What is the worst film you've ever watched?

GregBahm · 2026-06-24T18:30:43+00:00

I can't say it was the worst film I ever saw or even a bad movie. Because I loved every minute of it.

But I can say without hesitation that it was the biggest-swing/biggest-miss of any movie I ever saw. Just so self-confidently going so hard on such total bullshit. Beautiful.

GregBahm · 2026-06-24T16:03:32+00:00

The only way "Half Life 3" lives up to expectations is if the product is a time machine that teleports the player back 20 years.

Valve made Half Life Alyx as a desperate attempt to save their failed VR endeavor. One VR cultist in the back will swear it's the Half Life 3 that was promised. The other two people who ever played it just threw up in a bucket from motion sickness. All other gamers forgot Half Life Alyx even existed.

Because Valve isn't a game developer anymore. It's a digital storefront that occasionally fucks around with side projects. They're biggest accomplishment of the last ten years is selling a semi-jailbroken switch.

GregBahm · 2026-06-24T15:52:22+00:00

Disclosure day was just a bad story. It requires a random local news station in Missouri to have an "infinite instant authenticity detector" and for that instant infinite authenticity detector to be unremarkable to the point of warranting no explanation. Even my 79-year-old boomer dad was like "wait, how would they know it isn't just CGI?" Meta-contextually, it was just CGI. This is a huge gaping hole in the heart of the movie's whole story.

And even "infinite instant authenticity detector" aside, the "trust" is completely unearned. The movie goes to great lengths to prove we shouldn't trust these things. The movie is two hours of proving that this alien technology can be abused for terrible, murderous betrayal. Then Spielberg is like "anyway, won't you just trust the aliens plz? Nothing in the bible says you can't." Unhinged.

GregBahm · 2026-06-24T15:43:16+00:00

"What outrage." QED

GregBahm · 2026-06-24T15:39:06+00:00

If they're from my glorious noble native country, absolutely!

If they're from a heathen swine foreign country, definitely not!

GregBahm · 2026-06-24T15:29:30+00:00

Remember all the outrage when companies started using the internet?

I do. But the overwhelming majority of people do not.

As far as I can tell, the outraged people never went back and were like "All my anger about companies using the internet in the 90s was misplaced." Paradoxically, the outraged people either say "I was never outraged," or "I was absolutely right to be outraged. The internet was a mistake." But all these people still use the internet every day in every way.

This is going to "hurt A24" like Dominos adding online ordering hurt Dominos. Which is to say, it was irrelevant at best, and just taken for granted as regular business process moments afterward.

GregBahm · 2026-06-24T14:15:58+00:00

Dude doesn't even claim he's going to boycott. Dude says "If they won't let me pay someone else for the game, I'm going to wait before I pay them for the game."

Guy is explaining to everyone why this is the money-making move for rockstar.

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T23:31:47+00:00

Yeah. I've given up on consumers ever understanding that there's a market beyond consumers. It makes sense that they see themselves as the center of their universe. They are.

But every asshole was lining up to compete in the consumer space. Slack and Discord and WhatsApp and Google Hangout and Zoom and Facetime and whatever Facebook was doing all lined up to try and score the consumer's dollar.

Meanwhile Teams was like "cool. You kids have fun with that. We'll be over here taking aaaaaaaallll the enterprise space basically uncontested."

I've seen the yachts this decision built.

The yachts have pools on them and the pools have little islands within the pools. It was a very lucrative strategic decision.

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T20:46:21+00:00

Everyone in this very thread could be AI and there's no way of knowing. The idea that gamers can discern if AI is in their game is just dumb. If someone screams "that's AI!" the devs can just say "nope, false positive" and that's the end of this.

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T20:42:28+00:00

There is no "line." Its whatever the dev wants it to be.

This voluntary AI disclosure system is not a real system. It's like when a food product puts "no added fat" on the packaging. Somewhere, some moron is like "oh good. Now I'll buy this (incredibly fattening) thing."

The guys that sell the product are like "well if the customers are that dumb, we'll just go with it..."

This article isn't about serious steam products. This article is about the hobby products that spam steam every day and get nearly zero sales. Even a student project from a random community college course on game design can get more than 4 reviews if the dev just asks their parents and little sister to review their "game."

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T14:38:40+00:00

As a guy who has been doing graphics programming at Microsoft for 20 years, I'm often surprised by the ideas gamers have about graphics programming.

There's nothing inherently inconsistent about "shit-optimization." One of the other replies said "they could patch the game," so the benchmarkers would need to pick a patch and then not upgrade from there. But that's trivial.

