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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 5-4-8, The Uncomfortable Valley.
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Hello and welcome again to another edition of Games@Work.biz. This is Michael Martin, one of your two Michael co-hosts and not one of your Andy co-hosts who's not with us this week, who is off on other engagements. But Michael, you and I are going to hold down the fort. We're going to have all kinds of good fun stuff to talk about. Aren't we?
Yes, and I am also not one of your Andy co-hosts because there's only one Andy co-host as you said, and this Michael co-host is happy to be here. Michael, take it away. Let's have some fun.
Yeah, let's do. So the very first article for this week is coming from Fast Company and I used to subscribe to this magazine once upon a time and I enjoyed seeing it all the time and they still have great articles that come through and this particular one was super funny for me to read about.
Let's buy Rebecca Heil while, and that kind of rhymes there, doesn't it, that talks about
Microsoft Teams and the emoji faces on Microsoft Teams. So Michael, you know, I've both experienced Teams and yeah.
I'm just barely for a very short period of time before I switched companies.
My current company does not use Teams, but I do have a customer who uses Teams, and I keep trying to force them on to Zoom.
>> Well, good luck with that, because one of the reasons you might want to force them on to zoom is because the emojis are a little on the weird side.
Now we'll know why.
Creepy
So, the article is titled "The Uncomfortable Valley," and we have talked about different valleys here before, and I love the word "uncomfortable," because these emojis are not I'm Kenny, they don't remind you of a...
humanoid or a robot that's like it's a human but not quite, but it's a little uncomfortable because the emojis are animated and they do some stuff and so aside, maybe even from like the smiley face, once you start going a little bit beyond that, those emojis do things that are not exactly maybe what you'd really want to convey in many of a business meaning, and that's kind of what Rebecca is writing about in her article.
that the mojis are supposed to convey.
And to do so effectively and efficiently with a more or less common thought, but the manner in which these mojis and the animation behind them come across is sometimes maybe a little less business like than one might expect.
- Yeah, it is a funny story.
And the examples that the author gives going through the uncanny valley discussion, et cetera,
brought back nice little smiles and conversations that we had years ago in the 3D internet days.
And I do find it interesting that that,
there's this, there's this corporate move right now to be playful.
And I,
Don't say they're with disdain, that's what we've been talking about for years.
well, there's a difference to me between being playful and being professional.
You can be professionally playful with like gaming technology, things of that way.
But in the end.
For playfully professional, rest in playful.
And I actually posted about this on Macedon about living and I'm a text-based person living in an emoji world.
We've got this environment, at least my current environment world work at, that loves to put emojis in everything.
[Laughs]
And I don't need emojis in my documentation.
I don't need emojis in my status reports.
need cute little icons of things and stuff.
Or I'm trying to consume information and the emojis provide no additional value, right?
And so when I look at, when I look at this, it's another one, these, yes, the little faces are cute if you're like saying yay, you did great, right?
Mm-hmm
Or ha, ha, ha, I'm smiling or laughing, but you don't need the animation.
the animation.
That is an additional piece of cognitive load that you as a user have to do.
to deal with when it pops up on the screen.
And if you're in the middle of, let's say you're in the middle of a finance audit.
Right?
And you're on your own teams and suddenly this cute little thing comes up.
Let's yeee!
No.
I don't need that crap.
So, yours is not working.
Are you trying to give things?
I know, no, I'm just playing with, you know, so what Michael's referring to is I'm doing the reactions in macOS, right?
[laughing]
Reactions.
You know, so sometimes you get some birthday balloons or you get some fireworks or some other things and there's certainly been articles and other topics.
And they're not doing.
I think we've talked about it, too, that there are times when that might not be the appropriate emotion or animation that you might want to convey in a particular experience.
So I get it.
I don't understand your point, Michael. If I'm reading serious documentation about how to operate some software or hardware or what have you, I don't need it to be cutesy. I need it to convey the information and allow me to do what I need to do, right?
Exactly. Ex-ex-ex-ex-ax.
You know, it's not like at the end of a Monty Python, you know, the crawl where they, you know, claim that there were no llamas or coconuts or sparrows, you know, that were injured as a part of the making of the film.
Exactly. Exactly. You got it.
Yeah, yeah, so I'm with you. And that to me was why I was attracted to this article. I knew you're going to have a point of view on it.
of course
Because the idea of being professionally playful or playfully professional or, you know, being on the right part of that spectrum for the context of where you are is kind of important.
And when you're dealing with multiple nationalities and you're dealing with all kinds of, you know, other norms and people.
You want, you want the message sent to equal the message received. And that's what this article is really talking about, like the angry face, for example, where you might want to professionally playfully convey that, oh, I don't like that particular set of numbers in that, you know, region of the country of the world for the sales figures.
