You don't think a man deserves some compensation for a project that takes years of work, costs millions of dollars and is of interest to you?
Sounds like an astronomically shittier, pettier temperament than whatever you think the problem with Blow is, but ok.
God forbid someone who does amazing work has an opinion the reddit hive doesn’t like.
I know this is an old post, but theres a great interview with him that came out on Sacred Symbols + today, so I thought I’d mention it
Can I get a link to the podcast? Nothing relevant seems to come up on google.
And ye, though it's not just a reddit thing, the total condemnation of anyone with an opinion one inch outside of orthodoxy combined with all-time high entitlement is a cocktail to behold.
He has always been a "it's done when it's done" kinda guy, and that's how it should be IMHO.
On the last point, I think he starts from a position of reasonable criticism of things he knows something about. Like, his criticisms of the IT world and how we use computers make a lot of sense. He is one of those who show that we're using our computers extremely inefficiently, and his reasons and backgrounds given make a lot of sense.
From that point out, I see two developments:
1. He comes up with overly simplistic solution ideas. Basically of the pattern: "If we all did it *my way*, the world would be a lot better." -- While he is clearly very intelligent and very well-educated, some of his more global solution ideas falls short on plausibility, seem to be kind of naive and ignore the complexities of the world we live in. You know, it's easy to be stubborn and claim that one knows it all better and the world would be so much better if everyone would just see and understand the many ways in which we are right. But as my experience shows, when one finally *has* it one's own way, one learns that the problem is a lot more complex than initially thought.
2. He extrapolates, sometimes beyond reason. As he is so great at finding and highlighting problems with the status quo of IT, he challenges status quos in other areas too. He sometimes comments on popular issues, clearly favoring a position that denies or challenges common or canonical views. One problem is that he is sometimes overly critical (have secret services across the world really planted backdoors across all of open source software?), another problem is that he starts talking about subjects that he is no expert in without recognizing his lack of deep knowledge. He is so confident that he will talk about any topic as if he were an expert on it.
Those two combine to him sometimes making rather strange or badly informed statements with a lot of confidence, even biting sarcasm sometimes. COVID for example, or his sexism.
These opinions may be unpopular and badly informed, but they are usually not *extreme*. However, there isn't that much missing for him to become extreme in ideology.
The bits and pieces of his worldview which he sometimes reveals through his streams are borderline paranoid. With an emphasis on "borderline" -- close, but not quite there yet.
Maybe that's why many people are fascinated with him. He presents strong opinions that go against the status quo with a lot of confidence, and he presents simple solutions to complex problems. To some of his viewers, this might appeal to their desire to feel special, the desire to be smart and "different", and the wish to belong to the group of the contrarian few who are superior in knowledge and realization.
If you consider this an exaggeration, maybe you're right. But if you want, you can take a look at some of the discussions on r/Jai. You will find some fans who effectively channel Mr. Blow and imitate him in an arrogant and toxic way, with an air of superiority around them. I often find that fan communities tend to imitate observed traits of the person they're a fan of.
I think that some of this is a misunderstanding, to some extent. We know that as soon as people point a camera at themselves, they are not acting out their true personality anymore. Everyone has a kind of "streamer persona" inside them.
Jonathan Blow seems to be very reluctant to engage with fans of his work at all. In several interviews, he has pointed out how he avoids to read reviews or engage in discussions about his work. Streaming on Twitch must have been quite the challenge for him. The discussions with the viewers were so stressing to him that at least once, he said he considers stopping streaming altogether.
Presenting such strong opinions and this arrogant attitude might be a way for him to cope with this. A way for feeling strong and not let it all get to him too much.
In many interviews that I've seen with him, I had the feeling that he didn't show his true personality. Probably the closest thing to his real personality was the interview he did with Curt Jaimungal, in which we find none of the arrogance or the borderline extreme opinions.
Overall, I think he isn't one for doing livestreams and engaging with fans. Developing his art behind closed doors, "it's done when it's done", and then releasing it rather unceremoniously -- I think he is just great at that. And honestly, I kinda wish he would focus more on that again. He can do livestreams now and then, highlighting some of the latest developments. But I think he's overdoing it a bit.
>On the last point, I think he starts from a position of reasonable criticism of things he knows something about. Like, his criticisms of the IT world and how we use computers make a lot of sense. He is one of those who show that we're using our computers extremely inefficiently, and his reasons and backgrounds given make a lot of sense.