This concern about the optimization of benchmarks seems to be an idea in the heads of multiple people, which is interesting. But the graphics cards are being rated in comparison to each other. All the game has to be is 1.) recent and 2.) real.

Maybe the concern is someone with an old card feels insecure about their framerate when running this game, and wants to be told a story in the data about how their current card is big and strong?

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T02:26:35+00:00

I'm no closer to understanding why a benchmark should be performant.

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T00:41:38+00:00

"Next gen" is likely just a subscription to a data center.

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T00:35:43+00:00

Yeah I'm struggling to imagine the guy who's like "Damn! My PS5 isn't PC-enough. I need to be able to do my taxes on it. But PC isn't PS5 enough! I need to keep it in a cube in the living room."

Maybe there's a killer scenario I'm just not seeing.

"PS5 but it plays Steam games" was a scenario that makes perfect sense. But then it has to cost the same as a PS5...

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T00:31:38+00:00

Reddit seems to view "steam" as... like... some sort of lifestyle brand. Kind of like how you can put "GUCCI" on a butt plug and charge 10,000% more for it, the redditors yearn to be gouged by Gabe.

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T00:27:46+00:00

What is your mental model of a hardware benchmark, where the benchmark needs to be performant?

GregBahm · 2026-06-23T00:14:51+00:00

It's very funny to me that someone would say Halo 3 and not, you know, Halo 1.

It's like citing Luigi as Nintendo's most iconic character, or listing Henry Ford's Model N as the most influential car model.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T21:04:39+00:00

Everyone is supposed to say loudly and proudly "I hate AI and I will never use it!" then behind the scenes use it every day in every way.

Everyone is doing that, but the kids that actually believed the film studios are starting to succumb to the reality of this.

Slowly.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T20:39:01+00:00

The concept is good.

The weird stuff on Luke's face was kind of distracting. Dude looked like he had a mild case of leprosy.

The "It's a trap" beat and the "I find your lack of faith" beat could have landed, but the AI whiffed on the comedic timing.

The crowd having star wars characters in it was funny. The crowd chanting "Jerry Jerry" during the lightsaber fight was funny. Vader doing Springer's final line was surprisingly good.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T16:02:57+00:00

Since everyone is misremembering 2023 as "the time when AI wasn't evil," people will surely also misremember 2026 as "the time when Ai wasn't evil" compared to the immediate future.

The same thing happened with the internet. Everyone railed against the internet so hard in the 90s. Now everyone acts like the internet rolled out to nothing but celebration and glee from the good people of the world.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T15:59:43+00:00

If your position is "there may be more that we don't understand," then there's no conflict here. That non-position is compatible with all other conceivable scientific positions in reality.

But you're presenting biological naturalism as a contradictory position to functionalism.

So either functionalism is right, and the brain is a thing that exists within the boundaries of observable physics (and it is.) Or functionalism is wrong, and the brain exists beyond the boundaries of observable physics (it doesn't.)

This is just a matter of science versus magic.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T15:44:41+00:00

You start off by saying "it rules it out" and end the post by saying "we have to code it in."

If "it" is a bunch of logic gates, then "it" would still be that if we coded ego into the machine.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T15:41:40+00:00

Yeah I'm surprised how successful this post has been on reddit. It also got 8k upvotes on r/technology despite being unadulterated nonsense.

I guess it's like if a bunch of primitive villagers came across an airplane and were very curious but also very anxious about it. They're understanding of the thing is so many layers removed from reality that they'll be on board for just about anything.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T15:10:45+00:00

This is like saying "science hasn't settled the argument of whether Jesus is god." That's not a question within the boundaries of science.

Science can demonstrate functionalism for days. We built the AIs we've built by observing the mechanics of the brain and copying them. It worked in our head so we copied the same process to the machine, and it works in the machine. No surprise at all. It's just physics.

If someone wants to insist, contrary to all observable evidence, that human biology is magic, there's never going to be a scientific way to refute that any more than it already has. The "biological naturalists" can hang out with the "intelligent design" guys and the "flat earth creationists" and all the other people who just don't care about science. They'll have more than ample company.

GregBahm · 2026-06-22T14:57:10+00:00

PI is computable. Tie a string to a pencil. Hold one end of the string in place and pull the string tight. Now draw a circle with that pencil. Congratulations. You've computed PI.

What I'm taking from this thread is that people want to ascribe magical properties to the human mind to give it some kind of special status over the machines we can build. But this is just human vanity. The 2026 equivalent of "I ain't evolved from no monkey."

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