- cflewis parent"only if you are Yahoo!" is one of the best line reads of all time.
- 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.
- I'm a co-author of the first paper cited in the citations page, "Dark Patterns in the Design of Games" http://www.fdg2013.org/program/papers/paper06_zagal_etal.pdf
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...
- 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 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.
- 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.
- I managed to get a Waymo after a big event at Intuit Dome. It found a reasonable place to pick me up a couple blocks away. I didn’t have to try calling the driver to get them to figure out where I should go to try and get around roadblocks and traffic (I had no idea about the area). It didn’t cancel on me. It didn’t hit me with a surge price. So I don’t even buy the central premise by the article that Waymo is guaranteed to be more expensive.
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?
- I’ve ridden in Ubers across Hwy 17 in Northern California and I’m pretty sure some of those drivers had never taken a non-90 degree corner in their life.
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.
- As usual, 404 nails it:
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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.
- IANAL but my understanding from floating around open source licensing circles is that you'd have a hard time with the judge if you didn't just ask for the license to be put back as step 1. Microsoft willingly not restoring the license would be more problematic.
The forgiveness clause in GPL 3 is as much an acknowledgement of actual reality than anything else.
- iOS has this problem as well. You search for a setting in the Settings app. It’ll say “doesn’t exist” (or whatever) while it’s looking for something extremely obvious (like “software update”) instead of just showing a processing icon.
Then when it does show the results, they’re usually in some terribly unhelpful order. It took me ages to try and go through the CUJ of “this app isn’t sending me notifications because I turned them off now I want them back on”
- I worked on Fuchsia engprod for a while. I am still employed at Google and can't talk about anything that isn't publicly available already (which really means anything gleaned from commits to the Git repo).
I think the best way to look at it is like any software: there's Fuchsia The Artifact (thing that is made) and Fuchsia The Product (how thing is used, and how widely). I don't know anything about operating systems, but my understanding is that the engineers are very happy with Fuchsia The Artifact. Fuchsia The Product has had some wandering in the wilderness years.
- Can’t comment on the slowdown, I left the team a long time ago.
The goal at the time I thought was very sound: it was a massive PITA that Go programs that ran on cloud servers (of which I would hazard most of them do) were not Write Once Run Anywhere. It was all the same stuff, right? A blob store. A SQL backend. Etc etc. What we wanted was to say “you write a Go program, here run it on GCP. Then Azure. Why not AliBaba if you’re in China”.
What I am no longer convinced of today is that anyone is really looking for those greased rails because it’s _so much more complicated_ to run on cloud servers than I envisioned. Surely it was going to get more simple? But it didn’t. Networking, authorization, scaling, Kubernetes. The list goes on and on.
A fully uneducated guess is that Wire does what people who come to it want it to do, but it’s not attracting new users because the use cases are more constrained than envisaged.
- I just had my annual “career check-in” or whatever they are calling it now at work. I’m at the crossroads level: stick as being a software engineer and accept I’m not smart enough to ever be promoted again on software engeering track, or head for management track.
My guess is I would be either an excellent manager or an appalling one. Either way, I have absolutely no wish to do it. My wife is saying I should go for it in order to continue climbing the ladder.
I can’t pretend I’m not glad to see someone who would have been happy sticking as well. Hopefully you get the chance to demote yourself soon :)
- The problem with Java since Java 8 has never been Java. It's been about the appalling ecosystem that infected it with reflection frameworks. It was bonkers that "POJO" was ever a thing that had to be defined.
It feels like these frameworks are now just falling away, which is great. I'm not even hearing about Spring anymore, and if there is any reason to not use it, it would be this cringe "how do you do fellow kids?" blurb I just saw on their front page:
> Level up your Java™ code
> With Spring Boot in your app, just a few lines of code is all you need to start building services like a boss.
I personally would reach for Go by default, but I have no ill-will to Java.