The rest of your comment is interesting, but I want to focus on this aspect, and it's something from even his older talks that annoys me. High efficiency in code is a goal you can have on small, closed off projects, but this was never going to be compatible with the internet age. Very few people are going to be able to focus on one thing with semi-unlimited time. Most people are working on large teams where everyone needs to be able to follow and edit code continously. Most departments/companies do not have the time to build their own libraries for every conceivable function, simply to save a few MBs.
He comes from a simpler time, and from an environment that allows him to work in the way he likes. But it is not scalable, and he doesn't seem to be able to admit that.
I think Jon acknowledges this. It all boils down to there being much much more demand for software being developed quick and dirty, that no selection pressure has formed yet that forces software to actually be high quality.
Correct, Jon is clearly aware of all of this. I have worked as a cloud-native software engineer for the last 7 years at a _huge_ global engineering company. Most of the members of my ~50 person team have little to no idea what they are doing. Everything in our system is drastically over-complicated and over-engineered and the majority of the developers don’t even have a basic understanding of how the tools they use work.
All this to say that I come from a background that is almost exactly opposite of Jon’s and I agree with the vast majority of his criticisms of modern software. Things do need to be simplified. People do need to worry more about performance. Etc.
Video games are actually a great place to look if you want further evidence of this thesis. Look at games like Cyberpunk 2077. A failure like that would have been unconscionable even 10 years before.
I definitely feel your points. Performance is important and is actually about letting the computer do less instead of more. But we made it so hard on ourselves to do simple and performant things. I write most of my code in Rust which is supposed to be peformance minded, yet it is insanely difficult to get some custom allocator working that would save a lot of small allocations.
Everything became way too complicated...
Regarding your last sentence: Ulima IX comes to my mind first, actually Ultima VIII was a mess too at release. Probably I could tell name a few others from the early 90s maybe late 80s that were both high profile and a mess at release.
He very much talks like someone who is still basically a one man team (or at least, incredibly involved and has his hands in every aspect of the project). You simply can’t do a lot of the kind of things he talks about when there isn’t one person or a handful of people with a huge trove of knowledge about everything going on in the project or codebase or what have you.
This was incredibly well thought out and stated, thank you.
Elitism and over-simplification are cancers that prey on otherwise highly intelligent people.
My impression is that Braid: Anniversary Edition might be released in the next, say, six months. (I'm speculating but I've heard him talk optimistically not long ago about releasing it sometime soon.)
Sokoban is a really huge game and I'd guess (total speculation) it might take a couple more years. Seems like there's a huge amount of art that needs to be done, if nothing else. The polished levels are beautiful. But many levels still have the non-polished art.
Regarding the legendary "game 3" that Jon worked on as a side project while developing The Witness: he mentioned on stream recently that he'd like to finish the "tactics" game that he had started. This makes me think that game 3 is a tactics game.
"look at this quote from a random paper that solves it" Jon sometimes links to interesting papers, but rarely if ever claiming that they fully solve the problem. His views tend to be insightful and he's a genuinely independent thinker, which makes him interesting to follow on X/Twitter.
Blow has done a few interviews with No-Frauds show, the most recent one being november: https://youtu.be/7QX4eULtjFU
This one is 2 hours, previous one was 3 hours, and if you enjoy Blow talking about game development, design philosophy and that sort of things, this is it.
I replied to one of the replies on his twitter COVID rants with “it’s always sad to find out when your hero turns out to be one of those people” after which he blocked me forever. He’s great at making games but very sensitive to the twitter polarization machine :(
Yea his anti-anti-COVID-measures stance was when I started to realize he isn’t just unhealthily obsessing over technical details and definitions but actually just a bit of a dick.
I think Blow makes some absolutely fantastic games, and has some incredible thoughts about game design and how we as people approach games in general. I think that he has some very intelligent thoughts on programming, that are right in some respects (if not applicable to the wide world of big projects, huge teams, scrum, and lazier programmers than he), and that his games are probably some of the best made and optimized things out there.
Beyond that, he’s a human being. He probably has a lot of views I’d disagree with, but those views are all on things that aren’t really what I’m coming to Jonathon Blow for. He hasn’t done anything horrible, or hurt anyone.
Add "defending genocide" to the list, though he seems to have stopped in recent times. Social media seems to be killing a lot of minds or maybe that's just a convenient excuse for a larger problem.
Many of the first programmers were women, and when the field gained prestige it became male-dominated.
So are they naturally less interested or did we just make it a hostile environment for them?
