_cnt0

Thanks.

Thanks for the kind feedback. I’m happy I made sense. I don’t always do ;-)

This article was posted elsewhere, so I’ll just copy my comment from there over here:

I generally enjoy listening to/reading Sam Harris and always go away from his pieces with the feeling of having learned something new, some fact or perspective, however small. It’s kind of the same here, but, I think his arguments are, at least in part, deeply flawed here.

I find the distinction between victims of terror and collateral damage problematic. Under the line what he’s saying here, is that their quantities are not comparable because they are of very different nature. I can’t agree with that. Dead people are dead people no matter how they died. They had lives, family, friends, … To them it makes no difference if they died because of terror or as collateral damage. Thinking back to the WTC attack and the wars that followed Sam Harris’ notion suggests, that the >3.000 victims of terrorism could be worse than the >1.000.000 collateral in the following wars, because of their quality and the quantity not being comparable. In my book, that’s plain nonsense.

I tend to agree with his stance on “us” (western world/democracies) having a set of higher moral standards than Hamas and others we would consider failed states or dictatorships. Though, he and I share a compatible set of morals in our upbringing. I am personally opposed to absolute morals as they are usually provided by religious texts. But in the spirit of democracy I acknowledge that a majority could decide and settle on a set of morals incompatible with mine. I could argue all I want and never claim to be objectively correct. But, more importantly, especially when looking at Gaza and Hamas, as he points out himself, our moral compass wasn’t that different in sometimes very recent history. “Our” progress on the moral front was made in times of peace (at least at home) and economic stability and success. If “we” deny a group of people (I’m deliberately not saying society here) the conditions we had to achieve what we consider our superior morals, we can’t be surprised if they don’t share them. And I would go a step further and argue, that we are not in a morally justifiable position to criticize them for their “lack of morals”.

Sam Harris isn’t really saying much contrary to what I’m saying here. He’s just conveniently leaving out the angles I’m bringing up. Knowing lots of what he’s said/written and being familiar with his eloquence and rhetorics, I’m tempted to assume it is very deliberate. Hence I’m pretty disappointed in him for this particular piece.

It’s a difficult problem to navigate, especially as you need to have it work for such a big and diverse audience.

That’s a very polite way of saying that part of the target audience are idiots.

Don’t.

What people here are saying: Don’t try to enter the dimension of suffering and pain.

What you are saying: OK. How can I enter the dimension of suffering and pain?

If you insist on entering the dimension of suffering and pain: Go a step further back and develop your game for DOS. Older Windows versions will just be able to run it out of the box, and everything else can run it via DOSBox.

I think using OpenGL will be even harder than DX8. Your point with the documentation is spot on: it will be hard to come by. As for TLS/SSL third party libs: I had the fun opportunity to implement/maintain the backwards compatibility for a piece of software for Win XP/Server 2003 ~3 years ago. We had to jump some hoops with a custom compilation of OpenSSL to get the parts of TLS 1.2 we needed in Windows 10. I can say with confidence, that that route is a dead end for even older Windows versions.

Little add-on: My gut feeling is that you’ll need to set up a development environment on Windows 98/Me or NT4/2k, maybe XP.

If you use plain C and only the part of the Win32 API that has been availlable since 95 that should be doable. No modern toolkit/SDK will likely enable you to do that. The problem will be finding downloads/sources for OS, SDK, and IDE old enough to target Windows 95. You might be able to use DirectX 8, but it will require installing DirectX 9 on newer versions of Windows as a dependency (DX10+ is not backwards compatible with DX8 and DX8 is the latest you get for Windows 95, DX9 is still availlable for Windows 11). Your game will have to be offline only or rely on insecure network stack because hardware old enough to run 95 does not have CPU instruction sets required by implementations for modern SSL.

would this greatly affect the development process at all?

Well, take the information I provided and have a guess ;-)