e508 — Taxes and Tetris

e508 with Michael, Andy and Michael - stories and discussion on AI Conversational Swarm Intelligence, the Pokétax game, numerous Nintendo stories and much more.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
[Music]

(00:10):
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.
[upbeat music]

(00:33):
this is episode 508 taxes and Tetris.
[upbeat music]
Hello and welcome again to another edition of games at work.biz. This is Michael Martin,
one of your three co-hosts for this show, and I'm delighted to be joined by the other two that are here as well. Let me kick things over to my friend, Mr. Michael Rowe. Hey, how are you doing today,

(01:04):
I'm doing just Peachy Keen Michael and Andy, how are you?
well thank you friends I'm looking at our list of links and I'm excited to see some Nintendo action in there but there's plenty to talk about across the board.
Oh. Yeah. Well, let's get started and there's a ton here to talk about. In the run up to the show this week,

(01:26):
I had shared a link from Venturebeat and I was originally attracted to it because it deals with basketball and this is the time of year where college basketball in the United States is a big,
big deal. But the thing that really kept my attention here a bit more was the idea of conversational

(01:47):
So without spelling out the whole article on why it was and what it was there for the experiment was try to run and create a bracket that would allow the swarm of intelligent agents to discuss and come up with who they think would win. I was just fascinated by this notion of how do you have a simultaneous conversation with not small groups of 47 people, which is what research suggests.

(02:16):
is the right number, but potentially dozens or hundreds or maybe even thousands at the same time.
The article does link to a couple of additional documents and studies from 2004 and I read through some of the material there too from Carnegie Mellon for example and there's some software that's also been created here to use hyperchat they call it from ThinkScape, but the image that was given from the Carnegie Mellon.

(02:46):
And by the end of the article, it really shows how unstructured chat, which is absolutely impossible to do with groups that are larger, how that can be brought down into smaller groups and that information can be conveyed via these agents in between the smaller groups and connect one with another.
I would say this reminded me an awful lot of piece of work that you and I did a long time ago in an environment where we were imagining people in a virtual

(03:17):
virtual universe environment, talking about a particular subject, seeing them there and walking over to them and then talking about something from an ideation perspective. And this kind of takes it to another level. You remember that, right?
Yeah, yeah, I do. And also there were other aspects to that matter of fact, I thought one of them we had tried to patent and it went into the patent process and never came out.

(03:46):
[laughing]
Right? It was approved that they were going to go patent it and nothing ever happened.
Okay. Okay. So let me jump into this part of the conversation and say, I remember something called the global jam, which was which I I this this immediately brought me back to thinking about what was I guess in early 2000s mid mid 2000s IBM's global jam. Okay. There we go.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

(04:12):
2006
there's the date. I couldn't remember that but it was all about
trying to bring the whole company together to have these conversations about how we could improve and new ideas and things like that.
And as I was reading the piece in venture bit here about the science, the social elements and studies done around quote unquote ideal group sizes for these conversations, that all came rushing back to me.

(04:42):
So the notion here that you can apply.
Machine learning essentially machine intelligence to coordinate and manage very large machine based conversations because I can easily see that humans wouldn't accept this kind of intervention to try to shepherd them towards solutions answers or whatever because we just are not wired that way.

(05:12):
And I thought that it was a really interesting idea of this concept of hyper chat.
It reminded me, almost, of the architectural model for gaming color sharding, where you break things up into the various shards so that you can have the perspective of this really large chat going on, right?

(05:33):
But actually it's sharded out, and if you look at the diagram of the hyper chat, it models that quite well, and I mean, the point that you made Andy about that.
You might have machines doing this, but having people, having machine direct people in this way would not be accepted.

(05:54):
And it made me think, you know, the outcome of this article, and I know they did it to time based off of what time of year it is in the US, et cetera, et cetera.
And then the comment that you made about people accepting it or not, and I was going to ask Michael, "Michael, did you accept the outcome of their basketball study?"
Oh, well, I typically do, and when I go through my picks, I typically do that in the end just to ensure that because I'm going to be wrong, that that outcome does not happen.

(06:22):
[laughing]
I did also like the images of the fish and the schools of fish and the article from,
or the material from Carnegie Mellon, and the way of thinking about sharding and the way of thinking about the jam and the way of thinking about how nature kind of works in the same sort of thing where information might be at the periphery.

