エピソード

  • e534 — Hiding in Plain Sight

    e534 — Hiding in Plain Sight
    2025/11/24
    Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash Published 24 November 2025 e534 with Michael, Andy and Michael – AI and ML training data, camouflage, ppen source Zork, Deadpool VR, NPH movies and a whole lot more. Michael, Andy and Michael start things off with with an intriguing AI analysis of the heist from the Louvre. The Ars Technica article takes the examples of mathematical machine learning and human psychology to show how both were defeated what was considered to be ordinary versus suspicious. This is a terrific reminder on the importance of the training data sets used for AI models and how the “performance of normality became the perfect camouflage”. Michael R highlights the On Intelligence book, and Michael M brings up visual pattern recognition of the human form which ghillie suits help disguise. Switching to a hackster.io article, the die is cast – or rather the die is 3d printed. Andy shares his thoughts on this bluetooth enabled die, and mentions how dice have featured prominently in the the podcast over the years. E132 from 2016 appears to be the earliest reference to dice in the show notes. Next up is Microsoft’s announcement to open source the Zork family of text based adventure games from Infocom. Zork is another favorite of the podcast, and e78 from 2014 is the earliest reference! Then the team discusses the Deadpool VR game. The Kotaku article mentions that Neil Patrick Harris does the Deadpool voice acting in the game. This leads the cohosts down the rabbit hole of NPH acting with a number of movies and TV shows. Oh, and the reason for the “I don’t want a McRib” part of the show title was because the Kotaku article kept serving up McDonalds McRib ads to Michael M, while Michael R with his PiHole does not get such ads. What is your favorite NPH movie or tv show? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz@mastodon.social (our home for now) and let us know! These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. All rights reserved. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it. Selected Links AI Ars Technica article: How Louvre thieves exploited human psychology to avoid suspicion—and what it reveals about AI Wikipedia article: On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines by Jeff Hawkins IMDb: Now You See Me: Now You Don’t 2025 movie Wikipedia article: Ghillie Suit Bluetooth Dice hackter.io article: Travis Bumgarner’s Dice of Sending Are Bluetooth-Connected Dice for Fairer Digital Roleplays Games at Work e132: Wake Up! (For earliest description of dice) Games and NPH The Verge article: Microsoft makes Zork open-source Games at Work e78: The Show is Already in Progress (for earliest reference to Zork) Kotaku article: Deadpool VR Is A Game For Deadpool Fans And Nobody Else marvel.Fandom.com : Wade Wilson (Earth-616) IMDb: A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas IMDb: Starship Troopers IMDb: Doogie Howser, M.D. IMDb: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own. Michael Martine
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    29 分
  • e533 — Rings of Power

    e533 — Rings of Power
    2025/11/17
    Photo by Fallon Michael on Unsplash Published 17 November 2025 e533 with Andy, Michael and Michael – rings to chart the heavens and control your home, repurposing smart TVs, retro La Machine and Vectrex hardware made newly available, new Valve Steam hardware and a whole lot more. Andy, Michael and Michael start things off with a 400 year old ring that unfolds into an astronomy tool. Check out this amazing technology in the show notes below. If you want to have such a ring of your own, the design team from Black Adept have them available for sale! Sticking with the theme, the next powerful ring follows the Tron Master Control Disk concept. This interesting design expression reminded Michael M of the Mini circular dashboard display. Next up is a great way to repurpose an old TV. The team explores an article with instructions for making a smart mirror using two way glass and a Raspberry Pi. You may want to ensure that the TV has the automatic content recognition features turned off. Andy remarks on the continuing evolution over the years of the Magic Mirror software that enables this to work. After talking about the bright idea of using the circuity of a smart lightbulb to serve as a Minecraft server, the cohosts look La Machine. Then the team takes a look at the recent announcements from Valve. New Steam hardware has captured their imagination. The Steam Machine, Steam Frame and a new Steam controller provides great excitement for the platform. Wrapping up the episode, Michael R takes a look at the World of Warcraft new in game currency used for building houses. The blog post announcing this from Blizzard has 2,817 replies when these show notes were written! What legacy hardware would you most like to have again? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz@mastodon.social (our home for now) and let us know! These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. All rights reserved. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it. Selected Links Maker A 400-Year-Old Ring that Unfolds to Track the Movements of the Heavenshttps://www.openculture.com/2025/11/a-400-year-old-ring-that-unfolds-to-track-movements-of-the-heavens.html — Ronan (@ronanmcd@mastodon.green) 2025-11-06T12:16:00.036Z Open Culture article: A 400-Year-Old Ring that Unfolds to Track the Movements of the Heavens hackster.io article: Welcome to the Grid IMDb post: Tron movies and tv shows Photo by Nicole Logan on Unsplash Boy Genius Report article: You Can Use Your Old TV As A Smart Mirror – Here’s How Raspberry Pi Magic Mirror^2 documentation Games at Work e479: Listen Up Outlaws! for smart tv automatic content recognition Tom’s Hardware article: Hardware hacker installs Minecraft server on a cheap smart lightbulb — single 192 MHz RISC-V core with 276KB of RAM, enough to run tiny 90K byte world La Machine Gaming Hardware (and Software) Games Industry article: Valve announces 3 new Steam hardware devices: Steam Machine, VR headset Steam Frame, and a new Steam controller PC Gamer article: Valve announces the Steam Frame: ‘a new way to play your entire Steam library’ Eurogamer article: How did Valve design its new Steam Machine? It started with the fan, of course Kickstarter: Vectrex Mini The Verge article: World of Warcraft is getting a new kind of fake money Blizzard blog post: Developer Insight: Hearthsteel Virtual Currency and Housing in Midnight Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own. Michael Martine
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    32 分
  • e532 — Spooky Scary Tech Skeletons

