[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, or may be, affiliated with.
[upbeat music]
Hello and welcome again to another edition of Games at Worktop Is. This is Michael Martine.
I am joined with my other two co-hosts, so we're full strength yet again,
with Mr. Michael Rowe. How are you today, Michael?
Whoo! I am ready to rock and roll have some fun and talk tech with our other co-host Andy Piper. Andy, how are you?
I'm well, I am a slightly jealous of Michael Martine and his new toys.
In fact, I'm quite pleased that he's chosen to join us this week because he could be off, you know, making noises and playing with technological works.
Flash and Lights.
I could have flashing lights, neat sounds,
all that stuff.
So what Andy's referring to is I put in an order early for the new LEGO smart play all in one system.
And the one that I purchased was the X-Wing fighter set
with the only 581 pieces.
And one of those 581 pieces is that smart brick.
This is the one, you see, it would be 580 pieces otherwise.
And so just learning how to use this thing and I've done just a little bit with it so far.
I have not built the X-Wing yet.
I've built sort of the little transporter that would get the fuel to the X-Wing.
And what's super cool is that it has sort of this RFID tag that you can place.
And then you put the brick that makes the noise on top of said thing.
And it recognizes that it's on something.
and it will make a sound as you
are playing with it. The accelerometer, gyroscope, the flashing lights are all part of this smart play brick and I actually fooled Andy for a moment because he thought I had a play date which I didn't have, that's actually the charging receptacle I guess from Lego which is yellow and looks a little bit like the Playdate handheld device, just no crank.
So the question I have to ask, because now that we've seen it, at least on video, it looks like you have multiple different RF IDs that you can put on different parts of the model,
Yes. Yes.
but you have one brick and that one brick across possibly even all other builds will sit there and go, "Oh, I read this..."
So I make that sound, I read this RFID, so I make that sound, is that the basic premise of this?
I believe so and work, I'm going to learn a little bit more about it as I, as I build the thing that the obviously for kids having one brick.
That's cool.
That has this kind of feature is going to be tricky because it could get lost, you know, or you could step on it and crush it although Lego is extraordinarily resilient for that sort of thing and if you step on it, you'll know and you know, probably crush you.
Yeah, 'cause they lose them.
which, well, it's probably lucky that it's resilient to that sort of thing because it does contain a lipo battery, so it possibly could cause a small fire if it got punctured. So...
Uh.
Oh, so I wonder, I probably not allowed to take this on an airplane then.
"Explode" you can explode.
It's so super tiny.
There's tiny, tiny, tiny little lipo battery, I mean, yeah, yeah.
How did they get it to the US?
Yeah, so that those RFIDs come in a variety of different form factors that you there are some that are within many figs.
There are some that are just four by four smooth piles that you click on.
And I think I mentioned this the first time we talked about it, I expect that this is going to be a really cool on-ramp for people who will then want to hack this and create their own play experiences with perhaps special sounds, music, light shows, other things that Lego may unlock for kids to play with and digitally enhance their play experiences.
But the hacking community will find a way to go do that for them. So it really cool thing that will get you toward the robotic space and what Lego has done already for a good long while in robotics as well.
So fun stuff, I'll tell you more as I build more.
All right, so this little brick is the brain of these Lego builds as we're just talking about little chip and battery and whatnot. We have an article from new scientists about.
This is your brain on doom. And we've had some stories before about using brain cells, even human brain cells for compute power. And Michael, I think you found this particular article here about how these brain cells were put together and what did people do with them.
Yeah, what this reminded me of is actually I had gone to a meeting back in my Internet of Things days at the University, Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, work with a group of scientists who are doing stuff with biological computers.
And the chip biological interfaces and that's what this really is, instead of just using muscle tissue or whatever they're using neurons, i.e. brain cells.
And then using that to actually be able to do something in this case, play-dune. But Andy, you also had a thing that you wanted to jump in, right, as I got started, so I will uncut, I uncut you off and let you chime in.
Well, I was going to mention that perhaps we should explain fall listeners,
because this isn't possibly not something we've spoken about very much.
What doom is?
[laughing]
we're living it. Yes. I'm trying to remember when the first one came out was at ninety three.
Doom being a 3D...
SPS. Yeah.
Shoot 'em up first person shooter from the 1990s that has been used by a lot of people these days to demonstrate,
you know, basic computer computing capability.
The other thing...
Yes.
Yes, it was.
I remember playing it on DOS and then under OS 2 and then under Windows.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And of course it's been remade and re-written and ported from its original form to lots of different devices.
And just constantly being...
It's interesting to me that this article in the new scientist has a lot of references to academics in the UK.
Okay, one of whom is a gentleman called Steve Ferber, who is one of the folks that...
I knew of when I was much younger because he was one of the people that was involved with the acorn and arm computer systems back in the 80s.
