Work is the only part of my life where I feel any sort of competency. Anything else I'm just a ship on a stormy sea being battered around. I can change the sails and move the rudder, but the sea takes me where it wants me to go anyway.

The joke was "welcome to your vacation" when people got back from paternity leave for their new kid. I don't think I ever left that vacation.

Whether reviewing agentic code rather than writing it is a job he wants to do... Different question.

Its older people who can't or won't retool that are going to find that in the game of musical layoff chairs they won't have a chair left when the music stops (and some I've met haven't really internalized that they're even part of the game...)

I was able to drink an Italian soda this week and not feel like "oh God I'm drinking my calories I'm going to be punished for this on the scales later".

Mostly it's nausea and gastrointestinal distress side effects. These tend to cool down over time, but it'll put a ceiling on how big a dose you can tolerate. Some people can't tolerate a dose at any level.

I am on GLP-1 (Zepbound). I have done Weight Watchers multiple times. I'd lose the weight for a little bit, then it would come back. The reason was _I was hungry all the time_. It's not sustainable. As someone else in WW told me: "The easy bit is losing the weight. The hard part is continuing to eat that way your whole life."

It's simply a faulty hunger sensor in my body. It was not what I was eating, simply how much.

GLP-1s fix the sensor. It's really simple. Nothing else to it.

I still enjoy food (although my palette has turned away from anything greasy, which is for the better anyway), but I can finally understand why someone would eat half a plate of something and say "I'm good" and actually mean it rather than trying to diet/starve themselves.

At Big Tech Company I Work At the LLM is quite happy to make raw API calls. If it thinks the data is big, then it'll write a Python tool to do it.

The reason crafted backing CLIs are useful is you can guide the LLM towards stuff that is immediately useful rather than hoping the nondetermism can separate the wheat from the chaff.

Take CI: is it interesting to know which tests passed? Maybe, but probably not. What is really interesting is what failed. Instead of having the LLM go out and talk directly to the CI system, write an intermediate CLI that filters out less actionable stuff by default, and have a flag that'll deliver the full dump if necessary.

It's a skill to do this stuff, and it's a lot of hard won experience than something I think is easily teachable. You kind of have to feel out your model and how it "thinks" about solving problems.

And then a new model version comes out and you have to learn it all again!

There are places with construction where Waymo just seems to turn off the road and makes the car go around. But then taking away freeway access has made it more likely for vehicles to have to navigate these.

My wife will not ride alone in Uber's because she's had one too many uncomfortable -> possibly dangerous situations.

This appears to be true for all of her friends as well.

If you're in the Google ecosystem like Gmail and Calendar, it is exceptionally refreshing to be able to use an assistant that uses that ecosystem, instead of iOS requiring you to use Mail or its own Calendar app.

I don't think there's any real gap between Pixel and iPhone on the things that matter: UX jank, battery life, camera. Even the messaging issue in the US has closed with encrytped RCS support between them launching. So now it's just an ecosystem question, which might be why Gemini is mentioned so much with Pixel.

One thing that has bothered me for a very long time is that computer science (and I assume other scientific fields) has long since decided that English is the lingua franca, and if you don't speak it you can't be part of it. Can you imagine if being told that you could only do your research if you were able to write technical papers in a language you didn't speak, maybe even using glyphs you didn't know? It's crazy when you think about it even a little bit, but we ask it of so many. Let's not include the fact that 90% of the English-speaking population couldn't crank out a paper to the required vocabulary level anyway.

A very legitimate, not trying to cheat, use for LLMs is translation. While it would be an extremely broad and dangerous brush to paint with, I wonder if there is a correlation between English-as-a-Second (or even third)-Language authors and the hallucinations. That would indicate that they were trying to use LLMs to help craft the paper to the expected writing level. The only problem being that it sometimes mangles citations, and if you've done good work and got 25+ citations, it's easy for those errors to slip through.

My read from the paper was that Deturding was getting at in his rebuttal was my paper that was getting really popular for citing (now over 500) when really it was some Stuff Made Up By Some Guys. And it was! We all had backgrounds in pattern research, but even things like the Gang of Four are just Stuff Made Up By Some Guys. He reviewed my book that I span off from my thesis which contained the patterns so he was intimately aware of it all. We were friendly, if not capital-F friends, and I was interested in what he wrote for my academic career. He's a smart guy.

My co-authors and I never intended for the paper to be a be-all-and-end-all at 2013. Much of the non-AI research work in games at that time was "well, what if we poked at this avenue of research? what if we poked at that avenue?" And we did that by coming up with papers that were supposed to trigger conversation. It was not a good idea to go down a research avenue for 5 years only to find out no-one cared or someone had an idea that would have changed the direction dramatically had you just gotten something out there in year 1. So we thought hard about what we wrote, but we didn't do legwork tying it back to behavioral economics or something like that (my thesis attempted that to varying degrees of success).

I gave up some time ago trying to track where all the citations were coming from, but it did seem it was being cited because other people cited it. It wasn't really related to many of the papers, and certainly I didn't see anything directly building from it. And that's really what the rebuttal was saying: stop citing this paper unless you're building from it and making it more rigid in its foundations. It's not got the strong analytic/empirical basis that science is about. Which is 100% true, but was 100% known and somewhat by design.

I see at least some of the patterns we came up with appear on the site. Happy to answer any questions about it all, I think we were the first to write about dark patterns in games, at least academically. It was 2013 so predated Overwatch loot boxes, which I am sure I would have put in there, but now they seem quite tame.

I do want to get ahead of something many of the comments here made: we were very aware that one person's dark pattern was another's benefit eg Animal Crossing's appointment mechanics make it easy to just play for a bit then put it down for the day and come back tomorrow. We went back and forth a lot about how to phrase this dichotomy, as we knew it was the stickest point of the whole plan. That's why the paper's Abstract immediately addresses it: "Game designers are typically regarded as advocates for players. However, a game creator’s interests may not align with the players’." Alignment was the key: are the players and designers in agreement, or is there tension where the designer (or, more usually nowadays, bean counters) is trying to exploit the players in some dimension?

So yeah, happy to answer questions about it.

PS I would be remiss not to mention the rebuttal paper "Against Dark Game Design Patterns" https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/156460/1/DiGRA_202...