FWIW I support this. It's more relevant to HN to talk about Meta, the big tech company, doing something wrong than a nation, regardless of where you stand on this issue.
And conversely, another reason why Trump's tariffs on China are a bone-headed move. They are not going to sell TikTok while the tariffs last, and the popular demand for it makes banning it a non-starter.
I generally have the same frustration with roguelites as you seem to: every time I start a run, it feels like I'm gambling whether I'll have any fun at all. A bad seed or start can mean losing in ways that feel unfair or boring, like in balatro if you get a bunch of bad hands and bad jokers, you struggle through rounds and hands until you either lose or get an interesting combination. I don't need that kind of gambling in my life when there's tons of games out there where I know I will have fun.
E: I still quite like Balatro - when it works it's a blast. I'll also still try out Blue Prince because people I respect seem to like it.
> I still quite like Balatro - when it works it's a blast
I enjoyed Balatro for quite a few hours before I had this problem, which is more than enough for me to call it a good game.
Beyond these first few hours though, you need ridiculously high multipliers to succeed. There's way too many jokers and 90% of them are trash by this point. The ones you need have vanishingly small probabilities, and then you need to add those probabilities together to get the combo of jokers required.
I would start a run, and within the first few minutes I would know that the RNG hadn't given me what I needed, reset, start again, repeat.
I looked up some guides, and they'd recommend using specific legendary jokers, which over my entire time playing (maybe 15 hours?) I didn't encounter even once. The only way to get them would be to play hundreds or even thousands of times.
At that point, it doesn't feel like a game anymore. It feels like a gambling addiction.
For me, that's time to call it quits. But I do wonder if the same people who struggle with gambling addiction in the real world are the ones who continue playing here.
At least with Balatro there is ten hours worth of game before your reach this point.
People win streak gold stake Balatro, A20H slay the spire, unfair slice and dice, and plenty of other games in this category. Nothing wrong with playing a game for 10 hours and being done with it but calling them rng fiestas just because you can’t beat the game on the hardest difficulty every time after 10 hours is a bit dismissive of the level of effort that is put in to getting these games as tightly tuned as they are.
Hades is fun because there is some skill involved with the button mashing to go with the RNG, but it feels like too many games are just dressed up gambling mechanics these days. Balatro is too naked and bare with being clever gambling, plus all the ding ding ding slot machine dopamine special effects.
Hades relies too heavily on meta progression. You are supposed to grind before winning. The game is not balanced around your original state. I personally hate that because I view it as the game wasting my time but I can understand how it’s supposed to be enjoyable.
Balatro has a different issue for me. Despite having a lot of joker it sometimes feels very RNG reliant and limited once you reach high stakes. Plus the difficulty rises somehow artificially by withdrawing options rather than expending the challenge.
Slay the Spire remains unbeatable for me. No other game has the same level of complexity. You get all the tool to limit variance but every choice becomes very significant.
I don’t know how to understand your comment. The goal of Slay the Spire is to climb all the way to the heart while picking cards and beating it, preferably on A20 - all the other difficulty levels being basically a tutorial leading to the real game. There is no moment involving all the players of the world and the game is generally very slow so I’m a bit lost.
I swear I remember that when you get to the heart, you get to see something like "you need [huge number] of total damage, damage that has been applied [medium number gets increased by your measly tiny damage]" or maybe "health left [huge non-round number gets decreased by very little]" and then your character dies
I just assumed that it's some online thing where it counts total damage from everyone to finally slay that heart "together"
You get your score shown as damage once you beat the act 3 boss(es) and then go on to act 4 to fight the final boss if you properly collected the three keys which unlock it while climbing.
One common mantra about most roguelites is that every run can be a successful run if you play your cards right. Some will be harder, in others you’ll become unstoppable, but the general idea is that once you get good enough you should be able to win runs. I’m not sure if this holds and is extremely dependent on how balanced the game is, but I think it’s a sane way to approach the genre since it pushes you to improve and generally becomes a rule once you become good enough at some of the games.
One of the key differences between rogue lites and rogue likes is meta progression. In most roguelites you're able to unlock things and get more powerful for future runs. In roguelikes you always have the same starting rng. I definitely agree with you that it's all up to the game to balance the progression through both unlocks and skill improvement so it's not entirely rng. But I also don't think many put much effort into "every run is solvable". Especially for roguelikes.
I'd say it's even worse for roguelites. They tend to balanced assuming the player has done some or most of the meta-progression. Sometimes to the point where it feels the game forces you to lose to experience more of it. (I really liked inscryption up until it forced me to fail 2-3 times because I progressed too much)
With roguelikes at least you are at the intended power level every time, even if some of these games are too RNG reliant.
With real roguelikes (aka games on a grid with turn-based combat), I believe they're not designed to be fair at all. There's so much rng involved, so you will get unexpected and unfair deaths and lots of them.
Roguelike community has a saying - "losing is fun". And while I only played a few traditional rl games and finished none of them, I had great experience while constantly "losing" only a few hours into the run.
In most roguelites I play, losing isn't fun - it's frustrating. There is often very little variety in earlier stages of the game, so if you're bad (and I am) you're stuck replaying the same section for hours, only to get good RNG, go 1 level farther and immediately die to some new mechanic or difficulty spike.
One exception is The Binding Of Isaac, this is probably the best roguelite game I've ever played and nothing comes even close.
There is fair and then there is "fair". I do think most rougelikes spend at least some time on making sure the the default path is usually workable. I think roguelites fall into the trap of relying on meta-progression to push in-game progression too much. Some of the card roguelites I play feel impossible to "win" without meta progression. And in some it feels like they mostly expand complexity. It's a difficult thing to balance. I'm mostly okay with the difficulty spikes because they usually accompany power spikes that you can get with the right choices and rng. I really like the "breaking the game" aspect of roguelites like Balatro. Getting mathematical notation for high scores hits different, even though it's not necessary for beating the normal levels.
I don't buy the idea that Musk is doing this as some sort of branding play. I think he genuinely believes in what he says; his beliefs have just shifted over the past few years, notably after COVID.
His trans daughter Vivian is what flipped him. "Woke mind virus." For someone trying to have as many kids as possible (allegedly boys prioritized) and the controlling personality type, he takes great offense, as if this is a mortal sin against him. He also does not act in a healthy way when his attempts to exert control over others fails. Haven't heard much from him since his $25M in Wisconsin didn't buy him the election.
He has had sex-selective IVF for all of his children, and all that we know about have been biologically male.
Vivian has pointed this out - Elon feels personally affronted by having a daughter. She was selected to be be male at birth in a VERY LITERAL sense. Her being transgender is an explicit rejection of his wishes, and that triggers him.
Especially since he seems to ignore those children except the one he drags around with him.
Maybe he has some dream about being a patriarch of a giant family.
Actually, considering his "pay someone else to play video games" actions, it makes sense that he's paying others to raise his kids. He seems to want the appearance but none of the work behind it.
He legitimately believes that we're in a simulation. While scientists have explored the thought experiment to improve understanding of the universe, he took all the wrong lessons from it and considers everyone else an NPC. So to me it makes complete sense that an idiot like him would use his money and power to make as many boys as possible in that way.
I have a lot of skepticism about the "stalker threatened the vehicle" story that came out of Musk, especially considering his security never called 911 or anything corroborating, but on this note, in two separate incidents where two of his children were in a vehicle, his public statements afterwards commented on the threat to or safety of the male child, and made no mention of the female child in the same car.
I'm sure that's part of it, but I think the first sign was in 2020 when he basically went to war with California over their shelter in place orders. Remember the "Zero new cases by the end of April" prediction?
