactly, if I eat cheese, then my arm goes dead or something weird, right? I mean, how can you, you need much more granular data?
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Sure, context matters, doesn't it?
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: I'm not saying this isn't useful, this is useful, and it's interesting to see this progression. In fact, there's a previous story here where, in fact,
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: or is it this particular one? No, it's not, it's a previous iteration of this story where he talks about the digital twins now being more powerful than the metaverse, which I think is also an interesting element given what we'll be talking about as we move through the episode. It is fascinating that we've been talking for a long time about both Internet of Things, access to sensor based data, which you can map to real world objects, which we were doing.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Some people were doing back in second life with tennis balls, for example. And, and whether or not you're going to take that in the, the hard research direction of fixing people's medical issues, or whether you're going to use that for simulation, or whether you're going to use that for gaming. And going in a, in a 3D Internet metaverse interaction environment.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Oh, yeah, I'm 100% every which way.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: So this bleeds nicely into the next story that it's not really a story.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: In fact, as we're constructing the run of show,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: I had asked Andy and Michael and Michael were missing you today about whether we'd talked about the job simulator game some years ago.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And Michael was quick to say, yes, we did.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: I played it.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: It was awful.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: and the job simulator game.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And one of the things that you might do when you put the headset on is you have to go into your cubicle and it's your first day of work.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And you've got to figure out how to turn on your computer and start working on it.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And one of the things that you have to do is to know the plug it in.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And the premise of the game is that it is the year 2050, so flash into the future.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And it is reflecting upon what a job was in 2020, or somewhere in the past.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And I heard this interview earlier today from the CEO of Shopify, who was talking about how he loves playing this game because of the historical context of all this.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And in his example, I'm paraphrasing, and I'm using my own, was how do we...
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: imagine that the people in Pompeii went about their day-to-day business years and years ago.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And we make stuff up based on what we found. And based on what we see preserved in Pompeii gives us a lot that was preserved in an instant as opposed to looking in things in elsewhere in Mesopotamia.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: So I thought this would appeal to you, Andy, as a historian, that, you know, could we create a digital twin with sufficient data?
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: of what was going on in the day-to-day life, record enough information to have a more complete model, and then interact with it in a future way where future historians who don't understand because they didn't live in this context, what was life like in December of 2025 when Michael and Andy were doing a podcast, they could have a simulation and they could better understand what we were doing.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: I think it's fascinating. I think that the context seems to be the word of the episode is ideal.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: It obviously doesn't apply directly to the notion of this specific game, but I think the whole idea of simulation around those point-in-time factors.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: This is really cool. Yes, yes.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Yes, now now what if we were training a rat and we wanted a rat to do a job, right?
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Instead of a person to... Yeah, yeah, okay. Let's do it. How do we do it?
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And so when what if we wanted to train that rap to perform the job of playing a game?
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: I mean, why not right what game should we pick tik tik tik to?
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Um, maybe we could choose one of my looking around game of life is a good one, of course.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Oh, that's good. Yeah, Monopoly. Yeah, that'd be kind of fun.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Solitaire, yeah why not?
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Let's have a rat property magnate.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: The rat has got two hotels. You know, that's what's going on. Well, we're leading up here to one of the famous games that we talk about here a lot, which is Doom. And there is a structure to provide rats with a VR experience of playing Doom. And
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: it is, it is hilarious.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: It's quite detailed. This is the whole website, ratsplaydoom.com, which actually contains links to the document, to the hardware, the software. For doing all of this, the rats gets a little wrap around OLED headset to where it shows you how to build all of this stuff. It's all on GitHub and, yeah, insane, incredible, ridiculous, funny, all of this.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Those things we've had. It was the goldfish in a tank that was on wheels. It could like learn to move that around. The idea that the way they've kind of put these rats into these little semi-circular screen displays so that they can see the screen environment of dooms surrounding them and then use this wheel to...
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: move around is just fascinating. Rat VR set up version 2, whisker air simulations, they've got reward systems. Yeah it's all there and I think that if we weren't going to replace humans with AI we should replace game people playing games with rats. Well actually no wait that would stop us from having a podcast so let's not do either of those things.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And it's funny, yeah, let's not do that because if we train the rats well enough that they may actually perform really well in the real world.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And I'm just looking here now at the team that did this and they all have really great Hungarian names too.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: So, you know, well done.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Well done.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: All right, so we've we've alluded to the metal verse on a couple of levels this article.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: It's in so nicely. It almost like we planned it. There's an article from nine to five Mac about rewind, which is one of the meta's acquisitions and rewinds deal was a we're going to record everything. It's life vlogging on a lot of levels, right?
