Weekly Link Roundup (Part 1)
When you take some time off for the holidays, the links really pile up...
In 2024, AI Will Spark an Indie Video Game Renaissance (and Nightmare): I truly hope this is spot on. I love democratizing access to technology that can help people create. I do think the SoundCloud example they cite in the article is good for two reasons. First, yes new sound editing tech allowed for more indie artists. Two, that growth of creativity ran smack into a slowly changing business reality. While we have more B2C relationships between artists and consumers without an agent or a record company, this model is slow to change. I think the same will happen for the game world. I just hope we find new ways to reward creators faster.
China halts export of some rare earth processing technologies: Want to see what a real chokepoint looks like?
What Happens When Facebook Heats Your Home: This is interesting and smart in the 1st order - I think Amazon’s Spheres are actually partially heated by a larger telephony center on the next block…I do wonder though about 2nd and 3rd order effects.
Today’s AI won’t radically transform society, but it’s already reshaping business: I want to read this book when it hits but from the interview, Siegel is spot on. We are looking at the hype around AI because of the weird, cool, insane edge cases that we're seeing and we seem to be paying less attention to the more mundane but potentially more impactful things it can already do. See also: Amara's Law.
Apple’s latest AI research could completely transform your iPhone: OK..I loath headlines like this. Your phone will still look largely the same, it will still include rare earth metals (see first story), it will still run on cellular radio and WiFi and on and on. So really not a complete transformation. That doesn’t mean this won’t be interesting. I’m not sold on 3D avatars except as they can generate assets for others uses like building games. I’m a veteran on Second Life and have my opinions. I do think the ability to run LLMs on a phone-sized thing could be remarkable. Especially if the models are swappable based on what you might need in the moment.
AI's colossal puppet show: I really like this article because of confirmation bias :-) It agrees with me so I like it. No really, it goes after how rapidly we anthropomorphize tech like #GenAI (we also do it with storms but that's another pet peeve). Let's not let ourselves off the hook by trying to give agency to AI when it really is humanity pulling the strings. It's an easy out.
NASA Streams Cat Video From Deep, Deep Space: Cat videos for the win! “For the first time, high-definition video — this one of a lab employee’s cat named Taters — was streamed from 18.6 million miles away, or roughly 80 times the distance from the Earth to the moon, the farthest ever.” BY LASER!
Seeking a Big Edge in A.I., South Korean Firms Think Smaller: Americans can tend to forget that there are other languages in the world > “While they lag behind their U.S. counterparts, their focus on non-English languages could help loosen the American grip on artificial intelligence.”
Microsoft Copilot gets a music creation feature via Suno integration: “From a single sentence, Suno can generate complete songs — including lyrics, instrumentals and singing voices.” >Tell me again how your learning/training/compliance content is special?
Game preservationists dig for lost apps in TestFlight ‘teraleak’: As a historian and an anthropologist and a bit of a gamer…the digital preservation of artifacts like games is already important and will only become more so. “A huge number of old mobile games and apps from TestFlight, which lets developers share in-development versions of their apps, have been discovered on the Internet Archive, as reported by Eurogamer. The 1.2TB cache, which is being called the “teraleak,” could be a really big deal for preservationists, especially because many older apps are no longer available to download in any form.”
Ludo.ai introduces text-to-video generator tool for game devs: “The Video Generator takes text prompts and transforms them into engaging gameplay videos.” >This should be super interesting to futurists as well.
The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance: This is one of those “signals” for me. Browsers are probably invisible to people most of the time but they are the primary mechanism for mediating our contact with cyberspace. Even AI and our interactions with it, is and will probably remain something that we do through a browser. So it says something to me when Firefox slips so far. Obviously the big two, Chrome (GOOG) and Edge (MSFT) dominate but Opera is still out there and Brave was interesting for a minute. I’d love to see continued innovation in this space but I can’t see the business model that supports it.