palordrolap

Old school gamer here. Headline should definitely say Quake II.

There might not seem to be much difference to a casual observer, but from that standpoint there's not much difference between either and any other FPS. Even Minecraft to some extent.

Speaking of which, the Minecraft equivalent to this had all the same problems outlined in other comments here. Interesting as a proof of concept, but there are almost certainly better ways of using AI.

Package version 0.01: Built with libraries abc version 2, def version 0.1 and ghi version 7.2.2

Your system has requirements: abc version 2, def version 0.2 and ghi version 8.0.0

Package version 0.02: Requires abc version 3, def version 0.2 and ghi version 8.0.1

You realise that those differences in version would mean that you would have to basically recompile (then debug and recompile) your entire operating system with the three upgraded packages, and deal with a full cascade of dependencies, not just the package you really want to compile, OR basically sit down and rewrite Package 0.02 from the ground up using older libraries than it was originally written for.

You decide to make do with the old version of the package.

If endl is a function call and/or macro that magically knows the right line ending for whatever ultimately stores or reads the output stream, then, ugly though it is, endl is the right thing to use.

If a language or compiler automatically "do(es) the right thing" with \n as well, then check your local style guide. Is this your code? Do what you will. Is this for your company? Better to check what's acceptable.

If you want to guarantee a Unix line ending use \012 instead. Or \cJ if your language is sufficiently warped.

Do you remember the push to get everyone to sign up to YouTube with their real names and abandon pseudonyms when Google Plus was a thing?

They pulled the same trick there too. They'd pop up a box that said something like "Do you want to migrate your account to your real name now?" and if you said no, they said "OK, we'll ask again later.", which was inevitably in a couple of days.

No option to say "never ask me again" because that would be against what they wanted. I changed my then-main account to a name-like pseudonym just to get them to stop asking. Thankfully their algorithms that checked whether a name might be legit or not didn't catch on that it wasn't real.

As for why they do this, innovation for innovation's sake is to prove they're doing something and so the stakeholders think that value is being created and don't pull their investments. Also, the more you watch, the better the profile about you is that they can then sell to advertisers, especially if your account's under a real name.

If it was legal to install tracking devices in people's behinds, Google would be a top manufacturer of them.

Sounds like you have some aspect of synaesthesia, but there's no way to be completely sure about that. Numbers usually come with attached context, which may even be specific to the individual, and can affect how people feel about them whether they have crossed senses or not.

As for me, uh. I like numbers, but I think if I had any feelings about specific ones, practical concerns have long since overridden any of that, so my feelings can't have been that strong in the first place.

Practical concerns like a preferred number being too quiet or too loud on a volume setting, for example, which people often cite as having to be on certain values with certain properties. Likewise, temperature settings, where that's even possible to control in the first place.

I see I've forgotten to put on my head net today. You know the one. Looks like a volleyball net. C shape. Attaches at the back. Catches things that go woosh.

Those "almost completely forgotten" characters were important when ASCII was invented, and a lot of that data is still around in some form or another. There's also that, since they're there, they're still available for the use for which they were designed. You can be sure that someone would want to re-invent them if they weren't already there.

Some operating systems did assign symbols to those characters anyway. MS-DOS being notable for this. Other standards also had code pages where different languages had different meanings for the byte ranges beyond ASCII. One language might have "é" in one place and another language in another. This caused problems.

Unicode is an extension of ASCII that covers all bases and has all the necessary symbols in fixed places.

That languages X, Y and Z don't happen to have their alphabets in contiguous runs because they're extended Latin is a problem, but not something that much can be done about.

It's understandable that anyone would want their alphabet to be the base language, but one has to be or you end up in code page hell again. English happened to get there first.

If you want a fun exercise (for various interpretations of "fun"), design your own standard. Do you put the digits 0-9 as code points 0-9 or do you start with your preferred alphabet there? What about upper and lower case? Which goes first? Where do you put Chinese?

It's a "joke" because it comes from an era when memory was at a premium and, for better or worse, the English-speaking world was at the forefront of technology.

The fact that English has an alphabet of length just shy of a power of two probably helped spur on technological advancement that would have otherwise quickly been bogged down in trying to represent all the necessary glyphs and squeeze them into available RAM.

... Or ROM for that matter. In the ROM, you'd need bit patterns or vector lists that describe each and every character and that's necessarily an order of magnitude bigger than what's needed to store a value per glyph. ROM is an order of magnitude cheaper, but those two orders of magnitude basically cancel out and you have a ROM that costs as much to make as the RAM.

And when you look at ASCII's contemporary EBCDIC, you'll realise what a marvel ASCII is by comparison. Things could have been much, much worse.

Flag Admiral Stabby earned that knife.

If you have a grasp on distance rather than speed, you could figure out how quickly that speed would get you across that distance, assuming straight-line travel.

Let's say I live 10km from a relative (about 6 miles) and I know it takes them about 20 minutes to get here when the road's clear, that means I know they're doing about 30km/h (18.6mph) on average to get here. Pretty standard for urban driving. At an average speed of 300km/h that journey would take 2 minutes.

Equivalently, a 2 minute journey now takes 12 seconds. This ignores the fact that there'd have to be one heck of an acceleration and deceleration at either end to get that average, but nonetheless, 300km/h is scary speed.

Or to put it another way, one accidental twitch of the steering wheel at that sort of speed and even the best downforce in the world isn't going to stop you turning into a break-neck, sideways, tumbling disaster.

You could watch car disaster videos online if that helps. Or if you don't like the idea of potentially watching people die, seek out people playing sandbox games like BeamNG where they set up horrifying scenarios, but no-one gets hurt.

As long as it's free-range, organic, low cannabinoid hemp, I can get with this, man. Most stoners will be too stoned to notice it's the clean-livin' hippie kind of hemp, and hey, it'll be great for the environment too.

I bet it works great with my SATA mulch bin.

Somewhat ironically, it was about 10 years ago that I had to quit, and that was because of my mental health.

In my case, I'm a vanilla cis-het male, but if you go out along that other axis, the one that's neurodivergence, well, that's where years of trying to get by in a world heavily geared to neurotypicals finally took its toll and my brain just couldn't take it any more.