the positive/negative parasocial relationships people have with AMD and NVIDIA (respectively) borders on "splitting" in the personality-disorder sense. AMD represents everything wholesome and good about computing and nvidia represents everything bad and malicious about computing, to a lot of people. And when they see one of the brands they just have to hammer that post button to signal their virtue.

You're reading way too far into someone getting the context wrong.

Nah, these off topic rants are pretty much there in every single topic here. Every AMD/nVidia article has bunch of people just ranting without even trying to read the topic.

When the topic is explicitly a popularity contest, talking about which one is better is pretty reasonable.

No, ranting how nVidia kicked your dog because your favorite screensaver doesn't work in a topic about CUDA computation on Linux is not reasonable.

> in a topic about CUDA computation

That doesn't sound like a topic about a popularity contest. So why did you say "No"? Your statement doesn't disagree with mine.

Even here on HN, even when it isn’t a mistake, basically any thread that mentions nvidia essentially devolves into “Linus said fuck nvidia”. It’s effectively a thought-terminating cliche and it poisons almost every GPU discussion.

It’s really not just the Linus thing either. Every time AMD does anything anti-consumer people feel the need to temper it with praise about all the good they’ve done, and give them every benefit of the doubt about “maybe this isn’t true, maybe they had a good reason, etc” while every single thing nvidia does is viewed through the most negative and malicious possible lens.

It’s pretty clearly some variety of splitting plus parasocial attachment, AMD is “the good one” and nvidia is the bad one.

Anyway, it just sucks because it poisons discourse. How many posts did we get into this thread before the “Linus said fuck nvidia” canard came out? Zero, they opened right up with the thought-terminating cliche. It gets old after the 10,000th time.

This, the toxic fanboyism around this is uttery exausting to read.

(I also love how you're being downvoted for wishing for a better debate without fanboy rants.)

>AMD represents everything wholesome and good about computing

Must be an opinion of someone who has never had to deal with AMD customer support.