So I found that quite interesting that he's cited here, talking about the fact that we've had these brain or neuronal computer chips,
where they're using human neurons to train.
Or train these things to play games and they've used it to play poly in the past, but Doom is a much more complex game.
But the interesting thing here is that the neurons don't know what's on the screen because they don't have eyes.
Therefore, how can they possibly, how can any of this sort of thing work? So it's a really interesting...
... story about how... what learning means in this context.
Yeah, I think that the other part that really kind of interested me to is in, I think, 2019 at MOGFEST, there was a whole session on human computing interfaces and how people can develop an additional sense by having an input device attached to the brain and
so for example, seeing an infrared, exactly to your point, Andy, that the input gets translated into something that the brain can comprehend.
Yeah, it's just data. Yeah.
So while it can't see, while it can't see, it is still an appropriate set of signals and inputs that happen.
And then that got me going down the rest of the agenda briefly thinking as long as they don't hook this up to an LLM after they've tried.
If you're trained at how to fight its way through Corridors, I'm probably okay.
Yeah. So Michael's alluding to an R's technical article about how large language models can
identify users, the people that are converted into data because LLMs don't have eyes either
with amazing accuracy. And this is related very much to the idea that you can triangulate who a person is based on just a few data points of where are you picking up some of their digital exhaust and location-based information.
You can very rapidly identify and mask someone who is attempting to be anonymous.
Well, that's why browser fingerprinting is so successful and targeted ads, right?
There's very little additional data that you need, then an IP address or some detailed information about the size of your screen, the plugins that you have to narrow it down from, you know, seven billion people on the planet using your computer to, there's probably 150 people in that geography that could be using a computer with that configuration.
Once you get down to that, having an LLM that sees additional patterns with additional data,
it just seems unfortunately way too logical that an LLM-based AI can find signals in the noise of all you say this digital exhaust and figure out pinpointing who people are.
>> Yeah. So, let's move from something that's scary like that to something that's both humorous and a little scary. There is an article from PC Mag that's all about Orcs and this particular article is saying how the Orcs and their special phrases that they utter in Warcraft 3 have been now enabled and ported so that as you're doing your Vibe coding,
it will use those voices or those little audio snippets to communicate, you know, where things are.
So, kind of cute stuff for those of you who have been in the Warcraft environment for just a little
Well, yeah. I mean, I still have Warcraft 3 available matter of fact on the machine that we're recording the podcast on.
And I, as soon as I saw this article, I think Andy, you had found this and sent it to us.
My brain immediately went, "Ready to work", because it's, I mean, it's just fun, right?
and one of the things.
back on Windows 3-1 and Windows 95 you would buy these audio packs so that you would have sounds from your favorite movie or whatever and somewhere in a box in my attic I think I still have the Windows 95 Star Wars sound pack so when you open up a window it would make you know a light saber sound like and things like that and having that makes computing.
Oh yeah.
Fun. Badly.
Yeah, now we've got liquid glass to do that.
It's kind of funny. I did not play the Defense of the Ancients or Warcraft at all, but the article does reference defense of the Ancients in here. It's kind of funny because my daughter was putting together a playlist and some of the songs that she had kind of reminded me of the,
I hope I'm pronouncing it right, the bass hunter version of Defense of the Ancients. So I was
to add that to her playlist of other stuff. So I'll put the music in the show notes if you haven't heard it before. It's kind of catchy. Okay, so moving right along, let's head on over to Texas A&M and we'll kind of turn our white towel there and celebrate the idea that in their science and tech structure, they have created the humanity's last exam. Yes, Andy.
Texas A&M, explain.
Now, it is a university in Texas. They have a very involved fan base for their US football and basketball teams. They have, yes, yes, yes, yes. And mechanical. And mechanical. Yeah.
Are they the Aggies?
Okay.
And the A stands for Agricultural College, right?
Okay, okay. Well, that was useful background because when you first started referencing Texas earlier on or conversations today, I had no idea what you were talking about. So thank you for clarifying.
[laughs]
I know it's a state, but yeah, okay. Good.
Yes, of course.
- Yeah, some state.
Yeah.
And it's a state of mind for the people who live in Texas.
So, so this is an article from that institution about an exam that you can use within an LLM that will, that it can't answer in theory at the moment as of today. That's a recording.
Yes.
That's very important to say right now, and today being recording is on March 6th, 2026.
Yeah, and it's huge.
And this was written on February the 25th, this article, so yeah, yeah.
So maybe I don't know, maybe it has solved it by now, it's been a couple of weeks.
Well, and why not? I mean, if there's an exam, you can train something to do what it needs to do to hack it and win it and, you know, and get there, it's 2,500 questions that my guess would be their fair very few humans who might be able to pass this exam to when you look at the ancient languages that you would have to know how to translate and do all kinds of other interesting things to be able to get through this exam.