The fact that the emoji shakes and kind of is looking like super-deluxe angry might
overly state how you feel and that's not what you're trying to send.
And it also, I mean, those cultural differences, too, that could play into misrepresentation or misunderstanding of what you're actually sending.
So context is kind of important, don't you think?
It kind of is so uncomfortable valley. I love the term and then then thanks. I'm really really grateful for that now Now thinking about some other weird things. We've talked about some weird Nintendo
Experiences like the Elorimo was one of the things we talked about recently and there's an article from the verge Although there's been several articles on this particular front of a flower toy a talking flower toy
that remains playful and it will tell you various and sundry things as you see it but it also looks a little bit weird and it will interrupt your day and in the way I'm reading it in a playful fun kind of way to tell you the time and maybe say something a little bit like gosh the talking moose would have done back in the day.
Yeah, okay. So I get to be grumpy old man this episode. And yeah, so this one I actually get
Oh my gosh, you don't have to, don't, don't feel like you need to play the role if you don't want it.
because this is a consumer device for home and you could probably have it like in your kid's room or in a playroom or something. And you can have some fun with it and you can disable it.
Yes, right
You can tell it not to do things too. And and it's not a chat device.
It's not designed for full interaction where it's sucking up the data in your house.
Right, there's no large language model for this, right?
So so this one actually I would never have it, but I get it and I'm okay with it.
Okay, they see your side step that nicely now. Now, how about this next one about this camera idea?
See I wasn't the grumpy old man.
You know, how does this one grab you? I mean, it doesn't have a large language model to it, but it will help create a
Gameified version of your day and send you on
Quests to go and collect information and pictures and a whole lot more
Yeah, so this is from Haxter I/O, and it's a device that a guy developed that gamifies taking environmental pictures as the way I put things around you.
And I was actually listening to a story the other day about Pokemon Go.
Oh yeah.
And about pizzas?
I know you, you, you, you.
You were a fan of the monopoly game and the whole idea of checking in places and, you know,
Oh yeah, that was fun.
we, we ultimately discovered the main reason for each of these is data collection and mapping out popular areas and, and finding out where people are and, and so this is an individual doing it, it's kind of for fun and I, I think those
other games may have started for fun but tended to be a data suck in the long run.
I, I hope this stays a one off fun little project for a guy who just wants to hack around and do these things and I'll leave it at that because I've, you know, we all know I've gotten sensitive about my data over time and, and I, I think it's important that people understand.
[laughing]
The nuances of data collection. What can and cannot be collected, right? And what it can and cannot be used for it's funny. I've I've listened to
The Twitter network for 20 years
Gosh, they've been around that long.
Yeah, and
For the longest time Leoloport who's kind of the founder of that and does a lot of the shows there would say I've I've got nothing to hide open blood.
I got no problem about data privacy and he's starting to finally switch his tune, which yeah, recognizing that just because you got nothing to hide doesn't mean you want everything consumed and known, right?
And so I think we as tech people and people who enjoy technology.
And learning new things and playing on the leading edge need to kind of reassess the assumptions when we play with something new to don't just assume everything's always going to be used for good, right?
Or not used for nefarious purposes.
And so I found it interesting that he was recognized.
And yeah, I want to get your perspective because I know, are you still doing, was it for square and checking in places?
They have something called swarm, which is a derivative of four square.
That was it, squirmed that the new version was the, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, so there's certainly a lot of thoughts about what data you're putting out where.
Who owns it?
Who has control over it?
What could go?
What are the derivative works that come as a result?
And this works whether you're playing with Google Maps.
Even Apple Maps now has frequented places and there's ways of storing or not storing
for square and swarm have their own data structures and the like and certainly Pokemon go in a variety of other situations.
Waze is another lovely example.
We're all about harvesting data and providing a degree of entertainment to people or some other element of value because why would people do it if they weren't getting some value out of it in order to then have a deeper hash of information that could be used and repurposed for things like, I thought you were going to talk about the article about how for pizza delivery, you know, optimization, you know, and for mapping, you know, that's what many of these are harvesting data for to keep up to speed with what's changing with the roads and what is now the most efficient, effective direction to go get somewhere crowdsourcing that.
Oh, I remember having, when I did a lot of work with the automotive industry, one of the big things was, you know, looking at the sensor data coming off the tires of the car, that you could then sell that information to the city to say, hey, you've got problems with potholes in this area and you ought to consider going out and sending a repair truck and fixing that.
Yes. Exactly. Exactly. So it's, it's, it's in a super interesting area about how do you,
how could you monetize data that people are emitting? And, and the digital contrails of how we walk through life, many people don't consider it all what they're emitting and some, you know, some do.
You should assume that if a new technology can collect telemetry data, assume they're going to monetize it.
And if you're okay with your data being monetized and you're getting no incremental value over just the toy or the game that you're playing, are you okay with it?
