cf https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/rogomatic.html
"ROG-O-MATIC: A Belligerent Expert System"
(a ca. 1984 AI that would play rogue(6) for you)
Going Rogue
61–70 of 72 posts
Re: Going Rogue
#62I've managed to finish Rogue (version IV, DOS) a few times from many hundreds of games over 25+ years. The secret (hopefully this isn't a spoiler) is to know how to use the scroll of scare monster.
I find that, when I'm playing, I enter a state of 'flow' that I suspect might be similar to (or maybe the opposite of?) meditation - my feeling of conscious self disappears - the world is everything around the '@' symbol.
Re: Going Rogue
#63Great article, but it did give me the "an elephant is like a rope" feeling—it seems like it's one person's idiosyncratic perspective, some of which I agree with and some I disagree with, and there isn't really much justification for changing my mind about the parts where we differ. A couple of specific things that jumped out at me, as someone who lived through this (and got hooked for varying amounts of time on sever…
Great article, but it did give me the "an elephant is like a rope"
feeling—it seems like it's one person's idiosyncratic perspective,
some of which I agree with and some I disagree with, and there
isn't really much justification for changing my mind about the
parts where we differ.
Re: Going Rogue
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Diablo, I guess. It’s got quite clear rogue influences.
at the time when Diablo came out it was clear it was a polished, graphical version of Nethack
It was more like a polished graphical off-shot of Angband. But I wouldn't call it a "version of it" anymore than I'd call Battlefield a version of Doom (or any platformer a version of Super Mario), they are simply games in the same (or similar) genre.
Re: Going Rogue
#65Wasn't there also SuperRogue and UltraRogue or something?
I used to spend endless hours playing Rogue on a VAX/Unix computer. Then I'm sure I spent a lot playing NetHack. I totally didn't realize there's still new versions coming out, this was maybe 30+ years ago ;)
The leaderboard in Rogue was cool (I'm pretty sure there was one) and a bunch of us battled over it.
Re: Going Rogue
#66Great article, but it did give me the "an elephant is like a rope" feeling—it seems like it's one person's idiosyncratic perspective, some of which I agree with and some I disagree with, and there isn't really much justification for changing my mind about the parts where we differ. A couple of specific things that jumped out at me, as someone who lived through this (and got hooked for varying amounts of time on sever…
Great article, but it did give me the "an elephant is like a rope" feeling—it seems like it's one person's idiosyncratic perspective, some of which I agree with and some I disagree with, and there isn't really much justification for changing my mind about the parts where we differ. But this is exactly Jimmy's writing style and the entire (extremely long) series is like that - it's not meant to be a wikipedia page.
Sorry, I was being too indirect.
The whole intro section is weirdly selective about what to include and weave into a single narrative. I lived through that time. There were a lot of other things going on that paint a different picture. Not that the description is definitively wrong or anything, it's just that it is very like the fable of the blind men and the elephant. It's not wrong to say an elephant is like a rope, but it is incomplete to the point of being deceptive.
The odd rant about open source makes quite a tenuous leap to the meat of the article, which I enjoyed much more and didn't have any particular issues with. "An elephant is like a rope, now let's talk about the fascinating physiology and ecology of the hippopotamus, a roughly elephant-shaped animal."
Ok, that's unfair, the opening and the Rogue history are more related than that. But note that the latter is explicitly called out as an "exception that proves the rule" of the former. Yet "most A are B, so now let's look at a rare example of a not-B that is an A" only supports the opening thesis insofar as you explain or at least make the point that `A & not(B)` is uncommon and illustrate it with your example. Simply giving an example of where your argument doesn't hold, well... it just undercuts the argument.
Anyway, it's not the author's responsibility to write an article in a way that works for me. And I certainly don't want something complete or wikipedia-like. It's just... odd. It talks about how open source failed to live up to its expectations. That relies on an overly literal acceptance of those expectations, because in my mind it has vastly exceeded those expectations. People were indeed overenthusiastic, but even then not many were claiming it would take over everything.
Is a developer scratching their own itch a fundamentally flawed approach that will never produce software that takes its users' actual needs into account? I would argue that they are reasonably independent from each other. Someone scratching an itch may very well be able to maintain a coherent design, or something may start with itch-scratching but then attract the involvement of designer-architects, or the reverse: itch-scratchers may join in a more "designed" project once it starts to show promise and be useful enough to trigger its own itching. On a related note, the purist "cathedral vs bazaar" interpretation is largely a myth. The bazaar pretty much always evolves some level of organization, and cathedrals are staffed with people, people who are often motivated by itch-scratching no matter what the high priests ordain.
I am sympathetic to the argument that programmers tend to produce things to be consumed by other programmers. I am also sympathetic to the argument that once a program gets to the point where it is useful to other people, it has a strong tendency to get absorbed into an organization that makes it usable by a broader audience. Is that a failure of open source or a success? It depends where you draw the finish line.
Blender, Godot, Firefox, GNOME, WordPress, GnuCash... it's not like there aren't counterexamples out there.
And the plain fact that nearly everything is now built off of an open source base, and that base is steadily moving up the stack, makes me suspect the "open source can never handle X" argument has a limited shelf life.
Re: Going Rogue
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great article, but it did give me the "an elephant is like a rope" feeling—it seems like it's one person's idiosyncratic perspective, some of which I agree with and some I disagree with, and there isn't really much justification for changing my mind about the parts where we differ. But this is exactly Jimmy's writing style and the entire (extremely long) series is like that - it's not meant to be a wikipedia page.
Sorry, I was being too indirect. The whole intro section is weirdly selective about what to include and weave into a single narrative. I lived through that time. There were a lot of other things going on that paint a different picture. Not that the description is definitively wrong or anything, it's just that it is very like the fable of the blind men and the elephant. It's not wrong to say an elephant is like a rope…
I agree that the open source section was a bit strange and not really necessary for the article's actual focus - when I read it I immediately thought this will create a completely avoidable flame-war.
Re: Going Rogue
#68As a rogue addict, nice read. But rogue is a gateway drug to the nethacks :) * ssh nethack@alt.org * ssh nethack@hf * ssh play@server.gnollhack.com * ssh slashem@slashem.me
(hf here is hardfought.org)
Thanks, I forgot I had hf defined in ~/.ssh/config
I cannot edit my post, so I hope people see your post
Re: Going Rogue
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
My wrong. It was written for Unix. Well, I guess there's something funny with the license; it's not packaged for Debian, and I can't remember a time when it was.
Larn has a noncommercial license, so it's nonfree by Debian standards.
This appears to be the licence for Larn:
https://github.com/primeau/Larn/blob/master/LICENSE
That seems to be a normal MIT licence (without advertising clause). Debian packages loads of software under that licence.
[Edit] That appears to be JS Larn, which is apparently derived from Larn and uLarn, but with an MIT licence replacing the original author's. You can't do that.
Re: Going Rogue
#70> Not only was it not a failure upon its eventual release, but Windows 2000 evolved in 2001 into the consumer-grade Windows XP
esr was talking about server OSes, and he proved to be right in the end. Today Windows server ecosystem survived only in deeply entrenched corporate niches or as a legacy payload. No one in their right mind will not start a new project on MS SQL or IIS. Even .Net server development moved to Linux eventually.