But the point is, is that many LLMs have been used to do the entrance exams for law school or medical school or things like that, so this is the humanity's last exam, so it...
So if you'd like to go and try this yourself, go to lastexam.ai and you can look at the data set, look at the papers that you used it and see how the different L of them AI models have scored against it, I think a moment at the time of writing, really recording.
So this is the entry into the human school.
Maybe.
We have Gemini 3.1 Pro reaching about 50...
30% accuracy, just under, but starting off back in November when they started doing this with GPT-4 November 24, I think you've had them, so 18 months ago, getting sub-10% accuracy,
Hmm. Hmm.
so really rapid increase already in the accuracy.
Yeah, so, again, if you're going back a year from now, listening to our entire podcast catalog, which you can find at gamesatwork.biz, yeah, then we'll know more.
Or you're all all I'm doing, man.
You can answer questions about any of us if you're doing that.
So, moving along, we have a really fun YouTube video,
because we're a family-friendly show.
We'll give you a warning that if you go and play the video,
there'll be a few words that are maybe not as family-friendly as you might like.
And this is from the Norwegian Consumer Council,
and we all enjoyed it tremendously because of A, the accent,
and be the whole idea about how digital
products and services are being made worse and worse. And you can see the references to so many examples in modern life.
I, I didn't think this had any problems with being family friendly.
I thought they were talking about bed sheets.
Sheets, right?
Sheets?
Oh, you mean the company that sells gasoline when you you get cheap other things? Yeah
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so anyway fun fun little video don't play it out loud in your workspace But you you'll probably enjoy it and you'll see things like oh cars where premium features of cars would be things like
Radios and stuff like that when you have an update
- All things we've talked about actually over the years.
Things we've talked about over the years. Yeah, so good stuff
[laughs]
Moving along. Let's let's do some metaverse 3d internet stuff Let's bring back you know some of the old stuff and this articles from March 4th so it's barely recently here just a couple of days ago and
really hold.
The the thing that kind of popped out of this when I looked at it in reader mode So I could read it is apparently epic games and Google had a deal
using Unreal, the Unreal engine, for both the size.
I guess is not entirely surprising, because when you think of all the investment schools made about maps and everything else, and all the additional elements that relate to that, why wouldn't there be something along the metaverse concept here?
Well, there's a lot of redacted content here in these courts, sheets, but it's interesting as well.
There's a separate story that springs from these set of papers and these set of rulings,
which is that Tim Sweeney now has to say nice things about Google having been very public about upsetting them about the app store as he did with Apple as well.
So it's quite interesting, but it's a shame that there's such limited information.
I'm just going to read out since we've got a few minutes here.
What's visible in the document and the specifics of it, there's references to a Metaverse browser,
which Google and Epic are collaborating on.
Metaverse browsers mean that they will have the primary purpose of allowing the navigation and exploration of metaverse worlds, support virtual items,
identity that are portable across different worlds in the metaverse browser and support modern security considerations, including sandbox capabilities.
And, gosh, going all the way back to when we started the podcast, we were talking about interoperability between virtual world spaces, metaverse spaces, the ability to port your belongings, possessions, virtual items, identity between them.
Didn't... I was about to say.
So, what goes around goes around I guess.
It was same old, but it's curious to see what it means.
Yeah, I think both, I think both you and I at conferences have spoken similar words to the effect of and the example I used to always use is I'm playing World of Warcraft and I get a call but I'm dressed up like my orc with my battle axe and I get a call and I walk my avatar into the meeting room out of World of Warcraft in
into the meeting room, my battle axe turns into a laser pointer for a presentation because we wanted this exchange across meta-verses, across gaming platforms, across virtual worlds,
et cetera, and to have a continuity of personality across those.
>> Yeah. What that service might look like in terms of transferring data or identity between those systems. I mean, it's funny because we deal with some of the same questions in the open social web where you're potentially having multiple identities depending on which systems you're using and so in the FEDI verse, not the META verse today,
Yeah, I mean that was 2007.
I have, because I've been playing with this this week, doing some work on coding around this.
I think I've got about 26 different activity pub FEDI verse identities,
including the one that we use for the show that games have worked up is on, on Macedon, for example.
And, and some others, so they're not all personal identities, but that they are all me.
I am the glue that holds them together, and at the moment you can't port the data between the
I am the walrus.
platform and you can port the networks between platforms, you can't port the data between the platforms, and that is, it's not a different problem, it's the same problem in a different context in a non 3D context here.
You know guys, I was just hunting in our back catalog here for Niantic and when we've talked about them in the past and I came across an episode from October of 2014.
What where where this was one of the topics of discussion?
So this has been around for for a little while as we're all saying, right?
Well, 2007 we were talking about it too. I mean it's it's it's literally 20 years just about 20 years
Yeah, wait.
