“Existence” by Excision

Short, sweet, and catchy. They did a good job with that one.

I had the privilege to see them live about 8 years ago and it was an incredible show. Dickinson has incredible stage presence; really puts a lot of energy into the show to keep the crowd engaged.

The giant animatronic zombie freaked me out a bit. It was enormous and moved realistically enough to be unsettling since I wasn’t that far away from it. Most metal shit I’ve ever seen in person.

Probably! He was a very smart guy (way more formal education in computer science than I), so I’ve always assumed there was some truth to what he said, but he didn’t elaborate further and I didn’t like bothering him with unnecessary questions, so I never followed up on the topic despite my confusion.

Not a teacher, per se, but the senior dev on my old team once said something that left me scratching my head. We were trying to troubleshoot an inconsistent bug in our software, and I said, “Maybe it’s a race condition,” to which he replied, “There’s no such thing.”

Still trying to figure out what he meant by that.

Agreed. I’ve learned most of what I know about computers by fixing broken stuff. Like you, my first serious daily driver was Manjaro. And after dealing with broken systems time and time again, I’m tired, boss. My daily driver for the last 2 years has been Mint and I love it to death for how stable and functional it is. But the lessons I learned along the way with other distros have been invaluable.

You could try opening up the Resource Monitor and checking out the Network tab:

It might have the same issue (grouping everything under the VPN .exe), but it’s worth a shot.

I follow Blender on Mastodon and, about a month ago, they started this campaign to see if they could double the amount of donations (from approximately 1% of users to 2% of users), and it’s been decently successful so far just by putting “Can you donate?” banners in more places (and posting memes about donating on their social media).

Here’s a short video they put out about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v7Uhoot4Qg

I think the funding campaign only lasts a month, so it’s probably about over (though donations are always accepted, this is just a brief social media campaign to increase development funds for FY2025).

Does the device show up if you open Gparted? Maybe it needs to be formatted. Though I guess it’d still show up with ‘lsusb’ even if it needed formatting.

I wanna say fwupd/lvfs manages firmware updates on Arch (and lots of other distros) these days.

You may be able to roll back the latest firmware update with fwupdmgr. What’s the output of fwupdmgr get-devices in your terminal? Also, what is the make/model of the ethernet port that is now on the fritz? You can search for it on the website here: https://fwupd.org/ in the “search for firmware” bar at the top, then you may be able to install the old version with fwupdmgr.

I’m not familiar with EndeavourOS, but I’ll ask a few questions to get the troubleshooting process started:

With the ethernet cable plugged in, can you access your local router config page (if you have one)? e.g.: 192.168.1.1. If not, what happens when you ping the router’s address in the terminal?

If you’re able to successfully ping/access your router, can you ping a well-known IP address such as 8.8.8.8 (google DNS) or 1.1.1.1 (cloudflare DNS)?

Jokingly: “Linux is free if your time is worthless”

Though this tongue-in-cheek tagline takes the “free as in free beer” misinterpretation of the term “free software”, I’ve always found it a fun way to describe the time investment you’ll need to make if you’ve spent your whole life using Windows before making the switch.

So, can you tell me in your own words what scene(s) in the film makes you think this Randian interpretation is valid?

I’ve seen this film more than most people (it’s my favorite movie; I’ve seen it probably two dozen times since it released), and I am comfortable discussing any scene wherein you think the viewer’s takeaway is meant to be that “the unexceptional are intimidated by exceptional people and force them to perform inadequacy for the comfort of others and how this is a net loss for society.”

The Incredibles isn’t Randian propaganda by any stretch. This interpretation is wildly missing the film’s messages about society. Brad Bird, the director, called the “Ayn Rand” interpretation of the film “nonsense” and “ridiculous” in multiple interviews when this interpretation started getting parroted by people who didn’t get the point of the film.

I think it got misinterpreted a few times. Some people said it was Ayn Rand or something like that, which is ridiculous. other people threw Nietzsche around, which I also find ridiculous. But I think the vast majority of people took it the way I intended. Some people said it was sort of a right-wing feeling, but I think that’s as silly of an analysis as saying The Iron Giant was left-wing. I’m definitely a centrist and feel like both parties can be absurd.

I’m in a similar boat to you; whether the blobs constitute a security threat seems to still be up in the air. I read through the issue thread on github a few months back and it seemed the vast majority of the blobs were built by scripts contained in the repository, but some weren’t documented well, leading to uncertainty.

The comment by Long0x0 on Aug 05 lists a lot of the blob files.

There’s no way to srsly prevent a full-bloat browser from messing with its environment.

Can you elaborate on this? I’m curious as to what manner a browser like Firefox could be exploited in order to affect its environment outside of something like a sandbox escape.

As others have pointed out, there’s a lot to hate about ads since the industry is routinely dishonest, insulting, obnoxious, deceptive, intrusive, and all manner of unpleasant. I’ve been adblocking religiously for most of my life for these reasons.

So I think a more interesting question might be the other way around: “What do you like about commercials?”

The only commercials I’ve ever liked are the ones for local small businesses. The ones with a nonexistent production budget that aren’t beating the viewer over the head with blatant lies or dishonest sales tactics.

Adult Swim used to have faux-ad bumpers for the fictional business “Strickland Propane” from King of the Hill, featuring the honest-to-a-fault character Hank Hill as the spokesman, which I felt captured that vibe well.

Rhett and Link also made a funny homage to these kinds of commercials in this classic skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnOyMSEWNTs

Could it be “Fira Sans”?

https://mozilla.github.io/Fira/

Ah, darn. Unfortunately I have no additional help to offer since that particular issue was fixed for me after changing those options in Flatseal.

I’d try running Firefox from the terminal to see what error message you’re receiving when the crashes occur; the unique error message was what led me to this workaround when I was originally troubleshooting.

In Bazzite, you should just need to open the Discover package manager and click “Refresh” and then “Update All” in the top right. Although these drivers don’t appear to be available through the package manager yet; mine is still on version 560.31.02.

If your Firefox crashes are anything like mine were, it should be solved by opening up Flatseal and disabling Wayland rendering for Firefox. See the screenshot shown here: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/nvidia-555-drivers-incoming-important-information/2554

When I first installed Bazzite on my Intel+Nvidia laptop, the Firefox crashes were constant. The workaround here fixed the issue for me.