August 4, 2025 • 32 mins
Photo by Pete Godfrey on Unsplash
Published 4 August 2025
e523 with Michael R and Andy, possibly arriving via carefully-arranged starlings? – stories about AI again, obviously; iPadOS 26; games, old and new; and, an innovative method of data transfer.
Andy and Michael R are back together this week, while Michael M takes a turn being away! We kick off with some AI-related topics, with ChatGPT successfully passing the anti-bot Turing test, CAPTCHA, and then some discussion of AI tools being allowed in Meta's hiring process. Could the North Koreans be on their way?
Seamlessly gliding (almost like... liquid glass), there's a discussion of iPadOS 26 public beta, and all the window-y goodness that's coming to all in September.
Under the heading of games topics, the hosts cover a number of links, including the existential crisis experienced by games characters in a Matrix game, an incredible clay animated music video that revisits the 1980s and 1990s, and then, a brand new game all about the life of... a fly. Yes, a fly.
The last segment covers a different kind of flying creature, and looks at the potential for birds to become digital data carriers. Well, starlings anyway.
Are you switching to bird tech any time soon? Have your bots drop our bots a line on Mastodon at @gamesatwork_biz and let us know what you're reading and what you're thinking about!
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 on ChatGPT's Casual Clicking - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/07/openais-chatgpt-agent-casually-clicks-through-i-am-not-a-robot-verification-test/
404Media on Meta job interviews - https://www.404media.co/meta-is-going-to-let-job-candidates-use-ai-during-coding-tests/
BBC: US woman gets 8-year sentence for stealing identities to give North Koreans jobs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2l2yn5zmxo
https://ultracode.ai/
Apple
iPadOS 26 public beta - https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/07/first-look-ipados-26-public-beta/
Gaming
Characters panic inside Matrix game - https://futurism.com/demo-video-game-characters-panic-code-matrix
Music video GUNSHIP - Tech Noir 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlUJTtBphb0
Time Flies game - https://timeflies.buzz
Birds! Yes, birds! (can we pretend this is a Maker section?)
Full video - storing PNGs in birds - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQCP-5g5bo
Tom's Hardware coverage - https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/yes-you-can-store-data-on-a-bird-enthusiast-converts-png-to-bird-shaped-waveform-teaches-young-starling-to-recall-file-at-up-to-2mb-s
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(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.
(00:38):
[upbeat music]
Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. Michael Rowe here is Friday. I get to talk tech with my friends, but this week, it's only one friend.
Andy Piper, how are you?
I'm well. I'm still here. Yes. I didn't barely left my seat since last Friday when I was talking to the other michael. So we have the
(01:03):
You guys are about to say, we've had this Michael swap going on.
We have the automatic Michael Disambiguation process in play again. Great. I love it. Yeah, she might make it very easy for our listeners as long as they check
We'll do that again next week.
Yeah, they'll go, oh, yeah, it's Andy and Michael.
Yeah, there you go
So I never remember what AM stands for.
(01:23):
Not amplitude modulated, but the AM PM.
Hand tame Redian.
Hand tame Redian.
That's it.
Before noon.
Okay, and post meridian missing.
Well, speaking of post meridian, no, no, not at all.
I was trying to figure out why you suddenly started talking about AEM and then realized Andy and Michael, right? Yes.
We've got.
(01:45):
Yes, yes, instead of ma, Michael and Andy.
Murch as in acquisitions.
Yes, so so we've got some fun topics this week and some other other topics to begin with.
I think all of us saw this article in one way or the other.
I'm going to click the "I am not a bot" button, which is so funny because I was doing some work earlier this year with a small company and they were using as part of their augmentation to AI data.
(02:08):
I'm beginning to think you might be a bot, though, to be honest.
How are you going to prove it to me that you're not a bot?
(02:33):
There are a couple of different third-party scraping tools.
Okay, screen scraping tools.
There are a whole ecosystem of screenscaping tools out there that you pay for.
Hmm. Yeah.
They all ran into the wall with things like LinkedIn and a couple other sites, which I thought was kind of interesting.
But I'm betting based off of this article that you don't have that problem with some of the AI data consumers because they're just clicking through.
(03:03):
So I'm not a robot.
And that's what this article from ours technical is talking about.
You want to take us through it briefly or what your thoughts are.
Yeah, I mean it's a it's a it's an article that is on us to ask technical. It's been on other sites as well this week about
Open AI's chat GPT agent
which is a tool that lets you it run it basically control its own web browser
(03:29):
so It can you can sit back and it will start driving your mouse pointer and moving around and doing stuff to to navigate the the web and
of course use of permission before buying things for example or doing anything that might cost you you know have have real-world consequences
(03:49):
but evidently somebody on reddit posted a
Proof of it just
Casually clicking the I am not a robot button having established that it needed to do so to carry on doing things and and I
I wouldn't say necessarily worse than that but doubly ironically it's the specifically it's the one I On Cloudflare which is supposed to be you know have a very strong anti AI bot
(04:20):
protections so
So, you know, I was thinking about, I mean, it's AI, so it's a buzzworthy article, right?
But I mean, I've developed graphic UI tests that do similar things, right?
(04:41):
I mean, there's lots of tools out there.
And I guess if you just add one teeny tiny bit of variability into the mouse movement,
that would resolve the issue, because, I mean...
Well. Yes. So, so there's a few elements of this. I think one of them is that this is using the single click capture device to get through it rather than one of the multi, you know, pick an image, slide something into place, all of those kind of things that require additional processing, you'll understand here what's on the screen.
it takes most of these single click ones, take multiple telemetry data readings to figure out,
is that robotic, clicking, or human clicking.
