It works fine. The processes get a fenced off piece of memory and are allowed to portion it out to themselves any way they prefer. Syscalls are designed to be mostly neutral about how the app wants to proceed.
I don’t know much about CPU and memory back then, but did they not have some kind of memory access debugging mode where it would match every access against the alloc map, understanding that it could be very slow, but would find some of this kind of bug? Come to think of it, do we even have that today?
I was imagining more like some kind of primitive CPU mode that sends every single RAM request to a software exception. Something you would normally have turned off but available for truly heavy duty debugging.
That sounds pretty similar to what Valgrind does, basically runs your program in a VM with that kind of instrumentation. The details of how it works are way past the boundaries of my own knowledge though :)
The operating system could effect this by not providing any page tables to the CPU, so every memory reference faults and the OS has to handle them all.
What’s the word for trying to do cluster analysis on what is actually randomly distributed data? The games do have obvious similarities and sometimes refer to each other, but they’re independent events.
I have been playing Zelda games since the late 80s. I have never felt the need to try to weave a cohesive timeline out of the entire series.
Instead, I view the games as a combination of re-imaginings and direct sequels. However, the games really are not story-driven enough to care which one is which. Any of the games can be played standalone or in any order, and it doesn't matter.
In my view, the story of these games is mostly a pretext and the real reason is the gameplay. Some of the games lean a bit harder into the story angles, and they really suffer for it (too many cutscenes make those games frustrating to play).
I feel this way too. A huge trend in general I have noticed with younger generations, as gaming has modernized and matured, is the overall importance of story and cohesion. Plumber fell in a pipe and discovered weirdness was all we needed. I don’t play a lot these days but when I do I still just tend to skip over the story part or get annoyed when it won’t let me.
I don't consider it canon when a different group of people decades later make a timeline, just because they happen to work for the same company. It might as well be fanfic.
There is a 2003 interview with Shigeru Miyamoto that suggests an "enormous" timeline document existed since at least 2002 and they took it into account when writing Wind Waker if not earlier games[1]:
> Shigeru Miyamoto: For every Zelda game we tell a new story, but we actually have an enormous document that explains how the game relates to the others, and bind them together. But to be honest, they are not that important to us. We care more about developing the game system… give the player new challenges for every chapter that is born.
So I don't think this is as clear cut as "a different group of people decades later make a timeline". The least charitable view might be that they never intended the unified timeline thing to became public and didn't consider it "lore", but I'm not sure I buy that either (since they talked about some details in other interviews, including the Victorious/Fallen Hero split most people object to).
You'd have an understandable point for a western company who likely had a revolving door of key developers and leadershhip. But Japanese companies have pretty high retention rates, and Nintendo has some of the highest of all Japanese companies, period. Not just in games.
So in this case, I imagine almost all the writing staff present for Zelda in 1986 were present to establish such a timeline some 15 years later. And much of them were probably still around 20 years after that working on the upcoming remake. I'm truly envious.
It's a fair point, but Nintendo is the only entity that can decide canonicity, and retconning continuity is far from uncommon especially when a franchise transitions from being a single entry to multiple installments.
Nintendo just never did that until the speculation about the topic became noticeable enough that they felt they had to address it (at which point everything was so inconsistent that only the timeline split could reconcile it). And even then, the unified timeline was published years before BoTW, and it adds the wrinkle that... (waves hands) all of the timelines sort of became the same thing.
That sort of hand waving is unavoidable as BoTW has elements from all three of the timelines, it literally cannot be on one of the three legs-- and if it's not, the only other logical place it would fit is before Skyward Sword (meaning an entirely separate ancient founding of Hyrule) or just after the Imprisoning War which would butt up against A Link To The Past. But those can't fit because the Zora evolved into the Rito and BoTW has both.
Never mind the strange notion that a fish people evolved into bird people under the pressure of a worldwide flood... you'd think that wouldn't be necessary or helpful, but hey, Zelda's weird.
Haha yes-- in this case for BoTW to be at the beginning of the timeline, the Rito wouldn't exist yet, as they are only present in Wind Waker and beyond, not that it's impossible for both to exist.
The Rito are fundamentally different though, right? WW Rito are humans with bird beaks, but BotW/TotK Rito are actual birds in humanoid stature. Personally I always assumed they were Loftwings that became sentient.
I mean it's not like it's a different group of people now. Out of the development team for the original game, only one person definitely doesn't work at Nintendo anymore (Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo CEO that retired in 2002 and died in 2013), and possibly I. Marui (who doesn't have much info online in general). And Eiji Aonuma has been producer since Ocarina of Time in 1998.
