Ha, got eem

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

I'm going for the boring but practical answer: {x | x ∈ A} and {x | x ∉ A}. Obviously the second set is doing the heavy lifting.

Wikipedia often has disambiguation pages for numbers that may be helpful in a search like this (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/71).

WolframAlpha is good for identifying numerical properties of numbers (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=71).

OEIS has a searchable set of sequences (https://oeis.org/search?q=71&language=english&go=Search)

I fear that none of these is what you're looking for, though. My attempts to find something that sounds like what you want mostly turned up resources on numerology, and at least one article apparently about how the meaning of numbers is radically different between cultures.

My brain is going to OEIS or angel numbers which are both like total opposites. Number theory or numerology, take your pick.

Well, three is prime and pi starts with a three, therefore, even if there's larger primes, there is one which is the largest. QED.

Pi is suspected to be a normal number (though this has not been proven). If it is normal, it's likely that integers comprised of the first N digits of pi will be just as likely to be prime as comparable large integers. I suspect but cannot prove that there are infinitely many prime numbers whose digits are the first N digits of pi (with or without the leading 3).

They're the same picture.

The independent

plausible, but my experience from dissecting these kinds of games is that they tend not to be as space efficient as you'd think they could be if they were the kaze emanuar type. The fact that they opted to have 257 distinct values for the laurels suggests to me that they weren't prioritizing space efficiency.

My best (wildly speculative) guess is that a designer, knowing 256 is a common limit, wasn't thinking carefully and said the maximum value should be 256 (instead of 255), and then an overly pedantic coder implemented this to the letter while rolling their eyes.

Even if true, 256 would be a waste of the range. 255 would make sense if trying to stay in one byte, using a whole different data type to get one extra bit just to hold 256 instead of saying "screw it, let's go to 511" even while using other bits.

It's just a very weird thing to do to pick 256 as a value limit back in those days (also oddly specific now, but for different reasons)

Having made a few games back in the day, this isn't something you add on purpose, this is something that you screwed up, are going to "fix later", then realize it's too much hassle to rewrite 45% of your code and you just raise the minimum spec requirements a bit to compensate.

In the top ten, with Blaster Master, and Batman.

I've never given TGL a proper listen, though I have the game for NES. Thanks for the recommendation!

the number of laurels in your inventory is stored as an integer from 0 to 256.

Or when it's bothering you that people forget the difference between counting and indexing.

You can index to 255 in an 8 bit number, but your count is still 256 when you get there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero:_The_Biography_of_a_Dangerous_Idea

One of the most annoying books I ever read. Every page made me feel stupider and more uneducated.

Still, it works well for "normies"...

I liked the switches analogy! Generally about binary though; I agree it doesn’t connect back to the number of users application.

And yeah most important number…sounds like they were quoting an LLM.

If you look what the last articles for the independent Doug Bolton (the guy who wrote the stuff in question) wrote, it was Condom discovered inside woman's appendix, and afterwards he only wrote for "Movers & Makers Cincinatti" and some stuff looking like crawler bait for "Old Times Music" so i'm pretty sure the Independent didn't want him anymore

I think you're highlighting two different problems here.

I agree that Gen Z and younger are, on average, far worse at basic computer skills than many seem to assume. It makes me reflect on my tech-learning throughout my childhood, as a Millennial. I think that part of it is that many erroneously assume that because Gen Z has grown up online, that this will lead to proficiency, but the kind of tech they've been exposed to is largely walled gardens and oversimplified UIs. That assumption of proficiency leads to scenarios where their lack of skill is only discovered when they enter college, or the workplace. I am astounded at the prospect of people not even knowing the difference between "Cut and Paste" and "Copy and Paste". It's grim.

The poor quality of journalism may be linked to this, but I think it's larger than that. It seems like it's not a great time to be a journalist at the moment (my writer friends tell me that increasingly, the only work they're able to find is copy-editing AI shit). Private equity is fucking up so much of the world — journalism included. Polygon is an example of an outlet that was apparently sustainably profitable, before it was sold and experienced mass lay-offs; an individual company's success doesn't matter to the big conglomerate that owns it. I know that other journalistic companies have fallen to the same fate too.

It also seems that tech journalism ends up being especially shit. I didn't start noticing it properly until I watched this podcast episode from "Tech Won't Save Us". The TL;DW of it is that tech journalists like Kara Swisher like to pretend that they speak truth to power, and fire hard-hitting questions at big tech people, when that's patently bullshit and it's clear that they only get the access that they do by playing softball with the powerful. We can't blame a few individuals for the entirety of the tech journalism problem, but I reckon it's a big part of it when so many of the established, big names in this space don't seem interested in actually doing tech journalism (and smaller names who want to ask journalistically interesting questions don't get platforms or access to ask those questions).

Our information ecosystem is not in a great place. I've found it tremendously beneficial to curate the news and information I'm exposed to (praise be RSS), but that has been a gradual process of actively working to notice good journalism in the world and build up my mental "rolodex" of people whose perspectives I trust to be worthwhile (even if I don't necessarily agree with said perspectives). However, this is an area that I care deeply about, and thus it feels worthwhile to spend that energy to curate my infosphere. Most people won't have the inclination or energy to do this work, which is unfortunate.