(05:23):
So, so that's one part of it. And the other thing is, as people point out, all it's doing is repeating what it's learned, right? It doesn't necessarily know that it's a bot.
It's just repeating learned behavior, which is exactly how all of this stuff works.
And if it's been watching or recordings, screen recordings, other people, people, humans,
(05:49):
Do this all the time.
doing that, then of course it's going to learn that that's how you...
get through that particular gate.
And as you say, it's repeating what it's seeing. It didn't learn anything, and we've talked about that on the show many times. It doesn't know anything.
Hmm. Yeah. Exactly right. So yeah, it's not, it's not solving the, the, the more complicated ones of these because those do require, you know, understanding of what's on the screen,
(06:23):
potentially moving things around to, to get, unlock the next section. But yeah, absolutely
it would, there's no reason to, to know whether, what, for it not to succeed at this particular challenge.
Well, speaking of not knowing anything, we saw an article on 404 media this week about meta-going all-in on AI by even allowing the people interviewing for developer positions to use AI during their interview process.
(07:02):
I once again, just at the mention of 404 media just want to shout out to that publication just because the number of really hot stories they publish this week have again been incredibly high and this one is interesting but it wasn't quite as dramatic, I don't think it's some of the other things they publish this week.
(07:29):
This one talks about, yeah, meta evidently allowed.
And we spoke about this before we started recording that.
It's arguably another skill.
Quite on quite prompt engineering or whatever you want to call it.
Similar to what Michael and I were talking about last week in terms of how, if you know how to use a search engine well,
(07:55):
if you know how to optimize your query for the best results,
answers, similarly to this.
I guess the same gotch as applied to last week's comment,
which is that all of this stuff is moving very fast.
So you also need to demonstrate that you can keep up and adapt to whatever the latest way of interacting is.
(08:23):
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know how to feel about it particularly.
- Yeah, I'm in the same boat to some degree.
We are seeing a massive shift going on where the ability to effectively use these AI engines
(08:46):
of various kinds is a desirable skill for companies,
and the ability to demonstrate that you can.
So I'm going to provide the skills a company is looking for, and that level I don't have a problem with it.
Then I go back to everything else we've discussed for the last couple of years and how bad the output is, or can be, especially if you don't know what you're getting, or how to phrase the question.
(09:13):
Yeah.
I can imagine, because I've done a lot with some agents and stuff recently, the results of your output.
If you don't know the system, if you don't know the language, and you don't know the nuance of what the results are, that you would gladly accept an answer and be providing really bad code.
(09:44):
Well, if you are being interviewed, I might very rarely interviewed for this particular set of skills myself, but if you are being interviewed as a senior engineer in coding language or framework Z, right, I refuse to use X as my example anymore, then you would be expected or you should be expected to know the nuances and the ins and outs and the specific
X, Y. Yes, I understand.
(10:14):
that you might need to get by and make the best results. I found it particularly interesting and sad that this article calls out another company, UltraCode.ai, who literally have a massive
landing page showing past any software engineering interview with Invisible AI,
(10:37):
with an example of doing a video call with the interviewer, and it prompting you with all of
the answers, which is just kind of makes me a little bit ill. It seems utterly pointless to me you're not demonstrating anything in that case and it's very frustrating.
Yeah, well, it's so funny. We just I can't remember if you guys talked about this on about this last week on the show I think you did and I've seen it all over the place in in the US. There's been a a huge
(11:07):
Ring cracked if you want to call it that of North Korean
remote coders
hiring on as remote developers for US companies and
finding a local person in the U.S. to base.
And, you know, here's the tool to says I can pass any interview, assuming you can get past the AI screeners, right?
(11:42):
I can then not really know the skill. Yes, we'll get to that later.
And this whole idea of, are we?
Hiring skills or re-hiring people who can exercise the tools to get through the interview.
All I can say is that we didn't talk about it on the show last week and you must have been listening to one of the other podcast, the better podcast that Michael alluded to, listen is not having, you know, they only listen to our one when when they've got to the end of their list and because they don't have anything better to listen to, which I refuse to believe of course, I know our listen is a loyal and listen to us because we know what we're talking about. We can drive podcasts better than better than an AI for now.
(12:10):
I've seen it on the four or five.
I agree. Both of them. That's right, that's right. You couldn't take our catalog of 523 episodes now, plus a couple of special ones. Feed them into notebook LLM and generate a good
(12:43):
games that were dot videos episode. Well, I was I was almost going to say, can you generate a good
you sure? You sure you're not a robot? Yeah. Maybe we should start providing a detailed prompt to our agent to do that. Anyway, let's talk about what's coming new, what's new,
games that worked out? Yes. Let's jump on. Well, one of the really new things is I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I took the dive and I upgraded my podcasting rig
(13:03):
how things are going in Apple now.
to Mac OS Tahoe. And well, if you
this episode is edited as well as the rest of it is going fine. If it's not, you'll know that we ran into a couple of audio problems this week. But there's a there's a great detail article that Jason Snell over at six colors put out on the first look of I iPad OS 26 public beta. Now,
(13:46):
I've been using the developer beta since it came out. And there's all lot to like on the iPad. There's a lot to like. There are there are things that I will say are still under development. Right. And most of what I've seen online about complaints have to do with the things that are still under development. Basically, the look and feel of glass. Right.
(14:18):
and I even have a bug in one of my apps that I read.
