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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 547.
B-tastic!
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Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon, Michael Row here.
It's Friday afternoon. I've got screens in front of me, a giant microphone and a friend named Michael on the other side of the screen to talk tech with you and for you about your tags and interesting topics at games or work.biz. Michael
excited to be here on a lovely day and all kinds of excited share lots of stories here about some things that have studs to them.
Ooh. Does that make us studs? No. Not at all. Well, first we're going to say, well, no,
How about that.
No.
No, not at all, but we're going to we're going to start with an article from ours technica don't you think.
because first I'm going to shout out our co-host, Andy Piper, who's off this week. And I think we'll be off next week. And I hope he's having an awesome time spelunking in the fjords,
Because you don't know where he's at.
No one knows where he's at.
But he's having a good time.
Now, what are we going to talk about next?
All right.
So we're going to go under the sea just a little bit with a story about meta and about multiple.
So there was an article earlier this week, there were several articles about this particular topic where meta acquired multiple book.
And we've talked about that a little bit before.
So we won't go into great detail, but the fun thing about this in my mind is when you consider the voracious appetite of
elm's including llama from our friends over at meta. It kind of makes sense that you might want to have something like moat book where agents are talking to one another as a potential source of additional information that you might incorporate into your large language model.
There's that and you might want to have them sell advertisements to agents that may decide to buy them or tell their humans that they should buy them too. So good fun stuff.
I actually had an interesting thought about this the other day.
And so as you say,
Walt Book has these agents talking to each other.
And the idea is, is there value in that conversation that I can leverage if I'm building an agentic workflow to understand how other agents might be doing things and can I reverse engineer some knowledge?
So maybe that's an acquisition target for that reason.
So we're going to think about what happens when you take a deep research document,
you run an AI on it and you say summarize this to help me make a decision.
So it does that.
And you probably used AI to generate that deep research.
So then you have a summary of an AI summary deep research.
And then you say, take this summarized information and let me create something on from it.
Like maybe I'm creating a presentation or a keynote or whatever.
And then you have a summary of the summary of AI generated research.
And then you go off and you take that information and you use it to feed into an agentic tool to go off and run an exercise of some sort which is going to summarize that data and create content.
And you get down to, do you remember the days when photocopiers were really bad.
And you would take a new story on an article from a physical magazine, you make a photocopy and then you make another photocopy of that photocopy and eventually your teacher would do a handout of a photocopy of a photocopy and it was this black mess.
Sure it would degrade with every copy, of course.
or a mimeograph, that was even better.
Well, those were loads of fun. I actually got to work on that as one of my little student things as a kid in high school and got to love the moon grass.
But yeah, I mean, at what level do all these acquisitions of second and third level AI tools add value versus subtract value because they're over summarizing existing content.
Well, I don't know, does this mall book summarizing content or was it really more agents essentially interacting with other agents, right?
Well, it's the agents interacting with other agents,
So, sure.
and multiple was capturing that conversation.
Well, that conversation is driven based off of a summarization of something that turns into a set of actions.
So, it's actions based off of summarization that turn into a string of actions that you're then going to take and feed into an LLM of some sort to learn from.
Yeah, well, I mean it makes it makes sense because that's a meta set of conversations.
Ahh, you got it, it's meta.
So why not, right?
[laughing]
It's on brand, right?
It's yup, yup.
It's really on brand.
I mean, this reminds me also a little bit of the topic we had some years ago where you had a Google Home device talking to another Google Home device or to the watchword and they they would talk back and forth and not understand what.
Siri, and they had these arguments.
And it was so entertaining. Maybe we'll maybe we'll find that for the show notes and if you want to see that YouTube video, it was it was good fun.
Mm. Well, and, and especially if we remember the stories, I guess there's two weeks ago where they talk about, maybe three weeks ago that a lot of the conversation where, where agents looked like they were going off to try to, you know, do things that he weren't supposed to do were actually fed by prompts by people.
- Yeah, exactly, all right.
So moving on to another interesting discussion,
Agents, they're people just like us.
where great followers of Mike Elgin and one of the things that he'd shared was a futurism post about a study here,
that title is study finds that execs are already outsourcing, they're thinking to AI.
And this is a common discussion point here that people are losing their own.
