

I have an ASUS laptop that maps its multiple speakers incorrectly under Linux, it’s been killing me for months and I’m now considering it. I was not prepared for the realization that the Linux path forward would be to just pay by the bug fix.


I have an ASUS laptop that maps its multiple speakers incorrectly under Linux, it’s been killing me for months and I’m now considering it. I was not prepared for the realization that the Linux path forward would be to just pay by the bug fix.


The government isn’t a subscription service or a company.
I can’t deal with Americans’ ultracapitalist perspective on the res publica. It’s so annoying.
I nean… it’s a labelling thing, presumably. They don’t want milk substitutes to be labelled “milk” so they can’t advertise as easily as a milk substitute on supermarket shelves, and presumably the same is true for meat substitutes, except this goes at a glacial pace and they tried and failed in 2020 when it was still relevant and now they’re trying again even though nobody cares about veggie burgers anymore.
You are presuming this sort of arcane manipulation of collective weirdness into multinational legislation follows human logic, and that way lies madness. Best you can do is steer it ever so slightly so it at least does something in the aggregate that stops some anarchocapitalist loon from privatizing oxygen or whatever. It’s been a very weird century.


In that it’s mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.
So I guess it’s a good test for that sort of “just read the headline” response.
It’s been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can’t parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?
I may be done with this place at this point. It’s just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.


Not really, it’s more of a farmer’s lobby protecting animal products from vegetarian alternatives.
Which as someone else says below is a bit neutral and doesn’t do much, but hey. They did it to milk.
Guessing it’s some bargaining chip with the industry on the wider legislation they’re passing? This stuff is pretty byzantine. European agricultural industries are constantly on the verge of setting stuff on fire. It’s a full time job to be even vaguely aware of what’s going on with them.


Yeah, but… this isn’t that.
You’re literally saying “well, anecdotal impressions say this, so I refute this study that says something else”.
We don’t like that. That’s not a thing we like to do.
And for the record, as these things go, the article linked here is pretty good. I’ve seen more than one worse example of a study being reported in the press today.
They provide a neutral headline that conveys the takeaway of the study, they provide context about companies mentioning AIs on layoffs, they provide a link to the full study and they provide a separate study that yields different, seemingly contradicting results.
I mean, this is as close to best case scenario for reporting on a study as you can get in mainstream press. If nothing else, kudos to The Register. The bar was low but they went for personal best anyway.
Man, the problem with giving up all the wonky fashy social media is that when you’re in an echo chamber all the weird misinformation and emotion-driven politics are coming from inside the house. It’s been a particularly rough day for politically-adjacent but epistemologically depressing posts today.


So the report itself argues there is a need for better data, and it seems fairly level headed, but…
…what’s with people being mad about it?
I say this a lot, but there seems to be a lot of weird anti-hype where people want this AI stuff to work better than it does so it can be worse than it is, and I’m often confused by it. The takeaway here is that most jobs don’t seem to be behaving that differently so far if you look at the labor market in aggregate. Which is… fine? It’s not that unexpected? The AI shills were selling that entire industries would be replaced by AI overnight, and most sensible people didn’t think so or argued that the jobs would get replaced with AI wrangler tasks because this thing wouldn’t completely automate most tasks in ways that weren’t already available.
Which seems to be most of what’s going on. AI art is 100% not production-ready out of the gate, AI text seems to be a bit of a wash in terms of saving time for programmers and even in more obvious industries like customer service we already had a bunch of bots and automation in place.
So what’s all the anger? Did people want this to be worse? Do they just want to vibe with the economy being bad in a way they can pin on something they already don’t like and maybe politics is too heavy now? What’s going on there?
Boycotts, yes.
“I was on the fence about buying this and I want to sound engaged on the Internet, may still get it later” voting-with-your-wallet nonsense? No.


Honestly, even at the time that entire “benefit of the doubt” garbage read like some combination of active collaboration and outright denial. It’s nuts that Trump rode it to a second term, honestly. As late as the week of the election people were having haughty conversations about the lack of ties between Project 2025 and the Trump campaign and those morons still elected them again because Harris was too weak on Israel or whatever.
I mean, I’d normally not assume an entire culture is incapable of parsing reality, but there are still supposed American leftists going “they’re both the same” on this site right now.
Which reminds me I’m trying to cut off American politics from my media menu as much as possible, so maybe it’s time to mute this stuff and move on with my day, because man, what a group of weirdos.