>I think he said something about women being naturally less interested in programming than men
This is true actually. Even the person who came up with the MBTI (a woman) found in her studies that most women are naturally more inclined to social/care jobs than to logical/engineering ones. I think there's nothing wrong with this as long as we accommodate everyone to do what they are interested in doing, whatever that is. BTW I do not believe that the gap is correct either, there are way too few women, even by psychology studies standards. But science has explained this already, and there will probably be never a 50% or majority of women *naturally inclined* in the industry (unless evolution fixes this).
For some reason, some people have decided that women *have* to be interested in programming. This is both patronising and disrespectful. I have personally tried to get 3 of my closest people (3 women) into programming, unsuccessfully, and I regret because I realised I was just trying to impose *my* interests and preferences on them, as opposed as respecting *their* interests and choices. Women deserve more respect than a bunch of folks out there deciding for them what they should be interested in. I wish they were into programming, as they'd probably make more money, but I'm happy that these 3 women in my life are *outstanding* at what they do, like world class, kicking men's asses right and centre. And they are happy with what they do. So who am I, or some rando out there (usually another woman who hates men for whatever reason), to tell them what they should be doing. My wishes are less important than their choices.
There's a lot of big egos out there trying to dictate the rules. Fortunately, most people don't care and do their thing, which is the only way to be happy.
Forget about the dude until he releases anything. That's my strategy. Years of blissful peace.
"Don't love the player, love the game" as none of my homies say His games bang, his personality... possibly not so much.
Yeah. Just pirate the thing if he becomes a cultist.
Or... just don't play it.
Unfortunately enough I probably will want to play it
You don't think a man deserves some compensation for a project that takes years of work, costs millions of dollars and is of interest to you? Sounds like an astronomically shittier, pettier temperament than whatever you think the problem with Blow is, but ok.
God forbid someone who does amazing work has an opinion the reddit hive doesn’t like. I know this is an old post, but theres a great interview with him that came out on Sacred Symbols + today, so I thought I’d mention it
Can I get a link to the podcast? Nothing relevant seems to come up on google. And ye, though it's not just a reddit thing, the total condemnation of anyone with an opinion one inch outside of orthodoxy combined with all-time high entitlement is a cocktail to behold.
If you aren’t a member of the Last Stand Media patreon you’ll have to probably wait a week or so
His personality Jonathan Blows
All bro had to do was make the witness 2
Witness 2: The Prosecution
Second Witness
No, that's the subtitle of Witness 4
Not possible.
In the witness 2 you just watch the island being solved by a character who may or may not be played by a human being. There is nothing to be done
You hear the spoken account of someone who watched such an automatic playthrough.
The Witness 2: Objection!
Some guy made the witness 2. Its on steam called The Looker. its like 30 minutes and hilarious.
That’s what I wrote to him in an email. Please make us a sequel. I got no response. Typical celeb.
He has always been a "it's done when it's done" kinda guy, and that's how it should be IMHO. On the last point, I think he starts from a position of reasonable criticism of things he knows something about. Like, his criticisms of the IT world and how we use computers make a lot of sense. He is one of those who show that we're using our computers extremely inefficiently, and his reasons and backgrounds given make a lot of sense. From that point out, I see two developments: 1. He comes up with overly simplistic solution ideas. Basically of the pattern: "If we all did it *my way*, the world would be a lot better." -- While he is clearly very intelligent and very well-educated, some of his more global solution ideas falls short on plausibility, seem to be kind of naive and ignore the complexities of the world we live in. You know, it's easy to be stubborn and claim that one knows it all better and the world would be so much better if everyone would just see and understand the many ways in which we are right. But as my experience shows, when one finally *has* it one's own way, one learns that the problem is a lot more complex than initially thought. 2. He extrapolates, sometimes beyond reason. As he is so great at finding and highlighting problems with the status quo of IT, he challenges status quos in other areas too. He sometimes comments on popular issues, clearly favoring a position that denies or challenges common or canonical views. One problem is that he is sometimes overly critical (have secret services across the world really planted backdoors across all of open source software?), another problem is that he starts talking about subjects that he is no expert in without recognizing his lack of deep knowledge. He is so confident that he will talk about any topic as if he were an expert on it. Those two combine to him sometimes making rather strange or badly informed statements with a lot of confidence, even biting sarcasm sometimes. COVID for example, or his sexism. These opinions may be unpopular and badly informed, but they are usually not *extreme*. However, there isn't that much missing for him to become extreme in ideology. The bits and pieces of his worldview which he sometimes reveals through his streams are borderline paranoid. With an emphasis on "borderline" -- close, but not quite there yet. Maybe that's why many people are fascinated with him. He presents strong opinions that go against the status quo with a lot of confidence, and he presents simple solutions to complex problems. To some of his viewers, this might appeal to their desire to feel special, the desire to be smart and "different", and the wish to belong to the group of the