Slay the Spire: yes. All four rules are there, specially in spirit. It’s also a deck-building game but that’s fine, a game can belong to 2+ genres at the same time.

I’m not sure on Balatro. I didn’t play it, so… maybe?

There are a thousand definitions and mine is just one among many, I’m aware. This is not a “right vs. wrong” matter, it’s how you cut things out.

For me, a roguelike has four rules:

1. Permadeath—can’t reuse dead chars for new playthrus.
2. Procedural generation—lots of the game get changed from one to another playthru.
3. Turn-based—game time is split into turns, and there’s no RL time limit on how long each turn takes.
4. Simple elements—each action, event, item, stat etc. is by itself simple. Complexity appears through their interaction.

People aware of other definitions (like the Berlin Interpretation) will notice my #4 is not “grid-based”. I think the grid is just a consequence of keeping individual elements simple, in this case movement.

Those rules are not random. They create gameplay where there are limits on how better your character can get; but you, as the player, are consistently getting better. Not by having better reflexes, not by dumb memorisation, but by understanding the game better, and thinking deeper on how its elements interact.

I personally don’t consider games missing any of those elements a “roguelike”. Like The Binding of Isaac; don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game (I love it); but since it’s missing #3 (combat is real-timed) and #4 (complex movement and attack patterns, not just for you but your enemies), it relies way more on your reflexes and senses than a roguelike would.

Some might be tempted to use the label “roguelite” for games having at least few of those features, but not all of them. Like… well, Isaac—it does feature permadeath and procedural generation, right? Frankly, I think the definition isn’t useful, and it’s bound to include things completely different from each other. It’s like saying carrots and limes are both “orange-like” (carrots due to colour, limes because they’re citrus); instead of letting those games shine as their own things, you’re dumping them into a “failed to be a roguelike” category.

English: [ɔ:]. It rhymes with “dinosaur”.
Portuguese: [ä’uɾ]. Basically how it’s spelled.

This is almost a textbook example of the broken window fallacy.

“Microsoft”, who? Certainly not Suleyman, Davuluri, or Nadella.

Even if you’re in the camp that understands memes like “6 7” have more significance than they’re given credit for,

I think 6-7 is a shibboleth. It doesn’t say much on its own, except which group you belong to.

Substance, as ever, remains a relative notion. Nyan Cat perhaps didn’t have the substance of an Andy Warhol image

I’d argue the Nyan cat is more substantial than what Andy Warhol came up with.

If you want a great reset you’ll need a new internet that is outright hostile to corporate interests. No corposlop being produced there, no derailing old memes to sell you junk.

Nah, quoting Stormfront is not a bug. Quoting well-sourced facts retrieved from Wikipedia is.

Related:

• Mustafa Suleyman*, Microsoft AI CEO, mindblown at people not being excited with his corpo-slop
• Pavan Davuluri, Windows chief, trying to address criticism without doing jack shit to fix what’s being criticised
• Microsoft still trying to push Edge down the users’ throats

“I don’t understand, why did users turn stupid out of blue? Those things used to know basic obedience! Now they can’t even follow simple orders like «be excited»! Let’s fire the User Taming Department and replace it with AI!” /hj

*aka “Suleyman the Chaoswrecker”. Not to be confused with “Suleiman the Lawgiver”, the Ottoman sultan from five centuries ago.

I wish the author had the courage to title the article “Frustrated Windows users are switching to Linux because of Microsoft’s Windows 11 tracking, logging, screen capturing, spying, high-jacking user data to Onedrive, resetting basic user settings”.

I’m mindblown at him being mindblown.

Oh wait, I’m not. Because I know those CEOs are completely detached from reality, and take users for dumb cattle ready to be herded.

Funny but insightful comment from the link:

“Never get high on your own stuff. A lesson this guy doesn’t seem to have learned…”

Fediverse, please enlighten me - is Windows a drug? …on a more serious note, “don’t overestimate the desirability of what you’re trying to sell” is sensible advice.

Indeed. Sadly, corporations abused telemetry so much that it makes users automatically distrust software with it - even when it’s opt-in. As such I’m not surprised it isn’t more common, specially in the Linux ecosystem.

