What I mean is like, what do you think is unironically awesome, even if people now think its cringe or stupid?
Cats. I used to be a dog person until I rescued this little red oxytocin potato.
awwww that sounds adorable
Charlie Kirk getting fucking holed
They had the actual footage was on YouTube. Well it was this afternoon at least.
Will this be the new “Hey man, nice shot”?
If he’s so pro life, why is he dead?
If he was anti-vax why did get a shot?
Brave and contrary.
Literally just got banned from the red place for saying “lol, I don’t give a fuck” for promoting or threatening violence.
Rings of Power
While it is not perfect, a lot of criticism of the show is insane or plain dishonest. It became a playing ground for shit stirring and easy rage bait.
Death Stranding
The worst game I ever loved. Yes, the story and dialogue gets weird towards the end. Yes, Kojima keeps over explaining everything almost pathologically. Yes, I only played the Directors Cut, which I have been told reworked most of the game into a better state. And yes, I got PTSD from getting called after every single mission. But if you keep driving vehicles into terrain that obviously isn’t suited to be driven on, or otherwise try to bend the gameplay to your liking instead of accepting how it is supposed to be played, maybe you should play something else.
I agree, Rings of Power is great! As someone who has read and watched LotR, but not the Silmarillion, I found it a nice step into the lore. I found a lot of it matches up decently with the appendices of LotR, even if the timeline isn’t accurate.
It took me a while, but I ended up really enjoying Death Stranding. One of the things that made it click for me was that I watched a video essay on a different game that used the playwright Bertholt Brecht’s V-effect as an analytical frame.
My rough understanding of it is that Brecht wanted to break the fourth wall and prevent audiences from identifying too heavily with characters, enabling them to better engage with the themes of the play; for example, if audiences end up identifying with a character who is a relatable asshole, then they might be less inclined to critically understand this character and the systems that facilitate their assholery.
Death Stranding invokes this with its absurd characters and setting. I never stopped finding it jarring when you have such silly character names and plots. This meant that for my first few hours of playing, I felt like I didn’t “get it”, and it seems like this is a fairly common reaction. However, this sense of “I don’t get it” is interesting because of how it primes you to search for something to get — some larger point that Kojima is trying to make with the game. If nothing else, I appreciate games and other media that have something to say, even if I struggle to grasp that message.
If I had to distill things down, I think the most prominent theme I understood was “Play is an essential component of human wellness, and it has tremendous capacity to facilitate building human connection”. I enjoyed how this was explored narratively through Sam’s interactions with various characters, but also through ludic means via the player interacting with other player build structures (I really enjoyed getting so many thumbs up for all the roads I built). Death Stranding sometimes feels pretentious, but I remember thinking “what’s more pretentious: the game that’s trying (and possibly failing, depending on perspective) hard to say something larger, or the player who regards the game with disdain”. Ultimately, I feel that the potential pretentiousness is neutralised by how earnest it is. Yes, it’s a very silly game, but that’s sort of the point.
Regarding Rings of Power, I absolutely hated the show, which sounds like a stronger opinion than what you hold. However, I completely agree that the discourse around the show is a trash fire of bad faith criticism that makes it impossible to express legitimate dislike of the show that’s based in honesty.
Hell I like when I’m struggling to get exactly what media is telling me. I remember reading When Women Were Dragons and spending so much of the book trying to figure out what the dragons were a metaphor for as the book dripped with social commentary before
Tap for spoiler
Coming to the conclusion that the dragons weren’t a direct metaphor, just another axis of oppression struggled with in mid century Wisconsin.
And I love the book for that. It challenged me to think in metaphor and meaning and to analyze history.
I love how some people criticize Kojima for beating you over the head with unsubtle themes, but then the other half of people are like “this game made no sense so I deliver packages and then people talk about ropes a lot and why are there hands everywhere”
Edit: just adding this on, of course Kojima is trying to reach as many people as possible with his art, even those with poor media literacy. But it only just occurred to me how that in itself is so reminiscent of Sam pushing to connect people, even the ones who are remote or obstinate.
I was an early adopter of No Man’s Sky (long before the shift in public perception), and I fucking loved it back then, and love it now as well. But admitting that in public a few years back was tantamount to saying that stapling your child to a rabid badger was a great alternative to hiring a babysitter.
What is no man’s sky
A space exploration video game. It had a famously bad launch, because the director had over-promised on basically every single feature. It was massively anticipated because the director had hyped it up so much. And when it launched, players quickly discovered that many of the promised features were only half finished, or were missing entirely. The backlash was swift, but the company said they planned to keep working on the game.
And now many years later, the game is actually fairly solid, and basically meets the original promises. But at launch, it definitely didn’t.