    e532 — Spooky Scary Tech Skeletons
    2025/11/03
    Photo by Chris Charles on Unsplash Published 3 November 2025 e532 with Michael and Michael – Halloween Spooktacular edition with AI whale communications & implications, robotic vacuums that phone home, ad supported TVs and a whole lot more. For the Halloween spooktacular edition of Games at Work, Michael and Michael start things off with an article about AI decoding whale’s communications, and the potential for the recognition of whales’ rights. There have been multiple discussions about the promise of understanding non-human communications over the years on Games at Work, and a couple of these are included in the show notes links below. Next up is a series of articles the benefits and challenges of internet of things powered hardware, and the challenges they present. First, a discussion on the remote software feature removal, in the case of the Futurism article, when the owner blocked the transmissions from his IoT vacuum, that the software running the bot was changed to make it stop working. Then, there is a story about free TV hardware that requires an ELUA to run a second screen of advertising. After considering this free, ad supported TV, the co-hosts muse what other hardware might be made available at no cost, and with an advertising stream. Changes to streaming television to insert more advertising has become more common. Michael and Michael explore the idea of an IoT refrigerator with a screen might become an ad supported platform, and that to access certain functionality, the screen may require the user to watch an advertising video. After the cloud outage from last week, there have been articles that discuss how the hardware behaves without the constant internet connection. An example of this is the malfunctions from an internet connected bed. Sticking with the robot and advertising theme, Michael R highlights Sandwich’s immersive commercial making use of the new Blackmagic camera to capture an immersive video for Robot.com. After touching on Apple’s Family Sharing and CarPlay capabilities and Windows 11 immersive ultra wide mode, Michael M wraps up the show with a quick point on The Simulation Hypothesis book and the LEGO Arcade Machine that opens up to have a minifig’s gamer room inside the cabinet. What ad supported free hardware would you accept? What data streams would you not allow your IoT devices to hear / see / say? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz@mastodon.social (our home for now) and let us know! These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. All rights reserved. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it. Selected Links AI Inside Climate News article: AI Is Decoding Whales’ Communications. Could That Be a Turning Point in the Push for Their Rights? Games at Work e466: AI’s Perfect Vacation from May 2024 for machine learning decoding the sperm whale alphabet Games at Work e495: Personal Planetarium from December 2024 for talking with animals via AI, Sandwich Vision Technology Futurism article: Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House Games at Work e235: Bots on Batuu from June 2019 for discussion on vacuum bots Games at Work e260: 1984 Tesla for Sale from February 2020 for discussion on remote software feature removal Creative Bloq article: You can now get a TV for free… and I’m worried this is the future of tech Ars Technica article: Samsung makes ads on $3,499 smart fridges official with upcoming software update Ars Technica article: AWS outage reminds us why $2,449 Internet-dependent beds are a bad idea More Technology Six Colors article: Hello, Robot: Sandwich launches “immersive commercial” 9 to 5 Mac article: Mother describes the dark side of Apple’s Family Sharing when a relationship ends Daring Fireball article: CarPlay Seems Essential for Rental Fleets The Verge article: Windows 11’s Vision Pro-like remote desktop is now widely available on Quest 3 Two More Things The Simulation Hypothesis 2nd Edition by Rizwan Virk LEGO Arcade Machine 40805 Two Bonus Game Things The Register article: This is Doom, running headless, on Ubuntu Arm… on a satellite Engadget article: Board is a $500 board game console with 12 original titles Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own. Michael Martine
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    34 分
  • e531 – Games and Such

    e531 – Games and Such
    2025/10/20
    Epredator created AI Generated image

    Michael R and Ian “Epredator” Hughes get together for a chat about #gaming, #VR, and #technology. We talk about some of our favorite comfort games, how they are procedurally generated, and how the gaming business model has bifurcated between ongoing money grabs and lovingly created indie games.