(06:43):
It may be also a bit about how you do that in a chat level on a more of a massive scale.
And to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd while still preserving privacy.
That's that's the phrase I was waiting to hear and if you didn't say it, I was the wisdom the crowd and all the books and every all the studies way back then and how they were used for the global jam then the innovation jam and the other jam and there's a hack hack the factory jam that happened recently by a group and France and others. But yeah, it's it's I don't think this is an AI thing. This is a machined version of wisdom of the crowd.

(07:31):
- Well, yes it is, but it is done,
but because it is done by machines.
So just circling back to what I said,
I was not talking necessarily about humans accepting machines managing their conversations.
I was talking about, at a certain scale,
people get fed up and walk off, right?
Yeah, right.
They're not engaged with the conversation at once.

(07:51):
It says here, you know, the wait time for speaking goes up so high that it becomes almost,
you feel that there's no value in you participating
'cause you're gonna be unheard or whatever.
Yeah, and I saw that in some jams right where people feel like they're just screaming into the void because there's so many people talking at once
But on the subject of wisdom of the crowds, we have a second story here which is all about Wikipedia and Wikipedia and the notion there that people can collaborate through Wikipedia to generate this incredible corpus of human knowledge and information and curate it effectively at scale except when when the machine's getting involved.

(08:15):
Yes, we do.
Ha ha. Yes.

(08:37):
Right, because the machines are now interrogating that data because they need to be fed in order to extend the corpus, so to speak, and in doing so, it's making it not unusable, but harder to use because of all the consumption that bandwidth for the humans that it was really intended.
It's not just feeding the machine, it's with all the new kind of deep research models that try to go back and then document their assumptions and point to the data.

(09:07):
They're constantly hitting it.
It's not just the big sock of sucking in all the data once, it's a constant hit.
So this is this is a story that came across a number of sites this week with you media themselves made a statement and then that led to
The link with God is from the register, but I've seen this in wired and elsewhere as well and they they do depending on the publication They do different levels of analysis of exactly what Michael was saying not just are they going and getting the knowledge

(09:33):
But they are then going back and pointing at the knowledge. They are getting imagery
There's a lot here as well
I think it was mentioned in a few versions of this story, but about the offsetting of cost, because if you are publishing on the internet today, then it's at your cost already.

(09:56):
You're paying for your electricity, your hosting, your domain, all the things that you're doing.
But then suddenly you're having a load of unexpected load coming from these sources that is seeking to constantly crawl and spider and discover.
What's new and what's changed and what's there and a lot of these AI companies are getting massive valuations and injections of money, but that money is not coming down to the people who are running the underlying services.

(10:28):
There was an interesting talk at the All Things Open AI conference that I went to a couple of weeks ago, and I can't remember the speaker, but she's based in London.
[Laughs]
So I'll have to find it for the show notes, and she was talking about how the various scrapers that are being used in these additional search-based AI engines are constantly working to get around anything that you put in their way.

(10:56):
Yeah, mm-hmm. So yeah
So, let's say you say, "Okay, I know the scrapers are coming from this IP range, I'll put a cider in place, it says, "Black that cider."
Well, they'll go around that, or I'll look for certain behavior, they'll go around that, and it's a constant battle.
So not only is it the cost of your data being sucked away, it's the continual cost of trying to keep it from being sucked away.
So the Linux desktop I use which is the known desktop environment, they, their GitLab instance now has a, what they call proof of work challenge.

(11:25):
So when you click through to it, the browser has to do some work on the front end to basically prove that there's a real person on it's a real browser waiting with a real person.
So you have a pause to get through to it.
as much as you can, as you say.
If they try and block some of these IP addresses or ranges, and then maybe identify the crawlers, but they keep changing their identities to get around them.

(11:51):
That's going... I have got a quick question about all things open, AI.
- Yes.
Did they constantly talk about being on X and following them on X? Or did they actually talk about the Fediverse?
- No, they did not.
I'll bet they talked about Blue Sky.
They talked about other real open platforms.
Oh, really? Platforms, the Fediverse.
- Yeah.
Amazing. Wow.
- Yeah.
And this was Rachel Lee neighbors at [e-mail] was the speaker.

(12:19):
N-A-O-B-R-S, right? I know Rachel.
- Yes.
Well, that's when we're to expect. London, right? Yes. You know, two last quick things on this before we leave the first Michael, I was thinking about the twit army, you know, back in the day,
She was fantastic.
I knew you would. I knew you would as soon as I mentioned it.
Obviously, I know everybody in London, so yeah.