I’ll forever be mad about it because I thought I was buying a planetary physics/ecology simulator and I got “we have Spore at home.” I don’t care that it has Minecraft in it now, it still doesn’t do the thing I cared about from the early hype.
I have a lot of respect for the Devs, as shining example of “how to recover from a mistake and make it up to your players”
Many other dev teams would have probably taken their payday and disappeared into the wind after that launch.
Dude, next time use a healthy badger and you’ll only have to deal with blowback from NMS.
I actually preferred the early days, I don’t like most of the recent updates and I haven’t played in probably a year. I can’t really explain why except now it feels too busy.
stapling your child to a rabid badger was a great alternative to hiring a babysitter.
lololololololololol
Twinkies. The perfect dessert.
I hate twinkies as they are, but if you roast them over a fire they really do become perfect. All that extra grease in the bread fries it to perfection and the cream isn’t as gross when it’s molten.
Have you had the banana cream Twinkies? Probably not as good as the OG ones, but definitely a nice treat when you come across them!
drizzle some chocolate syrup on one on a stupidly large plate and sell it in Manhattan for $38.
Saving money. I take pride in doing my research and getting the best deal instead of just stumbling into the first store I come across and paying for whatever the sales person talks me into. The latter wouldn’t even hurt me financially, it’s just a thing of principle.
This is me with travel I typically spend 2-3000 less than other couples when going to the same destination and end up in the same hotels.
Gun Control lol
Charlie Kirk would approve… Well, he would now I mean. SCNR
Too soon?
I saw someone say charlie kirk used the getting shot tactic to avoid the question.
💀💀💀
someone shot charlie kirk?
goddamn the trump admin will do ANYTHING to distract from the epstein horrors
You would be surprised with how many old timers would agree with you if they weren’t in a self enforced social isolation bubble. I’ve heard farmers at two separate gun counters completely dumb founded when they find out they don’t need to fill out any paperwork to sell a gun to a friend. And that’s just meandering around in my day to day. I can’t imagine how regularly often Atwood’s has to deal with them.
The shooter did demonstrate excellent control of that gun. Put a bullet through a carotid artery from beyond “saw it coming” distance.
Working out. Used to think it was too hard and I didn’t have time. Pushed myself, started exercising at home and it’s snowballed to protein loading, supplement taking, and lifting to failure. It’s good to feel like jelly.
I feel this comment in my bones. Now it’s weird if I don’t feel sore.
I like listening to some of the shittiest songs ever made mixed in with some of the best songs ever made, on shuffle. About 6400 songs now, extremely different genres. Digbar was my 3rd biggest artist last year lol
You should add MC Hellshit and DJ Carhouse’s “Live” (1996) to your list.
i still think Balan Wonderworld was awesome. the single button controls were refreshing after three decades of controller bloat, the suits felt like a fun evolution of the character switching from LEGO Star Wars, the game is full of weird nooks and crannies that constantly had me thinking “i can’t believe they thought of that,” and the music and art kick ass. there are definitely areas that could be improved and i think we were all hoping for something more kinetic from Sonic Team alum but it’s still ultimately one of the better AAA games in the last few years. i still don’t understand the backlash, especially after the crickets Naka’s previous and signifigantly worse game Rodea the Sky Soldier got
Gender variance. Cosmetics can be fun, and sometimes women’s clothes are just so damn comfy.
I’m a feminine woman, but damn do I love how I look and feel in a slightly butch pantsuit
Totally Spies 🥲
Idk why but I randomly thought of that show recently, when I was a kid I took a bit of guilty pleasure in watching it when it was on TV ☺️
French stuff at it’s best!
Never knew it was French, really good work! Also never realized how many episodes there were, might be worth a revisit…
Perfect for binge watching when sick 😁
I used to watch it in Arabic. Good times.
And I’m not even a girl.
Ohh people are aren’t going to like this
AI coding, “vibe coding”
AI coding, “vibe coding”
We call it ‘slopping’
No we don’t
Not everything AI generates is slop. It is only when used by commercial instances, like businesses and people who want to sell their art.
Let me guess, you frequent the “Fuck AI” sub?
Nice an actual controversial take. Im glad more people are getting into coding because of AI honestly. Anyone can code (not just a saying).
Me im impressed sometimes, but its only good for scripting languages. Start getting into compiled or anything beyond templates and it falls on its face.
Anyone can code (not just a saying).
Anyone who is willing to invest the effort in understanding program flow can code.
That was my experience a few months ago as well, but recently I’ve actually been using it almost exclusively with rust, the extra type safety and language safety features have helped a lot with the end code quality.
Claude in particular has been really impressive with compiled languages, it does take a bit more hand holding to get something workable out than with javascript or python though.
