Reading/Playing/Watching, 5/5/25

Stuff I'm Reading

I'd rather read the prompt - great blog post about LLMs in a university environment. Nicely sums up a lot of my thoughts about LLM-aided writing, which is that using an LLM defeats the point! "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly." Write bad essays! That's how you learn!

Bizarro World - a 2007 essay on the competitive retro gaming scene, in which the author discovers his wife is the best Gameboy Tetris player in the world. Really wild to revisit a time before Twitch when esports weren't really a thing and competitive gaming was relegated to arcade bars and weird dives.

Why Using ChatGPT Is Not Bad For The Environment - I think we've all probably seen the viral Instagram posts about how a single ChatGPT query uses ten times as much water as a Google search or whatever. This puts that in perspective - according to the author it would take 100 ChatGPT queries a day to increase the average American's energy usage by 1%. Grain of salt, I haven't fact-checked this, but the environmental critiques of AI always felt a bit off-base to me. There's plenty to criticize there without making stuff up!

AI Hallucinations Are Getting Worse - and here's one of them! Reasoning models are hallucinating at higher rates than their predecessors and nobody can explain exactly why. My pet theory that the continued pollution of the data well (GenAI content being sucked back up into its training data) will continue making things worse isn't dead yet.

People Are Losing Loved Ones To AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies - and another one! Even before OpenAI's sycophancy mea culpa LLMs are noticeably prone to validating whatever users say to them, no matter how insane, and an increasing number of people are developing full-blown psychosis because they've got a digital hype man telling them they might actually be God. I'm sure nothing bad will come of this.

Stuff I'm Playing

The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy - this spiritual successor to Danganronpa/Zero Escape has piqued my interest. Thanks to a mix of bad marketing, high pricing, and poor release timing (it came out the same week as the Elder Scrolls remaster and Clair Obscur) this hasn't been selling well and its studio may go under, with its director saying he'll retire if the game fails. I want to support studios making absolutely insane visual novels so I went ahead and paid full price for it. I don't think I can give an honest opinion yet since I am only about 10 hours into it, and the first 30 hours are supposed to just be the prologue, but, well, it's clearly made by the Danganronpa guys. Same art style, same cringey dialogue choices, same absolutely demented whole deal. You'll love it or you'll hate it. I just have to know what a game with an alleged hundred different endings is like.

R.E.P.O. - I think this is a superior version of Lethal Company, last year's viral co-op survival horror hit. The goofy physics, sound-reactive monsters, and adorable little flappy-headed robots all make for a delightful experience. I have spent most of my time playing this game dead but it's a fun way to hang with your friends without leaving your house.

Stuff I'm Watching

Bacurau - rewatched this at Nitehawk last week and it's still in my top five from the last decade. Just a movie that never really does what I expect it to at any turn, a different way of telling stories from what I'm used to. This time I really enjoyed thinking about how it focuses on relationships between characters rather than backstory or really having any particular hero's journey. Pacote I guess comes the closest but he deserves it.