Plot twist: The dialogue for "You have X wishes!" was not written beyond 3, so he now overflows into unused memory and just screams incoherent garbage at you.

But 0!=1, what am I missing here?

The Disney genie was also just a scam. Aladdin explicitly wished to be a prince. Not look like a prince or be as rich as a prince or have a parade like a prince. But actually be one.

Instead he's revealed to be a 'fake prince' because the genie half assed his wish.

For a moment I read it as 0! (zero factorial) and was super confused.

Updating the balance after granting the wish is bad practice. This genie is begging for a reentrancy attack.

While Hercules is impressively wrong, I knew Aladdin was a fun original read when it began with 'In the Far East Kingdom of China....'

Hercules, for all of its faults, actually takes place in Greece. Which is kinda sorta close to Rome (Hercules is his Roman name lol. Heracles is his Greek name).

On the other hand, Aladdin might be a fake story all together. As in, some French Guy may have made up Aladdin as part of his translation of 1001 Arabian Nights. IIRC, Arabs don't know wtf that story is doing in the (French) book.

So Aladdin might be an entirely fake addition to the 1001 Arabian Nights novel. Canonically fake. So it's in the true spirit of Aladdin (and 1001 Arabian Nights) to screw with the story anyway.

I love when fanfic gets canonized by public consensus.

Its a quirk in binary math with 8 digits. If you "roll the odometer" past 0, it resets to 255

 0000 0011 (3)
-0000 0001 (1)
=0000 0010 (2)

 0000 0000 (0)
-0000 0001 (1)
=1111 1111 (255)

I think you missed the joke

Genie grants the wish, and then deducts one from the pool of remaining wishes.

Edit 1: And it is implied that the Genie stored the number of remaining wishes as an eight bit unsigned integer, where subtracting one from zero gives 255.

It is worth noting that unsigned integer subtract-from-zero exploits were common in video games from around the time that Disney's Aladdin was released.

Edit 2: No discussion of amusing subtract-from-zero bugs is complete without a link to Nuclear Gandhi. (Even though it is now believed not to have been a subtract-from-zero bug.)

He is saying factorial of zero, so more a math nerd than a computer nerd.

Yes. I caught the factorial reference, but wanted to address the question, in case it was also in earnest.

Missingno appears.

I don't see how the vacuously true statement 0 != 1 has any relevance here.

First, "make it 0!" - * Number *! As a "surprise factorial" (as seen in comments in this very thread making this exact joke) is a common joke in threads like this and that was the only connection I could make for this meme, having no previously knowledge of binary quirks.

Second, I don't know if you were trying to be a dick or you're just some overly wordy ass clown high on your own farts, but how on earth is me explaining what I thought a joke meant, showing why it didn't work, and then asking for help to understand it vacuous?

I assumed that you understood that the original joke was about having 0 wishes.

I also assumed that you were making a joke about factorials.

I decided to make my own joke about "!=" in your joke being misinterpreted as the programming symbol for "not equal".

My statement should be read as "0 is not equal to 1". This is a vacuously true statement, as it does not rely rely on any input, and is always true.

Shouldn't it be -1, not 0?

Depends. If the wish counter decrements after fulfilling the wish, then it works.

• Wish 1: Wish for the numeric rule to operate in 64-bit unsigned integer space.

• Wish 2: wish for 0 wishes.

• Wish 3: Wish for minus 1 Wish.

Result: now be left with 1.8446744073709551616*10^19 Wishes.

Avarage argument in any science related space: