Actually, compared to the US at least, we do get decent comp. I believe the meme spawned from that one incident was more along the lines “We want Pizza Parties” because we’ve got the rest already.

I once tried Red Bull Cola.

I am very flexible when it comes to Cola. I have my strong preference, but I’ll drink other brands to when offered, with one notable exception: You’d have to pay me to drink Red Bull Cola again. They should’ve stuck to Energy Drinks. All their pretty flavours are nice, but that one product is an crime against my tastebuds.

Rich people spend much more money than I do and yet they’re fine, so clearly the spending of the money isn’t actually the problem.

I’m going to go ahead and appropriate that for liberal use. “Used liberally”, that is, not “used for Liberal politics”.

Oh shut the front door, for flipping real? What the frick? Why does nobody ever tell me this sh*t? Now I feel like a bleeping idiot.

You know it’s bad when even a two thousand year old gospel considers “rich people don’t go to heaven” to be divine wisdom. It has always been thus.

There’s no way the CEO of my last company - making a cool 6mil one year that I saw an article about the shareholders paying him a bonus of another few mil - works 125 times as hard as my 48k (gross) ass.

I made it to two. It just keeps going.

Instead of trolling kids that get pissed when their game shuts down mid-match and learn not to trust the internet, they get disgusted for life and learn not to trust the internet and also how horrible a place it can be.

Right? “Oh look, country with huge population has more downloads than country with small population!”

Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that’s one of those cases where you either add support yourself (provided you have the time, know-how - which most already don’t - and commitment) or wait until hopefully someone else does. Or - like me - you curse and go back to X11 until something gives you enouhh confidence to try Wayland again. I think I read somewhere on this platform that there will be (or was?) some Nvidia driver update that should help with Wayland support, but I haven’t looked into it.

I don’t have much experience with laptop hardware. I did have one elderly laptop running Ubuntu, though it probably would have been served better with something more lightweight (I just didn’t know much about anything at the time). But that wasn’t doing anything intensive, just some Uni exercises. I think a simple neural network was the most challenging thing it ever had to handle.

I’ve got working Nvidia drivers without any tinkering. Gaming on my 3060 without issues. Never had microphone issues either. This isn’t supposed to be “You’re wrong”, more a “I wonder what I’m doing differently”.

ASUS TUF GAMING B550 MoBo, AMD Ryzen 5600x, some Gigabyte version of the RTX 3060, running the Nvidia version of Nobara (Fedora-based gaming oriented distro).

What distro did you try?

I imagine the answer is “what’s the real world?”

I’m being facetious. I don’t want to assume they all fit the stereotype of nerd that never leaves his room if he can help it.

They can probably either mask their hatred well enough, or they’re in a place just as bigoted, which may have fostered their convictions in the first place. They go through their interactions with the real world seething with anger and bitterness, then seek relief in video games.

At their heart, they’re no different from anyone else seeking to escape the unpleasant reality through some media - be that through building a peaceful farm, fighting powerful enemies, reading a gripping story or watching sports. They can’t actually fight the circumstances that cause their pain (or at least think so), so they flee instead.

It’s reallly just the source of their pain that’s so much more toxic, which in turn leads to a toxic result that ends up poisoning their joy in life even more. Most likely, they’ve been fed that poison by someone exploiting their vulnerability and unhappiness by giving their aimless frustration a target, reassuring them that someone else is to blame for their misery. It didn’t lessen their misery, but at least it gave the question “why am I suffering?” a satisfying and concrete answer. “It’s not you. It’s not some random and unpredictable circumstance that you have no control over. It’s these people that you can do something about.”

Except you can’t actually do anything about “these people”, but you can at least construct a fantasy of an ideal world without “these people”, where naturally you’re doing much better too. In the specific case of the toxic gamers, they’re looking to video games for manifestations of that world, for places they can immerse themselves in and be free from the troubles of the real world.

If these games fail to sate that fantasy, to provide an environment they seek where they’re powerful and “safe” from all the things that make them upset, that rage is taken to the forums and echo chambers where they share their suffering with each other to ease and validate it. It’s one thing if there’s some niche indie game made by “these people” - they’re on the outskirts of the gaming world, you can easily ridicule or ignore them. It’s another thing when there’s a game placed front and center, getting all the attention and hype for a moment, and that game is full of things that hurt you.

For a twisted comparison, imagine if a new game got all the hype and (positive) attention, despite being full of Nazis, presenting them as entirely normal or even good people. You’d (rightly) be upset too. The difference - aside from the subject - is that your upset lilely isn’t born from a stock of thoroughly curated hatred and anger. You’ll probably not muster the same rage as these people, because you don’t have it bottled up already.

I say this because I’ve been a hateful person too once. Not as bad as some of these specimens, but bad enough to know the spiral and to guess how much unhappier I could have been, how much unhappier they must be. They’re victims turned abusers, and while that doesn’t excuse their behaviour, it may help us understand where it comes from and give us an idea of what to fight:

Bigotry is born from misery seeking an outlet, fertilised by ignorance, nurtured by confirmation bias. The better our lives get, the less reason to look for someone to blame. The more we learn to think critically and question the lies we’re fed, the less that “someone” will be a convenient target keeping us in the spiral. The more we’re exposed to things that contradict our bias, the weaker it will get.

The last bit is what broke me out of the loop, the second is what saw me crawl back up the spiral and unravel my convictions.

Life’s still tough, but at least it has gotten a lot less hateful and miserable since I stopped feeding the hate and blaming others for my own deficiencies and started working on myself.

Good on him for giving Linux a platform. Bad on google for coercing him to do so in a clickbaity manner.

I might be the minority, but I’m more inclined to click a video that says “Plasma 6.1: Release, features and my opinions” than one that proclaims it THE BEST THING (unless it’s from a creator I already know and like anyway, they get a pass as long as the content is good)

The internet is full of delightfully horrifying tales like that. Just yesterday, I got to witness a few people regretting asking about the pony jar. (Don’t look that one up either)

Thank you for the details! I find the different properties of metals fascinating but rarely have the time to read up on it (which isn’t made easier by having to first read up on and understand a bunch of terminology and underlying concepts, which my ADHD just doesn’t have the patience for), so comments like yours giving a bit of insight are perfect.

The first problem, as with many things AI, is nailing down just what you mean with AI.

The second problem, as with many things Linux, is the question of shipping these things with the Desktop Environment / OS by default, given that not everybody wants or needs that and for those that don’t, it’s just useless bloat.

The third problem, as with many things FOSS or AI, is transparency, here particularly training. Would I have to train the models myself? If yes: How would I acquire training data that has quantity, quality and transparent control of sources? If no: What control do I have over the source material the pre-trained model I get uses?

The fourth problem is privacy. The tradeoff for a universal assistant is universal access, which requires universal trust. Even if it can only fetch information (read files, query the web), the automated web searches could expose private data to whatever search engine or websites it uses. Particularly in the wake of Recall, the idea of saying “Oh actually we want to do the same as Microsoft” would harm Linux adoption more than it would help.

The fifth problem is control. The more control you hand to machines, the more control their developers will have. This isn’t just about trusting the machines at that point, it’s about trusting the developers. To build something the caliber of full AI assistants, you’d need a ridiculous amount of volunteer efforts, particularly due to the splintering that always comes with such projects and the friction that creates. Alternatively, you’d need corporate contributions, and they always come with an expectation of profit. Hence we’re back to trust: Do you trust a corporation big enough to make a difference to contribute to such an endeavour without amy avenue of abuse? I don’t.

Linux has survived long enough despite not keeping up with every mainstream development. In fact, what drove me to Linux was precisely that it doesn’t do everything Microsoft does. The idea of volunteers (by and large unorganised) trying to match the sheer power of a megacorp (with a strict hierarchy for who calls the shots) in development power to produce such an assistant is ridiculous enough, but the suggestion that DEs should come with it already integrated? Hell no

One useful applications of “AI” (machine learning) I could see: Evaluating logs to detect recurring errors and cross-referencing them with other logs to see if there are correlations, which might help with troubleshooting.
That doesn’t need to be an integrated desktop assistant, it can just be a regular app.

Really, that applies to every possible AI tool. Make it an app, if you care enough. People can install it for themselves if they want. But for the love of the Machine God, don’t let the hype blind you to the issues.

