Dan Gonyea

Photographer, Future-Breed, XBOX programer. 

Recorded July 12, 2019 in Los Angeles, CA. 

What we talk about: 

Dan Gonyea is mainly a live concert photography. 

Works at Xbox as a software developer. 

Grew up in small town Goshen, NH. 

Started shooting photographs at 15. 

Sneaking in cameras to warped tour.

The story behind the name “Future-Breed,” circa 2004. 

2006: Start at North Eastern: Double Major in Multimedia Studies and Computer Sciences. 

Became a ‘game engineer’ for XBOX. 

XBOX is an acronym. 

Dan is a code fixer and fluent in 10 programming languages. 

A time of pre-internet, Facebook written in Java, and different code ‘languages.’ 

Object oriented coding: Java, C++, great for gaming. 

Functional language space: mimics lambda calculus (lisp). 

Computers run on 0,1 (i.e. True/False), but there are “translators” for these computer languages to explain to the computer how to run a game….but the faster the translator, the more you can do. 

Assembly code = Job Security

Vice News: the Future of Work. The future is automated. 

What humans and robots see as ‘challenging’ are often vastly different. 

Quantum Computing, molecular entanglement, and text messaging. 

Stingray phone trackers, loss of privacy, and machine learning. 

Edward Snowden, terabytes of data into data center, and not needing a warrant to store data (only  need a warrant if you USE the data, it’s legal to collect). 

Bucketing in machine learning is used daily now in our modern era to order everything from drone strikes to target advertising.  

Transatlantic communication cables carries the internet across the ocean from the New World to Old World. It has been literally tapped into. 

Privacy mode on your computer does not mean you aren’t being tract. You are being tract by machine learning constantly. 

Data scientists are highly sought out in tech. If you can sell someone something with out them knowing that they are being advertised to. 

Google Glass, constant VR, and personalized ads tailored directly to YOU. 

How do you make a video game? 

Option 1: Craft the story first: make the universe.  

Option 2: Start with the program first…then make the story around it, actually more common. 

You need to mimic physics (light/gravity) to make a game realistic. Takes a lot of work. 

E-Sports. Why and How? 

In 2019: More people in the world watch E-sports more than they actually play video games. 

Twitch tv

In the future, will we be watching computers play each other? Probably not as computers are poor at experimenting and making impulse decisions. It’s hard to program “randomness” 

“Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected” by Werner Herzog. 

Solar flares knocking out the internet. What does a “post-internet” world looks like? 

We need an updated power lines/ infrastructure. Countries that had to rebuilt in the last century have the fastest internet speeds. 

The richness life is not on the internet.