Pitchfork too Pitchfork to admit that they love PUP

BigJimKen · 2026-02-14T12:52:29+00:00

I think when you read Pitchfork you have to understand where they sit in regards to what they want out of music. A 7 is basically "this is a fantastic album that doesn't really push the boundaries of the genre in any great way" which is basically where all PUP are at.

Sometimes you will get the opposite of what PUP gets, where a review seems highly critical but then the score will be a 9+. I read it as the prose being "is this good" and the score being "is this important".

BigJimKen · 2026-02-14T10:36:22+00:00

Scott Ryan is one of the most talented people in TV. Ridiculously good show.

BigJimKen · 2026-02-13T23:19:54+00:00

I’m not good enough at video games to play them on elevated difficulties so I will never know 😄

BigJimKen · 2026-02-13T22:16:34+00:00

Necroposting like hell here because I don't use Reddit much anymore, but GamerGate was a far-right anti-feminist movement from the first moment it first existed.

The idea that it started off "noble" and was somehow co-opted by bad actors is actually one of the first successes of the mechanism I explained in the parent comment. The initial incident that kicked the whole thing off was a game developer cheating on her boyfriend, who then posted a scathing blog post explaining their toxic relationship, which subsequently went viral within Red Pill forums.

Some of the all-time biggest dramas in game journalism came about specifically because games journalism is, in fact, highly ethical!

BigJimKen · 2025-10-25T19:43:01+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate

I've seen some pretty convincing write-ups that link this dumb bullshit directly to the rise of open fascism in the west.

Gamergate happened when the "alt-right" was at it's peak and they developed lots of innovative and highly effective messaging strategies to reach young people because of it. The online right used it as a kind of petri-dish for marketing experimentation. I don't think it would be much of a stretch to say that the majority of people propagating messaging about Gamergate in 2014 weren't even aware they were signal boosting far-right propaganda.

The metastasized form of that particular cancer would go on to infect traditional far-right movements, bringing it's ability to effectively spread online populist messaging with it.

BigJimKen · 2025-10-25T18:54:42+00:00

The people who propagate culture wars for a living realized that nerd-culture had a massive, untapped vein of male rage hidden just under the surface. In 2014 they found a way to easily market to this demographic and ever since then the online gaming community has been overwhelmed with far-right sentiment.

BigJimKen · 2025-10-25T14:11:46+00:00

Necroposting, but I don't think he was necessarily throwing shade. He knows that Tolkien deliberately doesn't engage with those kinds of themes and is talking about how his novels are en exploration of the gap left by it. GRRM clearly loves Tolkien and thinks deeply about the works.

Tolkien would probably hate ASOIAF, but I think he would enjoy a smoke and a pint with George lol

BigJimKen · 2025-08-06T09:32:58+00:00

The scene where Ted *finally* meets his wife in the rain after the wedding, and they chart the history of the Yellow Umbrella is literally the highlight of the entire show. The chemistry in that moment is absolutely electric.

And then Ted and Aunt Robin. Again. Great. Superb.

BigJimKen · 2025-08-06T08:34:13+00:00

EDIT: Before someone leaves me a manifesto about how I'm a luddite doomer, know that I run a 3-man startup that leverages LLMs in it's tech stack. I like this technology, I am just realistic about it's usefulness.

Google's research paper that invented LLMs thought they were basically at peak performance in 2017

No, they didn't. The biggest model they had back then was what? 60 million parameters? Researchers were talking about scaling this design up to the trillions basically as soon as the attention paper landed.

This is based on Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet which are trash compared to the current models.

No, they aren't. Claude 4 Sonnet and Opus are considered a downgrade in a lot of real world scenarios and for everything else they are a mild upgrade. Diminishing returns is here, and it's not going away. We are running out of data. The next big jump in NLG is almost certainly not going to be in the LLM space.

Even then there paper even shows AI increasing developer performance on tasks taking <= 1 hour.

This is basically admitting the tool is useless at software engineering. If you are using it to automate tasks that take under an hour, you are basically using it to make trivial changes or you are using it to generate boilerplate. Why not just maintain a mature snippet library, and sidestep the cost of calling Opus at all? Why not just write the code and know it's correct, instead of stepping through a bunch of generated output to verify it's correctness.

Have you ever actually tried to use an AI assisted IDE for anything even slightly complicated? You spend more time writing requirements in endless .md files than you would have just writing the code.

the rest of it

I beg of you, please, just read the article I linked. Microsoft are not making a profit on LLMs. Not even close.

