Hey, just letting you know I sorted the issue, the thread I opened about it on the mint forums is here if you’re interested in more details: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?p=2691196#p2691196

It turned out that the base mesa and mesa (extra) packages were duplicated on my system, so just uninstalling both of them and reinstalling only one copy fixed it. It wasn’t the mesa-vulkan-drivers though, but very similar to your problem. Your information did help me to the solution.

Thanks for your help!

Okay, thanks, I’ll take a look at my options there.

And I do also have an nvidia card. Thanks for the help!

Oooh, interesting, so you’re right that when I get the lag, there’s a lot of CPU usage. Also there was definitely a system update before it started happening - although I can’t say exactly when because I wasn’t gaming on this system for a few days.

I’m on Mint 22.1 and I’ve tried uinstalling and reinstalling through the software manager GUI, and I’ve also tried:

sudo apt purge mesa-vulkan-drivers
sudo apt install mesa-vulkan-drivers

None of that changed the problem. I also made sure I restarted the system.

Am I doing that right? Are there any other steps that I’m missing?

Thanks, I’ve found the problem, it’s in an edit.

Thanks, I’ve found the problem, it’s in an edit.

Thanks, I’ve found the problem, it’s in an edit.

I would have asked about that but I checked a few places through a VPN first.

I turns out it was my noscript addon, I’ve put more details in an edit.

Could be, but it’s hard to get any information on whether the site is actually down. downforeveryoneorjustme.com reports it as being up, but that could be just because it serves the loading icon and not anything useful.

What do you see when you go to protondb.com?

I was floored by how perfectly they did the voice, then I looked it up and this song is literally by the original radio play voice actor Stephen Moore. Amazing.

I’m not sure exactly why but I can’t think of anything after then that properly enriches my life.

Was that around the time you moved out of home?

We need to implement tarpits: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/

There are examples yes, Dr Fatima on youtube talks a lot about the philosophy of science and how it’s not such a rigid, prescriptive process as a lot of people - including scientists - seem to think.

When Pseudoscience Beat Science: Three Stories About Knowing Things

That video has three stories of phenomena that were unknown to western science until ancestral knowledge revealed them. The first two you could argue are just traditionally acquired knowledge that has gained a veneer of supernatural language, but “voodoo death” is literally named after the fact that a voodoo curse can kill someone.

I’d reccommend her whole channel if this stuff interests you. Particularly Gravity is a Social Construct, and How Galileo Broke the Scientific Method.

Edit: the downvotes on this with absolutely no explanation of what’s wrong are a perfect example of why science struggles with these concepts. Anything that doesn’t immediately fit the schema of what western respectable rational people expect gets dismissed out of hand.

I know by making this edit I’m inviting the most incurious assholes to mansplain to me why I’m wrong, but maybe someone will actually engage with the points.

Yup, Behind the Bastards did an excellent two parter on forensic science in general:

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-bastards-of-forensic-170035753/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-two-the-bastards-of-forensic-170702749/

They make a good point that real science is involved, but by the time it makes it into the police’s hands it’s mutated into essentially a mechanism to manufacture convictions. Grifters get hold of the science, and cops are like the perfect marks, because they’re just primed for anything that will confirm their existing biases, plus they’ve got massive state budgets to play with, and they’ll happily give the grifters legitimacy.

It would be nice if you could post something where we can examine the source. (EDIT: the link has been changed since I wrote this)

I found this article: https://www.techspot.com/news/108720-hidden-fingerprints-inside-3d-printed-ghost-guns.html

There they say that it’s not yet ready to be used in evidence, but the problem with that is that most forensic “science” is generally misapplied and nowhere near as conclusive as the police want us to think. They can usually massage the results to tell a jury what they want to be true. That would be my concern with this kind of technique.

Also, if you’re going to the trouble of making a 3d printed ghost gun that will be used in a crime, you could always hide the toolmarks with a sander. You could also treat the surface with resin which would make the markings practically unrecoverable. I’ve started doing both of these for my prints and I love the results just for the aesthetics, so it’s not such a stretch to imagine a gunsmith doing the same.

Sorry for the short novel but this topic is fascinating to me.

Okay, so it looks like “existence ex-nihilo” is a phrase I cooked up from “creation ex-nihilo”, and the accepted term is more like “first cause”, but it explains the problem I have with a purely material universe. Either our entire universe with all its complexity and scale spontaneously exists from nothing - “ex-nihilo”, or no first cause - or it has infinite regress, an infinite age, which doesn’t fit with what we know of thermodynamics. We would need an infinite source of useful energy to maintain a universe for infinite time.