So, that's really annoying in that the photo picker that I have is returning an image, but there's no image.
Oh, that sounds pretty bad.
Oh yeah, which is a big problem for something that's built around images.
(14:40):
So, it worked in beta 3, it doesn't work in beta 4, and of course beta 4 is, developer beta 4 is the public beta.
I haven't upgraded anything. I might, I'm considering trying it on the iPad. I don't use the iPad as much, so I used to and yeah, I might give it a go just because I generally try to, I have tried to go ahead of the curve. I normally, I normally wait to the release candidate and install at least the release candidate so I know what my friends and family are going to face a week later. Yeah. But
So, thank you.
I broke that. They broke audio on my Mac. Right. So, but you had indicated you had not upgraded on any of your devices yet.
(15:26):
about to complain about yeah, well one of the one of the interesting things is you know that the biggest thing of of iPad OS 26 is the multi tasking multi-windowing
Yeah and everything I've heard and read about it is that it obviously it blokes out the
and yeah
the window frames because you've now got like frames around things rather than it being necessarily full screen and therefore you lose real estate on the screen and I've seen a lot of people complaining especially on Reddit about wanting slide over mode and that's probably the thing that I used quite a lot as well so I will have to adjust my behaviour.
(16:07):
To learn the new way of doing things but I, yeah I think it could be good it could be great.
I... So I'll give you...
I also am not, I've spoken about this before I'm not yet convinced by the glass UI stuff we'll see.
I'll give two reactions to the UI things.
One, I rarely use slide over in the past 'cause it got confusing to me.
(16:33):
So it's not a miss for me 'cause you can just take a window and slide it almost to the edge of the screen.
So it's only a little line there that you can pick it up and slide it back.
So you can slide over tons of windows to slide over.
So that's a use case thing.
but I do think that the one point that is made
is I've got the 13 inch so the larger iPad Pro and I even hook up to an external 27 inch monitor at times and the extra window chrome is enough to realize that you're losing space. It's not on the Mac and the Mac has always had the extra window chrome so you've already lost it, you're used to not having it so So to me, that's kind of where you're used to.
(17:05):
Hmm
And I do find that the menu bar being there in the center of the screen instead of to the left.
(17:32):
Yeah, I noticed that I noticed that the text elements are all in the middle on the screenshots, yeah
And then the one last thing and then we'll move on because this is not a max show is the the the the stoplights right so the buttons for close minimize and maximize.
(17:53):
So they zoom in and out based off of your cursor being up there because they hide them to make them as small as possible so they don't take up a lot of space so that they don't add the extra chrome.
right I see. So they pop up if your cursor is near there. But what about... but what if I...
If it's near there and then there's all kinds of screens to have window elements up there and it's a problem.
and what if I'm using my finger instead of a pointer?
(18:15):
Uh, it's about the same, but the-
So I want to close the window but there's no red thing to close it with my finger without using the
No, if you take your finger up there as you get close to the screen, it'll pop out.
Oh, I see.
Yeah.
Because at least on the on the pro models. So anyway.
Right.
(18:37):
I've got a previous gen pro model,
so I'm not sure, but we'll see.
So there'll be some fun coming up, but speaking of fun, I think Michael provided this one.
We are meant to be a games gaming show, right?
And talk about gaming technology and play, as well as work, so.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And I think, I think, did you post this or did Michael about the, uh, disturbing demo?
(18:58):
I think this was Michael's conscious.
I think that's a good contribution for the week. Yeah.
So, so basically, uh, this is an article from futurism.com. Um, and it ties in part of the, uh,
sag after, uh, agreement, right, which took a long time to be reached, um,
(19:22):
the union agreement about
and other actors to have some kind of guardrails around AI and their work and whether or not things can be replaced by AI, etc.
And so there's an Australian company replica studios that released a demo for the Matrix franchise, a game for the Matrix.
(19:52):
And as I...
I get it... they... they used AI to generate the output of the NPCs and the dialogue of the NPCs.
Is that what we're supposed to get out of how they created this demo?
So, it's a bit confusing because the story on futureism summarizes a story on the New York Times,
(20:20):
also published this week. And the one in futureism talks about this game coming out, which came out about two years ago, it was a Matrix game. And it refers to this demo.
Where these AI characters seemingly got confused at their own nature, they started panicking inside the game about the fact. So, this was two years ago, two years ago. Well, maybe sort of. But this story is interesting for other reasons, because it's also been the New New York Times story has also been widely passed.
(20:55):
But isn't that the story of the Matrix?
This is the paragraph that people have been calling out on the New York Times.
(21:22):
Most experts acknowledge that a takeover by artificial intelligence is coming for the video game industry within the next 5 years and executives have already started preparing to restructure their companies in anticipation.
After all, it was one of the first sectors to deploy AI programming in the 1980s.
With the four ghosts who chase Pac-Man, each responding differently to the player's real-time movements.
(21:49):
So it sounds like somebody who doesn't understand AI and
Now, correct. This story has been widely quoted in my feeds this week, based on that element, not on the element, which is referred to at the beginning and is very unclear about a 2-year-old game in which some may be.
(22:10):
Demo was apparently shown showing the characters freaking out and they themselves being some kind of AI.
Again, which is the story of the Matrix?
It's just not clear about what this is. It's just very confusing in terms of both elements of the story and the New York Times is appalling.
(22:38):
the New York Times is
Yeah. Well, yes. Well, and we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, I think, with the NVIDIA story at one of the game conferences where they were, or one of the gaming studio execs talking about AI would allow them to develop game fasteners, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and our point then, and I think we stick to it is that was a self serving statement.
childlike reporting of the topic, I would say.