(12:40):
right? So when something would come up on Twitter beyond Ignatian or something,
everybody would go to it and it would bring those sites down and it kind of,
yeah, it's slash. Oh, yeah, for sure, right? So kind of funny that this is happening on a machine
and then the second, my last point for this is around the whole data model governance perspective,

(13:00):
right? So just because something is available in a data format that could be read or harvested or scraped doesn't necessarily mean that you should because you don't necessarily have the rights to it, even if it was out on the interwebs. So interesting, interesting article, yeah. And thank Thank you for getting Rachel's link there for the show.

(13:24):
We're going to switch now to our ARVR material and there's a super cool slingshotty example from John Ellen Rich that looks just amazing for how you might use a VR or really augmented reality version here to switch around lights.

(13:45):
This was super fun.
Yeah, I saw this in my feed.
I've been following a lot of people are doing work for the Vision Pro.
And this one is just one of those UI designs that is different, right?
And so as I put in our chat, it's like, it's cool.

(14:05):
I wouldn't do this for very long, because basically you make a peace sign with one hand.
And it uses that to frame the device you're looking at.
and a ball appears that you can tap.
that changes colors then it uses it as a slingshot and flings the ball at his various digital lamps around the room changing their colors and so it's it's kind of cool.

(14:28):
It's very fun. I love I love the demo that showed in the video on the in the post
I think it's pretty in practical. I look I've got queue lamps not not consistently through the through the house But I've got quite we've got them in quite a few rooms and I have to say that the color changing is not something I you make a ton of use of

(14:49):
You know occasionally the the overall brightness or the warmth perhaps, but yeah, I'm not I don't actively use that and I would
find it extremely annoying to go have to go around and manually
- Yeah, yeah, I mean, and it's just changing the dynamics of UI, right? You know, in a way that's
catapult things into each each one. But yeah, it's a really fun demo. It was it was it was a good

(15:10):
way of saying look what you can do when you've got this kind of interactivity through a headset
Yes, it's definitely playful for sure. Talking of playful and UIs and different ways of interacting,

(15:32):
this is some story that is closing out really, it's a 12 or 13 year old story that I joked before the show that we probably should have reported on back in the day, but it turns out that the Louvre museum in Paris has had the...
Nintendo 3DS as its audio guides for the last decade, over the last decade, and so not only have you been able to use the 3DS for exploring the museum and getting the audio content, but you've obviously had the touch screen there, the dual screens from the 3DS. I don't know, they don't talk about whether they used the AR features that were built in, very, I mean, they were there,

(16:17):
that I don't think they really got very much a use after that initial flurry of excitement with the little AR cards that you got with the 3DS and the ability to sort of
manifest Mario on your little me on the desktop in front of you. But yeah, they're retiring them now.
The 3DS is no longer made. The parts that is continued. You can no longer repair them, so they're going to be going out of operation this year and replaced by some form of new system. Perhaps everybody who as it's the Louvre will get a vision pro to it.

(16:50):
Yeah, I just can't imagine doing this and how many walked, right?
How many walked out?
Yeah, they hit the person's credit card when they left.
I'm sure, but still, kids, the families there,
the kid goes, "Oh, 3D, yeah, 2-2-2-2-2 walks out with it."
If 5,000 of them, they could have lost a couple.
Just unbelievable.

(17:11):
Yeah, they had.
[laughs]
So that means they must have had probably 10,000 in stock just to keep up for broken parts, swapping them out.
Everything else. Yeah, this is so bizarre and if we didn't talk about it, I would be surprised.
But I don't remember us talking about it. Yeah.
We've got a search engine, surely. I don't remember talking about it. I mean, uh...
Well, I went back in the archives and I did find as early as 2013, we did talk about the 3DS

(17:38):
Hmm.
and using them for concentration training. So we have a few, although that web link that goes back to Nintendo is unfortunately no longer active. Surprise. There you go. But cool stuff, right?
Oh, yes, I remember that.
Ah, of course. That's an at-rott. But there's it.
Imagine that.