The pure materialists have all sorts of rebuttals. I’ve heard of quantum spontaneity as a first cause, but like… for quantum spontaneity to exist, there has to be a substrate of physical laws that cause quantum effects to happen in the first place. That can’t be the baseline of existence.

And if they say that cause & effect breaks down at the boundaries of the universe, well, that’s just another way of saying that it gives way to a supernatural reality. Because ultimately science is about cause & effect, it is about the laws of nature, so anything that goes outside of that schema is, by definition, supernatural. That’s all supernatural means, beyond the natural. You can also talk abut physical laws vs the metaphysical, it’s just different words for the same thing.

And science is fundamentally only capable of interrogating the natural, the physical. The analogy I’ve used to explain this to materialistic atheists is of a simulation. Imagine we exist entirely within a simulation. Well, if we wanted to use the science that exists within this simulation to interrogate the world outside the the computer we’re in, we couldn’t. You could not design an experiment that would give repeatable results because whatever existed in the physical world beyond the simulation would be entirely unaffected by it. The creators could walk away or change the external environment at any moment, they could turn off the simulation, unplug it, move it to another continent, wait 20 years and plug it back in and we would have no way of even knowing it had happened. They would be outside of our space and time entirely. They could edit out our attempts to understand. The simulation idea is just spirituality with a veneer of sciencey-sounding language. It’s functionally no different.

So any evidence of anything beyond the physical is going to necessarily be anecdotal. You can do surveys and such things, but you can’t get a systematic data set. It could easily be that non-physical phenomena are shy of direct inspection, who knows.

My partner back when we were both gradually leaving the faith took an online philosophy course from some university, and I sort of took it in over their shoulder. The 101 course started with a discussion about the existence of god, which is the classical way of discussing spirituality. It probably helps that “god” is one syllable whereas “metaphysical reality” is seven. The basic takeaway was, we’ve been discussing this for thousands of years and nobody has yet come up with a slam-dunk answer either way. This is entry-level stuff in philosophy.

The reddit atheist bros are doing philosophy, but they don’t realise it, so they just keep tripping over their own balls. They want to use a “null hypothesis” and shift the “burden of proof” but there is nothing more or less natural or “null” about assuming no first cause as there is about assuming a cause that exists beyond the boundaries of cause and effect. They refuse to learn any philosophy, instead assuming that the tools of science can answer everything, but that in itself is a purely materialist assumption, so it’s downstream from philosophy. They are literally begging the question. They’re right that science cannot disprove spirituality, but it can’t prove it either, regardless of what is real. In my experience it’s very hard to get them to see this point.

Their arguments in my experience are always geared towards attacking evangelical christianity, which is actually an easy target. Evangelicals are fucking ridiculous when you strip away their respectability and institutional support. But then when they’re done with that target they turn the same weapons on the whole notion of spirituality and it just blows up in their faces. This is why these kinds of atheists are also called “christian atheists”. They just don’t want to admit that’s what they are; it’s purely reactionary. Their thought leaders seem to be mainly intellectually lazy grifters who have long since drifted back into an alliance with christianity and started attacking islam instead. Almost like they were always just attacking easy targets and the audience for anti-christian stuff turned out to be smaller than the one for anti-muslim stuff, at least after 9/11.

As for what I personally believe, I’m actually fine with the existence of an afterlife, and with its nonexistence. I found The Good Place ending amazing in this regard. They handled the notion of death so well, and they hit on something fascinating, which is that even if you’ve seen a thousand afterlives and been alive for billions of Jeremy Bearimy’s and seen and done all that you’re curious about in the universe you still have no idea what awaits beyond death. Oblivion is not a thing that you can grasp.

So yeah, I’ve realised that it doesn’t matter either way.

Not by itself no, but it was a vector to be indoctrinated into a strong belief in a christian afterlife at a very young age.

I no longer hold any of those beliefs. I now think that existence ex-nihilo and creation by something outside of the natural universe are two equally absurd possibilities, and science is fundamentally incapable of resolving that question.

I have certainly had odd, even otherworldly experiences, but I couldn’t say what any of them meant or if they mean anything at all. I am deeply suspicious of anyone that claims to have the answers.

Oh I do know about that, I’ve had a near death experience myself, your body/brain has an uncanny sense that says “you are dangling over the precipice right now.”

I just mean that until it actually happens, there is no true confirmation, and after, you can’t report back, that’s why it’s called a mystery.

In fact from the way that person is talking it sounds like they may have had such an experience, and maybe now they’re doubting that it’s real.

Every single person who ever lived could use this logic and they’d never see it disproven.

“We’ll take our ball and go home, and you’ll all miss out on our fabulous AI products!”

“No. Wait. Don’t.”