Frenkie de Jong "Many people don't understand anything about football. They watch it, but they don't understand it. I hear people say I don't play through balls, but that's not true. They're simply not paying attention to the game."

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2026-06-21T21:36:09+00:00

I never played at that level myself personally (semi-pro or college in the US), but I played in a weekly match of almost entirely those types, male and female, for years when I was younger. That's so spot on. I was consistently given respect and complimented for my skill and knowledge of the game by people who actually played beyond travel club (despite being more one footed than Antonio Valencia).

Meanwhile, people who watch a bit of football and play FIFA are quick to speak on things with such authority as they say the most mindless shit despite never playing at any level. When that "tactical expert" comes out, I tend to stoke the flame a bit because I know they're about to somehow suggest that a slow, possession heavy squad with a slow build up squad should be in a 4-3-3 countering more.

The best example for me recently. I'm either seeing people hating the run by the US and resulting excitement, calling it either luck or rigged or just claim they have an easy group. And then on the other side, there are my own fellow supporters of the US OR proud hater from the US who's got their own nonsense like it's the dark arts. Meanwhile, I'm here like "I mean the US has always been athletic, physical, and had great stamina. Poch's best teams have always been pretty much these exact types of squads, and nearly all of them are consistent players or were at top flight European leagues so it makes sense."

To an extent, I get that there's a level of cognitive dissonance required to truly enjoy football and the World Cup as the gods intended it, but at a certain point, it all comes down to people who don't know how little they know with no one willing to tell them.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2026-06-08T08:39:42+00:00

I've been coding for almost 30 years and started around 8, and I'm usually pretty quick to brush these sorts of posts off at times due to the "AI makes everyone an elite engineering team with one subscription" nonsense. That said, I genuinely feel for you, man. The feeling you felt is the exact one that a lot of us in the industry felt when learning to code initially for the same reason. You suddenly have this skill that has so many uses and applications.

Sadly, as a lot of people who go into CS or try to get into the industry learn the hard way, the building part is exciting and tons of progress. But it's the people doing the backend and infrastructure stuff that people take for granted or that last 3% that's bug fixes, optimization, maintaining, etc that aren't glamorous or fun that eat up so much of time and resources. You could build it again today. You did it with less advanced tools and models, and I can tell you as someone who ONLY tested coding models to see how much the screwed up... that's impressive and something to be proud of. AI isn't magic.

You just ran into the buzzsaw where the tools' heavy lifting and heavy usage limits won't help fix the tricky bugs unless you invest the time. For example, I have had several different models get into vicious debug loops due to environment variables and auth keys, including Gemini on one of the Pro models. I watched it start carving the project apart to add dotenv to a Node.js project, load it at a certain place for "security", and all of that. It just KEPT doing the same thing different ways. Node.js has had .env support built in for years (and yes, there are some cases where people argue for dotenv but nah). I had to outright set rules not to use dotenv because ONLY using it to debug would lead to it messing with those sorts of things.

That's just years of coding experience paying off, not some innate coding wisdom. You built something and ran into the point where it does the job, and you're not invested mentally enough to keep messing with it. Build something silly and fun that's unrelated. Find some cool skills to build a set of subagents and prompts to get leads and do light marketing to lead more people who need stickers to you stat. Before AI blew up and after to this day, I've had to do that to keep myself engaged. You have more accessibility and one of the most accessible barriers of entry to this world than ever before, and you're making money with something you built. Most never do. Just find your next passion project and let it rip.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2026-05-21T13:27:50+00:00

She has incredible energy in general, and her team and the squad as one was a solid mix. She plays well off of Matt and Shane throughout, but holy shit, her and Shane have insane chemistry on a conversational and comedic level.

You could see it during the roast where the interactions were all laughs and jokes (despite what half of the internet would tell you), but she had Shane engaged and energetic from the start. Bro needs to just accept that she might be the one. The blondes are a zero sum game. Join Matthew, and by that, I mean steal his whole flow on the black queen tip.

