I'm going to be charitable and say that the papers from prestigious universities were honest mistakes rather than paper mill university fabrications.
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.
I can't speak for the American universities, but remember there is no entrance exam for UK PhDs, you just require a 2:1 or 1st class bachelor's degree/masters (going straight without a masters is becoming more common) usually, which is trivial to obtain. The hard part is usually getting funding, but if you provide your own funding you can go to any university you want. They are only really hard universities to get into for a bachelors, not for masters or PhD where you are more of a money/labour source than anything else.
Yeah in principle funded PhD positions are quite competitive and as I understand it you tend to be interviewed and essentially ranked against other candidates. But I guess if you're paying for yourself to be there you'll face lower scrutiny
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?
I enjoy following academic discourse, review and collaboration give me the feeling that actual progress is being made.
So I love that you linked the rebuttal paper. In the last paragraph the authors mention that some ideas could lead to "fruitful analytic or empirical starting points" - did anyone follow up on these? From your perspective, what are the most interesting directions in this area of research today?
I honestly have no idea; I left academia 12 years ago now. I do know that game research continued (e.g. the conference I published that paper in continues: http://fdg2025.org/ and the workshop I started at ICSE continues on as well: https://sites.google.com/view/icsegasworkshop2025/home), but I'm not aware of anyone working in the patterns work right now.
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.
Thanks for the insights! A bit disappointing that this avenue didn't turn out to be the one worth pursuing at the time, although I don't think the ball was completely dropped. Some light prodding surfaces recent research into dark patterns with empirical data based on player perception [1] and attempts to create frameworks for categorization [2].
I tried to report this and Uber does not make it easy. It does not fit in any of the multiple choice categories and there's no freeform. At least there was none back then, started to use waymo.
RDNA 3 is going to hold this machine back. DLSS is far and away better, but Nvidia's apathy towards Linux has made playing on something like Bazzite a worse experience. Nvidia has little reason to keep investing in Windows gaming drivers given the AI race, so seeing DLSS 4 or something on Linux is a pipe dream.
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've been really happy with the TP-Link smart plugs. I keep upgrading them as The Latest Standard That's Definitely The Real One This Time Trust Us Bro comes out, and the Matter ones are excellent. Getting an instant response from them is really nice. I see no reason to buy others.
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.
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,
Ikea makes Zigbee smart plugs with power monitoring (Inspelning) that are ~10 Euro here (probably $10 in the US). Also Zigbee does not have all the security issues, since it is purely local and will talk with whatever hub/bridge you choose, e.g. Homey, Hubitat, or if you want to go free software Home Assistant or zigbee2mqtt.
It's somewhat insane to me that people use WiFi plugs for actuating things that actuate real-life electrical devices. Even more from companies that have a bad security reputation. Zigbee or Z-Wave all the way or possibly Matter over Thread, but the only Matter device that I had (an upgraded Eve Energy plug) has been a pain.
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 switched to Unifi gear (Cloud Gateway Max, two of their U7 access points, and a bunch of their managed switches) and they are a dream to set up. Making VLANs, associating VLANs with SSIDs, etc. is so easy. I had a TP Link managed switch and the interface was a huge pile of crap and I saved it several times after misconfiguration by virtue of it having a serial console. I only used it for two months or so because it was so frustrating.
They just announced the Matter range, it isn't even in stores yet. I was at the Ikea store yesterday and they still had a good stock of Inspelning and most likely they will still have for a while (they only introduced it a year ago and it seems quite popular).
At any rate, Matter over Thread is still much better than WiFi security-wise (even though it's IPv6 routable) and Ikea's Matter over Thread plug will probably be similar price-wise. And the good thing is that probably even more people have a thread border router (Apple TV, HomePods, some Amazon Echo, Google TV Streamer 4k, etc.).
Still, these Ikea plugs are so cheap and Zigbee is extremely nice, so it doesn't hurt to buy and stock ten now for the future :).
I have some TP-Link smart plugs and was happy with them for a long time because their app could be used without an account. Then I recently got the new version of the app and it forces an account, there's no more guest mode. I'm done with TP-Link now.
The whole Tapo/Kasa interop thing was badly handled too a few years back. Put me right off, when most were dangling the seamless integration carrot to distract you from the vendor lock-in.
> all routers are uniformly fucking awful [...] 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
My OPNsense router currently has 74 days of uptime, and that's just because I ran an update 74 days ago. I've never rebooted it to solve a problem. The only wrinkle is OPNsense (and pfSense) is at least an order of magnitude more complicated than your average consumer router.
OTOH, my ubiquity access point reboots itself every time I change any setting at all.
I think it's a "yes but" here. AI is the first transition point since the smartphone. Apple knows how to make hardware, and knows how to make software. I am extremely unconvinced Apple has a clue about what to do with AI.
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.
There are a lot of AI companies that don't have a clue about what to do with AI. I would argue almost no one really knows what to do with it, which is why it's being shoehorned in everywhere.
I think Apple is being smart by sitting out this "light barrels of money on fire" phase, because we have no idea where it ends or whether it'll be worth a damn. Apple has a big enough warchest that once real solutions do start to coalesce out of the fog, they can just acquire what they need to build actual products.
Typing can also work, but handwriting is simply faster and easier to decode.
sEMG signals correlate with *muscle* activation. When your fingers move, the actuators are the muscles in your forearm, and the tendons relay the force on the joint. Placing the band higher up on the forearm would actually give you better signals, but a wrist placement is much more socially acceptable.
For marketing reasons, it needs to be something that people can pick up with absolutely minimal practice.
I doubt it has enough accuracy for a virtual keyboards (since keyboards require precise absolute input and it measures relative), besides, most people aren't experienced with single-hand typing.
A bespoke gesture based shorthand would be optimal, but then users would need to spend months learning this new shorthand.
But (almost) everyone already has experience with handwriting, which is a single hand relative input method. It's the easiest option for people to quickly pick up and enjoy.
Though, it's far from perfect, you can see he is struggling to trick his muscle memory into writing without a pen, and he needs to do it on a solid surface (I'm not sure if that's a technology limitation, or a muscle memory limitation).
Yeah, not going to lie, working at Google and having unlimited access to Gemini sure is nice (even if it has performance issues vs Claude Code… I can’t say as I can’t use it at work)
Agreed. The most unique thing I find with vibecoding is not that it presses all the keyboard buttons. That’s a big timesaver, but it’s not going to make your code “better” as it has no taste. But what it can do is think of far more possibilities than you can far quicker. I love saying “this is what I need to do, show me three to five ways of doing it as snippets, weigh the pros and cons”. Then you pick one and let it go. No more trying the first thing you think of, realizing it sucks after you wrote it, then back to square one.
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.
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.