i suppose that's what you get when you desire secure communication on one hand but at the same time strive for total surveillance. i'm not sure what data wire is able to provide when legally requested but at least they know where to send the letter.
Who are you even talking about? Bob didn't say life is meaningless. If you want the perspective of someone who survived the "trenches" and kept a meaningful perspective on life then I recommend the book "Man's search for meaning" by Viktor Frankl.
I agree. I'm quite sure even Bob would agree. He never even used the words "farce" or "meaning(less)". He just agreed to "life is a farce" in a context that mostly reflected on his work as a comedian. Also the entire interview reads quite performative. This whole emotions-are-just-molecules, life-is-just-a-game etc perspectives fall flat as soon as the doctor tells the armchair-nihilist he has cancer ... suddenly life feels like something more important than a game and the feelings are no longer just molecules.
There's also ZIL by way of ZILF https://github.com/taradinoc/zilf This is the Lisp-like language that Infocom implementers actually used back in the day.
Infocom came out of the MIT AI Lab which was very LISP-centric at the time. Depending upon you you listen to, the gaming part was something of a side effect as opposed to the ultimate goal.
Though I find it fun on the language family tree that the Infocom team's preferred MDL (and thus ZIL) language was surprisingly closer to (and almost prototyping for) the Scheme split despite being "next door" to some of the most LISP legacy work, too.
Yes, they actually planned to release cross-platform applications in addition to games and actually shipped one (1985's database Cornerstone). The problem was 1985 was a bit late for cross-platform business software to be successful; the IBM PC and compatibles had taken over the business market, and having apps in a VM just meant they were a bit slower than native ones.
And they really went all-in on Cornerstone at a time when PC databases, as you say, had really cornered a (shrinking) market. Even MS Access arguably ended up as something of a footnote. Not that text adventure games, even with some graphical chrome, were really a growing market either.
Yes, very easy to grasp and games will be much lighter than Inform7. Tads it's propietary even if the interpreters are free. Inform6 has the whole stack (even free documentation too), from Inform Beginner's Guide to these, where you have libre games for Inform6 and some free as in freedom
related documentation of Inform6 internals.
Inform 7 source code, at first glance, looks like plain English. It makes you start to wonder whether Inform 7 is actually an LLM and not a compiler. Then as you look at more code, you quickly start to see the structure of the language, and realize that it is indeed a programming language merely structured to look like English at first glance. But it's very cool that you can do things like this (example from the Inform 7 documentation):
Definition: a room is neighboring if the number of moves from it to the location is 1.
Every turn:
if a random chance of 1 in 2 succeeds:
let current location be the location of the lurking critter;
let next location be a random room which is adjacent to the current location;
if the lurking critter is visible:
say "The critter [one of]slouches[or]slithers[or]shambles[or]lurches[at random] away.";
move the lurking critter to next location;
if the lurking critter is visible:
say "A critter [one of]oozes[or]staggers[or]ambles[or]creeps[at random] into the room.";
[Whether or not the critter has moved, we need to adjust the sword-glow, because the player may have moved.]
if the lurking critter is in the location:
adjust sword-glow to glowing brightly;
otherwise if the lurking critter is in a neighboring room:
adjust sword-glow to glowing faintly;
otherwise:
adjust sword-glow to glowless.
This snippet omits the definition of "the lurking critter" (a standard NPC) and the sword (a standard object with a custom defined method called "adjust sword-glow to"), but it should give you a good idea of what Inform 7 source code looks like. (Inform 6 looked much more like a traditional programming language).
It's still pretty good. TADS is a more modern alternative, and the one I would go with, but basically these haven't been commercially viable products since the 80s so there's not a lot going into it.
Arguably, the right answer now is to document everything that matters to you about the adventure, and tell an LLM to run it.
Well, TADS is older than Inform, yes, but the whole idea of VM-based platforms for adventures originated from Infocom's Z-machine starting with Zork I in 1980 -- it's what let them basically release their games for every platform current in the US in the 1980s.
It does even better than that.
I have a private interactive fiction game going based on a popular novel. It's very immersive. Still a work in progress. Right now you can do the daily life things the novel skips like making dinner. I make it so you can skip the day but I was enjoying doing the routine things. It's hard having the game keep track of objects and some NPCs knew things they shouldn't. I tightened it but testing is a lot of work. Hmm. Maybe I can have another LLM play test it.
It also allows you to deviate from the novel. This is a romance novel. I had the main character choose someone else and it showed an alternate version of the novel. After the main threat of the story was dispatched things settled into weeks of routine living where I added another person into my routine. I played to see if another event would show up but after 3 in game weeks I decided to stop. This was a test and I needed to improve the game. I can see this becoming addictive to some people because they will be living in the story and having a life there and making friends and finding partners.
This type of game is still uncharted territory. Does one end the game or let the player play indefinitely? Is it more fun to have the player do the daily life things or skip those or give them a choice?
I'd say, Hz is quite regular choice for _this_ ... it's just not referred to as "Hertz" by IT practitioners (usually). Technically Bq and Hz are same unit 1/sec - difference is that Bq is used for random physical events (comparable to web requests) and Hz is used for periodic physical events.
As a German it makes me tiny little bit proud that he mentions two German traditional companies. Schwalbe (tires, tubes) and Abus (locks) are basically the default choice other brands have to compete against. The primary competitor for Schwalbe is Continental which is also a German company.
most readers seem to conclude that the ai industry should have done better marketing when the truth is that they believed they wouldn't even have to consider the public opinion because of how powerful their technology is.
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