There were glimpses of his idiotic side coming out earlier, mainly the "pedo" comment about the diver in Thai kids rescue but COVID definitely triggered something major on him, he lost any semblance of a filter after the pandemic.
I also remember the Personification of Science who funded virus creation at a lab in the city where the virus first spread spending February 2020 saying that Covid probably wasn’t going to be a problem. This raises a whole lot of questions BUT no one here wants to talk about that. And besides he’s been pardoned.
It’s funny how fast the Hn crowd can go back and forth between asking “what radicalized you?” and looking away from the answer.
He's been an extremist freak forever he just used to think it was more beneficial to keep it somewhat out of view. It's been there if you looked though.
Like go read how he talked about it when he first started publicly fantasizing about mars about a decade ago. Ignore the technical stuff and take the few concrete details he does give about his goals per se and not just the means to accomplish them. And extrapolate out into how that could actually work as an economic or governance system. The only way it could work is as a novel configuration of indentured servitude or possibly straight up slavery. He's smoking the worst ideas from a century of dystopian sci fi and taking them as a blueprint. Literally torment nexus shit.
Or I mean the "pedo diver" thing was seven years ago, this was only just after pizzagate, it was a massive clue he was already deep in far right conspiracy theory subcultures. The article by his first wife came out years before that which sure you could have just dismissed as pure fabrication. But already by then there was enough evidence aligned with it that it was wholly credible. https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-start...
Or uh, why did he leave south africa in the first place. Not why did he come to the US, which is what he tries to divert this question to if asked. Emigrating is a massive upheaval, it generally takes a lot of pressure, or anticipation of it, to get someone to do that. What pressure did he perceive to be on him?
I'm not willing or qualified to get too into the political history of south africa but 1987 is frequently mentioned in scholarship as when it became broadly clear to south africans that apartheid was going to collapse in the near future. Musk left in 1988. His father was a south african politician who resigned his party over their support of a constitutional reform that would give (limited!) representation to non-white south africans. People aren't their parents of course but a 18-year-old isn't completely free of their influence either. We'll never know for sure obviously but I think it's very likely ... why am I even writing this how can you not see it.
I ask that you read his words, look at the timing, and connect the dots. Any one of these could be a coincidence, sure, I guess. But given his more recent behavior a much simpler explanation is, again, that he was always an extremist freak.
I clocked this guy as a massive threat in like 2011 just based on vibes and kept an eye on him. I think I got this one right.
[I've edited this post rather than respond to some of the comments because I'm rate limited and out of comments for the next several hours.]
Sorry, but why would a Mars colony only work with indentured servitude and/or slavery, as proposed by Elon Musk? Not disputing this, just curious what his proposal looks like.
He doesn't exactly strike me as a democrat, but I would like to know his plans?
Well just extremely basically, what are you gonna get when "not a democrat" forms a brand new & fully independent polity, completely outside the international system, virtually impossible to have any external insight into, not a signatory to any treaties or conventions, with no peers at all to provide any sort of mechanism for economic or humanitarian pressure and not even the realistic possibility of emigration if you're born inside it. It may not be exactly slavery as we know it historically but there are very few ways this could go I think.
Indentured servitude I believe he proposed himself actually, though I can't find it now I think it was in a twitter thread and I don't think he used those words precisely. But the idea of people taking loans for the transit costs and then working them off on mars he endorses. That could be called a few different things based on implementation I guess but given the other information we have I find it alarming. At the very least it's company town + 21st century state surveillance apparatus + the above paragraph.
And well but anyway the larger point I was making was just that his extreme political views predate covid or his daughter coming out or democrats being mean to him or several other hypotheses that are regularly asserted. If you don't find that one compelling just skip it and check the others.
> Sorry, but why would a Mars colony only work with indentured servitude and/or slavery, as proposed by Elon Musk?
Isn't there a saying that companies/startups are all dictatorships? That's exactly what a privately-run space colony would actually be, but without any of the outlets that make working for a company tolerable (the theoretical possibility of getting a job elsewhere, being free outside of work hours, etc.).