(17:58):
maybe there's a way for them to sell
them out as they're discontinuing them. I bet there's a few in the community who would want to purchase one and continue to use them.
So the next story I saw and I genuinely thought it was an April fool because there was a ton of those again this week and they were quite annoying and some some got your attention more than others and kind of tricked you into things but thinking things but this one is actually a real story

(18:19):
I didn't see many.
and there's a game that is called poker tax which essentially lets you and I assume it's a U.S.-based game.
But it lets you file your taxes, it seems, through playing a Pokémon, an open source game,

(18:46):
Pokémon showdown, modified to have tax trainers instead of gym leaders and tax-related names for the Pokémon, and you get your tax form at the end of it all.
It is designed for the U.S. citizens to play and file their tax returns, which of course There's, you know, a fully
Yes.

(19:07):
working administration to receive those tax returns right now. So, right, exactly.
Well, they think it's a game too, so...
So, who knows, who knows whether this is going to change the dynamics of filing taxes
Yeah, I found this to be very interesting and, you know, taxes in the U.S. are complex enough and then adding in the Pokemon aspect to try to figure out, you know, do I do a charge or whatever the heck they are?

(19:37):
Yeah, well staying on the same theme. We've had a couple of Nintendo themed stories and the bigger one this week is
that Nintendo are finally fully revealed the switch to which is the follow-up to obviously the switch But it's really their first ever
Direct successor as a console. Well, I'm not first ever. I would say the Nez and the Super Nez were were sort of fairly

(20:02):
closely related But if you think back to the we the we
you came along very different beast and then of course the switch was again a different piece so it really interesting device it follows along it's it's the same sort of form factor it's this detachable tablet that you can you can play mobile or you can plug in to your big screen on the big screen size side you now get you know 4k and all the nice graphics qualities that you might expect and want these days

(20:38):
other competing consoles they've changed things up a bit so now you can use the the joycons as a mouse on a tabletop as well which is quite a nice feature there's a few interesting technical changes so they've switched from micro SD card to micro SD card express which essentially makes them a bit more like an SSD and so they go through the they essentially go through the PCI express bus so they they've got they perform better but they're also much less

(21:07):
more common at the moment and much more expensive than than the SD micro SD form factor they've got this concept of digital lending for games which is which is quite interesting and of course there's a new Mario Kart coming along which is called Mario Kart well which looks I mean I'm a massive Mario Kart fan and it looks super fun and super cool and it's the kind of thing as usual with Nintendo it's the kind of first party IP that they've got that they guard jealously because it's the kind of thing that makes

(21:37):
the system you know and makes the system and must have I was going to also comment about the two two price things one of them being that the price of the games so they're starting at sort of an $80 80 pound price point for games which is pretty high from from what where you traditionally used to although these days with where you get the ultimate addition or deluxe addition or super mega collectors edition box set with figurine of a game you

(22:07):
are typically paying two hundred dollars for those anyway if that's the level you want to go for with all the DLC but of course they also announced this I think on Wednesday and immediately some buddy announced the tariffs and the whole world economy went into shock waves and I think there's a lot of manufacturers hardware tech manufacturers but of course businesses of all kinds that are scrambling
[laughing]

(22:37):
to understand what this is going to mean for them so I kind of feel sorry for Nintendo in that respect
Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, the micro SD Express cards
are pretty rare right now.
I don't think the tariffs are gonna help those make them easier to find in the US.
But it's a really interesting format, though.

(22:59):
I was reading a deep dive on it today about how that technology works and why it hasn't become as popular, partly it's the cost and the way that it interfaces with the main hardware through the PCI Express bus.
But yeah, it generally looks like a solid upgrade if you were wanting to stay on the Nintendo side. That said, I've seen people post

(23:24):
this week probably on the back of the Nintendo story about the fact that actually, you know,
desktop PCs, especially now that Steam is, you know, fully, pretty fully accessible on Linux,
you can get some really good experiences on desktop PCs without having to, you know, upgrade a console every few years. I've been a console fan and console gamer for a long time, but that's a compelling argument

(23:54):
So, my question for you, Andy, is have you registered your interest?
No, I have not. I've got the steam deck. I've got I'm currently. I just started playing a
Game on game pass Xbox game pass on the Xbox and also on X got Xbox cloud gaming on the iPad with my controller
Called Atom for which is a really awesome game which is set in Northern England in the 1970s during a

(24:19):
We're in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster, so that's been quite a fun
sort of stealth RPG to play and of
the scene deck I've got a play day I've got too many things in my car I don't need it stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop no stop I
so you don't need it that badly is what I'm hearing, yeah, all right. Yeah, well, I don't know that I'm going to buy it either, but I went ahead and registered interest just to see,
Once I once I once it but I'm not getting it

(24:47):
you know, what the process is and how this goes and we'll see what happens.
Story about my but sorry about my switch
I actually saw - I saw a thread on Macedon earlier, I think it was yesterday, that the purchasing experience is going to prioritize people who played more.
So I don't know how much you play, probably not as much as you would like to, giving your work habits.
Yeah, so it's on the Nintendo, yeah, yeah.