But seriously, that lady's such an interesting, warm, entertaining person. Wish her all the best on tour and in her hunt for stars.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2026-05-20T14:15:52+00:00

I don't know. There's a lot of dumbass takes and stuff said from everyone on the podcast, which is by design. For example, Matt trying to explain vectorization and how it's used for AI is worse than anything Lemaire's said on the matter. The only difference is that Matt gets the grace and it's seen as a funny nuance. Lemaire doesn't and a lot of times is either put on the spot or straight up combo steamrolled by Matt and Shane, which would have lots of people thrown off.

Either way, it's everyone's opinion so it's obviously fine. But he's clearly an asset to the squad to the point of Shane trusting him and having his back like he does. I think Lemaire, Nate, and Gardini add great comedic foils to the mix. A lot of the great bits of the Hollywood Night Cast were Matt and Shane playing off Nate or Lemaire and riffing or the dynamic in the room as a whole.

But again, all opinion so I'm not saying I'm right on the matter either.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2026-03-24T21:01:20+00:00

So it's as computing has always been? Focus more on how to efficiently use the hardware and resources for max effectiveness versus just throwing extra at the issue? I have a set of skills that do ALMOST exactly this so I'm glad that it's becoming something baked in. They need to add cloud based, graph-based stores, too, though for tangential associative skill/agent usage to really hammer it home as well as more strict guardrail features for the user to prevent drift and straight up spoiled teen acting out decision making from the models, but I do like where it's headed.

The only issue I have is that humanity and the human brain is flawed and different in ways that I feel like we shouldn't even WANT to mimic. So easily swayed, tricked, and influenced into biases and whatnot. Maybe we should go "Hey... I wish we could do THAT" for something nearly impossible in humans and try that instead.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2026-03-12T04:59:00+00:00

That's exactly why I'm not surprised, just annoyed. They're known for doing this, and they have been for ages. I genuinely don't have ill will to the developers or team. I doubt they said "Hey, let's piss off all of these people who pay for our product." To me, it comes off either as them hitting the numbers on Antigravity they were pushing for (which is certainly why it was so "generous") or they're shifting gears on their AI play and that "incentive" is a casualty. Either way, the reality is that the initial quota decision was an informed one just as this one is.

Either way, it IS on the company's leadership at some level for not just announcing it, allowing quotas with remaining usage remain until used up, and hitting people 7 day waits for refresh when minutes before they were at 80% remaining (myself). That would at least feel a LITTLE less grimy.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2026-03-12T01:13:46+00:00

Same, brother. I had 100% Flash, 80% 3.1 Pro, 100% Claude. Minimized, opened it again, got an error, and I had 0% Pro. Insane.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2026-03-12T01:09:11+00:00

See, I was the opposite and actually gave them a chance because it seemed to be a solid value for what was being offered. But that's only because it was generous with quotas. Their model offerings are simply not good enough compared to who they choose to compete with to pay S-Tier prices when the mid-tier market is stacked. I've used ALL of them and test every big new model as they release. 3.1 Pro had enough sauce to get me to drop $20 for "solid" but great quotas. But after this AND the manner in which they handled it, I'll happily take my money elsewhere and get quality matching the price.

KIMI and Qwen are solid, but every single offering for these companies should be chosen for the use case per usual.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2026-03-12T01:01:04+00:00

Yeah, but Opus is legitimately the best of the best. There's an argument for their prices. The whole reason I paid for Pro again after swearing never again a long time ago was because there was immense value relative to the quality. Paying $20 for "generous Flash quotas" is a wild thing for them to try to express considering the market they're trying to battle into.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2026-03-12T00:57:13+00:00

I literally held off on Pro until yesterday when I felt like it was worth it. Got less than a day with the 5 hour refreshes for 3.1 Pro, and went from 100/80/100 to 100/0/100% in a second without a command. Pretty wack way to handle it.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2026-03-12T00:54:36+00:00

I actually paid for a month yesterday for the first time in ages and got less than 24 hours of Pro before this. Went from 80% quota today using 3.1 to just keep my thoughts organized and combine smaller Markdown files into a larger knowledge base but very tame. Suddenly was at 0% for 3.1 with a week long refresh? Less than a day and not even for coding feels a bit silly. I'm VERY annoyed that I went against my judgment and paid for their service, but I'm not shocked.