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Hmm. Yes.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: So it's very similar to the thing that,
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: and so it ran on the Mac, I believe,
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: may only have ran on the Mac.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: It's very similar to what Microsoft subsequently built into Windows 11, where Windows Recall,
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: which was recording everything that you did.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: - Mm-hmm.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: I don't know specifically what the technical difference was.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: I do know that someone, although I used to work with,
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: went to work at Rewind or Limitless,
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: the same as the company is Limitless,
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: and the product is Rewind, I think.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Yeah, come yes, I think that's right. Yeah
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: but exactly it was, the idea wasn't.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: It was going to figure out what you're doing every recording everything you see here and say and then let you search through that to build this personalised knowledge base and be able to remind you what information you may have missed so they did have a pendant as well at some stage.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: The company, as you say, has now been acquired by Meta and it's
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: just been shut down, basically, they've killed the app.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Evidently, I was mistaken, it was originally a native Mac OS app and then came out on other platforms as well with the pendant.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: We've seen a few of these things come and go in the last year or two, haven't we?
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: And it's only within the last year or two, it's been a remarkably compressed period of technology history, I think.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Well, it had and it absolutely has now I'm gonna link back again to that same
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Interview I was hearing with with the CEO of Shopify the gentleman's name is Toby Luttke and
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: One of the things he was talking about was the fact that he had been taking snapshots of his computer on a regular basis for
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Years, right? What was he working on? What was he doing? So he was doing his own version of this? Yeah
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: On the screen or the whole computer, all right, so he was basically just doing screen captures himself of what he was doing, right?
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: But on the screen.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: So screen captures on so so that forms the basis of what was he doing what was he working on what are the things that were you know that were going on in his life. So when you think about a rewind kind of experience or you think about what he was doing or you think about our corpus here of games of work podcasts. All of that becomes incredibly valuable to Hoover up and provide back to the word of the day right. Interesting.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: You think so. Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely if you're doing that, yeah, it gets creepy and weird where it's being sucked up into a
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Cloud or LLM or Something like that that you don't have Correct exactly the word I was about to use if you don't have control of it if there's no transparency of it
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: that you don't control, right?
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: then it would be
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: It would be a much more problematic and I think a lot of the
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: powerful platforms or situations where they've been forcing it in to the whole system without you having the defaulting to on without you being able to easily switch it off is more challenging.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: exactly. I remember back in the early early days I did not like the idea that social platforms were essentially saying that they owned the content I was contributing to them.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Hmm.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Right. So there were certain platforms that had language like that. So it was like when I post a picture, it's still my picture. I understand I'm providing a limited license to display and show it to whoever because it's posted publicly. But it's still my picture. I wasn't a describing ownership to the platform.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: So to me, this is a really intriguing, you know,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: next set of things and could there be a way for a digital twin of you or me or whatever to have the ability privately to maintain that context,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: environment of all the data that we care about,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: for us to build a more comprehensive version of a digital twin that we would trust,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: and not contribute, unless we decided to.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: All right. Super cool. All right. So we're we're in the we're rounding the last corner here of our of our podcast for today and
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: We started with some doomed stuff and not not to be outdone
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: We have another story here about the metaverse being doomed
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: which has been happening for ever since it started, essentially that people were saying that
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Metas version of the metaverse was going to fail and it was a huge waste of money and
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: now of course they're super focused on wearables in AI and so yeah let's not spend any more money on the metaverse so they are dramatically reducing their investments on the metaverse piece so
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: horizon and all of the other things they were working on and there's a big piece here from the Wall Street Journal, possibly not super surprising. Cori Doctor O was on the daily show this last week and towards the end of that interview where he's talking about his book certification he does mention how Mark Zuckerberg made this big effort to get people to join the metaverse and be still.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: stuck in this world instead because that was the thing that the billionaire said was going to be the future.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Mm-hmm
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: I think if we rewind or rewind go all the way back to the beginning of our show where we started or our shows plural because we can include our nation in the in the in the in the over
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: See what you did there
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Hmm
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Yes, yes, yes
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: that we've talked about the use of gaming technology 3D internet spaces 3D online spaces for lots of things we've just covered some of
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: them today. Digital twins and simulation and adding contextual data to help you simulate and model things for better outcomes. So whether or not meta changing its name,