Back when I, back when I still had hair.
What's that? No.
Well, you're you're gonna out of this other avatar
Okay, we are an audio based podcast so in case you didn't know.
All right, so I think the last thing that we've got on our hit parade for today is an intriguing thing from the company liquid death.
And liquid death is such an intriguing company for what it is that they do and the marketing that they do in so many places.
But I did not know for example, and to read this article about they had a partnership with Yeti for a casket sized cooler from Yeti that they said here it was auctioned off for $68,200.
So I haven't I didn't have them clicked through to it yet, but I would imagine that it is, right?
Was it full of liquid death?
I'm not certain that this brand is one that is popular or known in the UK.
Is world wide? Yeah.
I don't know. I haven't really think I'd heard of it, to be honest.
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's fizzy water in a lot of ways and they're, they're, they're tagline is murder your thirst, right? Liquid death murder your thirst and they come in really big cans.
Yeah, with extra caffeine or something.
Right.
So that you can see in this way. So this article, which, which of you found this one? Let's, let's set it up.
Andy, was that you? Was that you, Michael? Who knew, who was it?
I don't think it was me.
hmm okay I mean I I
definitely wasn't me and it specifically says that the product is not available in my region
Maybe it was me.
It looks like something I would have found, but...
saw it to I saw it to oh well we have some rest in peach here in the house and you know it's it's actually okay and not too carbie so that's good yeah I you're always This peachy keen, how's- that was a little- no.
Okay, well then you're lucky.
I wouldn't drink it.
I definitely wouldn't drink that one. I pack peaches when summer. I don't drink stuff with peaches in it.
Wait, no, I'm wrong. It's I guess maybe the drinks are available here, but not the the specific product we're talking about I know free shipping to the UK on orders above a hundred pounds weird
I know that's because I lived in Georgia.
Okay.
So you can actually get the speaker.
I can't get the speak I can't get oh, the right. I see what you mean. Yeah
Yes.
But it is sold out actually.
Ah, that's terrible.
So tell us about this speaker.
So yeah, well, I can give you at least a couple of things.
So it's a Bluetooth speaker.
It is the eternal playlist urn is what it is.
And the idea here is that you can keep your favorite playlist of all the songs that you might like,
including your ashes in this earth.
And you'll have to charge it up because, you know, your ashes don't provide, you know, energy to an earth.
And it's appropriately, you know, logoified here from liquid death and Spotify on it.
And it looks like marble, but it's just a polyester resin sort of thing.
And you can play your playlist and it prompts you to figure out what your playlist should be, right, as you're resting
So, so, so, so.
in peace and the earn in some other place other than a cemetery, I suppose.
So I guess if you're resting in this arm, it can't really be liquid death until you add water.
So just add water and you have to do your liquid death.
So weird. So weird. I mean they're very clever, marketing and an angle I suppose, but yeah,
You need to do that if you're selling water you gotta have an angle, right?
so really totally odd.
I guess so.
Well, and what's really funny is this article's that all the way back from December.
Oh my gosh. No, it's February 26th. February 28th. Yeah, February
Oh, so it was a Christmas gift.
It's a it's a great Christmas car.
Yes, first February 26th here, 28th.
Mine says December 15th.
Well, that's because you have a pie hole
What?
It says it says December 15th.
How is this possible?
How is this possible? How come Michael and I are both seeing February 28th?
Huh
And you're seeing... You live in a different...
Because evidently it's one of these ever green stories that's using
The previous article is December 25th, is December 15th.
If you scroll down the page,
the one, the earn one is not. How crazy is that?
It's ever... Oh, yeah, exactly. The rare vintage tech products.
Maybe it's reader mode that's doing that,
I am must be. I think it must be. I think it's some read-a-mode is doing it because there you go. It's giving you the date of the previous article.
'cause if I turn off reader mode,
yeah, reader mode got confused and put the December,
Whoa, wow, there you go. That's the accuracy of AI summarization for you.
wow, that's bizarre.
Oh yeah, so who would have an Apple one computer in their attic?
[laughs]
Not many people.
Well, if you had one back in the day You forgot about it, put it in your attic.
This is going now, Michael, to be clear, Michael Martinez now scrolled far and I found the page to get to the previous article
Well, I had to get to the previous article.
to the other articles
And it's about an apple one
All right, well, friends, I think we're done, right?
So if you've got a great article,
On more levels
if you've got a great article, send it to us,
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hit like, subscribe, tell your friends,
and you'll see us again here next week.
Most of us on gamesawork.biz.
See ya.
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You've been listening to Games@Work.biz, the podcast about gaming technology and play.
We are part of the Blueberry podcasting network, and we'd like to thank the band,
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Random Encounters for their song, Big Blue.
You can follow us at our website at Games@Work.biz.
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