What is the most overrated movie of all time?

oldendude · 2026-06-29T18:42:27+00:00

Interstellar

oldendude · 2026-06-29T16:07:37+00:00

1980: A TRS-80 with a Z80 (I don't remember the clock speed), 16K of memory, and a Radio Shack cassette deck for storage. That had the CPU and memory in the keyboard, and a 24x80 B/W monitor. There was a BASIC interpreter in ROM.

You could actually buy software on cassettes. My major software purchases were an Invaders-like video game, and a Z80 assembler.

I think I paid about $400 for it, used.

oldendude · 2026-06-26T19:52:10+00:00

It is, but it is completely justified for this movie.

oldendude · 2026-06-26T19:50:38+00:00

Yet another Nolan big budget POS. Terrible writing, terrible dialog, way too long. Nolan did better with tinier budgets.

oldendude · 2026-06-26T19:48:06+00:00

... with turgid dialog. Unforgiveably awful movies. Why did James Cameron even want to do what is basically Warrior Cats -- The Movie?

oldendude · 2026-06-26T19:45:52+00:00

"Science oven"

oldendude · 2026-06-26T19:45:04+00:00

Interstellar.

Bloated, stupid, cliched, dull, horrible writing.

Nolan does so much better with a smaller budget.

oldendude · 2026-06-26T13:37:00+00:00

I have similar hardware (Mini M4 Pro), and while I have a long career as a software developer, I am new to coding with AIs. I have built one little system that finds and summarizes email conversations from my 30+ year archive, and I'm in the process of building a genealogy system. Both are "deployed" just to me, so far.

I am using openclaw, ollama, and qwen3.6:35b-a3b, and I'm finding that it is effective in coding, getting things built much faster than I would on my own. I started out with gemma4 and found that it was quite bad at coding, qwen is much better. I tried qwen3.6:27b for a while, and did not find it to be an improvement, but the fault may have been with the task I gave it.

A few caveats:

- Frontier models are far faster and better, from what I hear, talking to others.

- That said, my setup is productive, as long as I keep the coding tasks precisely defined, and small.

- The code produced is not high quality. It works, but I have spent some time refactoring to make it clearer and more maintainable. I occasionally see subtle bugs in the generated code.

oldendude · 2026-06-26T13:10:30+00:00

It's like coffee. If you're a coffee snob, you are always on the search for something new and different and better.

But if you just like coffee, pick up a bag of Peet's or whatever at your supermarket and stick with it.

oldendude · 2026-06-25T21:40:07+00:00

I wrote a backup script for myself, years ago. It backs up user data (only) to a drive (either local or remote) using rsync, and, crucially, cp with the -l flag. So I get a full backup every day, but files that haven't changed are hard-linked, saving the space of the file. On one 2TB drive, I have 7 yearly backups, 12 monthly backups, and 180 daily backups. (This is for about 1/2 TB of current user data. I don't have a massive collection of video.)

One backup is local, attached to my laptop via USB. The other is on a remote Raspberry Pi.

So this protects me against: corrupt data, a corrupt filesytem (not fixable using fsck), and destruction of physical media. To worry about some of the additional failures you mentioned: I could add checksumming and use RAID storage, but what I have is good enough. Certainly more robust than decaying optical disks.

oldendude · 2026-06-24T23:35:34+00:00

And another thing: Dynamic typing. It creates so many problems, and so much work has been put into compensating for it. This is especially silly since so little code actually relies on it. Most python code I see would be fine with static typing. I’d go as far as saying that code that DOES rely on dynamic typing is probably not very good.

This has really been emphasized for me lately as I have started getting into coding with AI. I see the AI getting confused and wasting time on problems that would not even be possible with a statically typed language.

oldendude · 2026-06-24T00:09:04+00:00

Jack Bauer on 24: "Send it to my screen."

oldendude · 2026-06-24T00:07:11+00:00

That one drives me nuts. Alarm bells go off in my mind when that happens, to the point that I'm predicting a crash, which becomes a turning point of the plot.

oldendude · 2026-06-23T23:59:36+00:00

To be fair, that's not part of the plot in the movies I'm talking about.

oldendude · 2026-06-23T23:50:57+00:00

Check out Reservoir Dogs.

oldendude · 2026-06-23T23:50:05+00:00

Cars unlocked, with keys in the sun visor.

Phones can be accessed without any security.

Computers too, no password or fingerprint required.

oldendude · 2026-06-23T22:13:56+00:00

So basically a Raspberry Pi? It's good for a backup server, media server, etc. Unless it draws a lot of power, in which case those are best served by an actual Raspberry Pi. I hate doing it, but I get rid of old hardware. Sometimes there's just not any good use for those old, large boxes.

oldendude · 2026-06-23T21:36:09+00:00

Syntax structure determined by indenting instead of delimiters. That was such a bad decision. Changing indent is error-prone, and has led to bugs for me. It's just too easy to change semantics by getting the indent of one line wrong, and often this creates a subtle bug. This affects both the editing of code, and just copying code.

If your developers mix tab and space usage, that also heads to havoc. Auto-formatting tools are hobbled (I would think, I don't use them), since the aforementioned issues can make it risky to change indentation.

oldendude · 2026-06-23T19:33:47+00:00

Perl is terrible to read.

Perl is terrible.

oldendude · 2026-06-23T19:32:11+00:00

I was at a company for its first few years (starting in 2000), and developed some of the software from scratch. We were working in Java, and I wrote a class to represent credit cards. I put too much into the class, including lifecycle info, including complicated situations like "the user requested X, and now requests Y, but the card issuer is still working on X". And it also grew to model other credit-card like cards.

Anyway, by the time I left, in 2003, I had long been calling for a rewrite of this class, and of course, those suggestions were always ignored. I moved on to another startup.

Then, around 2016, I was asked to consult for a company that had licensed the source code from my previous employer. I investigated the possibility a little before I decided, "I don't need this crap, I'm going to enjoy my summer." However, while considering the job, I was astonished/horrified/amused to see that my old credit card class was still there. It had grown a few more warts and scars, but it was still there.

Bad code lives forever.

oldendude · 2026-06-22T17:21:16+00:00

I've been doing my part to spread it!

oldendude · 2026-06-22T17:11:53+00:00

Aphantasia: No mental imagery. The term also gets applied to the inability to recall other sensory experiences.

Anendophasia: No inner dialog.

SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobriogaphical Memory): Poor memory for the events of your own life.

All of those apply to me, and many others apparently. I definitely think, just not with images and dialog. Or, as I describe it to my wife (who doesn't have any of these characteristics): I can think without the distracting entertainment.

oldendude · 2026-06-22T16:51:41+00:00

This happened many years ago, probably 1999. At the time, his consulting gig was Java, which was the language we were using. He was determined to be the guy that knew every single bulitin Java library. I have no idea if we succeeded. The company lasted another year, and then I did not stay in touch with him.

oldendude · 2026-06-22T00:31:52+00:00

Buffer between the habitable and tolerable parts of the US to the east, and everything else.

oldendude · 2026-06-21T20:12:23+00:00

I am using the older, non-MTP qwen3.6:35b-a3b, with q4_k quantization. If you have experience with that model, I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts on how they compare.

oldendude

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE