It says you can teleport. Doesn’t say you can take anything with you. Maybe you arrive there completely naked?

I love VtM:B but I never had high hopes for this one. Direct sequels made by unrelated developers rarely work out.

The family destruction came first. You don’t get to that level of cynical populism with a healthy family life and outlook.

I don’t even think it’s greed at this point. As far as I know, no one is making money on AI. Even NVIDIA is cooking the books by investing in AI companies and just making them use the invested money to buy graphics cards. They report those as sales but are they really sales if they gave them the money in the first place?

I think the real reason Microsoft is shoving AI down everyone’s throats is because they went all-in on AI and they’re hoping to keep the bubble going for now and somehow it will work out in the end. It’s literally a fake it until you make it strategy with zero guarantee of making it.

A lot of it I think is just driven by managers with AI FOMO. They really don’t know what AI is supposed to do but they’re hoping users will figure it out.

But that’s a specific optimization where you can no longer read the numbers left to right, the original intent of RPN.

Actually:

2 <enter> 5 <enter> 8 <enter> 5 - x +

10 keystrokes

I use RPN on my phone calculator for fun but it can also be annoying sometimes.

On my CASIO FX-260 Solar II calculator (super cheap, really nice and simple but also powerful) that would be:

2 + 5 ( 8 - 5 ) =

9 keystrokes

I really should just put a full block on lemmy.ml. Thanks for the reminder!

If you can eat well for $1 then it is definitely a poor country relative to the US. Differences in purchasing power are a direct result of differences in wealth.

I love trains but the issue with them is not money, it’s NIMBYs. China can build all the railroads they want because the government can just toss people out of their homes to build the tracks. In the west we can’t do that because of property rights etc.

Aladdin was my favourite Disney film as a kid. None of the characters are white Europeans! The villain is a real villain: someone who is evil that the heroes must defeat.

We left the leafy jungle and built a concrete one. We moved the competition indoors.

They’re clearly remoras which can attach and detach at will:

I see this a lot and GM definitely deserves a large share of the blame but we also need to look at ourselves, our culture, and the way we decided to evolve our cities.

Redlining, white flight, car-centric suburbs, HOAs, wide streets, 2-car garages, Hollywood movies like Rebel Without a Cause. The list of factors goes on and on and on.

A lot of people like to blame boomers for all our ills but I think the trend started earlier with people who were teenagers at the end of WW2. They were too young to fight in the war but they were old enough to get sucked into this brand new marketing and cultural phenomenon known as the teenager.

Prior to WW2, marketers targeted only older adults and their messaging was very practical and family-oriented. After WW2 there began a movement towards teenage independence, rebellion, and rock & roll. The centre of all this independence was the car!

Sure, though interpreters have already been written for the bytecode language that this source code compiles to. It shouldn’t be too difficult for the community to write a compiler when the back-end interpreter is already there and usable for testing.

They’re not just random examples for some people though. For some indigenous peoples these items are a foundational part of their cultural practices.

No, there’s a lot bigger difference than that. I have a modern cold climate air source heat pump. Unlike an air conditioner, it’s designed to operate continuously with a variable speed compressor and cooling fan. It’s easily capable of running for days on end during the coldest times of the year (well below freezing). It’s also capable of defrosting itself which is critical for winter operation because it’s literally cooling the air around itself way below freezing.

My previous air conditioner could not run for long cycles like that without the compressor shutting down as a protective measure. It had no ability to defrost itself and its vertical fan orientation allowed it to fill up with snow and ice during the winter, clearly making it totally inoperable until spring when the weather was warm enough to defrost it and dry it out.

They’re actually not hard to replace at all. Just look up “shower cartridge replacement” on YouTube.

How about using birds’ discarded feathers for decorations? Discarded seashells? Pearls from clams that died naturally?

You don’t have to have nostalgia for the game to appreciate how wonderfully crafted and expansive it is. It has one of the best soundtracks of any game, period, and its art is highly detailed and numerous. It has a ton of secrets (including one MAJOR secret) and a couple of extra game modes that enhance the replayability.

I would say the game seems to get better every time I play it. Is that nostalgia or something else? There are a lot of games I played before I had ever seen SOTN, yet I don’t feel the same desire to keep replaying them. I think it’s like a piece of classical music or a great movie. The more you replay it, the more details you come to appreciate. The original Deus Ex is like that for me as well.

The commands aren’t very complicated. You’re mostly looking at stuff, taking stuff, or using items on stuff. It’s usually just [verb] [noun] type simple 2 word sentences.

The hard part of Zork is figuring out where to go and what to use where. Navigation in the game is usually by compass directions but the map is not a plain grid, so you can go north and then go west and end up right back ever you started for odd reasons. You’re highly encouraged to make your own map on paper, in addition to lots of notes about things you saw in each area.

The game even includes a maze, a reference to the earlier Colossal Cave Adventure’s “maze of twisty passages, all alike.” Navigating it is a real challenge!