I mean… yeah, but also I’m very well on the record disagreeing with that and calling Trump a fascist since day one. Not that I expect you dig through my online presence to corroborate it.
I’m not American. The presence of fascists in US politics has been a commonly accepted truth in anybody anywhere left of demochristians for half a century. This isn’t “hindsigh”, it’s “I recommend always reading what people say about your country in foreign newspapers”.
And for the record, we got fascists, too. We’re just less shy about calling them that, maybe? Certainly don’t have any delusions about ourselves in terms of being inoculated from fascism at a fundamental level. The idea that Americans would have survived Bush, let alone the overtly fascist Trump without noticing or acknowledging it seems outright bizarre to me, but there you go.
I mean, Stephen Miller isn’t even shy about it. Even if you are the kind of European that would argue Berlusconi wasn’t a fascist and could maaaaaybe entertain Trump is on that same level of “just horny criminal idiot” you surely would have had zero questions after hearing five minutes of Dracula Hitler back in 2016.


What? Everybody thought fascism would come from the inside in the US. Even if you slept through the first Trump term this has been a thing since the 1930s. Surely during the Cold War, and definitely for everybody outside the US itself, but… I mean, were you alive during the whole “war on terror” nonsense?
Had the post-Reagan, post 9-11 US fascists successfully brainwashed even left of centre normies into thinking that was not the case? Were Americans that oblivious?


No, no, Jeff Ennis worked as an actual superhero briefly in the 1970s you’re thinking of John Ennis, who created The Boys as a musical in the 90s, but he was mad about his working conditions.


No, it’s much more interesting than that.
It’s an accurate representation of Garth Ennis being mad about having to work with superheroes despite not liking that at all and being a bit of a petty bitch with a bit of a dudebro sense of humor that, frankly, we all overrated at the time because when you were a teenager in the 90s you thought Preacher was hilarious and much smarter than it is, and it got to his head a bit.
And then it’s an accurate representation of Eric Kripke who was very much the right age to have gone through that, taking the material and going “well, that Trump guy sure was a thing, huh?” and “aren’t you kind of over all those MCU movies, also?” because superheroes in film were at the same point in 2019 than they were in comic books in 2006.
Don’t be the teenager we all were in the 90s and assume that “edgy and mean and over the top” is the same as “smart and realistic”. It’s not.
I’ll say that the show is at least less callous than the original material and it’s at least trying to be political, which makes it slightly more plausible and internally consistent than Ennis’ HR complaint of a comic book. Hollywood has a history of taking this edgelord crap (see also: every single Mark Millar adaptation) and making it palatable by applying the same mainstreaming and dumbing down that kills every Alan Moore adaptation. Turns out if the original material isn’t that smart to begin with that’s actually a good thing to do.


No, I’m getting what you’re saying.
I’m saying what you’re saying is wrong because it demands you consider only the statements they are explicitly making and disregard any statements they are not enumerating but that need to be included for it to follow some semblance of logic.
You are arguing that “I believe” has the capacity to contain all the false premises and justify them as long as every action that isn’t belief-based remains internally consistent.
I am saying that… well, no, you need to assess the premises included in that belief to evaluate the entire statement.
“I want to drain the swamp so I vote for Trump because I believe he’ll drain the swamp” or “I want to protect children from pedophiles and I believe Trump will do that” are just as valid of a statement, regardless of whether Trump is a convicted criminal or a sex offender.
As long as you are willing to collapse all incorrect arguments into “belief”, you can justify the logic of any premise at all by just assuming the speaker is incorrect somewhere else that you’re not evaluating. It’s entirely tautological at that point. All human action follows some perceived set of incentives. Not all human action makes sense.
You’re also presuming that the incorrect statements that make sense to you are fixable, which they absolutely are not. None of these people are working down that logic chain that you’re stating. Let me be clear, you won’t convince an antivaxer by changing their factual basis. Their factual basis is built to reach the conclusion they want to reach.
It’s also important to point out that even if that was possible, “we have a population crisis so we need to close the borders” is a contradiction, and it’s exactly what these guys are saying. They aren’t saying “we prefer the effects of the population crisis to the changes to our culture immigration brings”. That’s not the statement in the first place.
The statement is fundamentally incongruous because it’s incomplete and backwards. The real train of thought here is as follows:
“I hate foreigners” “Our population is shrinking” “I miss when women worked for me having babies and cleaning after me” “Foreigners are coming here because our population shrinking creates demand for them” “If women worked for me again having babies and cleaning after me we would be able to grow our population without creating demand for foreigners I hate”
The statement being provided is strategic. They won’t say what they want, they will act to reach it. That includes misrepresenting their argument.


