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...

I think this machine will be decent for most people, but it's no-one with a 3080 is going to be looking at this and thinking "this is worth it", as it's probably coming in at about $750. The question is whether it'll have power parity with whatever the next Xbox is.

I would buy only Hue but that's because I have more money than sense, and they don't actually make smart plugs last time I looked, they make plugs but label them all as lights in the app, which is more annoying than it sounds.

The real problem to solve ditching TP-Link _routers_ is that all routers are uniformly fucking awful, and all you are doing is choosing your particular poison. This is especially true after Apple exited the game so long ago. I use Google Wifi because it mostly works most of the time, but that's not glowing praise. But the world has become trained that rebooting a router once a week and praying that it works when it comes back is a perfectly normal state of affairs and we couldn't possibly do this any better.

You can't just jump in, the lead up to getting this stuff going is a 5 year+ horizon, and Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic are still moving exceptionally fast. Apple has shown they are nowhere near. They missed the boat on buying Anthropic, OpenAI was never going to sell with Musk behind it. There's no path forward for them, let alone catching up.

I use this with legacy code too. “Lines n—n+10 smell wrong to me, but I don’t know why and I don’t know what to do to fix it.” Gemini has done well for me at guessing what my gut was upset about and coming up with the solution. And then it just presses all the buttons. Job done.

And I didnt have to worry about a Waymo being unavailable late in the evening, or canceling my ride because it didn’t want to go that far at night. It just worked. Why would I ever take anything else?

More than once I semi-jokingly texted people at work that if I didn’t make the next meeting it was because I met my untimely end in that car.

I rode my first Waymo last week through Inglewood and Santa Monica and I felt so much more safe than I have in other ridesharing systems.

I think ridesharing is not the end game for Waymo. If I could just straight up buy a personal vehicle that was a Waymo I’d do it tomorrow.

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It should be noted, however, that almost no one reads end-user license agreements and many of Discord’s users are children and teenagers. Discord is, first and foremost, a platform for gamers to organize communities and it’s not plausible that a 15 year old looking for a Fortnite meme server ever thought their dumb jokes about Tomato Town would end up in a public database five years later.

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Same as other commenters here: I think this is shameful action under the guise of research and I cannot fathom why any IRB board would approve this (and perhaps it did not in this case, I do not know if Brazil has such a thing).

Back in the day (15ish years ago), I wrote a paper where I scraped the World of Warcraft API. It wasn't hard to do, I started on a realm, looked for arena teams, then went to guilds and got character sheets from there. I took the opinion that if Blizzard doesn't throttle me it's fair game.

Looking back now, I think that to have been pretty naive. I wouldn't say reckless, but definitely naive. In my mind, I had not made a delineation between "I can access this thing manually one at a time" and "I can access all of it automatically". As far as I was concerned, it was just the computer pressing the buttons. It was the same thing.

I think in the fullness of time we have collectively come to realize it is 100% not the same thing. The _availability_ of a thing and the _collection_ of a thing are two different issues with their own thorny problems. The researchers here have made the same mistake I did, but instead of it just being what gear your character was wearing, they took actual communications instead.

I hope this paper gets retracted, all data deleted and a sincere apology offered.

Computers used to fun! I miss the candy iMac theming.

The forgiveness clause in GPL 3 is as much an acknowledgement of actual reality than anything else.