e508 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories and discussion on AI Conversational Swarm Intelligence, the Pokétax game and numerous Nintendo stories and much more.
Michael, Andy and Michael get things started with a story about how large groups, well beyond the research ideal of 4-7 people, may have a simultaneous conversation with one another, sharing and evolving ideas. Drawing inspiration from how schools of fish communicate with one another, a Carnegie Mellon and unanimous.ai paper illustrates the architecture behind Conversational Swarm Intelligence. AI agents track groups of 7 humans for novel ideas and pass along those ideas to other groups of humans in order to more quickly propagate the evolution of ideas through an accelerated wisdom of the crowd manner.
Then, the co-hosts turn their attention to the experiences of the Wikimedia Foundation. They note that there have been huge spikes in bandwidth for serving up multimedia files – not from humans seeking information, rather from scraper bots.
Nothing But Nintendo
After an AR segue to look at a slingshot mechanism to change lighting colors (check out the video in the show notes), the team switches (see what we did there?) to all things Nintendo. A story somehow escaped the Games at Work team back in 2012, when the Louvre museum replaced their audio guides with Nintendo 3DS consoles. Well, that story is coming to an end, and those 3DS systems will be replaced by something new. Continuing on the Nintendo theme, the accounting firm Open Ledger has created a game called Pokétax to make filing your taxes fun and exciting with a Pokémon experience. Then, Andy, Michael and Michael talk about the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2. Last, the team reminisces about playing Tetris on the Nintendo Game Boy, in discussing an article about how Tetris is a hack for people to get better at their jobs.
Wrapping things up for this episode, the team continues the Nintendo theme a little more with 3d printed musical fidget toys that play classic Mario (and other) video game tunes. Check out that video below for an example.
Would you like to play a tax game? Or maybe a round of Tetris to improve your problem solving? 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.
Your eyes are not deceiving you… I got an Apple TV 1st Gen, the only x86 based model (it uses a Pentium M as its CPU) booting Windows XP Service Pack 3! For reals!
This was possible through a small security flaw in the Apple TV's firmware and boot process… while the Apple TV looks for a boot.efi file on its boot partition and has it load a Mach-O binary to be able to boot, it doesn't actually care about the actual contents of the file! So by that note, you can wrap a kernel or bootloader from another OS into a Mach-O file and name it mach_kernel, and the Apple TV won't care and will happily boot it! So after this little escapade of cursed computing, you know Linux is next! 😁
More deets are in this video, along with a link to grab a premade disk image from the Internet Archive! https://youtu.be/v2w5MmiRHUo
The entire project was done by distrohopper39b, who chronicles his work on the project from beginning to end here:
The weekly conversation hosted by Michael Rowe, Michael Martine, and Andy Piper, Games At Work dot Biz, explores the intersection where our digital play and professional lives collide. This isn't just a review show; it's a deep dive into the technology that powers our hobbies, the business behind the leisure, and the cultural news shaping both worlds. Each episode feels like pulling up a chair with three friends who are as passionate about the craft of game development and the evolution of hardware as they are about the pure joy of finding a great new title. You'll hear specific discussions on everything from the latest graphics card impacting performance to the narrative design of an indie darling, all filtered through the lens of professionals who live in the tech space. The Games At Work dot Biz podcast operates on the belief that the games we play and the tools we use are inextricably linked, offering listeners a consistently thoughtful and engaging analysis that goes far beyond a simple score. Tune in for a regular dose of insightful commentary where the serious business of technology meets the serious fun of games.
Author: Michael Rowe, Michael Martine, Andy Piper
Language: en-us
Episodes: 50
Photo from the International Space Station 1 April 2026 of the exhaust plume from Artemis II in Earth’s atmosphere – NASA ID: iss074e0431736 Published 20 April 2026 e551 with Michael, Michael and Andy – a tour of the Atm…
Mashup of photo by Victor Serban on Unsplash & images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e009287/art002e009287~orig.jpg Published 13 April 2026 e550 with Michael, Andy and Michael – celebrating Moon Joy with the Artemis II crew…
NASA photo art002e009057, 4 April 2026 Published 6 April 2026 e549 with Andy, Michael and Michael – boldly go into a deep set of space discussions featuring Artemis II, ways to keep track of the historic flight, COTS sof…
Photo by NEOM on Unsplash Published 23 March 2026 e548 with Michael and Michael – Stories and discussion on uncomfortable valley & uncanny valley, Nintendo’s Talking Flower, 8bit Pixel Agents for AI orchestration and a w…
Photo by Michael Martine, Chapel Hill, NC March 2026 Published 16 March 2026 e547 with Michael and Michael – Stories and discussion on bot to bot communications, 50 years of Apple, LEGO SmartPlay SmartBricks and a whole…
Published 9 March 2026 e543 with Andy, Michael and Michael – Stories and discussion on LEGO’s new Smart Play brick, this is a human brain (cells) on Doom, orc audio for vibe coding, Liquid Death’s Spotify urn for playlis…
Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash Published 2 March 2026 e545 with Andy and Michael – Get to talk about mostly non-AI topics this week, as we look at a cool kickstarter, Titan, that is building out a futuristic ga…
Photo by Masahiro Naruse on Unsplash Published 23 February 2026 e544 with Andy, Michael and Michael – Stories and discussion on rumoured AI devices, addictive predictives, listening through bananas (or mud), and what hap…
Photo by Viktor Keri on Unsplash Published 16 February 2026 e543 with Andy, Michael and Michael – Stories and discussion on Agentic AI and the changing nature of work, agents renting humans, real time translation, artist…
Photo by Mihai 👑 on Unsplash Published 9 February 2026 e542 with Michael, Andy and Michael – Stories and discussion on programming language localization, Virtual Boy hardware & emulation, LEGO terrestrial & orbital dwell…