Right, I mean the phrase was if you're not paying for something you're paying with it with your data, right?
And then that's something we've talked about for eons
Yeah, but we have, but your average user,
I don't think, understands what that.
So of course not, of course not, and the terms and conditions are deliberately so dense and impenetrable that you can't really fathom that unless you've had that level of experience
And we know that, you know, the smart individuals who listen to our podcast are well aware of all of this.
Well, that's one of the reasons why, you know, all of our listeners are above average and super, you know, super clever when it comes to this kind of stuff.
So speaking of super clever, there's, there was, um, I think Andy actually was the one who shared this and this tickled my fancy on a couple of different ages, right?
Yes, I knew it would as soon as I saw it. I was like this was targeted for you specifically
Well, yeah, so, so here's, here's the deal in, in an, in an energetic world where you're using agents to accomplish your task.
There's a need for a visual representation of them.
And if you're in a development environment,
Okey dokey!
well, I mean, yeah, that's what we talked about.
We talked about that two weeks ago.
The other time a couple of weeks ago.
There are ways for an agent to say,
"Oh, I've received a task and I'm doing something with it."
And in many cases, they chat experience back and forth, right?
So you ask for something in the chat experience.
So you get a working kind of...
response, and then at some point there's then, okay, I've done the thing you've asked for.
Now, what I've been looking at more and more are the design patterns of how do you orchestrate across a multiplicity of agents?
Who are independently operating on certain activities that might need to jointly use their inputs and outputs from one another to do something together, right?
an architect agent might need to do something with a user.
A database administrator agent to all come up with a solution that's going to work properly.
And this pixel friends or pixel agents, pixel-agents from Pablo de Luca, is a really neat way of having a representation of multiple agents.
Yes, using a bit, but to show that there's work going on in that an agent might be busy.
That's finishing up a piece of work, and another one might be ready to start.
And if there needs to be sub-agents, for those of us who've been playing in this space for a long time, not just an agent, but a demon,
that you can do this kind of work and show it and see what's happening.
And more easily as the human being in the center, orchestrate, recognize, see when things are done, inspect what has been completed, pass off a task to another agent.
and watch it going in its way. So I love this.
So, this is the ultimate management by walking around in a pixelated world because you could sit at your desk and watch all your agents go working and you could walk around without walking around.
And I used to love doing management by walking around.
I think that's a very effective way to do management when all your team is co-located and physically stuck, right, stuck in a room together because it's social, it's interactive.
Yep, very HP of you by the way.
Management by walking around, "Voilier Edition."
[laughing]
because all your agents are working.
Matter of fact, there was a thing announced last week or this week that is an agent orchestrator
for the MAC.
It's an open source project called OSARIS and I'll put a link into the show notes for it that I just started playing with.
It doesn't give you the UI, but I'm wondering if you could hook it up to this because I've actually taken some skills that somebody defined to improve your coding reviews, code reviews, and stuff, and they understand like the current rules around Swift data, the current rules around Swift concurrency, the current rule, I mean like last weeks, not the ones when the models were built.
And I've been using those and adjusting and creating local models based off of other coding models so that I can have my Olamas server hook up to my Xcode environment with current information to do things like review this code, I'm having a problem here can you kind of give me some pointers.
And so this is an orchestrator that has skills and capabilities to do things like access.
So it's on that edge now where it's open source, but is it freeware? There's a difference between those two things, right? But yeah, that's why I said there's a difference between those two things. If it's open source, that's one thing. If it's freeware, they're getting money somehow.
And are you paying for it with your data or not?
So yeah, very, very interesting.
Interesting set of things and I did as soon as I saw this from from Andy. I was like, yep, this this is for you, Michael. It's the pixelated 8 bit world and the number of games that that we played with with pixelated things.
Just just fits so perfect for this.
it does. I mean, it leaves you in the, not even the uncomfortable valley. It leaves you in a comfortable valley, because it gives you a user experience or a comfy chair. But it gives you that opportunity to really kind of see what's going on. And what I also like about this is the design pattern of multiple multiple threads with could be even the same agent when you think about it. But you can represent the same agent with multiple 8-bit characters, right? So the first agent is acting as that architect agent. The second one is doing documentation. The third one is doing user experience creation.
Like a fuzzy sweater.
Oh no, not the comfy chair! Not the comfy chair!
And they're all the same agent underlying, right? Still same LLM, etc. But you can now split them apart and see, okay, I've got three threads that are working concurrently.
Yeah. Well.
and may finish before the others and then you can go and inspect what's happened. And then now.
I think the interesting thing here, and I know we're going to run out of time, is there are a lot of paid services that do this exact thing, they just don't have that cute, playful nature sitting on top that allows you to understand what's going on.
And they're not open source, so there you go, right?
Well, yeah, that's true.