And we've seen some of that over time where, you know, think about the phone numbers you have memorized, you used to have most of the important people's in your life, their phone numbers memorized because doing that on a rotary dial meant you had to have that handy to do it on a rotary dial and now you could just say, you know, hey, wake word, please call so and so, and it'll call them.
So it's not entirely, uh,
surprising here that there's yet another article on this and they call it cognitive debt, um, you know, by outsourcing work to AIs.
So, yeah, I guess kind of the differentiating thought here might be.
If you think executive's incorporation is what their role is supposed to be, right?
It's supposed to be strategic thought and setting directions for others to go do something.
If you have an executive who's doing all this stuff, they're not performing executive activities, right? That's they're supposed to have people to do that.
For them. And in this case, they're saying I've got agents to do that for them.
The question is, when it comes to decision making, that is, I think, where the problem could lie.
If you're outsourcing the decision, that's a problem. If you're saying, go get me this information,
and I will then make a decision off of it. I think that's an appropriate executive function.
And looking at the article to me, it didn't go down deep enough to explain that part of it.
Yeah, no, of course not. Right.
And I don't think executive is asking something else or someone else to do
research for them is a bad thing if they're performing their executive function.
Exactly, and that's how do you guide your AI counterpart to go and collect information for you,
validate it, show where it came from, evaluate the trustworthiness or truthiness of those elements.
Michael and I, before we hit the pre-show, we're talking about what I'll be doing this weekend,
and I'll be doing a keynote address for a statewide hackathon called "Smathhacks" 2026,
I've been involved with this community now.
I've been involved for a number of years and one of the things that I'll be talking about are the skills that are needed now in 2026 to really be able to interoperate and to leverage AI and where those skills are to be best found, nurtured and allow people to move into the future.
So what you just explained, Michael, makes a ton of sense about the researching, right? So can you find the insights of using an AI agent that can quickly go and
to understand and ingest a wide variety of sources that the human then can evaluate the appropriateness, the truthiness, the nature of those sources and then direct the actions to be able to go and do something with that.
It might be to create some wireframes, it might be able to create code directly, it might be to do a refinement of the research or to do something compelling to convince others that this is a good idea.
it's worth investing in. So it's a variety of those things and that I think is going to be the really intriguing thing to delve a little bit deeper here for sure.
Yeah, one thought kind of riffing off of that that I that I had and I was talking to a colleague about this is when you think about
Where the bottleneck has been historically on change and I'll talk about corporate change
It could be how long does it take you to implement your new ERP system, right?
It may be how long does it take you to go from idea to MVP
To ship to the market etcetera and what's going to happen if it's not already happening is that the bottleneck is going to shift
Because it may be it took you six months to write the application MVP now that happens in a weekend that doesn't mean you're gonna ship on Monday
because there are other decisions and other things that now instead of testing.
50 features in your new product. You've got a thousand features because it becomes so trivial to create features that you just shove them all in 1.0 right and so you get into this shift of where the bottleneck is and when.
Again, back to the executive function, the the ability to understand the complexity etc. When you get into the thought process of I just got a thousand.
How's the decisions to make? To say this is shipable or not, how do you have the capacity and the cognitive ability to make those 1000 decisions with the same level or appropriate level of care and understanding and and knowledge that used to be able to make those 1000 decisions over the course of five releases in four years right and now you have a month.
So you're shifting where the bottlenecks are going to be and how do we make people skilled enough to be able to address those new bottlenecks that we're going to make.
Yeah, I love that. Michael, that is really, really insightful, and I think that leads really nicely into the next story here, too, which is the Mac stories article about Apple's 50th anniversary.
And one of the things that Steve Jobs was really famous for talking about was, and there's a link to it right here, so you can see the monologue and listen to it if you like to, the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.
And this features prominently in the remark.
I'll be giving this weekend as well because my belief is that certainly you have to have the necessary science level understanding in order to do what you need to do in a technology world for sure.
But you also need to have the level of creativity, empathy, humanity to know what's important to people.
Unless you're on mope book which in case that you're talking agent agent, that's a different story. But the thousand things.
Which are the most important and Steve Jobs also talked about saying a thousand knows to every yes.
So just because you can doesn't mean you should.
And these are the nuances that are going to be really really important now in 2026.
And I think for a long time still in the future because the bottlenecks are going to shift left.
And as they shift left earlier in the cycle, it's those ideas that are going to be the not commodities.
The uniqueness is that has to be determined.