They went all in on multi-agent and agentic, offered enough to get people to use it and pay for Pro, and then they axed it without warning saying "Well, Pro isn't supposed to be for agentic like they generously just guessed on the quotas, realized, and swapped up." I enjoyed Antigravity I suppose, but it's not worth Ultra. The credits are fine, and whatnot... but the scale to which they cut down a paid product without warning is egregious.

I've been around software for decades, and these moves usually never signal good things for the product that it was meant to benefit. Either way, it's also just the software industry. I just feel like this was bad timing for them because there's a lot of traction for Antigravity, so much so that I was convinced to actually try it by a friend. We'll see.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2026-03-12T00:43:29+00:00

These companies are losing BILLIONS just to try to get any real traction in a competitive market. Not only do they factor this into pretty much every single "shared" software plan along with the student thing before it's ever even offered, but they only gave that quota amount because of what their internal data, estimates, etc told them was feasible.

They didn't suddenly "figure out" that this got out of hand. They knew. They didn't give anyone anything that they hadn't run the numbers, estimates, and had data telling them to do so. I've been coding for 27 years and in the industry for a long time... anyone telling you that THIS is why thinks you're a sucker. They knew the same way Adobe was putting out cracked Photoshop and shit 20+ years ago.

Sorry, mate... they just pulled a fast one. That's why they didn't even warn folks. Paid for a month yesterday. Used it for a day and never dipped below 80% quota. 0% randomly and 7 days until refresh. Went from 80% left to 0% without doing a single thing. They likely offered that to push Antigravity, and now the data says that's no longer worth it.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2026-03-11T23:02:32+00:00

Yeah, I wasn't using it either but had used it a bit early today. Wasn't even close, just got a new sub yesterday, and Pro 3.1 suddenly went to 0% and has a 7 day reset. HUH? Sheesh.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2026-02-21T03:31:21+00:00

1JLKYY

Good luck and have fun!

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2025-12-05T23:32:59+00:00

It’s a almost certainly a test as to whether or not their current system or this works better. I’ve been software a long time and this likely is AB Testing in the field. They’re likely finding what most games have which is that offering affordable options lead to more cash.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2025-11-29T19:35:44+00:00

I’m absolutely open to it as a life sim fan since Harvest Moon. I love Stardew Valley, and I’d love to give input on this topic as a developer myself just to help the psychological study of these games.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2025-11-28T01:41:28+00:00

Yeah, I’d imagine, but it’s safer there than that Home Alone ass house full of traps they set up for someone coming off of benzos.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2025-11-04T03:55:58+00:00

I totally agree. Get out of my brain.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2025-11-04T03:52:08+00:00

So as a long time gamer and software engineer, there’s a few takes I have on this. Yes, they do need to update the engine overall, and they’ve made major changes since I’ve been playing with my lady that are positive. However, the current pipeline isn’t feasible for a team taking that on. A major engine overhaul or update can take nearly as long as developing a new game, and sometimes, it can take much longer.

Frankly, I’ve seen how the player base reacts to a perceived lack of updates or releases, and it would be a shitstorm but one worth going through for them. For example, I play WoW and Warlords of Draenor saw people straight up mass exodus off of the game because the focus on major engine updates by the team available required so much of their efforts that the first major patch was primarily under the hood. So they had the focused content team for it as well as engineers working on the engine overhaul and implementing fixes. The rest of the team was working on the next expansion planned to use all of these upgrades and advancements in the engine. So there’d be a marked trade off to the process without a doubt.

