[Verdex]

I mean ... sure. There's lots of people out there who have annoying personality traits that some people are going to be put off by.

In my mind, though, the difference between annoying and insufferable is whether or not you're willing to admit to being incorrect. And Jonathan Blow has gone on record to talk about his failures, flaws, and when he was definitely wrong. So while I can sympathize with people who don't enjoy him on like a personal level. I think it's objectively unfair to sink to "insufferable."

Also, I personally get a LOT of mileage just avoiding people and conversations about things that annoy me. Of course, I suppose your mileage may vary.

[cableshaft]

He's said some things I really disagree with, especially when he veers away from game design and programming and more into politics or climate change (or even somewhat when it comes to web development), but he still has a lot of interesting thoughts and I think he's well worth listening to on the whole.

I've listened to him far more than probably any other game designer or programmer at this point, probably well over 100 hours worth. Attended a couple of his talks in person at GDC too, many years ago (before Braid was released, he showed a brief demo of it during one of them). Didn't even know who he was, just had interesting sounding game design talks.

[fzeroracer]

'Admitting his flaws' certainly isn't the way I would describe Jonathan Blow. Even ignoring his political turns, he's had a long history of saying some outright wrong stuff on game dev, web dev etc and being insufferably rude to anyone that tells him he's wrong. I could go off on how many ways he was wrong in his talk on Software Decline [1] or his many wrong takes on Linux. All of which he's doubled down on.

[1] https://youtu.be/FeAMiBKi_EM?feature=shared

[silenced_trope]

If I recall, he attacked the guy who created home-brew or cocoa-pods (?) because the guy had failed a job interview where he was asked some algo question that he didn't know.

He then posted something like "<Company(Google?)>, where they reject you for not knowing <X> algorithm, even though they use and depend on your open source software".

I think Blow said something along the lines of "well the dumbest comp sci 101 student would know that algo, so I'm not sure what kind of coder you are?"

This is vaguely from memory ~10 years ago but is what I remember about Jon Blow too.