An early encounter gets revisted at the climax with all of the protagonist’s skills leveled to max. There’s a running gag that’s very Kojima (you’ll know it when you see it).

And “Predator: Badlands” stars a space creature with a wisecracking robot strapped to its back, so...

I think you could find a better analogy for this one.

Or you can use leading zero count (LZCNT aka __lzcnt64()) , which is defined as 0 → 64, and also 2 cycles faster than bsr.

*undefined = on some CPUs it returns 0 and on other CPUs it return either 0 or garbage depending on flags and source operand type and who knows what else
DON'T ASK HOW I KNOW

That said, I mostly enjoyed Tron: Ares. It's not a great film, but it has a great soundtrack, and it was fun to spot all the quotes and references.

AI as nascent lifeform is also core cyberpunk. But I think we're past that story being "Frankenstein" and need to start doing it as "Dr. Strangelove". The best movie we've had on the peril of overfit machine learning so far is M3GAN.

But a lot of Tron: Ares is cyberpunk about cyberpunk. War between the corporations. Computer hacking is infiltrating a Futurist building in cyberspace, straight out of Neuromancer. The world is saved by a heroic video game developer 😁

There are glimmers. Tron: Ares opens with a depiction of reinforcement learning from the GAN's perspective. One of its AIs transcends its training given more context. Another becomes misaligned from a bad prompt.

Tron isn't religious propaganda, it just uses allegory as a narrative device, and that allegory isn't 1:1. But allegory gives theme; the movie is *about* something, it's a parable of purpose and faith. Tron: Ares is mostly about Tron.

The rest is obvious. Tron, his faith in the Users unwavering, is a disciple. The I/O priests are conduits between the programs and their creators. Flynn sacrifices himself to restore that connection, then ascends bodily to the creators' world.

But things in Tron's world *do* have purposes! The tanks and Recognizers are game entities. The solar sail is a research sim. The programs use these things without knowing why they exist. Flynn can work miracles because he has context.

The same actors portray both programmers and their programs. AIs are made in their creators' images. So when Flynn gets abducted into cyberspace, he's literally The Creator bodily manifested among his creations, then condemned by Pilate.

Some programs believe they were created for a purpose by a higher power they cannot see. The local authority wants them to serve itself instead. So the ones who believe in The Users are sent to the games to die.

Tron's story asks what arcade games would be like for the characters in them, sent to fight in deadly sports on behalf of users they never see. Reach into history for a parallel and you'll find gladiators. The rest of the story flows from there:

Something that got lost between screenplay and screen is *why* the cyberspace of Tron looks the way it does: it's a world built from video games and simulations. The people are game avatars. The vehicles are CAD assets and research sims.

How widespread is that readiness?