Or it won’t happen when you’re watching, because then they’re thinking about what they’re doing and they don’t make the same unconscious mistake they did that brought up the error message. Then they get mad that “it never happens when you’re around. Why do you have to see the problem anyway? I described it to you.”
My favorite is “and there was some kind of error message.” There was? What did it say? Did it occur to you that an error message might help someone trying to diagnose your error?
The last time this happened, the deal was that the music was generated by bots, and also listened to by bots. Basically it was a scheme to get money out of Spotify.
But also, folks will use AI to generate anything these days, like these books that suggested that a good way to identify whether mushrooms are poisonous is to taste them.
Frustratingly, these lists keep going out of date, because apps are marked as incompatible with new devices unless they’re constantly updated. So I have a limited number of recommendations. E.g. the game Trainyard was terrific, but it looks like you can’t get it anymore. Auro and Glyder 2 were also excellent. And Trap! was great on the original G1.
Some of these games also do have in-app purchases, but they’ll be strictly “you pay X money for Y more levels” deals, which is basically fine in my book. No currencies, no gatchapon, no “pay or wait” mechanics.
10000000 and You Must Build A Boat are fun match-3 games. No in-app purchases.
The Room 1, 2, and 3 are all escape-room games.
If you liked doing constructions in geometry, the games Euclidea and Pythagorea are both good.
Puzzle Retreat by The Voxel Agents is, well, a puzzle game. Pretty fun, good slow difficulty ramp.
The Quell games (Quell, Quell Reflect) are a bit like Puzzle Retreat, but I didn’t find they had as much variety. I got a little bored with them. They’re quite polished though.
Star Realms is a two-player card game with deck drafting mechanics, sort of like a cross between Dominion and Magic. It’s available as an actual physical deck game, but also as a decent android game with both multiplayer and a single-player campaign. Since it’s a drafting game (i.e. you both recruit from the same deck), buying card expansions just changes what mechanics are available to both players, so it’s never pay-to-win. I’m very fond of it.
Freitag is a single-player deck-drafting game. The android app isn’t the best thing ever but it works. It’s based on Robinson Crusoe.
Spaceplan is an increment game, a bit like Cookie Clicker or Clicker Heroes, but it’s got a plot and an ending and is over in a couple of days. Plus it’s really silly. Recommended.
Super Hexagon is a very brief action game. Only uses the edge of the screen as its two buttons, so it basically works despite the touch screen. It’s only got…I think it’s twelve levels total? I forget. I think I’ve gotten to level four. It’s better with the sound on, though.
Slay the Spire is another great deck building game. Touch controls aren’t perfect and the UI is kinda small on a phone, but the underlying game is good enough that it’s worth playing.
Ridiculous Fishing is a very simple game, but very well made.
Pinball Arcade is pretty good, though you have to pay for each individual table you want. There are always some free ones on any given day though. It was easier to recommend before they lost their Williams and Bally licenses, since then they had all the classics like Theater of Magic and Attack from Mars; now it’s all Stern tables unless you already own the old ones. The simulation quality is pretty good, though. It’s all a bit more forgiving than the real thing, but I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing.
Bart Bonte’s games, which are all named after colors (black, blue, green, etc.) are pretty amusing. Not very difficult but kinda diverting for a bit. Kind of like an escape room game crossed with warioware? Each screen has unique touch-screen mechanics, and you have to figure them out to advance.
SetMania is a decent implementation of the card game Set. Make sure to turn off the (frankly bizarre) setting that randomizes your settings constantly.
Nonograms Katana is a pretty good nonogram (picross) game. Gotta buy levels though.
Monument Valley and 2 are kinda fun. Easy puzzles but diverting, with nice graphics.
If you find it fun to make fine distinctions between colors, I Love Hue is interesting. But I can also see other folks thinking that’s a circle of hell.
Oh, and I’m enjoying Cryptic Crossword by Teazel Inc. They’re not very difficult ones, and it would be nice if it had some kind of “explain” option for when you really can’t grok a clue even after seeing the answer. But you usually get an “aha” from most clues and the packs of puzzles aren’t too pricey.
There are a few more games I enjoyed, but that was at least partly because I got them from a Humble Bundle, and those versions had the in-app purchases turned into things you could earn in the game, which was way better. E.g. the Kingdom Rush games. I can’t really recommend the versions you can get now, because they’re all microtransactioned up. I think the same is true of some of the games I used to enjoy like Cut The Rope as well.