If we take distro defaults into account, it’s possible Arch stats overestimate GNOME market share.

Based on tecmint list, the top 3 distros are Mint, MX Linux, and Endeavour. Their defaults are:

• Mint - Cinnamon, MATE
• MX Linux - Xfce, Plasma, Fluxbox
• Endeavour - Plasma

Granted, the fourth one (Debian) does default to GNOME, but your typical Debian user is more experienced, so it’s less likely they stick to the default.

…I wish I had actual data instead of a bunch of guesses. :-/

I wouldn’t be surprised if other big DEs, such as KDE, start making firmer plans for dropping X11.

If going by Arch Linux statistics, KDE dropping X11 will have a bigger impact than GNOME doing it.

In this video (Odysee link), someone asks X11 users why they’re still using it in 2025. The main answers were

1. DE or WM doesn’t support Wayland, or its Wayland session is currently WIP.
2. [lack of] support for certain graphic tablets and their features.
3. old hardware. Specially old nVidia GPUs.
4. [If I got this right] Some software expects to be able to dictate window position, and Wayland doesn’t let it to.
5. OpenBSD.

In the light of the above, I think GNOME’s decision to drop the X11 backend is a big “meh, who cares”. If you use GNOME you’re likely not in the first case; #2 and #3 boil down to hardware support, not something DE developers can interfere directly; I’m not sure on #4 and #5, however.

Before I even read the article, let me guess:

1. it keeps Google under control of everything, giving it power to kick out competitors on a whim
2. it claims it’s “to protect those disgusting pieces of shit called users from causing themselves harm”
3. it claims Google did nothing wrong

Now, reading the article…

• “Google has denied any wrongdoing throughout the closely watched litigation.” - that’s #3 right off the bat
• “Under the new proposal, Google would allow users to more easily download and install third-party app stores that meet new security and safety standards.” - who decides those standards? If Google itself, that’s #1
• Sameer Samat, Google’s president of Android Ecosystem, said, opens new tab on Tuesday the proposed changes maintained user safety - #2.

*Yawn*

Yeah, the terminology is currently a mess. Not just due to language changes, but also synchronic variation - different people using the same words for different meanings, at the same time. But for me, it’s a mix of motivations, methods, and morality:

• hacker strictu sensu - like a kid who dismantles toys to see how they work. Sometimes they break things, but they want knowledge the most. Usually grey hat, sometimes white hat, only rarely black hat
• cracker - like a kid who bashes toys with a hammer. Not interested on the knowledge itself, except when it allows them to bully other kids. Almost always black hat.

It’s more than that: they’d need to have desires, aversions, goals. That is not automatically granted by intelligence; in our case it’s from our instincts as animals. So perhaps you’d need to actually evolve Darwin style the AGI systems you develop, and that would be way more massive than a single AGI, let alone the “put glue on pizza lol” systems we’re frying the planet for.

My guess:

Coverage roughly follows money, and that money comes the top of the hierarchy. However, the top is too far from the production to actually get that 1) automation is nothing new, and 2) AI won’t help as much with it as advertised.

The middle of the hierarchy is close enough to the production to know those two things, but it’ll parrot them because doing so enables the inefficiency they love so much, under the disguise of efficiency.

Then you got the bottom. It’s the closest to the production, but often suffers from a problem of “I don’t see the forest, I see the leaves”, plus since it has no decision power so it ends as a “meh who cares”. So it’ll parrot whatever it sees in the coverage.

As such, who’s actually going to get screwed here? The answer may surprise you.

All three. However not in the way people predict, “AI is going to steal our jobs”. It’s more like suckers at the top will lose big money on AI fluff, and to cut costs off they’ll fire a lot of people.

Setting aside “and how will it do that?” as outside the scope of the topic at hand, it’s a bit baffling to me how a nebulous concept prone to outright errors is an existential threat. (To be clear, I think the energy and water impacts are.)

Ditto.

Interestingly enough, not even making them actually intelligent would be enough to make them liable - because you can’t punish or reward them.

No problem - miscommunication happens.