Yeah, take the enshittification out and +1.
How many corporate man hours are wasted re-inventing the wheel a bajillion times? Wouldn’t it be awesome if people could do less of that, and do more personal stuff like “make this niche program to cuz I want to, and share it,” or “make a game as a passion project” because the bar to entry isn’t an expensive CS education?
How many corporate man hours are wasted re-inventing the wheel a bajillion times? Wouldn’t
Honestly, very little. Unless you’re in a “not designed here” environment. There’s a lot of open source applications/libraries out there that can be added to your project to get what you need.
But I do agree, vibe coding can be great as long as it’s just for one off small projects. Need to do a quick computation or a quick POC and don’t want to spend the time setting everything up? Great!
But if you want to build an application that’s used by 1000 or even millions and receives regular updates? Please follow best practices / design patterns, etc… otherwise you’ll be rewiring the entire codebase every time you want to add a new feature.
I dunno, my experience is teams of people grinding away designing systems that are likely 95% the same as what several other companies already constructed, if not hundreds. It’s great if they use (much less contribute to) some open library for the functionality, so the wheel doesn’t get re-invented, but how often is that the case?
Of course one doesn’t want to distribute slop. I’m talking more theoretical, especially if more formal code verification becomes standard.
Mind you, a lot of this reimplementation is because those 1000 other implementations that came before all haven’t had their source code released to the public. No amount of vibecoding is going to help there because those LLMs were never trained on code that was never publicly released.
They’re trained on plenty that’s similar enough, as long as its Python or something in the dataset.
It’s also been shown that LLMs are good at ‘abstracting’ languages to another, like training on (as an example) Chinese martial arts storytelling and translating that ability to english, despite having not seen a single english character in the finetune. That specific example I’m thinking of is:
https://huggingface.co/TriadParty/Deepsword-34B-Base
Same with code. If you’re, say, working with a language it doesn’t know well, you can finetune it on a relatively small subset, combine with with a framework to verify it, and get good results, like with this:
https://huggingface.co/cognition-ai/Kevin-32B
Someone did this with GDScript too (the Godot Game Engine scripting language, fairly obscure), but I can’t find it atm.
Not that they can be trusted for whole implementations or anything, but for banging out tedious blocks? Oh yeah. Especially if its something local/open one can tailor, and not a corporate API.
Auto-writing boilerplate code doesn’t change the fact that you still have to reimplement the business logic, which is what we’re talking about. If you want to address the “reinventing the wheel” problem, LLMs would have to be able to spit out complete architectures for concrete problems.
Nobody complains about reinventing the wheel on problems like “how do I test a method”, they’re complaining about reinventing the wheel on problems like “how can I refinance loans across multiple countries in the SEPA area while being in accord with all relevant laws”.
Vibe coding has a niche, which is people who can read, understand, and debug code, but can’t remember the syntax or can’t be arsed to write everything manually. It’s good for blocking in right now, basically, and that’s an entirely valid use of the technology
Yeah, vibe coding is fantastic for “I want to give this input {a}, have it do {function}, and return result {z}” types of code.
The issue is that being able to articulate that to an AI already basically requires you to think like a programmer. And many of the people getting into vibe coding don’t have that kind of mindset. They want to just go “give me a program that does {z}” and expect it to work.
Yes! You’ve nailed what I’ve been thinking about. The valuable parts of my work are on a whiteboard with boxes and arrows, not typing code. LLMs are great to use like an interactive reference.
Yes please.
- I’ve found ai useful as a tool especially when switching context to a different language or framework, as a quicker way to get the syntax and features, to generate a first approximation. It works and saves time
- vibe coding is a horrendous waste of my time doing code reviews. Don’t people look at the slop their tool generates and try to refine it? Why is it ok to waste my time like this?
Edit: just did yet another code review generated with “vibe coding” and there is so much slop that will create maintainability issues in the future - did everyone forget the truism that code is much more expensive to maintain than to create? So much duplicated code, misleading names, useless and excessive tests, hard-coded strings duplicated, etc. …… and I found an entire generated function very close to identical to one the same guy already created
The parallels with the Dotcom bust continue. Dreamweaver would barf up copious amounts of horrendous HTML that we would get paid decent amounts to clean up. A huge waste, really, but we have forgotten the lesson.
Silent Hill: Homecoming was the first thing to come to mind.
It’s the only one I’ve really played and I thought it was great. I can understand how the Silent Hill community doesn’t like it, but I also believe they’re blowing their criticisms out of proportion to fit in with immature tantrum throwers.
I saw this tread when it was just posted and I remember thinking “there is no way this is going to be still relevant tomorrow”
welllll you are right lol