Emulation is also a good option, but if you don’t want to bother with that there are a few purchasable apps that will basically do it for you, like Sega’s Shining Force games.
Hope this helps someone. I wrote it up partly to get myself to organize the things in my own brain.
It looks to me like they did it this way so that it could have natural-language names in many languages. So, the function Z10096 is called “is palindrome” in English, but if you’re coding in Japanese you can call it “回文の判定”. I don’t think the idea is for people to refer primarily to the alphanumeric soup version; I think that’s just the unique identifier for the database.
It does look like it’s leading to some issues, though. E.g., someone added a test for the “is palindrome” function which uses a somewhat common example: “Straw? No, too stupid. I put soot on warts.” Now, a human would probably say that this is a palindrome, because it’s got the same letters forwards and backwards, but most of the implementations disagree, because they consider the spaces, capitalization, and punctuation to be part of the string; that is, they test whether the input string and its reverse are equal. So someone (possibly the same person) has added a second python implementation which ignores spaces, capitalization, and punctuation, and mentions that in its name on the page.
Fundamentally this function is solving a different problem than the others (as demonstrated by the differing results on the relevant test), so should it get its own number and page? should there be a “palindrome disambiguation” page? This seems like something the site will have to figure out how to handle.
Turbo Pascal was the first language in which I had serious classes (I had tutoring in Applesoft Basic earlier on, but that language has a lot of limitations), and I used it for years afterwards. You could write auxiliary functions in Turbo Assembler and link them in; I used that to write a library that allowed access to the 320x200 256-color VGA mode (the built-in graphics only did EGA and were super slow), and other libraries for mouse and joystick control. I tried to control the soundblaster for FM synthesis, but it was too complicated for me to figure out how to do anything useful without better access to documentation (this was before the world wide web). The experience also taught me a lot about assembly language basics, function calling conventions for C and Pascal, stack manipulation, and so forth, which gave me a huge head start in my compilers courses at university.
On the whole I would still recommend C over Pascal as an early language–it gives you much better insight into memory layout and so forth, where Pascal kind of obfuscates such things, and C just generally kind of acts like both Pascal and Assembler rolled together. But Turbo Pascal definitely gave me a good foundation.
It really sounds like you’re describing Make (or LLVM). Is there something you need it to do that those can’t handle?
The only real objection I have to this as a term is that it’s too easy to confuse with “rubber ducking”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
I do a lot of this stuff with the HP48 Units menu (albeit at this point via an emulator on my phone).
Shaders are terrific fun. I highly recommend ShaderToy if you want to experiment with them; it makes the loop between changing the code and seeing the effect very tight. I also recommend the YouTube channel “Art of Code” for good examples, well-explained.
I just use swipe typing, but my dad absolutely loves MessagEase, which is basically a 9-key keyboard. The gimmick is that every letter is a gesture; nine letters are just taps, and everything else (including some punctuation) you start on one of those nine keys and swipe in one of eight directions (up, left, upper left, etc.). I think there are a couple of other large keys, like a space bar at the bottom and delete and “switch to numbers and extra punctuation” on the right, but you mainly use the nine for words. It’s not terrible, and he’s gotten moderately fast at it. Might be worth a look.
Edit: Oh, I’ve just seen that MessagEase is now unmaintained, and the “thumbkey” mentioned in another comment is basically a replacement. So I guess this is just another recommendation for that keyboard! Oops.
Gluten kicks ass. It’s easily the best fake meat base. I remember in college cooking a meal for my roommates and them saying afterwards “wait, aren’t you vegetarian? did you cook this just for us and not eat any?” and having to explain that no, that wasn’t beef, it was wheat gluten and mushrooms and miso. They were dubious, saying, “well, to me this is just really tender beef.”
So yeah. I’m also disappointed that gluten has gotten such a bad rap. I’m waiting for this knowledge to trickle back into the convenience foods sector so I can buy this stuff and not have to make it by hand every time, and it seems like I’ll be waiting a long time.
In addition to “format shifting,” which is a well-recognized use case, and game preservation, which is a huge and under-recognized public interest in emulator development, emulators are also used for the development of homebrew software. E.g., there’s a port of Moonlight for the Switch, which lets you play Steam games streamed from a PC using your Switch, letting it serve many of the purposes of a Steam Deck. That’s huge! It would be way less practical to develop this kind of software if you could only test on real hardware. Testing on real hardware is also essential, of course, but testing on an emulator is vastly faster for rapid iteration.