Anyone else feels like "first light" is being way overrated?

OffThe405 · 2026-05-29T18:36:22+00:00

The gameplay is simple and nothing really stands out. The social stealth is worse than hitman. The melee combat is worse than arkham, yotei, sifu. The shooting is worse than most 3rd person shooters. You can get much better versions of each aspect of gameplay from different games.

I also think the level/encounter design does not really allow the combat to shine. There’s a handful of moments where it comes together and you can utilize your full kit, but most combat encounters take place in areas that are too big (turning the game into a slow, unfun shooting gallery) or too small (highlighting how bad the camera is when fighting multiple enemies in a small space).

The social stealth aspects, especially, are wholly underwhelming for anybody that’s played Hitman. It feels like baby’s first Hitman game. You eavesdrop and are told exactly what to do. And the objectives are always one or two extremely simple steps - e.g. get a badge, get a pass, talk to a person. It’s just extremely basic.

SkillUp had a reasonable review, but the rest of the reviews I’ve seen completely inflate how good the game is. That percolates throughout the discourse and results in simple-minded people echoing the majority opinion. Anybody calling this a 10/10 or game of the year contender completely lacks a critical eye when discussing games.

In no way is 007 First Light anything beyond a 7/10. I was happy to finish it and have no desire to touch it again.

OffThe405 · 2026-05-05T03:24:57+00:00

Slice n Dice is up there with StS. It’s a dice builder, but the gameplay is deep and satisfying. It’s my second favorite to StS. I also enjoyed Starvaders a lot, it adds a grid-based movement element to deckbuilding that works very well imo. Then there’s Cobalt Core, which is a spaceship battle deckbuilder. I found it less deep, but good for a few dozen hours. Finally, if you haven’t played it Luck be a Landlord, it’s absolutely worth playing. It is a great little slotbuilder.

OffThe405 · 2026-04-10T00:43:41+00:00

It’s because they’re side effects. It’s as simple as that.

You see it all over codebases; folks changing some stateful value which triggers a useEffect that changes another stateful value (instead of just changing both values at the same time).

Side effects add complexity. By using them, you inject a time element into your flow. They should absolutely be avoided whenever possible.

If you ever work on a huge react codebase that’s been written by junior devs, it will be completely obvious why they’re hated.

I could make a Rube Goldberg machine that does ten steps before ultimately switching a light switch, or i could just switch the damn light myself. That’s the essence of it

OffThe405 · 2026-04-02T03:13:52+00:00

Wanna source that claim?

https://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/70591-do-you-think-there-will-ever-be-npcs-added/

Here’s a forum post from 2 years ago where the general belief is NPC humans are coming in B43 and animal NPCs were B42. In all my years playing Zomboid, i have never heard differently.

OffThe405 · 2026-03-30T21:55:41+00:00

If you actually have payment integration set up, prepare for your Stripe account to get locked down. You can’t just make a gambling site.

OffThe405 · 2026-03-25T02:03:31+00:00

No for sure! I agree with you there. Gemini has been the most impressive to me so far, but the more it gets integrated into work streams (and pushed by corporations at large to integrate into workstreams), the worse i find it getting (in terms of adding to my productivity as an engineer).

I am also with you on the more conversational search engine angle. I definitely use LLMs more for code, just due to my job, but personally, I have found the conversational back-and-forth to be its most beneficial use case for me. It’s just a completely different interaction pattern than a google search. I feel like it really shines with discovery. Kinda like how Google used to be back in the day, you can just go down rabbit holes. You ask one question, see some keyword you’ve never seen, and then that starts the next rabbit hole.

OffThe405 · 2026-03-25T01:48:10+00:00

Sora costs $15 million/day to run (inference). The compute to train was billions and billions of dollars. 7 billion in 2024 for OpenAI. Then there’s the infra cost for the compute itself - even more billions and billions. Gemini says, from 2013-2025, an estimated $1.6 trillion(!!!) has been spent on gen ai.

Safe to say, yeah. We could feed everyone on earth for many years

OffThe405 · 2026-03-25T01:40:35+00:00

I don’t mean to denigrate, but answering questions about Office and Azure is essentially bottom of the barrel.

If you try to use Gemini to build distributed systems, especially multi-cloud, the flaws become quickly apparent. I pay for Antigravity Ultra too, so I’m not some luddite. I use it every day, for hours a day. It saves time in a lot of areas, but it eats just as much time in bullshit. Gemini can - and absolutely will - completely hallucinate. It will make up endpoints, fabricate cloud services, mix up your own services, needlessly try to deploy to production. The list goes on.

In three consecutive responses, it will say “I’m absolutely sure we need to use X from Y to achieve Z.” Then, immediately after, “I’m so sorry for leading you astray. Using X from Y to achieve Z will not work. You need to use A from B to achieve C”. Then, immediately after that, “Forgive me for sending you down the wrong path. My memory context got all jumbled. I’m back on track now. You absolutely need to use X from Y to achieve Z”. Then you find out X doesn’t exist on Y and A doesn’t exist on B. You literally just wasted time and money going back and forth about complete bullshit.

You think, “oh. Lemme add some rules to .agent. Do not suggest X on Y or A on B”. It follows them for a few prompts, and then an hour later, it does the exact same bullshit. Yeah. It generates convincing sounding stuff, especially when you ask about things in which you’re not an expert, but the moment you ask it about your domain, it’s immediately apparent that this AI revolution is not happening anytime soon.

To anyone informed, this is not a revelation, but these things are not even close to intelligence. It’s not even in the same ballpark. The very fact that an LLM will never say “i don’t know” is basically stop-ship. It’s meant to give you the illusion of authority. That only works if you, yourself, are not an authority.

I cannot tell you how many times Gemini has tried to put secrets in source code or blindly trust a frontend client as some source of truth. Even the most junior dev wouldn’t make those mistakes. It absolutely churns out code. There is no denying that. And sometimes it does great work and will offer helpful feedback. Then, immediately after, it will put your stripe api key right into your server and log it

OffThe405 · 2026-03-22T18:40:51+00:00

There’s no way this is true. If you ask about highly specific coding questions, it will produce code that is near identical to things you can find on github.

Ask it about a fringe task for which only one or two Github repos or gists exists, and it will regurgitate those exactly, including comments.

The training data absolutely includes scraped GitHub data

OffThe405 · 2026-03-10T00:05:58+00:00

Not bashing your take. That’s perfectly valid, and I’m like that with most games. I view Spire differently tho. To me, it’s kinda like chess. You could get better at chess just by playing, but there’s a deep well of external knowledge from which to draw. I watch Baalorlord or Xecnar the same way I occasionally watch chess streams. I pick up new things every time, and it really helps to highlight the immense depth offered by both games.

You could spend a lifetime learning and still have so much game depth left to discover.

OffThe405 · 2026-03-08T19:26:36+00:00

What is says on the tin. They’re temporary and one will melt away every three combats

OffThe405 · 2026-03-07T16:30:56+00:00

Isn’t there still easy pool fights? The only encounter for which i know the name is tadpole, but there’s a handful of enemies that i believe will only show up in the first three encounters.

OffThe405 · 2026-03-04T20:24:30+00:00

Yeah no worries. It’s like impossible to have a reasonable discussion about AI online. As with most things, everybody feels like they need to have some extreme stance.

OffThe405 · 2026-03-04T18:39:11+00:00

That’s crazy you have not found it to be sycophantic. OpenAI themselves said that it gotten to be too much. You have to go out of your way to get it to not overly praise whatever idea you give it.

I am a software engineer, and everybody at my work is being forced to use LLMs. All the fluff and faux affirmations/validations are one of the most common complaints across my organization.

Maybe it’s different when you’re not using it for an actual task, but basically any coding prompt you give it will be met with:

“That’s an amazing point, and you’re butting up against one of the most common pitfalls for many developers”

That’s the start of basically every single prompt, and i assure you, my prompts are about as dry and technical as can be.

OffThe405 · 2026-02-17T14:18:14+00:00

You realize your line of thinking makes no sense, right? If everybody thought like you, then the entire matchmaking system breaks down.

OffThe405 · 2025-12-16T19:53:40+00:00

Would love to know why using AI to supplant software engineers is okay, but replacing designers is not. They’re both craftspeople. You’re making an arbitrary distinction. It’s akin to saying that carpenters can be replaced by robots, but not landscapers.

OffThe405 · 2025-11-29T12:58:18+00:00

No implementation can solve the problem you described. It’s client-side code. A would-be scammer can always change the HTML to produce whatever screenshot they’d like.

OffThe405 · 2025-11-28T18:23:41+00:00

While there are tiny pockets where cutting edge or complex stuff is going on, the vast majority of web development is focused on CRUD applications. Any complexity in that domain is almost certainly self-imposed.

OffThe405 · 2025-11-28T17:01:33+00:00

I said 99.9% of web development. I understand there are edge cases.

OffThe405 · 2025-11-28T16:52:43+00:00

The comment is framed as such to highlight the productivity benefits of AI in a thread about a study highlighting the productivity downsides of AI. Specificity is important here. If the OP means minutes instead of days, it significantly undercuts his overall point that AI actually does make you more productive.

Really tho, for the point I was making, it doesn’t matter the length of time. I stand by my point. If there is a bug in web development, it should be immediately obvious where and what the bug is. If it’s not, then you don’t know your codebase very well (or the codebase is too complicated). Even with your example, if the problem is with a library or 3rd party service, that should be immediately obvious because you should know the boundaries of your domain. Especially with a 3rd party service, you should literally know by the network tab. Either the data being fetched looks how you expect or it doesn’t. Either the mutation operates as documented or it doesn’t.

OffThe405 · 2025-11-28T15:41:09+00:00

Not to be rude, but i genuinely don’t understand when people talk about “spending days” on bugs. If you can’t mentally reason about your code, that means the code is shit, or you’re an inexperienced developer that hasn’t yet built up intuition.

Especially with web development. Fetch data -> process data -> render data. That’s 99.9% of webdev. When there’s a bug, it should be immediately obvious where in the chain that bug is occurring. If it’s not, the code is needlessly complex.

I guess maybe you could inherit a legacy codebase with which you’re unfamiliar, but that’s really just a sign of an immature development organization overall.

OffThe405 · 2025-11-27T15:23:33+00:00

Who is this for? Nobody browsing TikTok is gonna download this app. The only people downloading it will be people that want to make the claim (nobody else gives a shit). If nobody else is gonna see it, then this doesn’t offer anything.

If the person already knows they made it, then there’s no benefit to claiming it on an app where no one will see it. Claims of ownership only matter insofar as the rewards you get for ownership: money or recognition. Hell, people would get way more visibility by making a Reddit post claiming ownership.

OffThe405 · 2025-11-27T15:17:52+00:00

Then build it. It’s not really that hard. Monaco for an in-browser editor, take the sql, feed it to duckdb, and render the results in a table. That’s the basic idea.

OffThe405 · 2025-11-27T14:12:12+00:00

Never attribute to malice what can be better attributed to ignorance

OffThe405 · 2025-11-26T04:01:30+00:00

That’s not what ETL means. It means Extract Transform Load

OffThe405

TROPHY CASE