Yeah, I don't know if they're all going to shift left.
I think you're going to shift left and right.
And so right now, the bottleneck historically,
I'll just talk about software development was in the middle, the writing and the testing of the code.
You could come up with ideas pretty quick,
and you could do the final packaging and a little bit of marketing material pretty quick on the other end.
But now, the middle is going to shrink so dramatically that those both ends are going to be more important.
because if any--
anybody can write a full feature to do app,
there's no way to distinguish yourself in the markets.
You're going to spend a heck of a lot more time on the marketing side, right?
Keep calculator.
Typically, you got it.
What was the fart machine right on the early iPhone apps?
Or on the front end on market research and feature definition and user profiles.
and all this stuff.
I think, you know, jobs as comment was right and you're hitting it too, is we need to understand humanity and the humanities from an education perspective to make sure that we're building the right thing or doing the right thing for the right reasons and the right people, right, so that there's actually the right market out there. Otherwise, it could be really good slot, but it's still slop. Yep.
Product
It's product market fit, you know to you know talk about it in those terms and that that is going to be super crucial in remains So but the iterations and testing for that is going to be something can be known a whole heck of a lot faster, right?
Because you can really evaluate okay. Well, what if it was this what if it was this what if it was this what if it was this and
And so, so that's a really good question.
So it gets faster and faster and faster,
faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, right?
And we say that in the future because of AI and robotics,
we're going to have all this free time.
Are we really, or are we going to see what we're having exactly exactly what we're going to see?
And we see this today with developers who are using AI coding tools.
And instead of just putting out a release two or three times a year,
They're now cranking them out.
Instantly because they can and you end up in a situation where you end up with burnout a lot faster
So that takes us right back to the humanities. You've got to look at this whole listically It's not just about cranking out new features and not just about releasing new products to market
It's not just because you can go faster and have more and more iterations
That may not be the right thing to do
Yes, just another great example we know that once a year Apple's going to come out with a new iPhone
What really? Are you sure? Maybe?
Right usually in September or usually in September right, but right they might come out with a mid cycle release in Let's say March and call it an e device
But for all practical versus once you're they're kind of come out with a new iPhone
Imagine what would happen to their revenue cycle
If they didn't have that
Artificial once a year release cycle, but they just started cranking out new found phones as fast as they could because they can
I'll just leave it up there. So what else we got?
Oh, so what I guess we're not done with with Apple yet what we have is a really cool hack if you will of a case that looks an awful lot like the little Lego computer cases so it's a little two by two sloped computer simulation where you can put it around the Mac mini and the way it's been set up allows you then to have your Mac mini on on your table and you
Will have like this really cool little device and the way it's been set up you can charge your phone on it because that's been set in place too and that's kind of kind of cool
I think this guy actually was the one who developed the little Lego with an actual computer in it, the little two by Lego piece with an actual computer in it, a couple years ago, and so this is using his same designs for that, but scaling it up to put a Mac mini in it.
do it. Oh, really? Maybe.
Oh, that's funny. We'll have to find that if we if that's in fact the case.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I remember seeing that.
I know he's basing it off the classic two by two sloped computer brick Lego piece, but I think this might have been the same guy, and if not, it still has the same look who did that with an actual Lego piece.
Right Mm-hmm
Yeah, and the touch screen is just such a nice touch there too, right?
Yeah, I saw that, I was trying to figure out what he's actually showing on it, though.
Well, what he's, what he's showing is it is an image that is just like the sticker,
The one that was on the chip. Yeah.
not really sticker. It was what was on the actual little computer two by two sloped brick,
but you know, it is a touch screen that you could use for other controls and there are other companies out there that have created things that are like that. Yeah, yeah.
Kind of like a stream deck.
You can make it into your own little stream deck.
Yeah, I mean, that's that kind of was what
I've forgotten the name of it, but that's exactly what I was thinking. This lets us move a little bit more into the Lego space, or we're kind of picking up on that studs piece, and Michael, you saw an article come across your feeds from Duke about someone who actually went to go work for Lego, didn't you?
Yeah, so this is interesting
in the alumni newsletter crap that they send you all the time asking for money, right?
I think all universities do that. I saw this article. It really caught me. It's it's actually from December and
it's talking about a
student from Duke who actually went to Duke originally for the ballet program and
then it up switching into
the sciences with chemistry.
chemistry classes and how that led her into the path of STEM and teach for America and ultimately connecting up with the Lego education program.