(23:08):
And that CEO about their business. So I think this is a great story. You want to go to the next one?
I'm excited about the next one.
I don't know what to say about it.
The next one was a music video that I came across this week that was again shared on one of my social feeds and I clicked through to it.
And it's really quite brilliant.
(23:32):
It's a gun ship, the band is gun ship and the video is Teknoir II,
featuring John Carpenter and Charlie Simpson.
It's an official music video.
It's all done in claymation.
It's a follow-up sequel to a nine-year-old video for Teknoir, the original track.
(23:56):
It's all very kind of synth wave rock style.
I would say, I really enjoyed it,
but the whole thing is done in this kind of claymation animation.
It's about five minutes long.
There's a whole storyline in it.
And it's...
so very 80s, early 90s video game centric.
(24:20):
There are so many references to movies, games, the whole, kind of,
Yes, yes.
milieu of that era that there's blowing into video cartridges, there's...
Blowing on the cartridge. Did you catch the blowing on the cartridge?
terminator references, there's... it's narrated by John Carpenter...
(24:45):
it's got... the main character looks like Penny out of Inspector Gadget.
There's a whole thing in the beginning where she's using the Amiga and there's literally like the animated character on the screen looks exactly like Penny from with a little smartwatch like in the original Inspector Gadget cartoons.
(25:07):
It's phenomenal.
I mean, I didn't have the sound pumped up the first time I watched it.
I just enjoyed the animation.
And it's really great, it's really great.
So if you're listening to this show and you're into games as you're likely to be or video gaming,
then if you haven't seen this yet, go to go look at it.
definitely go to our show notes.
(25:28):
It's really good.
And whether or not you like the music is another thing, I happen to enjoy that one and start it to listen to more of their back catalogue.
And, yeah.
Cool, cool. Well, yeah, I I thought all the references were incredible and like you I'm a big fan of that style of music. So I listen to it at a low volume, I'm going to crank it up next time I watch it.
(25:50):
But speaking of cool animations, you found a
Hmm.
to the time flies game. What's that about?
Yeah.
Ah, you're a fly.
[laughs]
And there's a clock.
And there's a clock and, you know,
flies don't have a long lifespan, right?
So it's kind of this pixelated, but quite nice.
(26:14):
We were talking the other week about the Mac paint images
and kind of thin, pixelated lines artwork.
And you could do some quite sophisticated stuff.
So there's a lot of similarities in this sort of art style,
I think.
This is available on PS5's Nintendo Switch Steam,
(26:37):
Epic and the Mac App Store.
And I fully intended to play it before we went to record this week.
It's by, I think I came across it because of the fact that it's in cooperation with panic,
the folks that make the play date.
And I'm pretty sure I got I saw some media about it from there the website's quite fun because as you move your finger around your pointer around the screen the little fly if it's around flies off.
(27:06):
Like I'm looking forward to trying it. It looks very very simple graphics and I'm curious about it.
puzzle game this simple puzzle game cool and and yeah I noticed it and I was like oh he's walking across the top of the video I was like he's not part of the video he's literally on top of the video we met as I moved my cursor to he jumped over and I was like oh cool yeah
So yeah, I just found the fly again. Sorry I'm just chasing the fly around the screen with my pointer.
So, yeah. Ah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
(27:30):
So, it's made in, made with Unity.
It's a single play, a little adventure game.
Your life is short.
You can learn an instrument, read a book, become rich, get drunk,
or make someone smile.
So,
all in the life of a fly. Yes. And I remember, I remember in, was it biology 101 or 102 in college,
(27:51):
where we had to do the fruit fly experiments, because as you say, flies have a short life span.
You know, it's a genetic thing, and you could count the color of their eyes and other things.
I have a terrible feeling that my music was playing for the last two minutes and because I just closed the tab and noticed that sound changed so you may or may not have a load of background music playing whilst I was talking before. If you couldn't hear of that's weird. We've had audio problems this week.
(28:19):
Well, the good thing is, yeah.
Imagine that.
Okay, well speaking of weird, there was another video that you found about saving image data on a strange location.
- Yeah, so I think the best reporting of this actually came on Tom's hardware later in the week,
(28:44):
but the video that came out earlier in the week was a 30 minute YouTube video where you have to sort of skip to 14 minutes in before the interesting bit happens.
But the headline is that you can store data on birds as in real actual avian creatures that fly around.
And specifically it takes advantage of the fact that stalling.
(29:08):
We'll learn and mimic what they hear.
There's a whole section on why they didn't teach this to parrots or other birds at mimic.
It was specifically taught to a young stalling.
And this person manages to convert a picture of a bird that he draws into an audio waveform.
(29:31):
And then embeds it in the song memory of a young stalling.
And then, retreats.
The same thing back from the styling and manages to re-constitute the image.
Now, he spends about 15 minutes of the video talking about all of the necessary information that you need to understand and the considerations.
(29:54):
But then he goes on and actually demonstrates about 17 minutes in that you can actually do it.
And there was quite a good coverage as well on Tom's hardware that we'll have in the show notes talking about this.
And then back of the podcast cover calculations, based on the length of last week's show and the size of the audio file, and the size of the PNG file that was used in this instance.
(30:25):
And I believe it would take 266 starlings to store an episode of the show.
It may be tricky to retrieve that episode because you would have to persuade those starlings to flock together.
And then repeat the learned bits of song one after the other, or have to do some incredibly clever science to demux it all and figure it all out.