    Show Links

    Games:

    Battlemarked

    • https://battlemarked.com
    • On Steam – https://store.steampowered.com/app/3124340/Demeo_x_Dungeons__Dragons_Battlemarked

    No Man’s Sky

    • https://www.nomanssky.com
    • Where to buy – https://www.nomanssky.com/buy-now/

    Return to the Mines of Moria

    • https://www.returntomoria.com
    • Where to buy – https://www.returntomoria.com/buynow

    AI:

    • AI in Gaming: How Artificial Intelligence is Powering Game Production and Player Experience
    • The AI-Powered shift to “living games”
    • AI, Simulation, and The Generative Adversarial Network
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    32 分
  • e530 — Vibe It! - Ready Player Chum

    e530 — Vibe It! - Ready Player Chum
    2025/09/29
    Photo by Kindel Media from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-robot-toy-on-gray-concrete-floor-9026299/ Published 29 September 2025 e530 with Michael and Michael – an AI extravaganza with vibe coding, AI gaming chums, rating LLMs via Infocom games, robots for construction, self assembling space habitats and a whole lot more. Michael and Michael get things moving this episode with an AI extravaganza while Andy is away. The co hosts start things off with a vibe coding assistant to help you with your QBasic programming needs. Next up, the pair consider a couple of stories dealing with assistants who can help users be more effective in playing games. There is a real Goldilocks zone for the assistant to help the player remain in a state of flow, where the game is neither too easy due to the assistant’s help, nor too frustrating to play. Michael R gives an example of his trying to get to Orc Town to progress in Mines of Moria. Continuing on the theme of AIs playing games, Michael and Michael take a look at TextQuests, where a variety of LLMs take up the challenge of playing Infocom text based games. With all the discussion on AI slop in the news, the article from Computerworld about the mathematical inevitability of hallucinations is particularly timely. Michael and Michael move from AI to robotics and take a look at the construction bot from Dusty Robotics, which prints out a life size blueprint directly on the floor. Michael M shares a space habitat construction solution from Aurelia that uses magnets to self assemble in orbit. Michael R shares a story about the engineering feat of moving a viking ship without damaging it, which reminded Michael M of the challenge of moving the Cape Hatteras lighthouse. Check out the links below for all the details. What would your ideal game chum be like? What do you think about the current state of AI chum? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz@mastodon.social (our home for now) and let us know! These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. All rights reserved. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it. Selected Links AI hackaday.io AI Coding Assistant for Microsoft QBasic Engadget article: Google is turning Gemini into a gaming sidekick with a new Android overlay PC Gamer article: Microsoft’s new Gaming Copilot AI tool promises to be ‘your personal gaming sidekick’ but it mostly seems to do the work of a Google search, with the potential for ‘hallucinations’ Games at Work e488: Fight. For Your Right. To Pla-aaay! for Jane McGonigal and flow The Gamer article: How To Find Orc Town In The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria 404 Media article: AI-Powered Animal Crossing Villagers Begin Organizing Against Tom Nook TextQuests.ai Wikipedia article: Infocom OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flawshttps://www.computerworld.com/article/4059383/openai-admits-ai-hallucinations-are-mathematically-inevitable-not-just-engineering-flaws.html — Charlie Stross (@cstross@wandering.shop) 2025-09-21T17:14:32.576Z Computerworld article: OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws Rule 34 by Charles Stross Accelerando by Charles Stross Games at Work e306: Weak Ties for Accelerando hitchhikers.fandom.com: Infinite Improbability Drive Washington Post article: AI firm Deepseek writes less secure code for groups China disfavors Robots Dusty Robotics Aurelia: Tesserae: Self-Assembling Prototypes Magnatiles This is Colossal article: A Feat of Engineering Transports the World’s Best-Preserved Viking Ship to Its New Home National Park Service article: Moving the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse Two More Things Six Colors article: Apple Announces a New Set of Immersive Film Releases Random Thoughts post: My AirPods Review Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own. Michael Martine
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    32 分
  • e529 — Shake, Shake, Shake Your iPhone

