To be fair, being dead is about as sick as you can get. No cure for that.

Eight or nine years ago, I was working for a gaming company, on an RPG that never saw the light of day, because they went bankrupt before creating anything.

One of the most annoying things about RPGs (roleplaying games) is that all the NPCs (non-player characters) typically either stand in the same place all the time, or wander around in a set path. I wanted to change that, so I fed some heuristics into the AI (artificial intelligence).

If an NPC was a resident of a town, they'd need to eat. They'd check their inventory, and if they didn't have any, they'd go get some. If an NPC was, say, a blacksmith, they'd make things in real time - rather than the more typical approach of updating their stock each time an area is loaded, based on what items were in their inventory. If they had no crafting items, they'd go look for something.

Absolutely nothing fancy about it. Nothing difficult to do, just something that nobody else had ever gotten round to before. Just a slightly more advanced version of what Black Isle and Troika used to do.

But a curious thing happened. We sent an NPC to look for the nearest item of the type they wanted - and forgot to check if the nearest item an NPC was looking happened to be in the inventory of another character. Because we hadn't anticipated NPCs stealing from each other, the theft method didn't filter to only act on the player character...so from a simple model of collecting resources, we managed to accidentally invente war, as the NPCs AI told them to be hostile to an increasing number of other NPCs over time.

I'm not suggesting an RPG is a universe comparable to ours....but it also kinda is a universe of sorts. It's a simplified, abstracted universe, but it has it's own internal rules, and the actors behave in a way completely unpredicted by the developers.

Can you imagine a universe slightly more complicated than that? Note ours was only slightly more complicated than Arcanum, which was only slightly more complicated than Fallout 2. Perhaps the next guy also notices that nobody ever goes to the toilet, so they do the same thing, but also add bowel and bladder metres that have to be emptied, and so on.

How far can you increment the complexity one little step at a time, until you get something as complicated as our universe? Can we eventually create a virtual world that follows the rules of ours well, like Red Dwarf's Total Immersion Video Games, or the Star Trek Holodeck?

If we can create a universe as complicated as our own, isn't it perfectly possible that somebody else can too?

If we were a simulation, would it matter anyway? Does it make any difference to the experience you've had between the time you were born and now?

Ah, this explains SMBC's cartoon today, It did seem to come a bit out of the blue.

In fact, you're orders of magnitude more likely to win a phone in.

But don't let me stop you, both rely on people being unable to count.

ProTip: Go back to being a student, and watch these programs while off your face on {{drugs of your choice}}. They become so much better, and you don't have to phone at all.

"Third World" is officially developing nations, and Malysia is one...but more normally, when we say "Third World" we mean "Least Developed Countries" - which is mostly war-torn Africa.

The problem is since 1989 we stopped using the term Second World. Malaysia would definitely be a second world country by now if the term hadn't fallen out of use (and been politically loaded).

I'm not arrogant, I'm just better than everyone else.

Quote:a hacker

It sounds rather more like somebody missed out a ! than the work of hackers...

We're famous for being one thing or another. You can be Yorkshire Stubborn, or Yorkshire Reserved. You may be surprised to find I'm a tad eccentric, which implies I'm probably not Yorkshire Reserved.

I was paid by Tango today, despite the holiday.

Despite the long wait, that gains them a brownie point in my book.

Dude, it's just rand() or mt_rand()

It is cryptographically broken, and if you can figure out the seed, you can break it - but if you can do that, instead of breaking Clixsense for $10, you can break casinos just as easily and earn tens of thousands.

For others waiting on Tango, cashout came in 16 days (days, not working days).

It is illegal to start, but not finish, building a railway line - which should be interesting for HS2, because there's no way that's getting built.

Alternatively, the guillotine has a 100% cure rate for headaches of all kinds.

The best way to get rich with get rich books is to write a get rich book and sell it. You can just copy another get rich book, as you point out, they're all the same.

Doing it isn't as bad as cleaning it out. I've got a portapotty, it's much less pleasant than the composting toilet was.

Quote:what DIDN'T she do?

Fasten you to a radiator with the heat turned up on full, and leave a bottle of water in a cool bag just out of reach?

I hate it when people say you shouldn't hate things, you shouldn't hold a grudge.

How can you expect a man to hold you if he can't even hold a grudge?

tasman1 wrote: The wars of the future are very likely going to resemble many of the science fiction movies that we are watching right now. The U.S. military is in a global race to create the “technologies of the future”, and some of the things that they are coming up with are disturbing to say the least. Are you ready for future conflicts where “Iron Men”, “super soldiers”, “Terminator robots”, and autonomous drones do most of the killing? Are you ready for American soldiers that have been genetically modified to perform superhuman feats of strength, run at superhuman speeds and even regrow limbs? The truth is that all of this stuff is being developed right now and most Americans have no idea that it is happening.
This is very dangerous territory. Just because we now have the ability to “play God” and alter human DNA does not mean that we should. If our scientists are not careful, they could end up creating monsters far beyond what anyone could imagine right now. And once Pandora’s Box is opened and these super soldiers start spreading their DNA around, it simply will not be possible to put the genie back into the bottle.

One would point out they're already using robots to blow MSF hospitals, I mean, strategic military points, up. I'm not sure it's so much wars of the future you have to worry about as wars of today. We're already a bad sci-fi action movie, changes in the future are quantitative, not qualitative.

The other sci-fi movie is the independent hackers verses the government hackers. I'd point out that you all know somebody who has already been involved in this kind of fight - me. If you remember a couple of years ago when ISIS left Twitter, Facebook, et al and started using "indie" social networks, one of those was ours. They were using my code, and my friends sites. We were caught in the crossfire, not in actual war, and it was all over in a matter of days (for me - one of our developers was stalked for months) - but it's still the plot of a bad sci-fi movie.

CatMonster wrote: By the way did anyone notice that the "OpinionWorld (Router Survey)" has vanished not just from clixsense but from all other GPT/PTC sites too. I hope they will be back.

It is being phased out. It's been gone for us for ages.

There's a post in the offers forum from somebody official - I forget which one of them - explaining it a few months ago.