(30:50):
all you gotta do is you put him in a giant box and you take a string and you tie it to their legs and then and you put a small hole in one of the box and a long tube to your ears and and you get the first starling to start down the path.
I think you should definitely, and very quickly pattern out, yeah, exactly right, exactly right.
(31:12):
Patman, it's called a starling
and you can do that.
Oh, amazing, well look, on that bombshell on that incredible note, we look forward to
sharing more episodes of our show with you via Starling in the future, possibly in very, very small chunks, but if you do come across a Starling, then see what if you can record its audio and maybe you're going to fragment of Michael Martin, recording his element of the show remotely this week.
(31:33):
Yes.
Yes, yes.
Well, it's been great.
I will not be here next week.
(31:53):
You guys got it covered and to everybody else.
All I gotta say is, see ya.
[upbeat music]
You've been listening to gamesatwork.biz, the podcast about gaming technology and play.
We are part of the blueberry podcasting network.
[upbeat music]
And we'd like to thank the band, Random Encounters for their song, Big Blue.
You can follow us at our website at gamesatwork.biz.
(32:16):
[upbeat music]
(32:38):
[audience applauds]
[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.
(00:38):
[upbeat music]
Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. Michael Rowe here is Friday. I get to talk tech with my friends, but this week, it's only one friend.
Andy Piper, how are you?
I'm well. I'm still here. Yes. I didn't barely left my seat since last Friday when I was talking to the other michael. So we have the
(01:03):
You guys are about to say, we've had this Michael swap going on.
We have the automatic Michael Disambiguation process in play again. Great. I love it. Yeah, she might make it very easy for our listeners as long as they check
We'll do that again next week.
Yeah, they'll go, oh, yeah, it's Andy and Michael.
Yeah, there you go
So I never remember what AM stands for.
(01:23):
Not amplitude modulated, but the AM PM.
Hand tame Redian.
Hand tame Redian.
That's it.
Before noon.
Okay, and post meridian missing.
Well, speaking of post meridian, no, no, not at all.
I was trying to figure out why you suddenly started talking about AEM and then realized Andy and Michael, right? Yes.
We've got.
(01:45):
Yes, yes, instead of ma, Michael and Andy.
Murch as in acquisitions.
Yes, so so we've got some fun topics this week and some other other topics to begin with.
I think all of us saw this article in one way or the other.
I'm going to click the "I am not a bot" button, which is so funny because I was doing some work earlier this year with a small company and they were using as part of their augmentation to AI data.
(02:08):
I'm beginning to think you might be a bot, though, to be honest.
How are you going to prove it to me that you're not a bot?
(02:33):
There are a couple of different third-party scraping tools.
Okay, screen scraping tools.
There are a whole ecosystem of screenscaping tools out there that you pay for.
Hmm. Yeah.
They all ran into the wall with things like LinkedIn and a couple other sites, which I thought was kind of interesting.
But I'm betting based off of this article that you don't have that problem with some of the AI data consumers because they're just clicking through.
(03:03):
So I'm not a robot.
And that's what this article from ours technical is talking about.
You want to take us through it briefly or what your thoughts are.
Yeah, I mean it's a it's a it's an article that is on us to ask technical. It's been on other sites as well this week about
Open AI's chat GPT agent
which is a tool that lets you it run it basically control its own web browser
(03:29):
so It can you can sit back and it will start driving your mouse pointer and moving around and doing stuff to to navigate the the web and
of course use of permission before buying things for example or doing anything that might cost you you know have have real-world consequences
(03:49):
but evidently somebody on reddit posted a
Proof of it just
Casually clicking the I am not a robot button having established that it needed to do so to carry on doing things and and I
I wouldn't say necessarily worse than that but doubly ironically it's the specifically it's the one I On Cloudflare which is supposed to be you know have a very strong anti AI bot
(04:20):
protections so
So, you know, I was thinking about, I mean, it's AI, so it's a buzzworthy article, right?
But I mean, I've developed graphic UI tests that do similar things, right?
(04:41):
I mean, there's lots of tools out there.
And I guess if you just add one teeny tiny bit of variability into the mouse movement,
that would resolve the issue, because, I mean...
Well. Yes. So, so there's a few elements of this. I think one of them is that this is using the single click capture device to get through it rather than one of the multi, you know, pick an image, slide something into place, all of those kind of things that require additional processing, you'll understand here what's on the screen.
it takes most of these single click ones, take multiple telemetry data readings to figure out,
is that robotic, clicking, or human clicking.
(05:23):
So, so that's one part of it. And the other thing is, as people point out, all it's doing is repeating what it's learned, right? It doesn't necessarily know that it's a bot.
It's just repeating learned behavior, which is exactly how all of this stuff works.
And if it's been watching or recordings, screen recordings, other people, people, humans,
(05:49):
Do this all the time.
doing that, then of course it's going to learn that that's how you...
get through that particular gate.
And as you say, it's repeating what it's seeing. It didn't learn anything, and we've talked about that on the show many times. It doesn't know anything.
Hmm. Yeah. Exactly right. So yeah, it's not, it's not solving the, the, the more complicated ones of these because those do require, you know, understanding of what's on the screen,
(06:23):
potentially moving things around to, to get, unlock the next section. But yeah, absolutely
it would, there's no reason to, to know whether, what, for it not to succeed at this particular challenge.
Well, speaking of not knowing anything, we saw an article on 404 media this week about meta-going all-in on AI by even allowing the people interviewing for developer positions to use AI during their interview process.