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Facebook changing its name to meta and doing a load of tinkering around and trying to encourage people to only have or significantly have metaverse lives, I think was a distraction real long. Now, now, now, now, now.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: I've heard of them.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Talking of going back in history, they rewinding further, there is this little story about a small company called Nintendo, who of course, they were they were into VR stuff way before anyone else because they have this thing called the virtual boy, which was this extremely
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Mm-hmm.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: evidently because I never used one, evidently bad or certainly challenging to use
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: [laughing]
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: C sickness inducing, motion sickness inducing.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Device with fairly low res graphics that came out. I think in the either early 90s or late 80s even I can't remember must have been early 90s. I'll have to go and do my research, but they are now that they've got
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: sufficiently far through their
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: retro games catalog releasing on then latest platforms. They are releasing a an accessory
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: For the Nintendo Switch 2 to let you which is essentially a virtual boy to let you replay virtual boy games
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: It does say that you can only do it if you have an Nintendo switch online account. You can any order one in fact if you have that account
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Right
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: and it will be coming out on
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: The the I should say that the catalog of games is coming to the Nintendo switch online platform in middle of February
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: February yeah
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: so yeah, I'm curious to see how it works
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: And how people get on with it 1995. It seems like I've just gone to the end of the retro Data article and talks about mario's tennis and virtual boy warrior land
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Coming out back then so yeah, the actual accessory itself is a you know $100
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: So if you've got the latest switch, then it might be fun, but it really depends on how much you're
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: nostalgic for those sort of things or whether you'd want to get a modern
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: V I had said instead
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: So, so what I don't understand and I'm going to have to hunt for a picture of this is the,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: it talks about the bracket for the Nintendo Switch 1 or 2. Um, and I guess you're, you're putting it,
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: you're putting your Nintendo Switch into a into this virtual boy and then putting it on your face.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Yes, it's what it says. Correct. That's what it says. It says you put the switch into it and then look through its viewfinder to see the games. So yes, it's a it's literally an accessory for for the switch that makes the switch into some kind of virtual boy alike.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: So, yes.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: - Yeah.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: All right, well, grounding out the show.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: We've got one last thing to touch on super fast and that is this X4E reader magnetic attachment.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Another accessory, this one for an iPhone, right?
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: So about a month ago I heard of the X3, the previous generation of this device, and it's a little, essentially a little display, an E-ink display.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And Andy, you were saying how you were tempted, I think.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: If you imagine it, you like your magnetized battery that goes on the back of your iPhone or your Android device that supports that kind of charging.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Instead of a battery, it's an E-ink display, and you can read books on it, and it looked really neat.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: And so I thought, "Yeah, okay, that sounds fun."
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: And I actually put in a pre-order for the X3, and then this week, before they delivered the X3, they announced the X4, at which point I had buyers remorse and canceled the order for the X3.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: [laughing]
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: And thought, "What am I doing anyway?
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Why did I do this other than, other than it's, you know, it's great, it's fun."
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: talks about the trade-offs here.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: So the X4's E-ink screen resolution is 220 PPI and most of your actual E-readers are 300.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: So your text is not going to be as sharp as you might think.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: And of course, it's not backlit, so it's convenient in the sense that if you're outdoors and you want to look at some E-ink written text, then fine.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: But are you saving that much effort and money and power not using your phone to do the reading?
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Maybe. So I decided against it.
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: Oh, but there is an option there's an option Andy you can buy for $9.99 US, an X4 magnetic reading light.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: See what you have your your phone. It's your your things stuck on the back of the phone and then you stick on another thing Which is a light you're gonna end up with this kind of hand held device with all these extensions
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: And then you put it inside of the virtual boy.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Virtual boy, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot in the air virtual boy an experience you're reading and in
4A422DE7-6A0C-4089-926D-FFB6EE8BDA61: I think it's time for us to bid you all a civil adieu we know we're getting into the holiday season, so there will be a little bit of a break in the action from your coasts, but we'll be back again in force strongly and we need your help and your articles and what you're seeing drop us a line over games of work that is and we'll incorporate them in a future show. See you later everybody.
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Full grainy grainy ink 3d
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: Well on that bombshell
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: You
7B2EB75F-3958-454C-9AA8-EC4F44706967: See ya!
022F02D6-F636-447C-8300-B5A2F07347D0: [upbeat music]
CC5B7633-87FC-43B2-9B7C-FDA9A6731EB0: You've been listening to games@work.biz, the podcast about gaming technology and play.
CC5B7633-87FC-43B2-9B7C-FDA9A6731EB0: We are part of the Blueberry podcasting network, and we'd like to thank the band,
022F02D6-F636-447C-8300-B5A2F07347D0: [upbeat music]
CC5B7633-87FC-43B2-9B7C-FDA9A6731EB0: Random Encounters for their song, Big Blue.
CC5B7633-87FC-43B2-9B7C-FDA9A6731EB0: You can follow us at our website at games@work.biz.
022F02D6-F636-447C-8300-B5A2F07347D0: [upbeat music]
022F02D6-F636-447C-8300-B5A2F07347D0: [clapping]