So, while it's questionable how much involvement some of the team may have had with this timeline, it's entirely feasible they could have gotten input from the same people that wrote the games from the very beginning.
this is more so a corporate acquihire of fan fiction writers
Zelda canon was never that deep when each game was written
writers had no secret timeline or their own deep interest in the prior writers rendition
they have a loose setting and other people that chose the writer to have near complete license to do whatever they want with it
and even that’s a negotiation, writers often have their own backlogged story already that they adapt to existing IP retroactively
whatever it doesn’t matter, I’m just surprised people are actually spending energy on this for this franchise. If this is what “fun” looks like now, it’s fine
I'm pretty sure Nintendo itself said at one point that they don't have a clear chronological order and may not tie into each other properly, even though they later retconned an order.
Still, it's fun to try to figure out how the puzzle pieces might fit together even though they came out of different boxes.
I've only played a handful of these games .. but do they work together as a theme or story progression or are they, as I suspect, pretty much independent rehashes with no real relationship other than making money and appeasing fans?
> no real relationship other than making money and appeasing fans
That's a very cynical and dare I say Hackernews take. You could also, less cynically, see them as unique pieces of art that have managed to carve a space in a field where, by necessity, a lot of money is needed to create it (AAA games).
Tears of the Kingdom is art. It's a beautiful, simple fairytale told through the medium of a huge open world game and there's something unique in being able to embody that story for so many hours. I haven't played any other Zelda games from the past ~20 years but if they're similarly artful (and by all accounts they are) we don't need to be cynical towards their simplicity or the fact that they're variations on a theme. Pretty much all human art (and business) is, after all.
Which is the correct way to design a game, I am not going to go full Carmack and say the story does not matter at all, but at their heart a computer game is a simulation, a complex machine full of intricate moving parts. Getting thees parts to mesh well is the most critical part. and the story however well or poorly written sort of sits unconnected on top of it, for the most part ornithological to the machine underneath. The bit you actually interact with.
It is why I consider excessive use of cutscenes a tell of poor game design, They stop the machine and pull the player out of the environment. They have their place, but generally should be avoided.
book: tell a story
movie: show, don't tell (big sin opening lore dump)
I like "do, don't show" but I don't think that precludes a thin layer of gameplay over a story. Walking simulators are a prime example. The entire point of a walking simulator is the story, but the game doesn't progress without input from the player, unlike in a cutscene/movie. What Remains of Edith Finch is one of my favorite games, but the gameplay is pretty barebones.
To the exception of TOTK, I _never_ noticed any link (hehe) between different titles. I know there are some references, but I never catch them.
Even Majora's Mask, which is an official follow up occurring months after Ocarina of Time have a totally different story to tell that don't even try to continue the OoT story and is more just another completely independent story barely in the same universe.
I love the Zelda games, I consider myself a fan. But they are just that : good games. Each of those games do have interesting stories to tell, interesting universes to visit, but the overall "franchise" lore is totally uninteresting.
And honestly I don't think it's something bad, it means each game is free to go where it wants, and every game is free to have an universe as rich as it wants.
I see Zelda totally like I see mario : it's just universe codes, not a real lore. Nobody cares if Mario Galaxy happens before or after Mario 64 or Super Mario World. Zelda is the same for me. And that's cool.
Even TOTK which is meant to be a direct sequel to BotW is...only loosely connected. Like obviously the map is the same and characters kind of reference some of the events from BotW, but (frustratingly) it's like almost everyone underwent extensive lobotoby between the games and forgot 99% of what happened. The entire lore of the world gets rewritten too.
From what I understand - it's because Nintendo famously designs the game and gameplay systems first and then writes a story to match what they built. If the story doesn't work with the setting then... - it's still a good game at the end of the day.
They do have common themes. Sometimes, they (seem to) explicitly refer to each other, and sometimes, they make vague allusions to things you might interpret as having happened in other Zelda games. But overall, I think it's fair to call most Zelda games independent of each other.
The second graph on the spurious correlations page bugs me, that has a plausible explanation! (cultural prestige / zeitgeist centralizing on the hard sciences)
While I wait for my mail in ballot to be delivered, which is taking a suspiciously long time, while the President, who has already ben impeached for one visible and overt coup attempt, has specifically ordered the USPS not to deliver them on either side, this is a good place to note to you, that he has also declared anyone who doesn’t call it super intelligence to be THE ENEMY, in all caps.
How did we end up here. Even Super Cringe can't possibly describe this administration and this unhinged con man and the money behind him who have been granted excessive powers by an irresponsible Supreme Court and are enshitifying everything about our nation. Super Intelligence.
Yes, but who told you the GP was in that camp? Speaking from experience, plenty of people on the left thought the whole master branch, the pronouns or (even worse) whitelist thing to be insane.