    e529 — Shake, Shake, Shake Your iPhone
    2025/09/15
    Photo by Ravi Sharma on Unsplash Published 15 September 2025 e529 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories about AR glasses & snarky AI wearables, Carrot Weather, Rabbit OS2, shaking to summarize, Doomscrolling and a whole lot more. Michael, Andy and Michael get things moving this episode with all things AI. After starting with a parody about camera less phones which generate pictures, the team moves to an article about Amazon’s project Jayhawk AR glasses for their drivers. Next up is a new gesture for Firefox users on iOS – the ability to shake to summarize. After an article on AI audio manipulation, Andy and Michael M are reminded of how Denmark is providing a defense against deepfakes by updating copyrights to provide individuals the right to their own appearance and voice. Following up on a plethora of stories in recent episodes on AI powered wearables, this episode takes on the Futurism article about the Friend pendant. Apparently, this companion has a bit of a snarky personality by design, and that got the co hosts talking about Carrot’s weather application. After mentioning that the Rabbit portable AI device gains a new OS upgrade, the team takes on a couple of game topics, including iPod click wheel game preservation and a Doomscroll game to try. Would you rather play Doomscroll or just doomscroll manually? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz@mastodon.social (our home for now) and let us know! These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. All rights reserved. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it. Selected Links AI These iPhone features are getting ridiculous! (By Simon Meyer on IG (simonmeyer_director) — John 🎬 A Film Nerd 🍿 (@UKFilmNerd@mastodon.me.uk) 2025-09-09T19:45:34.929Z The Verge article: Amazon drivers could be wearing AR glasses with a built-in display next year Amazon Accelerate Sept 16-18, 2025 Meta Connect Sept 17 – 18, 2025 The Verge article: Firefox launches ‘shake to summarize’ on iPhones AskVG post: How to Disable and Remove All AI Features in Mozilla Firefox Firefox article: Ready to shake things up? News & Observer article: An NC senator’s words were manipulated by AI in an ad. Now she’s suing The Guardian article: Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features Futurism article: New AI Necklace Listens Constantly and Uses All That Data to Complain About You Friend Carrot Weather rabbit post: rabbit overhauls r1 experience with rabbitOS 2 Games at Work e502: Humane Rabbits Games Retrododo article: The Complete Range Of iPod Clickwheel Games Has Finally Been Preserved Ironic Sans post: Doomscrolling: The Game Doomscroll
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    29 分
  • e528 — Monstrous Mice & Nano Bananas

    e528 — Monstrous Mice & Nano Bananas
    2025/09/08
    ChatGPT 5 generated image of a banana in the midst of an atom cloudgenerated 31 August 2025 Published 8 September 2025 e528 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories about AI image editing with Nano Banana, GAN enabled LLM evolution with R-Zero, MentraOS open source smart glasses, automotive software, Making Monsters, Kazeta and a whole lot more. Michael, Andy and Michael get things rolling with the Nano Banana image editing software from Google. While the generated and altered images are very sophisticated, there are still a few tells that the photos came from AI. An example from the Washington Post article calls out the “AI gibberish” replacement of numbers on the phone keypad – while the replacement of the human in the phone booth with a water buffalo replete with smart ring is ultra realistic. Andy’s ChatGPT generated nano banana is a fun visualization for an atom-sized banana, even though he was “AI-splained” by the chatbot that “a banana at that scale couldn’t exist in any realistic way.” Ha! The team touches on a couple more AI stories dealing with with the Fast-VLM video captioning model and a generative adversarial network method of self evolving reasoning LLM with R-Zero. Next is a springboard for the MentraOS open source smart glasses operating system that reminds the team of Andy’s experience in 2024 with the Brilliant Labs Monocle. Then the co-hosts talk about automotive software – and the challenges posed by the need to troubleshoot and correct for the intersection between evolving software and existing hardware. The frequency for software updates for a vehicle, phones and more requires a level of testing and integration that can be very frustrating when things don’t work as expected. Understatement of the year, I’m sure. Wrapping up the episode are a couple of games – a kickstarter called Making Monsters, Office Job, which has a television sized screen and suitcase sized mouse and Kazeta for cartridge gaming. What’s been your most frustrating automotive software experience? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz@mastodon.social (our home for now) and let us know! These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. All rights reserved. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it. Selected Links AI Washington Post article: Masterful photo edits now just take a few words. Are we ready for this? Nano Banana AI Image Editing 9 to 5 Mac article: You can try Apple’s lightning-fast video captioning model right from your browser FastVLM-webgpu on Huggingface Spaces Venture Beat article: Forget data labeling: Tencent’s R-Zero shows how LLMs can train themselves R-Zero: Self-Evolving Reasoning LLM from Zero Data paper on arXiv Unacceptable situation to wear camera glasses of the moment: while doing a bikini waxhttps://futurism.com/wax-center-meta-glasses — Mike Elgan (@MikeElgan@mastodon.social) 2025-08-31T17:06:05.260Z MentraOS Open Source Smart Glasses OS on Github Games at Work e453: Vision Pro a Pro-Pro (for Brilliant Labs Frame) Games at Work e436: Squishy Purple Doom (for Andy’s experience with Brilliant Labs Monocle) Automotive Software TechCrunch article: BMW, I am so breaking up with you BMWblog post: Apple’s iOS 18 Update Is Causing BMW Digital Car Key Problems: Solutions Inside from October 2024 Games Making Monsters on Kickstarter Games at Work e455: Star Trek vs Douglas Adams (for Spore) Felix Fisgus post: Office Job from 2022 hackster.io article: Alesh Slovak’s Kazeta Turns Mini-PCs Into ’90s Throwback “Cartridge”-Based Games Consoles Kazeta Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own. Michael Martine
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    31 分
  • e527 — AI Taco Trolls