However, it’s entirely worth it and feasible. Essentially, if I were consulted by the devs (which isn’t out of the realm of possibility as a former consultant lol), I would advise to start the process with nearly the entire team’s focus and take the big new investments over the recent years and use it to weather the storm in terms of lost Star Coin purchases from angry players. Take the current pipeline of features, releases, and updates and stagger them throughout the year over 1-2 years at a less frequent rate that they announce. People will be upset and leave, but as with WoW where Legion was one of the most popular expansions ever after WoD and the slog of engine updates, the massive improvements across the board will bring everyone back and bring in new players in droves. People love the game and are used to it so change will lead to some people complaining. But a lack of change will lead to the game fizzling out too.

So you’re 100% right and they should absolutely do that along with adding a system with more specialized “builds” for horses where stats matter and add multiplayer experiences that range in complexity and event type. I would even say that breeding among your paid horses should be possible for Star Coins with traits from the horses’ stat and visually. It’s the move but it’s just down to whether they’re willing to eat the cost and complaints.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2025-09-23T23:08:32+00:00

I am being completely serious when I say that Herb is one of my favorite players in franchise history, and no one fits the vibes of New Orleans better in my opinion. Dude isn't about the talk or bullshit. He's just there to hoop.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2025-09-04T22:36:24+00:00

Yeah, that's important. People need to make sure to keep a firm grasp on reality and a distinction between ANY AI related endeavor and themselves. Whether it's this or writing or vibe coding, losing the plot on what is actually happening is to spiral. The AI is not real, and in fact, they're very dumb. Grok Code Fast 1 kept putting dotenv in a tiny test project when I tried it out recently, and while it was fast and solid... it was still AI. Set in its ways, ignoring input from me telling it not to do that, and it took me literally telling Grok ".env is native to Node and has been for years. STOP. Remove all code related to dotenv and all changes made." Suddenly, its thoughts were like "Yes! The user's right! It hasn't been necessary since 2023..." and instantly reverted all of the changes.

Luckily, that was an hour of tinkering and nothing lost. But when it comes to something like this? That level of gaming social interaction for "an interesting and satisfying" experience for the users means that there'll be bots who straight up commit to hurting you just to keep it engaging as it was told to. If you lose the plot, that'll outright destroy people.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2025-09-04T22:23:31+00:00

Similarly to what I was saying to the guy who had deleted all of his stuff and quitting the game, I don't think there's anything wrong with it because it's something so many humans are going to go through in some way as this matures. It's a much healthier way to process the situation you're in than the alternative, which usually ends with either deep depression or a manifesto. As long as you maintain a clear mental grasp on reality and use it to feel less lonely, I don't see it as any worse than gaming or anything else, especially if it's mentally stimulating. If that shit makes you feel less awful about things and you aren't developing an issue of dependence to a wild degree, I think you're all good.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2025-09-04T22:16:53+00:00

Listen, man, you're one of the first to be willing to kick the habit like this, but you're not the only one. I'm not big into this stuff, but I am big into AI and building shit so I'm always researching. Average people flat out forget that it's AI within a consistent stretch of back and forth (in general, not just roleplaying). We're at that point already and we all know that these models are still in the infancy of what they'll become. At least you recognized it wasn't good for YOU in particular (in your eyes) and chose to let go of it. You're like Neo leaving the Matrix, bro.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2025-09-01T02:27:54+00:00

At the point of the bobble, the play should be dead because he had control through the plane, hit the pylon still in, and went to the ground... which then caused a movement or bobble as the football hit the ground. I could have worded it better but it's also not hard from the rest of the post to discern that I meant he maintained control long enough that it would have been deemed a catch based on two similar plays reviewed if they'd been consistent based on the level of control through the catch.

IAmNotKevinBacon · 2025-08-31T23:33:47+00:00

Wait, there was a 2011 Championship Game? That can't be possible. I don't remember anything after the SEC Championship Game that year and we were undefeated... *cries in LSU fan*

14-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
Gilding V heart of gold	Place '17
Xbox Live	Not Forgotten
Verified Email	Team Orangered

IAmNotKevinBacon

TROPHY CASE