(07:02):
I once again, just at the mention of 404 media just want to shout out to that publication just because the number of really hot stories they publish this week have again been incredibly high and this one is interesting but it wasn't quite as dramatic, I don't think it's some of the other things they publish this week.
(07:29):
This one talks about, yeah, meta evidently allowed.
And we spoke about this before we started recording that.
It's arguably another skill.
Quite on quite prompt engineering or whatever you want to call it.
Similar to what Michael and I were talking about last week in terms of how, if you know how to use a search engine well,
(07:55):
if you know how to optimize your query for the best results,
answers, similarly to this.
I guess the same gotch as applied to last week's comment,
which is that all of this stuff is moving very fast.
So you also need to demonstrate that you can keep up and adapt to whatever the latest way of interacting is.
(08:23):
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know how to feel about it particularly.
- Yeah, I'm in the same boat to some degree.
We are seeing a massive shift going on where the ability to effectively use these AI engines
(08:46):
of various kinds is a desirable skill for companies,
and the ability to demonstrate that you can.
So I'm going to provide the skills a company is looking for, and that level I don't have a problem with it.
Then I go back to everything else we've discussed for the last couple of years and how bad the output is, or can be, especially if you don't know what you're getting, or how to phrase the question.
(09:13):
Yeah.
I can imagine, because I've done a lot with some agents and stuff recently, the results of your output.
If you don't know the system, if you don't know the language, and you don't know the nuance of what the results are, that you would gladly accept an answer and be providing really bad code.
(09:44):
Well, if you are being interviewed, I might very rarely interviewed for this particular set of skills myself, but if you are being interviewed as a senior engineer in coding language or framework Z, right, I refuse to use X as my example anymore, then you would be expected or you should be expected to know the nuances and the ins and outs and the specific
X, Y. Yes, I understand.
(10:14):
that you might need to get by and make the best results. I found it particularly interesting and sad that this article calls out another company, UltraCode.ai, who literally have a massive
landing page showing past any software engineering interview with Invisible AI,
(10:37):
with an example of doing a video call with the interviewer, and it prompting you with all of
the answers, which is just kind of makes me a little bit ill. It seems utterly pointless to me you're not demonstrating anything in that case and it's very frustrating.
Yeah, well, it's so funny. We just I can't remember if you guys talked about this on about this last week on the show I think you did and I've seen it all over the place in in the US. There's been a a huge
(11:07):
Ring cracked if you want to call it that of North Korean
remote coders
hiring on as remote developers for US companies and
finding a local person in the U.S. to base.
And, you know, here's the tool to says I can pass any interview, assuming you can get past the AI screeners, right?
(11:42):
I can then not really know the skill. Yes, we'll get to that later.
And this whole idea of, are we?
Hiring skills or re-hiring people who can exercise the tools to get through the interview.
All I can say is that we didn't talk about it on the show last week and you must have been listening to one of the other podcast, the better podcast that Michael alluded to, listen is not having, you know, they only listen to our one when when they've got to the end of their list and because they don't have anything better to listen to, which I refuse to believe of course, I know our listen is a loyal and listen to us because we know what we're talking about. We can drive podcasts better than better than an AI for now.
(12:10):
I've seen it on the four or five.
I agree. Both of them. That's right, that's right. You couldn't take our catalog of 523 episodes now, plus a couple of special ones. Feed them into notebook LLM and generate a good
(12:43):
games that were dot videos episode. Well, I was I was almost going to say, can you generate a good
you sure? You sure you're not a robot? Yeah. Maybe we should start providing a detailed prompt to our agent to do that. Anyway, let's talk about what's coming new, what's new,
games that worked out? Yes. Let's jump on. Well, one of the really new things is I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I took the dive and I upgraded my podcasting rig
(13:03):
how things are going in Apple now.
to Mac OS Tahoe. And well, if you
this episode is edited as well as the rest of it is going fine. If it's not, you'll know that we ran into a couple of audio problems this week. But there's a there's a great detail article that Jason Snell over at six colors put out on the first look of I iPad OS 26 public beta. Now,
(13:46):
I've been using the developer beta since it came out. And there's all lot to like on the iPad. There's a lot to like. There are there are things that I will say are still under development. Right. And most of what I've seen online about complaints have to do with the things that are still under development. Basically, the look and feel of glass. Right.
(14:18):
and I even have a bug in one of my apps that I read.
So, that's really annoying in that the photo picker that I have is returning an image, but there's no image.
Oh, that sounds pretty bad.
Oh yeah, which is a big problem for something that's built around images.
(14:40):
So, it worked in beta 3, it doesn't work in beta 4, and of course beta 4 is, developer beta 4 is the public beta.
I haven't upgraded anything. I might, I'm considering trying it on the iPad. I don't use the iPad as much, so I used to and yeah, I might give it a go just because I generally try to, I have tried to go ahead of the curve. I normally, I normally wait to the release candidate and install at least the release candidate so I know what my friends and family are going to face a week later. Yeah. But
So, thank you.
I broke that. They broke audio on my Mac. Right. So, but you had indicated you had not upgraded on any of your devices yet.
(15:26):
about to complain about yeah, well one of the one of the interesting things is you know that the biggest thing of of iPad OS 26 is the multi tasking multi-windowing
Yeah and everything I've heard and read about it is that it obviously it blokes out the
and yeah
the window frames because you've now got like frames around things rather than it being necessarily full screen and therefore you lose real estate on the screen and I've seen a lot of people complaining especially on Reddit about wanting slide over mode and that's probably the thing that I used quite a lot as well so I will have to adjust my behaviour.