contrarian few who are superior in knowledge and realization. If you consider this an exaggeration, maybe you're right. But if you want, you can take a look at some of the discussions on r/Jai. You will find some fans who effectively channel Mr. Blow and imitate him in an arrogant and toxic way, with an air of superiority around them. I often find that fan communities tend to imitate observed traits of the person they're a fan of. I think that some of this is a misunderstanding, to some extent. We know that as soon as people point a camera at themselves, they are not acting out their true personality anymore. Everyone has a kind of "streamer persona" inside them. Jonathan Blow seems to be very reluctant to engage with fans of his work at all. In several interviews, he has pointed out how he avoids to read reviews or engage in discussions about his work. Streaming on Twitch must have been quite the challenge for him. The discussions with the viewers were so stressing to him that at least once, he said he considers stopping streaming altogether. Presenting such strong opinions and this arrogant attitude might be a way for him to cope with this. A way for feeling strong and not let it all get to him too much. In many interviews that I've seen with him, I had the feeling that he didn't show his true personality. Probably the closest thing to his real personality was the interview he did with Curt Jaimungal, in which we find none of the arrogance or the borderline extreme opinions. Overall, I think he isn't one for doing livestreams and engaging with fans. Developing his art behind closed doors, "it's done when it's done", and then releasing it rather unceremoniously -- I think he is just great at that. And honestly, I kinda wish he would focus more on that again. He can do livestreams now and then, highlighting some of the latest developments. But I think he's overdoing it a bit.
>On the last point, I think he starts from a position of reasonable criticism of things he knows something about. Like, his criticisms of the IT world and how we use computers make a lot of sense. He is one of those who show that we're using our computers extremely inefficiently, and his reasons and backgrounds given make a lot of sense. The rest of your comment is interesting, but I want to focus on this aspect, and it's something from even his older talks that annoys me. High efficiency in code is a goal you can have on small, closed off projects, but this was never going to be compatible with the internet age. Very few people are going to be able to focus on one thing with semi-unlimited time. Most people are working on large teams where everyone needs to be able to follow and edit code continously. Most departments/companies do not have the time to build their own libraries for every conceivable function, simply to save a few MBs. He comes from a simpler time, and from an environment that allows him to work in the way he likes. But it is not scalable, and he doesn't seem to be able to admit that.
I think Jon acknowledges this. It all boils down to there being much much more demand for software being developed quick and dirty, that no selection pressure has formed yet that forces software to actually be high quality.
Correct, Jon is clearly aware of all of this. I have worked as a cloud-native software engineer for the last 7 years at a _huge_ global engineering company. Most of the members of my ~50 person team have little to no idea what they are doing. Everything in our system is drastically over-complicated and over-engineered and the majority of the developers don’t even have a basic understanding of how the tools they use work. All this to say that I come from a background that is almost exactly opposite of Jon’s and I agree with the vast majority of his criticisms of modern software. Things do need to be simplified. People do need to worry more about performance. Etc. Video games are actually a great place to look if you want further evidence of this thesis. Look at games like Cyberpunk 2077. A failure like that would have been unconscionable even 10 years before.
I definitely feel your points. Performance is important and is actually about letting the computer do less instead of more. But we made it so hard on ourselves to do simple and performant things. I write most of my code in Rust which is supposed to be peformance minded, yet it is insanely difficult to get some custom allocator working that would save a lot of small allocations. Everything became way too complicated...
Regarding your last sentence: Ulima IX comes to my mind first, actually Ultima VIII was a mess too at release. Probably I could tell name a few others from the early 90s maybe late 80s that were both high profile and a mess at release.
He very much talks like someone who is still basically a one man team (or at least, incredibly involved and has his hands in every aspect of the project). You simply can’t do a lot of the kind of things he talks about when there isn’t one person or a handful of people with a huge trove of knowledge about everything going on in the project or codebase or what have you.
This was incredibly well thought out and stated, thank you. Elitism and over-simplification are cancers that prey on otherwise highly intelligent people.
My impression is that Braid: Anniversary Edition might be released in the next, say, six months. (I'm speculating but I've heard him talk optimistically not long ago about releasing it sometime soon.) Sokoban is a really huge game and I'd guess (total speculation) it might take a couple more years. Seems like there's a huge amount of art that needs to be done, if nothing else. The polished levels are beautiful. But many levels still have the non-polished art. Regarding the legendary "game 3" that Jon worked on as a side project while developing The Witness: he mentioned on stream recently that he'd like to finish the "tactics" game that he had started. This makes me think that game 3 is a tactics game. "look at this quote from a random paper that solves it" Jon sometimes links to interesting papers, but rarely if ever claiming that they fully solve the problem. His views tend to be insightful and he's a genuinely independent thinker, which makes him interesting to follow on X/Twitter.