That’s… not how that works when you make statements about the world. Your unicorn example is all well and good in a universe where there are only hypothetical animals, but you’re eliding big chunks of that chain. “Unicorns are pink” is a valid statement in the abstract, but if you’re arguing about animals in the real world that’s not where the chain starts. The chain goes: unicorns exist, unicorns are pink, all pink animals eat clouds.
And of course in this situation you need to evaluate each statement. Unicorns exist is going to be a big fat FALSE, which means you can’t claim all unicorns eat clouds and argue it’s a logical statement. It’s a meaningless statement by itself because it depends on a false assumption.
Which is my exact point. You are claiming the argument is logical because you’re assuming the only requirement is that it is internally consistent when all their premises are accepted. But the premises are false, so it’s not. I appreciate that you’re getting stuck when the chain of statements they cherry pick changes over time (see the free speech example), but they’re not meaningfully different. If you let them cherry pick the clauses they need to verify and ignore everything else they can make a consistent argument in the moment about anything, including vaccines and flat planets and jewish space lasers.
I mean, no they can’t because they suck at this. But still, they can make something close enough to one that if they speak fast and loudly enough on the Internet they can get more morons to follow their channels than to block them, so… here we are, I suppose.


Sure, but that’s taking the concept of what’s “logical” to absurd extremes. Any sort of paranoid delusion is logical if you accept all of its premises.
Is being antivax logical? Not at all. It requires amazing mental gymnastics to ignore centuries of scientific research. Things that are “logical if you believe them” is a great way to describe things that aren’t logical. Vaccines do not, in fact, by all available measures, cause more dangerous issues than the diseases they prevent. If your “logic” requires a rejection of the entire epistemological framework upon which shared scientific kknowledge is established it’s not “logic”, kind of by definition.
This is the same thing. Its internal consistency isn’t “logic”. It can be shown to not be logical. If you suspend yourself from that conversation, deny the parameters of anybody who disagrees with you and cherry pick your values to specifically support your instinctively desired conclusion, then it doesn’t matter how well you can through your train of thought, it’s still indefensible.
I think that’s why the MAGA thing stumps you a bit. Their train of thought isn’t any better or worse than this. It’s, in fact, identical. Information that supports it gets magnified, information that disrupts it is ignored. They are fun about it in that they add this cool temporal dimension, where that selection is applied regardless of how it was applied before, so they’re all for free speech when people tell them to shut up, all for limiting speech when people criticise them. But that’s not different to the fundamental contradiction of being concerned about a population crisis when you are trying to turn women into walking incubators but concerned about the massive influx of people when you’re trying to be racist.
It’s a lot of things, but it’s not logic.


It is only logical if you’re… well, a supremacist.
I mean, it requires a mental framework of how culture and identity work that is fundamentally supremacist.
Culture works by aggregation, it’s entirely unrelated to borders and it is in perpetual shift. This assumption requires misunderstanding culture from a very specific perspective.
So no, not logical.
Internally consistent, yes: make women into reproductive vessels and men into the defenders of a fossilized culture enforced through violence. That’s a consistent worldview.
But not a logical one if you apply it to reality. The difference matters.


I keep hearing racist nationalists say stuff like this worldwide, and not matter how hard I squint it remains a non sequitur.
I mean, “we have a population crisis” and “don’t let people come here” seem entirely contradictory unless you are… well, a supremacist.
Which they are, it’s just the leap that gets me. So obvious, so rarely called out and never addressed.


In social media? Not much.
Here I block any and all threads and communities that focus on US news. Specifically stuff that just has a generic name (“News”) but is 100% US-focused content.
Night and day improvement, frankly.
No.
I had that laptop before I tried to move it to Linux and I’m not buying a new one. It does work under Windows.
This is not my laptop not supporting Linux, this is Linux not supporting my laptop. Because I already own the laptop. If people weren’t trying to cheerlead for their preferred OS for other reasons than… you know, whether it’s good or not, this wouldn’t even be a discussion. In fact, half the “Windows sucks” angles these days are down to “Windows 11 doesn’t support specific pieces of pre-existing hardware”. Which, you know, is the exact problem I’m having here.
Now, would ASUS finally paying attention to the ecosystem make it easier for a whole bunch of people to move over? Sure. Of course. But that doesn’t contradict my previous statements.