(25:12):
So your interest may be really low on their list.
So interesting story about both my Switch and my Xbox,
actually my original Xbox, the Xbox 360,
which is the first one I own.
I won them both in competition.
So, in raffles, in giveaways,
so I was super lucky.
I mean, I did buy the Series X, I mean, Xbox,

(25:38):
So speaking of playing games and what games do people have time to play and maybe playing games at work actually, there is a business insider article that kind of showed up this week in our feeds dealing with the idea of Tetris and we've talked about this a couple of few times before, but the article title that caught my attention was talking about how it helped people be better at work.
That is

(26:04):
because it helped to get people into a
low state and I could understand that because I remember on my very early Game Boy, I plan a lot of Tetris on that Game Boy and I can still hear the Russian music in my ears from that and I'm sure any of you who played it can hear it right now too, sorry for the earworm. But you know, the point here is that you everything in moderation, right? You know, if you're playing Tetris obviously you're not working, you know, but this could be a way to shake loose a little bit, take break, put your mind on something else and some of the podcasts and other things that I've been reading and watching and listening to these days does talk about how getting into a flow state, whether it is for a little game or just by going for a walk or shoot this is really hard for a lot of people doing nothing.

(26:29):
And if you play it really, really well, you could not only be better at work, you could be best.
Yep.

(27:08):
Don't get on a device, don't go read something if you want to go walk, go walk if you want to sit in a hammock, go sit in a hammock but do that. Those are where the ideas start to flow. So I love this article.
really hard for people. Yep.
It's, for me, that's swimming.
I do love Tetris myself.
It's one of those games that's been ported to everything,

(27:30):
and I've heard this study or studies of this kind before and around, you know, if you apply it,
if you apply the game as a medicine to someone who's in a trauma situation soon enough,
then it reduces the onset of things like PTSD.
So yeah, it's interesting.
But finally, on the sort of gaming Nintendo piece here,

(27:55):
there's a kind of a little arc that we've got that covers both our gaming and our retro and our hardware hacking area here.
There's a brilliant 3D printing hack that I came across on Hackaday today,
where somebody's actually figured out a way to 3D print these kind of little,

(28:17):
I don't know what you would call them,
but these little fit, yes.
Like the tongues on a fork, on a fork, or on a tuning fork, yeah.
yeah they like these little fidget toys that you draw a little tab across the top of these little as you say these these tangs on a fork that would play the tune of of different games so they've got Mario and Super Mario worlds and different things they've got Minecraft they've got Zelda they've got the Jeopardy one as well which is a great one if you the end of the article there's a little YouTube video that you can click to play the Jeopardy music in about seven seconds pulling this little plastic thing across I want to print some of these now I have to say they do look super

(28:40):
Jeopardy theme song.
there are you know about the size less less than the size of a I guess a packet packet packet of tic-tacs or something like that depending on the size of tic-tacs

(29:06):
Yeah, and I think just our we've got like 30 seconds left in the show to hit that last one of hacking. We talk about all these different things running doom, etc. This one, maybe not as impressive, but I still thought it was very interesting.
Someone hacked an old Apple TV first gen to boot Windows XP SP3, which was probably the best version of Windows XP.

(29:28):
It was it was the one that I yeah, that was that was a classic it was back in the day. Yes
That was back in the day.
that just need to get SQL Server up on it, right?
>> Just don't load their web server because it's wide open with security holes.
Yeah, exactly
All right, on that bombshell, we won't be hosting this episode on a Windows XP based web server,

(29:51):
but you will be able to get it from our website, games at work.biz or from your regular podcast apps and tell your friends about it as well. So do let your friends know what you think of the show and where to find us and keep in touch with us via the vetiverse.
Yeah, see ya!
Awesome. See you, everybody.
See ya.
[upbeat music]

(30:11):
You've been listening to [e-mail], 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 [e-mail].
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(30:49):
[audience applauds]