I think this is a basic “being an adult” skill to be honest.
We all know those friends that you can’t criticize because they’ll take it poorly.
Readit Newsjackero commented on All managers make mistakes; good managers acknowledge and repair terriblesoftware.org/2025... · Posted by u/matheusml
jackero commented on A statistical analysis of Rotten Tomatoes statsignificant.com/p/is-... · Posted by u/m463
The last comedy that I saw that matches your description is American Fiction. It didn’t feature too many laugh out loud moments, but it was thought provoking and well done. And yet, 93% from critics and 95% from audiences.
I wonder if audiences can appreciate these movies more than you give them credit for?
Let’s try a few more
- Death of Stalin (94%, 79%) has the pattern you’ve predicted.
- O Brother Where Art Thou? (78%, 89%) has the opposite of the pattern.
- Grand Budapest Hotel (92%, 87%) was appreciated by both, like American Fiction.
I’m just not seeing a pattern here. Looking at comedies that fit your description the critics and audience scores don’t follow a predictable 95%, 70% pattern.
A few things:
- Ratings are very personal. I find some movies funny but others don’t.
- There’s more factors involved but there’s no point mentioning them because the movies I like are not the movies you might like. Everyone has to find their own multi-dimension multi-axis criteria.
- And lastly, to repeat what someone else said — I see RT scores as a tool, not a verdict. It just has to be accurate enough where I consistently can pick movies I will enjoy.
jackero commented on A statistical analysis of Rotten Tomatoes statsignificant.com/p/is-... · Posted by u/m463
Please list a few more insights like this for picking good movies, thanks!
Additionally, I think someone could build an interesting RT browser based on these kinds of insights.
Here is a long ass post with some more but they come with a huge disclaimer — they are VERY personal opinions:
If you care a lot about plot and hate holes, go for critic >70%. 60-69% is passable but only if you like the subject/genre of the movie.
Very personal opinion — I find any movie with critic <50% completely unwatchable. I literally want to walk out of the theater. This includes nearly every modern horror movie because characters in horror movies always do dumb things. I know that’s the appeal but I hate it.
The extremely rare horror movie with >85% critic probably won’t be scary but these are personally the only horrors I enjoy (e.g. The Cabin in the Woods).
Movies with audience scores below 60% are hard watches.
>90% critic movies are really well done as in they did their homework. Left no stone unturned. It doesn’t mean that it’s an objectively good or memorable movie (use IMDB scores for that).
If you like experimental movies and/or are you’re into filmmaking, go for >90% critic and 65-85% audience for gems. If you’re not, you will HATE these movies.
But watch out — sometimes if you come an across a movie with high critic and low audience, it’s a movie really for people in the movie industry. You have to read the synopsis to figure out which case it is. See Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Superhero movies and fandom movies (e.g. LOTR) need extra consideration. If they didn’t follow source material, audience scores seem to be even lower than if it was original content. On the other hand, it also goes the other way.
If you’re a deep cut kind of person, check to make sure that the movie has a high enough rating count. Scores for less well-known movies are less accurate.
Old movies, especially those older than the 70s-80s, are harder to judge on RT. There seems to be a self-selection bias of people who are only rating those movies because they remembered liking them. But at the same time, they were also more revolutionary for their time (to be fair to the movie).
All of these tips are for movies. I watch few TV shows and don’t have insight into that side of RT.
jackero commented on A statistical analysis of Rotten Tomatoes statsignificant.com/p/is-... · Posted by u/m463
I often enjoy movies that are unexpected and don't fit neatly into one established genre, but I think these tend to get lower audience ratings, while films that deliver to expectations do better, even if most of a randomly selected audience would dislike them.
If a movie is a comedy, with a poster with big red letters and a white background, people know it's a certain kind of movie, and mostly those who enjoy those movies will go see it.
Likewise with documentaries about some niche interest - those who watch it mostly sought it out because they're into that.
Same. I’m big into filmmaking and arthouse films. But other times I may just want something simple.
Using RT’s two-axis score distribution helps narrow down movies.
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jackero commented on A statistical analysis of Rotten Tomatoes statsignificant.com/p/is-... · Posted by u/m463
I find RT scores very accurate but not the raw score.
What I mean is that a 70% score is meaningless to me. I need to know the movie genre, the audience score, the age of the movie and then I basically do a “lookup table” in my head. And I have that lookup table because I’ve looked up every movie I’ve watched on RT for 15 years so I know how the scores correlate to my own personal opinions.