And I just thought it was really kind of cool how, you know, our original paths don't always go down where you think they're going to be and how Lego to me was always a way of connecting things.
my love of Star Trek with
my love of building Legos, because I used to make phasers and stuff out of it. But it was a really interesting kind of journey for this student. And it fit really well into a lot of our discussions we've been having around Lego lately. I think it's cool.
Yeah, I like that too. And the fact that it's all about Lego education, which is where she wound up going, I think that's also really cool because Lego has been a key part of education through the robotics programs and through a variety of other things as well.
Last week's show, we talked a little bit about the new Lego brick and I've been playing around with it just a little bit since then, but I haven't built.
Well, they are only about this big, right? They are little.
Yeah, and one of the articles that turned up was the
the fact that you can't replace the battery in it, which is sort of a standard thing that we've seen around phones for, oh, I don't know, like 20 years that you can't replace batteries and things.
And it's funny because it bit me, because I had the Lego brick here at my desk and I was going to show it to some people, and I started shaking it and twisting it and moving it around and sure enough the battery had expired.
Lego themselves suggest that you keep it on the charger if you're not active.
And it's been recharged, so we're good, but the battery is really small, and trying to pry it open to replace it, or something that feels on a lot of levels just kind of silly.
So is it fully dead or are we able to recharge it?
Okay, good.
Of course, it's a break.
It would also be kind of dangerous because kids can eat bricks as it is and you start peeling a brick apart into smaller pieces that could be a safety hazard.
Yeah, good good point, Michael, too. So you, you, you don't want to have necessarily, excuse me,
like a button battery or something like that in there that could, you know, cause other issues.
And, and that brings to mind also, who are these things for, right? You know, who are these sets for? And this is not the adult fans of Lego kind of structure. There are plenty of sets that are really geared toward that. You're not going to spend a thousand dollars on a death star set for
you know, junior, who's only six years old. And there's a, there's a lovely, you know, maybe,
Some people might, but-
maybe some people. I don't know who those people are. But there's a lovely video that will include in the show to us. You can take a look at it about one of the Lego fans that had his kids kind of be exposed to this. And the sheer delight from the kids that is there is just fantastic. I mean,
it does add an awful lot to
the play experience, although there's some out there that are saying, "Well, it's stunting the imagination because now you're providing this extra stimulus to it," kind of a little bit like the phone conversation we had earlier. But at the same time, the fact that it unlocks some interesting new experiences and that when you have more than one brick cow, one gun turret as it's shooting, pew pew, and another one that's nearby can sense that and go,
Oh, I'm going to explode.
Now, over here, those are kind of cool things and I would say that as we go forward in time, that will provide for new play experiences and for people to do more stuff with them.
Now, along those lines there, there's a couple of other articles that we've listed out here too about finding other uses for the Smartbrick already.
So, there's an example video of someone who's taken the little RFID piece and putting it into a...
a light saber and then putting the brick on, said light saber and moving it around and getting the experiences and the sounds related to that is super deluxe, cool.
They'll probably other things you can do from a sensor perspective on it and we had one last or a point on from Mastodon about how cloning the bricks is also possible because they do comply with the appropriate ISO standards that allow for this sort of thing.
The hacker community is on it as we suggested they were, right?
Yeah. Of course they are. Of course they were. I mean, that's the fun thing. I mean, let's face it,
growing up to me before having my first computer, I mean, Leo's where you're hacking tool,
right? You built things that, I mean, you couldn't actually hack things with them, but you could pretend, right? And you learned, you know, how to break things down and how to build things up based off of components and features.
You're out how to put things together to represent something else and I mean go back to the the Lego computer design with the Mac mini in it right you're repurposing something in a way or making something to make it look like something else and possibly even behave differently than originally designed and and that's the fun of hacking.
Yeah. And tinkering and playing, which kind of brings us right back to the beginning of all this,
you learn by playing with things, experiencing them, even at work.
Even at work.
So with that friends, Andy Wemissia, we're looking forward to being back full strength with you again soon. And if you've got some Lego brick stories or you've got some other things that you'd like to hear us chat about, you can find us at games@work.biz and you can find us on the socials as well,
we'd love to hear about what you're playing with at work or otherwise. Thanks a lot, everybody,
and we'll see you next time.
See ya!
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