(16:07):
To learn the new way of doing things but I, yeah I think it could be good it could be great.
I... So I'll give you...
I also am not, I've spoken about this before I'm not yet convinced by the glass UI stuff we'll see.
I'll give two reactions to the UI things.
One, I rarely use slide over in the past 'cause it got confusing to me.
(16:33):
So it's not a miss for me 'cause you can just take a window and slide it almost to the edge of the screen.
So it's only a little line there that you can pick it up and slide it back.
So you can slide over tons of windows to slide over.
So that's a use case thing.
but I do think that the one point that is made
is I've got the 13 inch so the larger iPad Pro and I even hook up to an external 27 inch monitor at times and the extra window chrome is enough to realize that you're losing space. It's not on the Mac and the Mac has always had the extra window chrome so you've already lost it, you're used to not having it so So to me, that's kind of where you're used to.
(17:05):
Hmm
And I do find that the menu bar being there in the center of the screen instead of to the left.
(17:32):
Yeah, I noticed that I noticed that the text elements are all in the middle on the screenshots, yeah
And then the one last thing and then we'll move on because this is not a max show is the the the the stoplights right so the buttons for close minimize and maximize.
(17:53):
So they zoom in and out based off of your cursor being up there because they hide them to make them as small as possible so they don't take up a lot of space so that they don't add the extra chrome.
right I see. So they pop up if your cursor is near there. But what about... but what if I...
If it's near there and then there's all kinds of screens to have window elements up there and it's a problem.
and what if I'm using my finger instead of a pointer?
(18:15):
Uh, it's about the same, but the-
So I want to close the window but there's no red thing to close it with my finger without using the
No, if you take your finger up there as you get close to the screen, it'll pop out.
Oh, I see.
Yeah.
Because at least on the on the pro models. So anyway.
Right.
(18:37):
I've got a previous gen pro model,
so I'm not sure, but we'll see.
So there'll be some fun coming up, but speaking of fun, I think Michael provided this one.
We are meant to be a games gaming show, right?
And talk about gaming technology and play, as well as work, so.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And I think, I think, did you post this or did Michael about the, uh, disturbing demo?
(18:58):
I think this was Michael's conscious.
I think that's a good contribution for the week. Yeah.
So, so basically, uh, this is an article from futurism.com. Um, and it ties in part of the, uh,
sag after, uh, agreement, right, which took a long time to be reached, um,
(19:22):
the union agreement about
and other actors to have some kind of guardrails around AI and their work and whether or not things can be replaced by AI, etc.
And so there's an Australian company replica studios that released a demo for the Matrix franchise, a game for the Matrix.
(19:52):
And as I...
I get it... they... they used AI to generate the output of the NPCs and the dialogue of the NPCs.
Is that what we're supposed to get out of how they created this demo?
So, it's a bit confusing because the story on futureism summarizes a story on the New York Times,
(20:20):
also published this week. And the one in futureism talks about this game coming out, which came out about two years ago, it was a Matrix game. And it refers to this demo.
Where these AI characters seemingly got confused at their own nature, they started panicking inside the game about the fact. So, this was two years ago, two years ago. Well, maybe sort of. But this story is interesting for other reasons, because it's also been the New New York Times story has also been widely passed.
(20:55):
But isn't that the story of the Matrix?
This is the paragraph that people have been calling out on the New York Times.
(21:22):
Most experts acknowledge that a takeover by artificial intelligence is coming for the video game industry within the next 5 years and executives have already started preparing to restructure their companies in anticipation.
After all, it was one of the first sectors to deploy AI programming in the 1980s.
With the four ghosts who chase Pac-Man, each responding differently to the player's real-time movements.
(21:49):
So it sounds like somebody who doesn't understand AI and
Now, correct. This story has been widely quoted in my feeds this week, based on that element, not on the element, which is referred to at the beginning and is very unclear about a 2-year-old game in which some may be.
(22:10):
Demo was apparently shown showing the characters freaking out and they themselves being some kind of AI.
Again, which is the story of the Matrix?
It's just not clear about what this is. It's just very confusing in terms of both elements of the story and the New York Times is appalling.
(22:38):
the New York Times is
Yeah. Well, yes. Well, and we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, I think, with the NVIDIA story at one of the game conferences where they were, or one of the gaming studio execs talking about AI would allow them to develop game fasteners, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and our point then, and I think we stick to it is that was a self serving statement.
childlike reporting of the topic, I would say.
(23:08):
And that CEO about their business. So I think this is a great story. You want to go to the next one?
I'm excited about the next one.
I don't know what to say about it.
The next one was a music video that I came across this week that was again shared on one of my social feeds and I clicked through to it.
And it's really quite brilliant.
(23:32):
It's a gun ship, the band is gun ship and the video is Teknoir II,
featuring John Carpenter and Charlie Simpson.
It's an official music video.
It's all done in claymation.
It's a follow-up sequel to a nine-year-old video for Teknoir, the original track.
(23:56):
It's all very kind of synth wave rock style.
I would say, I really enjoyed it,
but the whole thing is done in this kind of claymation animation.
It's about five minutes long.
There's a whole storyline in it.
And it's...
so very 80s, early 90s video game centric.
(24:20):
There are so many references to movies, games, the whole, kind of,
Yes, yes.
milieu of that era that there's blowing into video cartridges, there's...
Blowing on the cartridge. Did you catch the blowing on the cartridge?
terminator references, there's... it's narrated by John Carpenter...