As an example: the author said that critic scores should align with audience scores but no that’s not true at all. Critics tend to care more about plot continuity, plot depth and details while the audience tends to care about enjoyability. Both are important to me so I always look at both scores. That’s why a lot of very funny comedies have a 60-69% critic score but a 90%-100% audience score — because it’s hilarious but the plot makes no fucking sense and has a million holes. And if you see a comedy with 95% critic but 70% audience, it will be thought-provoking and well done but don’t expect more than occasional chuckles.
jackero commented on How to stop feeling lost in tech: the wafflehouse method yacinemahdid.com/p/how-to... · Posted by u/research_pie
This is the opposite of what helped me to stop feeling lost in life. I grew up very goal oriented and executed towards those goals with focus and determination. Around when I turned 40 I realized I wasn't all that happy and I'd spent my entire life so far living for rewards that would come in the future. The problem is that those rewards didn't give sustaining satisfaction. They pass remarkably quickly when you get to them. I stopped feeling lost when I gave up trying to plan my life out and gave up setting goals. Instead I now just trust my instincts and follow what seems interesting or meaningful to me right now. This keeps me living more contentedly in the present and I still get things done.
Having said all that, I came to this realization only after ticking a whole bunch of societal and cultural expectation boxes which means I can afford to take my foot off the gas. Trusting your instincts is a much scarier proposition earlier in life, but I still think it's probably the right thing to do.
I’m not goal oriented and follow my instincts. There’s no way you could get me to write a 5 year plan for myself.
But I will never pick the fork on the road where I will probably be worse off in 5 years. I won’t take a job where I make good money but sit in a corner doing little, for example. I will regret it.
That’s basically my compromise.
jackero commented on I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file al3rez.com/todo-txt-journ... · Posted by u/al3rez
I use TickTick.
I saw the author tried it but didn’t actually write about it under “What Actually Happened With Each App”
I use TickTick over Todoist and other apps because it’s basically a .txt file dump for me, but with notifications and reoccurring tasks /shrug
jackero commented on Car has more than 1.2M km on it – and it's still going strong cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-s... · Posted by u/Sgt_Apone
Car reliability can vary so much. Some vendors have a deserved reputation for overall quality (Toyota) where issues are usually the exception (accepting the fact that issues can always happen). Others used to have terrible reputations, but are much better now (most of the Korean brands). Some have varying QA issues, depending on model, shifting suppliers, factory, etc (GM, Stellantis). Some can mostly be reliable, but when they do break it’s expensive (VW). Sometimes the car vendor is good, but the dealer you’re at can make all the difference.
That being said, you’ll always meet somebody burned by a particular vendor (or their dealer), then swear off them forever. We’re also going through a huge shift in the market with the rise of electrification and China. In some ways electric cars can me even more reliable with fewer moving parts. In other ways the software matters more and batteries replacements can be even more expensive than a new engine in a traditional car.
And model year too.
Sometimes you can link the bad years of a generally reliable vendor to a new part e.g. the first year they might have introduced a 10-speed transmission.
These first years are scary.
Some vendors don’t seem to change major parts as often, which helps their reliability.
But that universe did not happen.
Lots of "modern" tooling works around the need. For example, in a world of Docker and Kubernetes, are those standards really that important?
I would blame the adoption of containerization for the lack of interest in XML standards, but by the time containerization happened, XML had been all but abandoned.
Maybe it was the adoption of Python, whose JSON libraries are much nicer than XML. Maybe it was the fact that so few XML specs every became mainstream.
In terms of effort, there is a huge tail in XML, where you're trying to get things working, but getting little in return for that effort. XLST is supposed to be the glue that keeps it all together, but there is no "it" to keep together.
XML also does not play very nice with streaming technologies.
I suspect that eventually XML will make a comeback. Or maybe another SGML dialect. But that time is not now.
The idea behind XLST is nice — creating a stylesheet to transform raw data into presentation. The practice of using it was terrible. It was ugly, it was verbose, it was painful, it had gotchas, it made it easier for scrapers, it bound your data to your presentation more, and so on.
Most of the time I needed to generate XML to later apply a XLST style sheet, the resulting XML document was mostly a one off with no associated spec and not a serious transport document. It begged the question of why I was doing this extra work.