Once, I got a reviewer stating “in the code, I doubt line 43 was supposed to be submitted”
Line 43: FUUUCK, DOES NOT WORK
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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I'm amazed a reviewer read the code.
Me too! That wasn’t even the only time I got comments on my code. Since then, I make a point of doing at least a cursory check on codes when I review as well
Do you also embed little easter eggs to reward those diligent code-reviewers?
ASCII art in the comments
Whenever I come across ASCII art in the comments, it's a good day. Here's one from the day job:
Not like that anymore >.<
Did it work though?
Yes. Yes, everything works a-okay. Somehow I fixed the code but never removed the obnoxious, full cap comment…
That’s why you always prefix your todos with “TODO”
To-do: add TODO
Only in Kansas
todo, todo, todo todo todo, todo todooooo
tododododooo
Best case scenario:
- The initial submission didn't cite the crappy Gabor paper, and peer reviewers said that it should.
- The peer editor, summarizing feedback, said that the submission was accepted as long as it took into account the peer reviewer suggested revisions.
- The submitters don't really care about the paper quality, all they need is the citation. So they assigned the revisions to the lowliest grad student.
- The lowliest grad student knows their advisor hates that crapmaster Gabor, so when they sent it to their advisor they asked whether they should cite that paper, thinking they might prefer to passive-aggressively "forget" to do so
- The advisor doesn't care about the paper quality (see above) so they just skimmed it and saw the word "Gabor". (alternate hypothesis: they thought this was a great opportunity to troll that crap-merchant Gabor, as well as those useless middlemen thieves at Wiley.)
- The peer editor: same as the advisor, they're just doing this for a line-item on their CV.
- The Wiley "editor" doesn't even read the paper, they just forward it to the typesetter subcontractors and demand that the submitters pay up.
- The typesetter subcontractors don't care, it's all just text to them.
- And so it becomes Science, and the writer of crappy papers Gabor is enshrined in the pantheon along with Ea-Nasir and William "I'm something of a scientist myself" Dafoe. Immortality, of a sorts.
Worst case scenario:
The peer reviewer is Gabor.
Best Case Scenario:
Gabor agrees the paper was crap
Your comment combined with Zote’s made for an excellent synthesis.
If your reviewer suggests you cite another paper, it's one of their papers and they just doxed themselves, 100% of the time.
Awesome, it was published but retracted
That's why you change the color of any temporary text so that you can really see if there's any left
Considering how widespread of a situation it is, I am surprised I haven’t found yet a good LaTeX package that handles temporary sections
You don't need a package at all. I just define a new command \xxx{stuff} that changes the colour to red. It's a one-liner. Copy and paste that into any new document. Changing the colour without a custom command is equally trivial, but this allows you to search for "xxx" to find anything you might've missed.
why not add notes as marginalia?
####I throw some hashes in front
I throw ?? (that is also the default error code for LaTeX, so the last sweep of the pdf is always a search for ??)
OOP really overestimating how many people read a paper. It's about publishing as many papers as possible, not proofreading.
If I found all my reviewers paid this little attention I would contact the editors and demand new ones lmao
So you don't think editors send out complete garbage that they should have rejected themselves?
I mean I haven't reviewed many papers myself, but I haven't gotten something that made me think it should have been desk rejected. I suppose that happens though
At least it wasn't AI
My thought sas well! I'd rather stumble upon this than shit like "vegetative electron miscroscopy".
Vibes science?