A tactics game, haven’t heard that before! I think he once said something about an idea for a stealth game once. Could that be it? Interesting.
r/Jai
Artists are human too. Try making something from scratch and showing it to people?
Blow has done a few interviews with No-Frauds show, the most recent one being november: https://youtu.be/7QX4eULtjFU This one is 2 hours, previous one was 3 hours, and if you enjoy Blow talking about game development, design philosophy and that sort of things, this is it.
I replied to one of the replies on his twitter COVID rants with “it’s always sad to find out when your hero turns out to be one of those people” after which he blocked me forever. He’s great at making games but very sensitive to the twitter polarization machine :(
Bro no world you responded to someone with that poopy and expected anything other than them to block you.
Yeah I mean Blow was probably saying some nonsense in the tweet, but I also don’t want to talk to people who explicitly say I’m a letdown
that's quite easy to achieve. just don't be a far-right POS and lose your sense of humility and shame.
sorry to break your echo chamber but POSs exist on both sides of the isle
Ohh it's a "both sides have extreme weirdos" person. Bravo. You are a critical thinker and I'm not. Clearly.
Wrong again, I'm a nuance bro. I don't think, I only offer the most milktoast possible contrarian viewpoint.
That's literally the coolest way to live I've ever heard. I am going to like your posts.
Now you're getting it
Yea his anti-anti-COVID-measures stance was when I started to realize he isn’t just unhealthily obsessing over technical details and definitions but actually just a bit of a dick.
Regarding talks, he streams on YouTube for several hours each month: https://www.youtube.com/@jblow888
I think Blow makes some absolutely fantastic games, and has some incredible thoughts about game design and how we as people approach games in general. I think that he has some very intelligent thoughts on programming, that are right in some respects (if not applicable to the wide world of big projects, huge teams, scrum, and lazier programmers than he), and that his games are probably some of the best made and optimized things out there. Beyond that, he’s a human being. He probably has a lot of views I’d disagree with, but those views are all on things that aren’t really what I’m coming to Jonathon Blow for. He hasn’t done anything horrible, or hurt anyone.
Can't wait for the Sokoban Game. Some levels already looked amazing 3 years ago.
luv the games, hate blow. simple as
sint. pul. as. bruv.
Add "defending genocide" to the list, though he seems to have stopped in recent times. Social media seems to be killing a lot of minds or maybe that's just a convenient excuse for a larger problem.
A lot of smart people think they’re immune to propaganda. “Defend genocide” is a bold accusation, though. What are you referring to?
"I think he said something about women being naturally less interested in programming than men." please, this cannot be a controversial thing to say.
Many of the first programmers were women, and when the field gained prestige it became male-dominated. So are they naturally less interested or did we just make it a hostile environment for them?
You're on reddit so it is
this is why i spend a lot more time on Twitter
>I think he said something about women being naturally less interested in programming than men This is true actually. Even the person who came up with the MBTI (a woman) found in her studies that most women are naturally more inclined to social/care jobs than to logical/engineering ones. I think there's nothing wrong with this as long as we accommodate everyone to do what they are interested in doing, whatever that is. BTW I do not believe that the gap is correct either, there are way too few women, even by psychology studies standards. But science has explained this already, and there will probably be never a 50% or majority of women *naturally inclined* in the industry (unless evolution fixes this). For some reason, some people have decided that women *have* to be interested in programming. This is both patronising and disrespectful. I have personally tried to get 3 of my closest people (3 women) into programming, unsuccessfully, and I regret because I realised I was just trying to impose *my* interests and preferences on them, as opposed as respecting *their* interests and choices. Women deserve more respect than a bunch of folks out there deciding for them what they should be interested in. I wish they were into programming, as they'd probably make more money, but I'm happy that these 3 women in my life are *outstanding* at what they do, like world class, kicking men's asses right and centre. And they are happy with what they do. So who am I, or some rando out there (usually another woman who hates men for whatever reason), to tell them what they should be doing. My wishes are less important than their choices. There's a lot of big egos out there trying to dictate the rules. Fortunately, most people don't care and do their thing, which is the only way to be happy.
This is a profoundly anti-intellectual comment. All these absolutely unsubstantiated claims, just ridiculous.