2026-07-22 08:45:31
The small brained, big bigoted people on this subreddit are convinced that Rotten Tomatoes is lying to you. It's not that most people liked The Odyssey, actually a ton of people hated it! It's woke! People hate it!
Their evidence isn't on the page. No, that would be too easy. You need to exercise that hacker skill of viewing page source. Then look at the raw JSON data for the audience score, and that's where you see the data THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO SEE. See, Rotten Tomatoes has verified and unverified reviews. Basically, if you bought a ticket on Fandango (who owns Rotten Tomatoes), you can review the movie in Fandango after you see it and that review contributes to the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. These reviews are labeled as "verified" since Fandango knows you bought a ticket to the movie. Meanwhile, anyone with a Rotten Tomatoes account can leave a review, whether they've seen the movie or not.
Look, I've got my beef with the audience score, but the reason they've done this is to prevent review bombing.
Getting back to the original Reddit post, they found that the verified reviews (aka people who definitely bought tickets and probably saw it) had a 97% score, but if you look only at the unverified reviews, it's actually lower (60%) at the time of writing this post. See!?
But let me break this down:
This number relies on you agreeing that you only care about 12% of all the reviews (throwing out 10,700 of the 12,200 reviews). In fact, the only reviews you don't trust are people who definitely actually watched it. Even if you count all the unverified reviews equally, the overall score is 92%, which is still pretty great. I'm not saying that every single unverified review is some bigot grinding an axe, but I am saying you need to do some real mental gymnastics to make this work.
Another notable thing in the data is how many people left a rating vs how many also wrote a review. Of the verified reviews, 13% of people also wrote a full review. Meanwhile, 70% of unverified users wrote a review. That's a pretty stark difference, and I'm just saying most people don't leave reviews generally (even a movie fanatic site like Letterboxd has about a 50% written review rate for this film), so a 70% written review rate is insanely high. Almost like it's likely people who came to the site to review bomb something…
Anyway, the movie made a quarter billion dollars in its opening weekend, people generally seem to love it, and I would sure love to stop thinking about people who find reason after reason to be made about people of color in media.
2026-07-22 07:00:00
David Chen: 'Obsession' and 'Backrooms' Are Destroying Our Assumptions About the Box Office
But both films are also directed by filmmakers who found viral fame on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, and neither film is based on legacy IP (e.g. Marvel, Star Wars, etc.). Their audiences are skewing young. The majority of ticket buyers for both films are under the age of 34, with Gen Z and younger millennials driving a ton of business. It turns out the kids will show up if you give them an experience that they can't get anywhere else.
There are a few themes I keep coming back to on this blog, and one of them is that everything is a reaction to what came before. When I was a young adult, Marvel movies were starting to begin their run, and they were a breath of fresh air from what we had previously. I know cinematic universes and superhero movies are old hat now, but they were not a thing when I was a kid, and it was extremely novel to get to experience these things in a way we never had before. However, the MCU kicked off almost 20 years ago, and they flooded the zone with huge amounts of movies and TV shows, and all of it was connected, and it eventually became exhausting.
Today's young adults grew up in that world, so it's not novel to them. It's just the way things have always been. And you know what? They're tired of it as well. Marvel can't just keep escalating the stakes of each movie they release to draw in audiences, and Hollywood is slowly figuring that out.
I don't think the lesson of Obsession and Backrooms is that low-budget horror movies are the way forward, but I do think they represent a desire from people to have original stories told in interesting ways, and if we get those, people will go to the theaters for them.
Not to bring everything back to video games, but this is part of the reason why I think that Xbox's strategy around ditching everything that's not an enormous blockbuster and leaning into just the biggest stuff is a mistake there as well. They're trying to do the Marvel thing where bigger is always better, and I don't think that's necessarily what people are looking for. Whether it's games or movies, I think studios should be investing in more smaller bets because some of them will absolutely blow up and get people excited about the mediums.
2026-07-22 04:00:00
Jason Toney: I Hate The Way We Talk Online
What I got instead were weirdly defensive or hostile replies that seemed to take my innocuous question as an invitation to debate the merits of charts including conspiracy theories about their purpose. Others merely wanted to pat themselves on the back for having edgy tastes.
100% agreed. We genuinely are not ourselves on social media.
2026-07-22 00:00:00
Ana Maria Constantin: AI advice made people three times less accurate but twice as confident, researchers found
Researchers from three French and Italian universities found that access to AI advice collapsed people’s willingness to say “ I don’t know ” from 44% to 3%. Accuracy dropped from 27% to 9%. Confidence, meanwhile, rose from 30% to 76%. “People became much worse, the accuracy was only one third, but they were twice as confident,” said Valerio Capraro, associate professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca.
I think this is an interesting study that is definitely important to recognize. AI models do acknowledge when they don't know things more than they used to, but it's undeniable that they still sometimes get things wrong. Just like how you can't trust everything you read online, you can't trust everything an LLM says either, and you need to use your human faculties to validate things.
I will also note that this study does not test how often LLMs are wrong. They specifically chose a model that would get things wrong, and they specifically chose questions they knew it would get wrong. The study was specifically about when an AI gives a wrong answer, do people trust it? From that perspective, it would be interesting to see a similar study where people are presented regular blog posts written by humans that are inaccurate, and how many people get it wrong in that case. Are we particularly susceptible to LLMs getting things wrong, or do we just trust everything we read, no matter what entity wrote it?
For what it's worth, this is why I think LLMs are such a powerful tool for coding. Yes, sometimes the coding agent gets things wrong, but that is revealed immediately when the software doesn't do what it's supposed to do.
2026-07-21 19:56:58
Kalley Huang: ‘Vibecoded’ Apps Are Flooding the App Store. Is That Good for Apple?
Last year, the number of new apps released in the App Store grew 30 percent to about 600,000, according to estimates by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. In the first half of this year, new apps doubled to about 560,000.
And only about half of those are mine!
Although, adding some more context here helps clarify the scope of this jump. 10 years ago in 2016, there were 1.1 million new iOS apps added to the App Store, or almost exactly how many apps we're on pace to release this year. Agentic coding is definitely making it so more people can release apps, but it seems like this rapid rise is actually just getting us back to where we were a decade ago so far.
2026-07-20 02:00:00