(24:45):
it's got... the main character looks like Penny out of Inspector Gadget.
There's a whole thing in the beginning where she's using the Amiga and there's literally like the animated character on the screen looks exactly like Penny from with a little smartwatch like in the original Inspector Gadget cartoons.
(25:07):
It's phenomenal.
I mean, I didn't have the sound pumped up the first time I watched it.
I just enjoyed the animation.
And it's really great, it's really great.
So if you're listening to this show and you're into games as you're likely to be or video gaming,
then if you haven't seen this yet, go to go look at it.
definitely go to our show notes.
(25:28):
It's really good.
And whether or not you like the music is another thing, I happen to enjoy that one and start it to listen to more of their back catalogue.
And, yeah.
Cool, cool. Well, yeah, I I thought all the references were incredible and like you I'm a big fan of that style of music. So I listen to it at a low volume, I'm going to crank it up next time I watch it.
(25:50):
But speaking of cool animations, you found a
Hmm.
to the time flies game. What's that about?
Yeah.
Ah, you're a fly.
[laughs]
And there's a clock.
And there's a clock and, you know,
flies don't have a long lifespan, right?
So it's kind of this pixelated, but quite nice.
(26:14):
We were talking the other week about the Mac paint images
and kind of thin, pixelated lines artwork.
And you could do some quite sophisticated stuff.
So there's a lot of similarities in this sort of art style,
I think.
This is available on PS5's Nintendo Switch Steam,
(26:37):
Epic and the Mac App Store.
And I fully intended to play it before we went to record this week.
It's by, I think I came across it because of the fact that it's in cooperation with panic,
the folks that make the play date.
And I'm pretty sure I got I saw some media about it from there the website's quite fun because as you move your finger around your pointer around the screen the little fly if it's around flies off.
(27:06):
Like I'm looking forward to trying it. It looks very very simple graphics and I'm curious about it.
puzzle game this simple puzzle game cool and and yeah I noticed it and I was like oh he's walking across the top of the video I was like he's not part of the video he's literally on top of the video we met as I moved my cursor to he jumped over and I was like oh cool yeah
So yeah, I just found the fly again. Sorry I'm just chasing the fly around the screen with my pointer.
So, yeah. Ah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
(27:30):
So, it's made in, made with Unity.
It's a single play, a little adventure game.
Your life is short.
You can learn an instrument, read a book, become rich, get drunk,
or make someone smile.
So,
all in the life of a fly. Yes. And I remember, I remember in, was it biology 101 or 102 in college,
(27:51):
where we had to do the fruit fly experiments, because as you say, flies have a short life span.
You know, it's a genetic thing, and you could count the color of their eyes and other things.
I have a terrible feeling that my music was playing for the last two minutes and because I just closed the tab and noticed that sound changed so you may or may not have a load of background music playing whilst I was talking before. If you couldn't hear of that's weird. We've had audio problems this week.
(28:19):
Well, the good thing is, yeah.
Imagine that.
Okay, well speaking of weird, there was another video that you found about saving image data on a strange location.
- Yeah, so I think the best reporting of this actually came on Tom's hardware later in the week,
(28:44):
but the video that came out earlier in the week was a 30 minute YouTube video where you have to sort of skip to 14 minutes in before the interesting bit happens.
But the headline is that you can store data on birds as in real actual avian creatures that fly around.
And specifically it takes advantage of the fact that stalling.
(29:08):
We'll learn and mimic what they hear.
There's a whole section on why they didn't teach this to parrots or other birds at mimic.
It was specifically taught to a young stalling.
And this person manages to convert a picture of a bird that he draws into an audio waveform.
(29:31):
And then embeds it in the song memory of a young stalling.
And then, retreats.
The same thing back from the styling and manages to re-constitute the image.
Now, he spends about 15 minutes of the video talking about all of the necessary information that you need to understand and the considerations.
(29:54):
But then he goes on and actually demonstrates about 17 minutes in that you can actually do it.
And there was quite a good coverage as well on Tom's hardware that we'll have in the show notes talking about this.
And then back of the podcast cover calculations, based on the length of last week's show and the size of the audio file, and the size of the PNG file that was used in this instance.
(30:25):
And I believe it would take 266 starlings to store an episode of the show.
It may be tricky to retrieve that episode because you would have to persuade those starlings to flock together.
And then repeat the learned bits of song one after the other, or have to do some incredibly clever science to demux it all and figure it all out.
(30:50):
all you gotta do is you put him in a giant box and you take a string and you tie it to their legs and then and you put a small hole in one of the box and a long tube to your ears and and you get the first starling to start down the path.
I think you should definitely, and very quickly pattern out, yeah, exactly right, exactly right.
(31:12):
Patman, it's called a starling
and you can do that.
Oh, amazing, well look, on that bombshell on that incredible note, we look forward to
sharing more episodes of our show with you via Starling in the future, possibly in very, very small chunks, but if you do come across a Starling, then see what if you can record its audio and maybe you're going to fragment of Michael Martin, recording his element of the show remotely this week.
(31:33):
Yes.
Yes, yes.
Well, it's been great.
I will not be here next week.
(31:53):
You guys got it covered and to everybody else.
All I gotta say is, see ya.
[upbeat music]
You've been listening to gamesatwork.biz, the podcast about gaming technology and play.
We are part of the blueberry podcasting network.
[upbeat music]
And we'd like to thank the band, Random Encounters for their song, Big Blue.
You can follow us at our website at gamesatwork.biz.
(32:16):
[upbeat music]
(32:38):
[audience applauds]
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