It was simply a magical thing in the early days, and one wonders how things would have turned out if for instance we had had MacBasic instead of HyperCard:
I was pretty proud of my Game of Life & Wireworld implementations for the terminal, with half-character resolution o.o;
Guess I'll have to up my game and start work on Twin Cobra and Dune ][ clones.. now that I've seen it's possible..
Using sprites is clever :-) then I guess that's how these older games worked too.
Something quite similar to this is a theme in Greg Egan's Diaspora[1]. Specifically the various "flesher" societies and "bridgers" who facilitate communication between vastly divergent groups.
It's an exceedingly common theme in sci-fi, but particularly the space opera genre. In any literary universe where humans occupy multiple planets, at least one of those planets is an agrarian society who has renounced all the higher technology that brought them there.
Peter F. Hamilton loves talking about this. Offhand, I can't think of a single one of his books that doesn't at least mention this concept. He really likes to explore the very long-term evolution of the relationship between humans and technology. You get simple low-tech societies governed and protected by the most sophisticated AI it's possible or conceivable to build, lots of backwater planets with no money for technology, idealistic societies that set up a new way of life, farm planets, all sorts.
Look at 'The Dreaming Void' trilogy. It's very explicitly a juxtaposition between high 30th century intergalactic technology and a society living on a planet where electricity simply doesn't work. It's one of my favorites.
Retrotopia by John Michael Greer has an aspect similar to different technology levels. Except that in the novel they are essentially taxation zones relating to infrastructure. If you want to live in a zone with, say, publicly maintained roads, then you have to pay taxes for it. Otherwise you could live in a zone without them. Same for other public amenities. More details here:
https://theworthyhouse.com/2021/01/01/retrotopia-john-michae...
"To maintain autarky, and for practical and philosophical reasons we will turn to in a minute, Lakeland rejects public funding of any technology past 1940, and imposes cultural strictures discouraging much private use of such technology. Even 1940s technology is not necessarily the standard; each county chooses to implement public infrastructure in one of five technological tiers, going back to 1820. The more retro, the lower the taxes. Family farming is apparently the main activity for the population, usually with horses and oxen (petroleum is nearly non-existent and the few motor vehicles run on heavily-taxed biodiesel). Towns and cities have been rebuilt in solid 1940s style; they are powered by modest amounts of central electricity, generated by manure, supplemented by point-source hot-water solar and wind. There is no internet, much less metanet, and no satellite access (portrayed as ubiquitously critical to the outside world’s functioning). Business is conducted at a 1940s level, as is all physical culture. Clothes are throwbacks—made of high quality, long-lasting materials, rather than the disposable “bioplastic” found in the outside world. Economically, Lakeland is somewhere on the continuum to distributism—the Grange is back in action, concentrations of wealth with disproportionate power are forbidden, and associations and other intermediary institutions are ubiquitous. Subsidiarity, rather than concentration, is the rule; banks are individual and tied to the community, for example. Automation is rejected as costing a society more than it provides, if properly accounted. ..."
Alistar Reynolds' _Terminal World_ had something sort of like this (only discussed halfway through the story, of course), where the world had "zones" , each of which supported a maximum precision or resolution... Technology taken from a high precision zone to a lower precision either ran poorly or would lock up entirely. Bonus; the zones were not always contiguous.
IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z: Transform COBOL services to Java™ by using an AI-assisted approach with IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z and IBM Z Open Editor.
ChatGPT 4 pondered for a while, then started "Analyzing..", and eventually "Finished analyzing" (all following verbatim output):
python 9999999999999999.0 - 9999999999999998.0
Result 2.0
The result of the calculation 9999999999999999.0−9999999999999998.0 is 2.0.
This result may seem counterintuitive, but it's due to how floating-point numbers are represented and handled in computing. Floating-point arithmetic can introduce small rounding errors, especially with very large numbers, as precision is limited. In this case, the precision required to represent these large numbers exactly is beyond what typical floating-point representations (like IEEE 754 double precision) can handle, leading to a slight error in the calculation.
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