I don't think it's helpful to use terms like "slavery" or "indentured servitude" to describe the situation, since those are legal concepts for polity where freer statuses are possible. It'd be more like North Korea. Are North Koreans slaves? Not really. Are they free? No. Do you want to be a North Korean? Probably not.
> Or I mean the "pedo diver" thing was seven years ago, this was only just after pizzagate, it was a massive clue he was already deep in far right conspiracy theory subcultures.
I'm not sure I see that connection. At the time I though "pedo diver" was more throwing around stereotypes about Thailand and the kinds of people who travel there (e.g full of prostitution, and foreigners seeking it) than anything to do with pizzagate. Like a bullying "Oh you went to Thailand, you must be a pedo. Ha ha, look so-and-so is a pedo!"
> The article by his first wife came out around that time too which sure you could have just dismissed as pure fabrication. But already by then there was enough evidence aligned with it that it was wholly credible.
Can you link that article, or at least give a more specific cite?
> I ask that you read his words and connect the dots.
Can you spell it out more clearly, since I don't have enough time to pour over Elon Musk's words to repeat your analysis right now?
> At the time I though "pedo diver" was more throwing around stereotypes about Thailand and the kinds of people who travel there
You removed all the context. He replied to a professional diver, who dismissed Elon's useless submarine idea, with the genius retort that he was just a pedo guy. If that context doesn't change your view, then you must be fun at parties where it's fine to call people pedo if they have technical oppositions to your ideas.
I know that context, and it makes it sound more like bullying behavior to me, not pizzagate conspiracy stuff.
> If that context doesn't change your view, then you must be fun at parties where it's fine to call people pedo if they have technical oppositions to your ideas.
I think you totally misread my point and my view of his behavior.
> I think there's enough of a pattern on the alt-right at this point to disregard joking.
I don't think Musk was joking with the pedo comment. I think we was being an asshole and a bully. He might have claimed to have been joking in his legal defense, but I think that was a lie.
But I don't think his comment has anything to do with pizzagate.
The "joking" in this case would be just being an asshole. The crazy, if there's not too much blowback, would be actually believing in pedophile conspiracies.
Excluding SuperPACs, Musk's political contributions are public. Like most of the UHNW types, he donates to both political parties. But going back to pre-Tesla days Musk has NEVER donated more to the Democrats than the Republicans. In fact, he usually donates at about a ratio of 10:1 towards Republicans.
Musk isn't interested in liberal/ecological/whatever agendas and never has been, it's a means to an end. Even his libertarian bent... go on shows/podcasts and smoke weed because hey, he's a libertarian. But work at Tesla? Better piss clean or you're fired.
Yes pretty much. Admittedly that's all the README needs to say. When I first wrote the project README LLMs were still relatively new for public use, it was much harder to detect back then. Thanks for the feedback.
V overpromised and underdelivered, and the creator is pretty abrasive and went to war with anyone who criticized it, so most people stopped paying attention to it until it fulfills what was promised.
It would be fair to say that many would disagree or have different opinions about the language and the creator. V's creator has an open discussion for criticism[1], which many other languages don't have.
After reading various related threads, the strange abrasiveness and negativity often seems to be from others, not the other way around.
Clearly, many people are paying attention to V. It is quite popular at GitHub with over 36.2k stars, 2.2k forks, and 775 contributors.
It's not just the French researcher (and I agree with you about the CBP's suspect official statement); three members of a British punk band were also recently denied entry for an "another issue, which they wouldn’t disclose": https://consequence.net/2025/03/uk-subs-detained-denied-entr...
For the elderly (TAM ~= 100% of US humans.. eventually) and disabled, Alexa is life changing. Sadly, Amazon has not invested in those use cases. It's an ideal market for Apple voice control + HomeKit privacy + local LLMs, if and when they get their act together.
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