[laughs]
Excuse me, yeah, so you're right,
we're gonna run out of time if we don't move along.
And if we had all the time in the world,
because there were agents that could take over the jobs,
then we could have time to talk about this stuff for hours and hours on end.
And the Washington Post,
and there were several other articles that came around the last week about What is anthropic thing?
We're thinking are the jobs that are most and least exposed to having AI be able to handle the preponderance of the work that is going on.
So, wasn't exactly surprising to me where things were fitting on here, plumbers and electricians, hairdressers, where those roles are fitting versus web designers and others like that.
The only thing that I would add to this and it's a key section of the article is that
they're analysis and if you go back historically this may be a common pattern is that
86% of the most vulnerable workers are women based off of what's being automated.
And that is a very interesting statistic and I'd love to learn more about that
additional stories about this because that seems very, very bad.
Yep, I'll be interested to see what you turn out, Michael. I think that's an astute observation
So rounding out our topics for this week. We had kind of a fun-ish one I mean, it's not really fun when you think about it, but it was an intriguing way
[laughs]
Yeah, exactly who is an intriguing way of leveraging large language models in AI here And this is from the Virgin, the title, which was a great clickbait, is chat GPT did not cure a dog's cancer
What was your main takeaway? Would you say from this, Michael?
- Yeah, my, I mean, the click bait title aside,
my take is, chat GPT doesn't solve anything.
It provides you with data that doctors and scientists and researchers and other people might not have found those patterns and then can go do something with them, right?
And so from that perspective,
you're leveraging it to brainstorm treatment ideas,
I think that's a good thing, right?
I think it's interesting way of doing it. And if that helps them uncover anything, that's great. But yeah, I don't think chat GPT cures anything.
I like the reference of the protein folding from the alpha fold example, too, and that was intriguing for me just because I've been running on my machines for -- yeah, so I've been still doing that for a really long time, and it's interesting to see how this is continuously moving forward, and I have to imagine that that's going to be a lovely, lovely
Are you still running? Folding at home.
workload to put on quantum computers as we go into the future, because that way you're not doing the bulldozer version of, okay, you find the contents of the sphere by slicing off one slice of the sphere, and then a second slice, and then a third, go ch-ch-ch-ch all the way down.
So that was kind of cool. All right, so take us home, Michael, with this Devo link,
you said you had something interesting to share, and I'm all -- I'm all excited.
I got two angles, actually, one that just came up.
If you remember, what was the very very first kickstarter I backed?
Oh my gosh, Michael, I don't keep track of that.
It was a divo documentary that never happened.
Oh, yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right. Yes.
The guy took everybody's money and disappeared basically because he, it was going to be the authorized divo documentary and then divo said, no, after he took everybody's money did it.
Anyway, so that was the first angle.
So this is there's a debo has a
a YouTube channel called D revolutionary Times where they go in and they give background and information about videos and the albums that they created over the years and I think this was filmed I want to say within the last couple of years it may even be like last year anyway episode six is on the album oh no it's divo and that album has a wonderful history to me
in high school is when this album came out and a friend of mine he had gotten tickets to go see them live at the Fox Theater in Atlanta and in high school I lived about a hundred and twenty miles south of Atlanta and my parents said no you can't go I'm like but his dad's taking him so his dad got to go see the concert with him instead of me however the interesting thing and how it ties in with this show.
What Divo did for that concert tour is they started using computer generated animation and integrated it with their music system so that they could control what was on giant video screens behind them down to the millisecond.
And so there's videos out there and the videos don't look that good because the way they do it.
They finally rendered them out.
They're sync problems in it.
But during the concert there's a point where Divo did a lot of things where they would kind of march in place singing forward.
And Mark Mothersbad, who's a lead singer, would point up over his right shoulder at the exact time where a certain thing would happen in the video.
And all of that was computer generated graphics happening in real time based off of the integration between the computers on their keyboard.
It turns into the sound system into the video system.
So this is like the earliest example of a major musical act doing some really cool computer generated graphics in real time in video.
Fantastic 16 minute video.
Highly recommend you watch it all the way through and just see how we've gotten from that because it's like wire frames and stuff to what you can do now.
if you've ever gone to like, when I went to MOGF.
the couple of years, well, it was still here in Durham, there are a lot of bands that do this electronic bands now, that will do music integrated with video content, etc. in real time, and they're basically using a Mac and a keyboard, right? And that's it. And this is, it's just really, really cool,
highly recommend watching.
Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, you'll find that in the show notes along with all the other links from what we talked about today So if you're like, hey, what was that thing?
You know, it's now a go all to the website and you'll see what the thing is
That was the thing.
Because it'll be there All right. Well, thanks everyone for joining us for this edition You know where to find us games at work dot biz drop us a link or idea and we'll be happy to incorporate it in our show
Next time right here on games at work dot this
Biz. See ya.
See everybody
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