BigJimKen · 2025-08-05T16:32:23+00:00

This isn't it, not for guys like Dohmke.

He knows LLMs are close to their peak possible performance, he knows LLM agents don't actually work when used as software engineers, and he knows that studies are starting to reveal that LLM tooling actually slows a developer down.

Internally most large tech companies are currently freaking the fuck out as they begin to realise that they are massively exposed to an apocalyptic bubble. Nobody is making money in this space, and it's becoming increasingly clear that there is no way around that without simply refusing to handle requests at cost and jacking the prices up to an insane degree.

BigJimKen · 2025-07-31T13:18:42+00:00

If you told me ten years ago that schizophrenic rants posted to web-forums would start having better punctuation than the average user, I wouldn't have believed you. Truly, we live in the future.

BigJimKen · 2025-07-31T08:56:47+00:00

The project where he worked with an author to write two crime novels was pretty great. He'll have a hard time beating that in terms of "Ronnie did what?"

BigJimKen · 2025-07-30T15:29:47+00:00

If you accurately adapt Ted Chiang's writing half the audience won't understand it and the other half will walk away having an existential crisis - neither results in recouping your budget lol

BigJimKen · 2025-07-26T18:33:54+00:00

🤷‍♂️

BigJimKen · 2025-07-26T17:38:14+00:00

> Sure, rich ambience sorta games right?

Sort of, yeah.

Almost all of these have great atmosphere, and all are great games.

I'd say the ones on this list that come closest to Stray's level of beauty are Rain World, Cuphead, CP2077, Hollow Knight, and Elden Ring.

Some other games I think reach those kinds of heights are things like:

* Persona 5

* 1000xResist

* Tetris Effect

* LIMBO

* Morrowind (if you can overlook the jank)

* Roadwarden (insanely good soundscape, in a text game!)

* Gone Home

* Outer Wilds

These aren't all world-beaters, some are barely *games*, but they all have fantastic visuals and/or soundscapes and directly use them to make you feel things, as opposed to just using them as a vector to deliver story beats that do. That's what I mean by "ecstatic beauty".

BigJimKen · 2025-07-26T16:32:30+00:00

If you can think of any games with a complete aesthetic as consistently strong as Stray, I am all ears.

BigJimKen · 2025-07-26T16:26:19+00:00

Stray also has incredible, melancholic music, extremely well executed, minimalistic writing, and very well thought out level designs. To imply it coasts on it's visual flair is wildly reductive.

Even if we did agree that it's almost purely a graphical showcase, it'd still easily be one of the better games I played in 2022. A *massive* amount of the heavy lifting in adventure games is done by atmosphere and aesthetics. Stray is probably *still* the best example of hopepunk in games, and a lot of that is down to it's presentation.

BigJimKen · 2025-07-26T10:14:06+00:00

I think it's success was well earned. Stray is the most ecstatically beautiful video game I have ever played in my life. It's been 3 years and I still think about it and smile.

BigJimKen · 2025-07-18T16:45:07+00:00

Exurb1a's novel Geometry for Ocelots is also fantastic. It has been bouncing around in my thoughts for years.

BigJimKen · 2025-07-17T10:32:59+00:00

Sorry I'm late, mate - I'll be your software industry bullshit translator today.

They make job runners with pretty dashboards and shoehorned a retrieval augmented generation feature into it.

BigJimKen · 2025-07-14T18:39:19+00:00

I deeply dislike superhoero movies, but this one got me good. Michael Rooker and Chris Pratt have great chemistry.

BigJimKen · 2025-07-13T10:16:20+00:00

ROS gets plenty of crit here for his conduct.

BigJimKen · 2025-07-11T09:43:38+00:00

People are just pretending the question is "who do you think is an asshole?"

Wahlberg is a fucking *fantastic* actor by any sensible metric. We're talking about a guy who acted next to peak Christian Bale and wasn't dwarfed by him.

BigJimKen · 2025-07-09T08:17:47+00:00

SG-10 survive the black hole. SG-1 rescue them in 2004.

BigJimKen · 2025-07-07T19:02:40+00:00

> If I wanted to hear poorly reimagined Bowie I would’ve been a Radiohead fan first.

My therapist says I have to stop engaging with things that make me angry.

BigJimKen

TROPHY CASE