• sqgl@sh.itjust.works
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    13 days ago

    The phrase “Gandhi’s words are backed with nuclear” refers to a popular internet meme and in-joke related to the video game “Civilization.” In the game, Mahatma Gandhi, known for his non-violent philosophy in real life, has a tendency to become surprisingly aggressive and develop nuclear weapons in later stages of the game. This has led to the humorous association of his name with nuclear power, despite his actual historical stance.

    • A Wild Mimic appears!@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      13 days ago

      IIRC that was caused by a buffer underflow, his probability to try to go nuclear was set to literally zero, which was stored in an unsigned int, and in-game policies reduced it further, causing a nuke-maxing ghandi

      • brisk@aussie.zone
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        4 hours ago

        Hey it’s me the fun ruiner here to ruin your fun.

        Nuclear Ghandi was mostly a myth until Civilisation V where it was deliberately programmed in.

        Also the concept of an integer wrapping around below it’s minimum value is still integer overflow, just like wrapping above it’s maximum value. Underflow does exist in the context of floating point numbers, when a calculation produces a result too small to represent in the floating point schema.

        Buffer overflow is putting more elements into an array than can fit in the array, therefore trying to write beyond the end of an array. They’re a super common form of vulnerability exploit, particularly in older programs written in C. Buffer underflow is when something consuming from a buffer consumes faster than it is filled, and so empties the buffer. I didn’t actually know this term before making this comment.