Careful there. Seeing contradictions and mistakes made by your dear leader may not be as good of an idea as you it sounds. For the only reason that nobody would lift their ass to do anything else but raise their grave concerns over yet another violation of civil conduct by offending parties, which will probably not help to ones suffering from such.
Just putting 100 of the smartest people in the planet in the same room doesn’t mean profit. It’s the underwear gnome problem. AI is no different in that regard.
If it really is formalized, it seems like the exact ideas would be able to be translated to and from any other sufficiently capable language without gaining or losing anything.
"sufficiently capable" is doing an insane amount of heavy lifting here. Like you can only interpret a theory into another one if the target is at least as strong as the source and even then "to and from" is a MUCH stronger condition that most pairs of theories do not satisfy.
Then when a translation exists the proofs can blow up in size to where you lose feasibility and understandability even tho they are technically still proofs.
Regardless of all that, I wasn't even bringing up 1lab because of the choice of language or type theory. I bring it up as an example of a pro-human way of presenting formalization.
What I think this was intended to say was that a lot of nonsense work can be done by AI, so let’s eliminate the nonsense work. Valid, but consider that you may be protected too by the amount of paperwork it takes to hurt someone.
> this was intended to say was that a lot of nonsense work can be done by AI, so let’s eliminate the nonsense work
I'm not sure this makes sense, since there is no getting away from "nonsense work", which is shorthand for low value return on time and cognitive overhead.
I understood the post to mean something different...with my own added context.
The digital age has increased the complexity of life and various processes by orders of magnitude. Programming is at the forefront, having had to deal with implementation for decades. The complexity necessarily grows every day, as the easiest problems are solved first, before tackling more nuanced or difficult ones (very different). Understanding how to identify these, track the tradeoffs, and choose specialized approaches, grows in every vertical. There are many subjects that a person can study for their entire life and not fully comprehend the totality. We have been living in a time where specialists must be increasingly specialized, for decades, due to the breadth of human knowledge and social progress.
One of the best ways to deal with this complexity, has been to be smarter. Have a better memory. Have high cognitive function. This leaves an ever-growing amount of the population in uncertainty. Families all have (or had) a "smart" resource they tapped to answer the tough questions and find paths through seemingly-intractable legalities, kafka-esque bureaucracy, medical emergency, financial advice, et al. AI has given many of the less-gifted (the majority of the population) a "wise" resource that seems to be informed enough to provide solutions and even offer opinions that can be reasoned, for some value of "reason". AI has also granted easily accessible automation. This will make the situation worse. A form of specialized logical processor would have been necessary at some point (mentat or AI). It came earlier than many expected, but this is the form and it's here now.
You know, if an old city with a natural boundary doesn’t think you should build a bunch of profitable crap in it, maybe you could take the hint and stop acting like you’re bringing Jesus to them. San Francisco’s seen the conquistadors. In fact, many of the streets in the Sunset are named after them.
Locked supply. Affordable housing. Growing standards of living (or population). Pick two.
If you lock supply and want taxes and wages to grow, you're choosing unaffordable housing. That's San Francisco's current policy choice. Over decades, it filters the poor to San Francisco's "outer boroughs" or onto its streets.
For what it's worth, my friends who lived in San Francisco "took the hint" and moved out when they chose to have kids. They didn't sell their place, however, since the above policy mix together with California's property-tax system strongly disincentivizes that.
Ah, blue city progressivism: "Welcome to my country! Now get the fuck out of my city."
Also, note that these cities always happily welcome more offices and businesses. They just don't want to build the housing for those workers to actually live in.
I haven't played OP's game but hopefully it accurately models the plummetting quality of life and rampant homelessness created by doing what you describe in the real world.
I remember before COVID I was debating with a friend of mine whether or not private property is justifiable and it's ironic that the discussion was made obsolete by nobody being able to afford private property anymore
Basically a CA politician told Musk to go fuck himself, he replied "message received" then shortly thereafter moved billions of dollars of tax revenue, jobs, development etc. out of their jurisdiction by moving his base of operations to Texas. All very viral / in the news.
You can tell people not to build in your city, just don't expect them to continue investing there if you fuck them over.
I mean, stopping housing construction hasn’t stopped the new money from pushing out the old soul. Given the US enshrines the free movement of people in the Constitution, it’s make room or have someone outbid you for yours.
It is possible to grow in a pleasant way without mallification, seems like a lot of projecting. And it’s not like the current approach is preventing that; insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
I’m a single family homeowner in SF and as YIMBY as they come. And contrary to my goals of development even if it deflates home prices, development lags and home prices are getting more out of control.
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