Kurt Pankau Dot Com

⚙️ "You are technically correct, the best kind of correct..." Today I ran across an article from tech blogger Dan Luu about "The Benchmark-pocalypse." Luu had experimented with an LLM-generated regex engine and tested it against Rebar, a comprehensive benchmark suite. The engine out-performed the top scorer by 40%! Only, it didn't actually do that. When he applied the same regex engine to a different benchmark suite, he found that it was on average 4x slower , and that was on the benchmarks it was actually able to complete. The LLM had gamed the numbers because it knew what benchmarking suite it was going to be compared to. In fact, Luu had gone so far as to instruct the LLM not  to overfit its data to that suite... but it did it anyway. LLMs are statistical inference engines with an optimization loop. Whether you intend to or not, they will  tailor their output to maximize their optimization, which means they will  game the system if only because gaming metric...

⚡ You're burnin' up the quarter mile... It's that time of year once again where Kurt spends an inordinate amount of time at a conference playing board games. There were some new titles, some returning favorites, and a whoooooooole lot of people. This year, instead of trying to play everything that looked interesting to me, I went a little deeper on fewer titles. I would have loved to try out some of the heavier games, but while I had the desire, I had not the mental fortitude to learn the rules ahead of time. Alas. Better luck next year. The themes for this year seemed to be trains, trains, tableau-builders, and more trains. Seriously, there were I think six different train games here, including Ticket to Ride  and two that just started with the word Railroad . Anyway, without further ado, here are the new-to-me titles that I played at Geekway To The West 2026! Lightning Train This the was the first game I played, it was easily my favorite of the con, and I won a copy in th...

😈 Watch Out Boy, She'll Chew You Up... Last week I had occasion to watch the new  Predator: Badlands  and I gotta say... it did not work for me. I'm not saying it's a bad film, just that I didn't care for it. I watched it at the insistence of my wife, who had already seen it and was itching to watch it again. She thoroughly enjoyed it. And she usually has a pretty good barometer for how much I'm going to like a movie, too. But this one was a miss, and it was a miss for reasons that I can very clearly point to. I know exactly  what I didn't like about this movie. For one thing, it barely feels like part of the franchise. They didn't bring back Martin Sheen or Sissy Spacek, there was no mention of the murders, not even a stylistic nod to Terrence Malick and... hold on, I'm being told that this is actually a Predator  sequel, not a Badlands  sequel. Recalibrating... Anyway, I felt like talking about what I thought didn't work, because it comes down to ...

🗡️ Gone Are The Dark Clouds That Had Me Blind... Over the weekend I decided to give  Final Fantasy VII  another chance. Specifically, I was trying out the demo for the Switch 2 version of Final Fantasy VII Remake: Intergrade , the updated version of the first part of the remake of a now thirty-year-old RPG that still looms enormous in the genre discourse. I'd actually put off starting it until I finished up Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment , because I figured that once I started I was just going to want to buy the full game and start playing. So on Saturday I played all the way through the demo, and... And then I decided to play Octopath Traveler  instead. Yeah, I bounced off of FF7R:I  pretty hard. The updated graphics look nice, and the voice acting is solid, but it still didn't work for me. The world of Midgar has been reimagined to look more contemporary, which just makes the main cast stand out, as their character designs have not changed all that much asid...

🦸 I! Am! That! Hero! Heads up, this post is about tabletop gaming and programming. It's gonna get hella nerdy up in here. You have been warned. Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition  is my favorite tabletop game, full-stop, no qualifiers. I routinely played it two or three nights a week, sometimes two or three times in a single night. It's a game with high replayability because there's a lot of variability in set up. It involves selecting five-to-seven decks of cards and some associated character cards, and there is a large pool to choose from. At present (in the latest edition of the game and its expansions) there are twenty-four hero decks, with three-to-four character variants each; twenty-four villain decks, with two character variants each; and sixteen environment decks. One villain plus one environment plus three-to-five heroes makes for a lot of options that need to be worked through any time you sit down to play. You can easily spend more time making deci...

🎲 It Just Takes a Little Bit of This, a Little Bit of That... This last weekend was Geekway Mini, one of the board game conventions I attend every year in which I hang out with friends and play a bunch of new games. The main draw is the Play-and-Win event, in which you try out new games and get registered for a chance to win a copy. There were quite a few heavier games this year, and several popular games that were quite cozy. On the whole it was a very chill con. Anyway, here's what I played! Star Wars: Battle of Hoth I knew I was going to have to play this one because it's exactly the sort of thing my 14-year-old would love. I was a little wary because I don't really get into these kinds of dice-based tactical combat games and because IP-based games can be very hit-or-miss, but I was pleasantly surprised. There's a decent amount of depth of gameplay here, including 17 different scenarios and 4 different campaigns. The units are interesting and the gameplay is pretty ...