    e527 — AI Taco Trolls
    2025/09/01
    Photo by Daniel Hooper 🌊 on Unsplash Published 1 September 2025 e527 with Andy, Michael and Michael – stories about AI restaurant experiences, historical LLMs, zoetropes and a whole lot more. After Michael R gives his impressions of the PhotoDome app, the team starts things off with a story about the AI powering Taco Bell’s drive through point of sale experience. In the past few days, there have been a multitude of stories about the attempt to order 18,000 cups of water from the Yum Foods franchise. Check out the conversation in the podcast and the referenced articles in the show notes below. Continuing on the AI and restaurant theme, the team considers another article that reports on nonexistent specials that the restaurant has to deal with. While discussing the Wired article about which jobs AI is eliminating first, Michael M (mistakenly!) references a zoom seminar on the subject from Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Digital Economy Lab. This seminar is scheduled for 29 September, so there’s still plenty of time to register for it at the link below! After touching on a couple of articles dealing with ChatGPT scanning conversations and instituting parental controls, the team switches to an AI use case that is very close to home for Andy’s educational background as a historian. Check out the GitHub link to TimeCapsuleLLM below and give it a whirl for yourself! The team wraps up this episode with two interesting links – the trailer for the upcoming game The Expanse, and a fantastic piece of vinyl zoetrope technology from Atliens (please check out the link to see the visual for the alien abduction visuals – so cool!) What is your favorite vinyl zoetrope? We’d love to share it with the Games at Work audience! Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz@mastodon.social (our home for now) and let us know! These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. All rights reserved. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it. Selected Links PhotoDome reprise Random Thoughts blog post: PhotoDome for visionOS PhotoDome Games at Work e526: Beans and Bricks (for the initial discussion on PhotoDome) AI The Verge article: Taco Bell’s AI drive-thru plan gets caught up on trolls and glitches AI Business article: Taco Bell Expands AI Voice Ordering at Drive-Thrus Nationwide BBC article: Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters Wikipedia article: Troll Futurism article: Local Restaurant Exhausted as Google AI Keeps Telling Customers About Daily Specials That Don’t Exist Games at Work e522: Pointing at Doomed Fish (for how Google’s AI Overview oversimplifies) Wired article: AI Is Eliminating Jobs for Younger Workers Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence paper and seminar: Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence Futurism article: OpenAI Says It’s Scanning Users’ ChatGPT Conversations and Reporting Content to the Police The Verge article: OpenAI will add parental controls for ChatGPT following teen’s death Games at Work e524: Googlenight AI (for discussion on publishing exchanges with ChatGPT) Ars Technica article: College student’s “time travel” AI experiment accidentally outputs real 1834 history Github: haykgrigo3/TimeCapsuleLLM Software atliensofficial.com post: Leaving The World Behind Vinyl Web 11.0 mashup junkie, and co-founder / co-host of the GamesAtWork.biz podcast. My views are my own. Michael Martine
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    28 分