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 by benjamin lehman on Unsplash Published 21 July 2025 e521 with Andy, Michael and Michael – stories about expressive robots (Shoggoth Mini, Apple ELEGNT, SpiRob & facehugger), newly reengineered Commodore & Sinclai…
original photo, by Michael Martine, Sandwich MA June 2025. Animated by Google Veo3 July 2025 Published 14 July 2025 e520 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories about AI advertising, still photo animation, anime agents,…
Photo by Mike Stimpson on Unsplash Published 30 June 2025 e519 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories about AI conversations with pets and people, LLM data retention, AI slop, Clippy-esque prompts, AI workloads in spac…
Photo by Boris Langvand on Unsplash Published 23 June 2025 e518 with Andy, Michael, and Michael – stories about Atari adjacent AI, a new Emotiv experience, Midjourney video magic, Bondi blue, visionOS persona improvement…
Photo by Hasnain Sikora on Unsplash Published 9 June 2025 e517 with Michael, Michael and Andy – stories about Atarino microcomputing, AI through movie and television metaphor, AR running, screens and zombies, Skyrim Gran…
Photo by insung yoon on Unsplash Published 2 June 2025 e516 with Michael and Michael – AI prompts, browsers, model collapse & automation along with a teeny tiny pico Mac nano, and a whole lot more. While Andy is away, Mi…
Photo by Mihály Köles on Unsplash Published 26 May 2025 e515 with Andy, Michael and Michael – the Fortnite Darth Vader NPC, IO, both from Google and Open AI, AI hardware, an intriguing Vision Pro use case, infrared conta…
Photo by WTFast on Unsplash Published 19 May 2025 e514 with Michael R and Andy – generative ads & LEGO, Aston Martin x Apple CarPlay Ultra, new Vision Pro UX, an Internet Roadtrip, Leroy Jenkins and so much more. While M…
Photo by Hande B. on Unsplash Published 12 May 2025 e513 with Michael and Michael – Clippy + LLMs, social AI, first person video, Duck, Pong & other games, and so much more. While Andy is away, Michael and Michael start…
Cartoon versions of Andy and Michael M, generated by ChatGPT Published 5 May 2025 e512 with Andy and Michael – E Ink monitors, Agent run companies & towns, winning arguments with AI assistants, pixellating reality and mu…