Last I heard, there were some issues about who owns the IP and copyrights? I’m not overly familiar, but legal jungle combined with corporate politics may be scary enough to navigate that Miyazaki would rather be careful around making explicit statements

To expand on what the others mentioned, it can be used to lure a victim of abuse back to their abuser or soften them up for the next blow.

I won’t talk about the specifics of how I know this phenomenon, but the rough pattern usually looks something like this. I’ll use the “narrative I” for the position of the abuser, because that feels more comfortable to write.

Imagine I’m some person of authority or admiration, be that a parent, a cult leader, a partner, a friend, or even a boss at work. You care about my approval and support, whether out of dependency, affection or convictions. The exact motivations may differ: You may be dependent on a parent’s support even as an adult or hold the conviction that you have to love your parents no matter what. Your cult may (and usually will) have isolated you from other social contacts. Your boss used to be really nice or even a friend and maybe still is, outside of work. Whatever the reason, you want me to like you.

If I treat you like shit, make demands, then punish your disobedience by withdrawing affection, support and approval, that hurts in one way or another. You’re used to my affection, perhaps relying on something I’m giving you or some promise I made, and suddenly that has been taken away.

Once it starts to relent and you get used to the new "normal"¹, I suddenly start “loving” you again, maybe giving you nice things, saying nice things, promising nice things. If I’m an estranged parent, a partner or a friend, I might suggest doing something nice together, meet you for coffee, a lunch or drinks - my treat - to chat, ask how things are going, sympathise with your struggles, offer to help, promise you to cover that expensive repair of your car. I reassure you that things will work out, I praise you for things you’re doing well, validate where you’re insecure, hit all the right buttons to make you feel better. A boss might praise your performance, make a point of talking you up while you’re in earshot, promise a raise etc. A cult leader might restore whatever grace you have fallen from, promise salvation, pray for you or whatever else passes for approval and support in the cult.

Most people are suckers for nice things, and even if you tell yourself you’ll just take the nice things and not trust me any further, you’re still receptive to what I say…

…until the next punch (whether emotional or physical) comes. I express disapproval with something you’re doing that I want you to stop, request your help, disparage your partner of many years, make decisions on your behalf, ask you to work overtime “just this once”, expect you to follow along with some cult activity, whatever may fit the given dynamic.

You might (reluctantly) obey at first - that’s the price you pay for the nice things, but so far, it’s still worth it - until the demands start tallying up and the rewards diminish¹.
I totally forgot to send you the money for that repair, I’ll do it later, but right now I need you to help me with this thing. The raise is being held up on formalities, but I’m sorting it out and it should be coming by the next quarter. In the meantime, could you look into this? I just don’t have the time or energy to do this right now, but I promise, I’ll do it when I have the time.
You get the picture.

You start reevaluating pain vs. gain. Is it still worth it? Eventually, you’re fed up. You start making excuses why you’re not doing some thing, your work ethic declines, you become dispassionate, withhold whatever validation I’m expecting of you. I get angry with how ungrateful you are. you can pay the damn repair yourself if you can’t even do this “little” thing for me, I’m not giving you that money while you’re with that partner or hang out with that friwnd who I’m convinced is only out to take your (my)² money. The raise is off the table. You’ll go to hell.

I won’t entirely cut you out, of course, while you’re still useful to me (or I expect you will be at some point). You don’t entirely cut me off because of the reasons mentioned earlier, because you hope I’ll turn around again some day. And so the cycle repeats.

From the outside, it’s easy to say “just leave”. It’s often the reasonable solution in the long term. But emotions are complex, change is scary and sometimes, it’s easier to stay with the devil you know.

[1]: If I’m particularly canny, I’ll push that line in such small increments that you barely even notice it’s creeping and you’re getting less and less. Just one more poisonous comment you have to endure, one more loaded question, one slight annoyance at not having read my after-hours email yet (I won’t say that I’d expect you to, but my face says enough). You dismiss it, but it leaves you slightly more drained every time.

[2]: Particularly with abusive parents or partners, there’s a phenomenon where they’ll consider you their property, and by extent, everything they give you is actually still theirs to take back at any time.

I don’t think people were confused so much as bending the point a little to make a joke topical. It’s both “downloading Linux stuff”.

I can see the appeal of stealing something expensive, where the expected payoff relative to the risk and consequences of being caught is quite large, but to risk theft charges for food? I don’t think anyone would steal food.

If they have a choice, that is.