Interactive Fiction still exists and is being actively developed.
Check out the top games on Interactive Fiction DB.
https://ifdb.org/viewcomp?id=1lv599reviaxvwo7
Readit Newsthewanderer1983 commented on Choose Your Own Adventure filfre.net/2025/09/choose... · Posted by u/naves
Peer review isn't spellcheck or proofreading.
It's about logic, methodology, significance, and citations.
It's not some gold standard of perfection or truth.
>Peer review isn't spellcheck or proofreading.
>It's about logic, methodology, significance, and citations
To quote kazinator in this thread. "The typo is not the problem; it's that the typo is evidence of academic dishonesty.
When you make a citation, it means you cracked open the original work, understood what it says and located a relevant passage to reference in your work.
The authors are propagating the same typo because they are not copying the original correct text; they are just copying ready-made citations of that text which they plant into their papers to manufacture the impression that they are surveying other work in their area and taking it into account when doing their work."
>It's not some gold standard of perfection or truth.
"Gold standard" is a term used within the scientific community to describe the high rigor expected within the scientific community when doing research. One of the processes they hold up in this standard is Peer Review. I wasn't making some general public statement about perfection. Google "Gold Peer Review Gold Standard".
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thewanderer1983 commented on Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use? · Posted by u/rickybule
Go here. https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues
Very helpful community.
Also related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
Similiar tech was used for screeners to try and track leakers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screener_(promotional)
Printer Tracking dots is another example. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
For those interested in modern solutions. Look at watermark researchpapers.r
There have been incidents like this, but it's more about criticising the review process of fields that aren't theirs
The list is bigger than sokal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_s...
As any practicing scientist knows even good research papers may be littered with blatant but unimportant errors. There is unfortunately no good reason or system to "correct the record", and it is not clear to me if such a thing is a good use of human resources. Nonetheless, I think correcting the record is always appreciated!
Have you heard of this thing called Peer Review? It's what academia hold up as their gold standard and it is supposed to pick up on these things.
thewanderer1983 commented on The contrarian physics podcast subculture timothynguyen.org/2025/08... · Posted by u/Emerson1
I have written previously about Sabine. I think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory. Initially I quite liked her show and my impression was that it gave valuable insights and critique of some branches of modern theoretical physics.
At some point I noticed that her shows were starting to significantly diverge from her area of expertise and she was weighing in on much broader topics, something in her early shows she often criticised scientists for ("don't think because someone is an expert in A that he can judge B").
At some point she weighted in on some topics where I'm an expert or at least have significant insights and I realised that she is largely talking without any understanding, often being wrong (although difficult to ascertain for nonexperts). At the same time she started to become more and more ambiguous in her messaging about academia, scientific communities etc., clearly peddling to the "sceptics" (in quotes because they tend to only ever be sceptic towards towards what the call the "establishment"). Initially she would still qualify or weaken her "questions" but later the peddling became more and more obvious.
From what the article writes I'm not the only one who has seen this and it seems to go beyond just peddling.
I used to watch her show a few years back. I enjoyed her willingness to point out the failings of the scientific community. Things like lying by omission around the cold fusion energy levels being generated. Certain cosmological areas ignoring the need for empirical validation of their mathematical models etc. This was during that post-covid window where science was the institutions not the the method, skepticism was anti-science. Scientists were being portrayed as angels not humans, that don't suffer from the same failings as the rest of humanity... Anyway it was refreshing.
It was her video on the Stanford Internet Observatory. That made me realise she doesn't always put a lot of research into areas outside her expertise.
The last line of the slide reads
"Once you start thinking about these issues, it is hard to think about anything else: demography is
destiny."
Raoul Pal primary thesis about macroeconomics is that Demographics is everything. Here is a 54 second video of him highlighting that issue.
Not really. You are correctly citing the enclosure acts as a historic example, but that was not beginning or the end of history. It was just a recent, location-specific historic moment when big English landlords won in the millenia-old power struggle between peasant and landlord.
Control of the commons - land and the resources buried in it - has been a point of contention and bloodshed for as long as recorded human history. It's a pendulum that swung back and forth, but has always had bad actors making personally-profitable, socially-impoverishing decisions.
For an alternative example of how things have gone in other places, look at the blood feuds between ranchers and farmers[1] in the American west, concerns over upstream and rainfall water rights in literally any part of the world that relies on irrigation, or, the varied situations where existing landlords politically won the struggle... Or lost it in the 20th century.
As for well-established[2]...
---
[1] The enclosure acts echo this farmer/rancher dichotomy, actually. Feudal lord/serf relationships have the lords derive wealth from having ever more serfs doing ever more labour-intensive agriculture on their land. The enclosure acts, however, were intended to drive the peasants from their land, because in the case of England, the lords figured out that they can derive way more wealth from turning over their land to low-labour grazelands for sheep. And the way they could do that was to use the law as a cudgel to drive out their tenants at sword and gunpoint.
[2] They were only well-established for particular points in history. Prior to William the Conqueror arriving in England, and stealing all the land in it for himself and his mercenaries, there were also 'well-established' land use norms - that greatly limited the power and ownership-of-land granted to lords and petty kings. The Norman conquest turned all that over - into a different 'well-established' equilibrium - that was then, again, turned over into a 'well-established' equilibrium after the passage of the enclosure acts.