LSD: Dream Emulator must also rank up there, surely? :)

Gorogoa has been on my “pile of shame” for several years now. Perhaps today’s the day.

The morality system was a huge disappointment for me. You said most of what I wanted to say, so I’ll be brief.

Right near the start of the game, an NPC outlines the Way of the Open Palm vs. the Way of the Closed Fist, more or less the same way you described them. And I was so excited to see a morality system in which both sides were morally defensible positions. But from the very first Closed Fist follower you meet (just minutes later), they may as well all be monacle-wearing moustache-twirlers who punctuate every sentence with “mwah-ha-ha!”

The worst example that I remember is a bootlegger who’s essentially holding a town hostage. Far from following either philosophy as described, he’s just plain evil, and in fact I easily came up with (IMO solid) arguments for actually swapping the game’s morality labels on the player’s options. But no, one option is clearly “evil”, so that’s Closed Palm, while the other is obviously “good”, hence Open Palm.

Whoops! When I looked at the second time that the shift value is calculated, I wondered if it would be inverted from the first time, but for some reason I decided that it wouldn’t be. But looking at it again it’s clear now that (1 - i) = (-i + 1) = ((~i + 1) + 1), making bit 0 the inverse. Then I wondered why there wasn’t more corruption and realized that the author’s compiler must perform postfix increments and decrements immediately after the variable is used, so the initial shift is also inverted. That’s why the character pairs are flipped, but they still decode correctly otherwise. I hope this version works better:

long main () {
    char output;
    unsigned char shift;
    long temp;
    
    if (i < 152) {
        shift = (~i & 1) * 7;
        temp = b[i >> 1] >> shift;
        i++;
        output = (char)(64 & temp);
        output += (char)((n >> (temp & 63)) & main());
        printf("%c", output);
    }

    return 63;
}

EDIT: I just got a chance to compile it and it does work.

I first learned about Java in the late 90s and it sounded fantastic. “Write once, run anywhere!” Great!

After I got past “Hello world!” and other simple text output tutorials, things took a turn for the worse. It seemed like if you wanted to do just about anything beyond producing text output with compile-time data (e.g. graphics, sound, file access), you needed to figure out what platform and which edition/version of Java your program was being run on, so you could import the right libraries and call the right functions with the right parameters. I guess that technically this was still “write once, run anywhere”.

After that, I learned just enough Java to squeak past a university project that required it, then promptly forgot all of it.

I feel like Sun was trying to hit multiple moving targets at the same time, and failing to land a solid hit on any of them. They were laser-focused on portable binaries, but without standardized storage or multimedia APIs at a time when even low-powered devices were starting to come with those capabilities. I presume that things are better now, but I’ve never been tempted to have another look. Even just trying to get my machines set up to run other people’s Java programs has been enough to keep me away.

I don’t know if this will work or even compile, but I feel like I’m pretty close.

long main () {
    char output;
    unsigned char shift;
    long temp;
    
    if (i < 152) {
        shift = (i & 1) * 7;
        temp = b[i >> 1] >> shift;
        i++;
        output = (char)(64 & temp);
        output += (char)((n >> (temp & 63)) & main());
        printf("%c", output);
    }

    return 63;
}

It’s not a really big thing, but it is a pet peeve of mine (and some others); the name of the series isn’t “Dues Ex” but “Deus Ex” (day-us ex), as in “deus ex machina” (day-us ex mack-in-a).

“Deus ex machina” literally translates as “God from (the) machine”, and originally referred to a type of stage prop used in ancient plays, then in more modern times the term came to refer more generally to the sort of plot device that used that prop, which is a previously unmentioned person or thing that suddenly appears to save the heroes from an otherwise inescapable threat. At some time in the 60s or 70s it started to become popular to use it in a more literal sense in sci-fi stories about machine intelligence or cyborgs.

Maybe, but it’s gonna be more like SkyNet with electrolytes; it’s what terminators crave.

This genie must’ve read or watched Brewster’s Millions.

I saw it at the cinema and vaguely remember enjoying it well enough. It’s not a great movie, but it’s not awful, either. I didn’t know that it was supposed to be terrible; it looks like reviewers gave it a slightly better than average score.

I don’t expect ever to watch it a second time, if that helps.

That’s still newer than any of my daily-use laptops that are all running full-featured Linux distros just fine. I got 'em all cheap secondhand, and just pumped up the RAM (12-16GB) and installed SSDs.

Did you read all the way to the end of the article? I did.

At the very bottom of the piece, I found that the author had already expressed what I wanted to say quite well:

In my humble opinion, here’s the key takeaway: just write your own fucking constructors! You see all that nonsense? Almost completely avoidable if you had just written your own fucking constructors. Don’t let the compiler figure it out for you. You’re the one in control here.

The joke here isn’t C++. The joke is people who expect C++ to be as warm, fuzzy, and forgiving as JavaScript.

Yeah, I’m sure that almost all of us have felt this way at one time or another. But the thing is, every team behind every moronic, bone-headed interface “update” that you’ve ever hated also sees themselves in the programmer’s position in this meme.

When I go to that URL on a stock, direct FF install, I still see that notice.

Since you seem earnest, probably play_my_game or possibly gamedev.

I reserve further comments until I know whether you posted this in this community: a) deliberately but seriously, b) deliberately and sarcastically, or c) by accident.

I think I can appreciate where you’re coming from, but in the context of the article it was legitimately necessary to address the topic somehow; it’s not like it was written apropos of nothing as a commentary on transsexuality. As a CIS person, I also have a “percieved gender” with which I identify.

Would “post-transition gender” be a more sensitive term, or less?

Any time I need to learn something about JS, I go to W3Schools to wrap my head around the basics, then over to MDN for current best practice.

Let me know if you find one that uses AI to find groupings of my search terms in its catalogues instead of using AI to reduce my search to the nearest common searches made by others, over some arbitrary popularity threshold.

Theoretical search: “slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie”
Expected results in 2010: Pages about people slipping on banana peels, mostly in comedy movies, mostly from the 80s.
Expected results in 2024: More than I ever wanted to know about buying bananas online, the health impacts of eating too many or not enough bananas, and whatever “celebrities” have recently said something about them. Nothing about movies from the 80s.

That was my first take as well, coming back to C++ in recent years after a long hiatus. But once I really got into it I realized that those pointer types still exist (conceptually) in C, but they’re undeclared and mostly unmanaged by the compiler. The little bit of automagic management that does happen is hidden from the programmer.

I feel like most of the complex overhead in modern C++ is actually just explaining in extra detail about what you think is happening. Where a C compiler would make your code work in any way possible, which may or may not be what you intended, a C++ compiler will kick out errors and let you know where you got it wrong. I think it may be a bit like JavaScript vs TypeScript: the issues were always there, we just introduced mechanisms to point them out.

You’re also mostly free to use those C-style pointers in C++. It’s just generally considered bad practice.

Every time I see yet another obscure game/platform article or video, I realise that I’ve once again forgotten how little most people delve into the history of their creative media. I’m teaching myself about Soviet clones and niche Japanese systems that came out before I was born, and some 20-something self-proclaimed video game historian is releasing a video titled “The most obscure game that NO-ONE remembers” and it’s about Legacy of Kain or Space Quest or Sly Cooper or some other million-selling franchise that just hasn’t had a new release in the last 5-10 years.

I’m waiting for these guys to get old enough to start seeing “world’s most obscure game” videos about Minecraft and Fortnite.

AIX is pretty obscure as a gaming platform, though, I’ll give you that.