My parents don’t speak English, but I learned it as a kid by watching a lot of Cartoon Network. All the cartoons were in English, no subtitles or dub or anything. Somehow I assimilated the language without any external aid, and then learned the rest when we first got the internet and I started communicating with others via games.

So, if I had to teach a kid English, I’d just expose them to as much English as possible with plenty of context and encourage them to express themselves in English when they can. This is also a popular method how adults can learn languages, called tprs

The meaning and ideas of solarpunk are still evolving, but the main themes are freedom, community, ecology and pragmatism. I won’t go over the anarchic organisation of communities since I think you mistook the pragmatism for primitivism.

Solarpunk is not about primitivism and a return to a low-technological era, and neither is it a high tech cyberpunk spinoff, as some others think. Solarpunk is about using practical solutions that are also ethical and egolocially friendly. This often means not throwing stuff away, but fixing what can be fixed and reusing what can be reused, because mass production and consumerism is seen as a damaging force. So instead of trying to make up new tech and produce new things, solarpunk would ask you to first consider whether you can do something already with what you have, which means that a DIY approach is encouraged. However, if new technology can improve our lives without damaging everything else, it’s acceptable.

And it is the complete opposite of thinking about the “good old days”, as solarpunk is looking only towards the future. The ‘punk’ in the name means that when you look at all the doom and gloom in the future (capitalism, wars, global warming) you don’t fall into despair, but instead try to play your part in your community to fight it and promote a lifestyle of mutual aid and a respect for nature, with whatever level of technology can give you the best results.

That was my attempt at a short presentation. We have a wiki and a manifesto if anyone is interested

Yeah, I forgot about that. It varies from company to company, I get exactly nothing above my standard salary each month lol

In Serbia as well. Whenever someone mentions an annual salary, I have to divide it by 12 to get some sense out of it, because we only talk about the monthly.

Right, I think it only covers personal information: companies can only collect what they need to run their service, users can request to see their data etc. I don’t think it applies to comments and posts.

I’m so traumatized by that video that now, 17 or so years later, I had to carefully scroll your comment in case the picture you posted was the screaming face

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it”

And at the end:

“No one keeps death in view, no one refrains from far-reaching hopes; some men, indeed, even arrange for things that lie beyond life—huge masses of tombs and dedications of public works and gifts for their funeral-pyres and ostentatious funerals. But, in very truth, the funerals of such men ought to be conducted by the light of torches and wax tapers, as though they had lived but the tiniest span.” [As if a child had died]

Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

This might just be the thing that makes me learn Rust

“Geralt, it’s me, Yennefer, you haven’t seen me in a long time and Ciri is back and in danger!”

“Oh wow, that’s the biggest thing that has happened to me in a long time, so I’m going to become the best gwent player in the north”

Don’t know honestly. I once ate cold mashed potatoes and peas, like straight from the fridge cold, and it was awful. The thought of eating frozen flat bean soup, the liquid gelatinized, gives me a gag reflex.

I had a colleague that would bring frozen soups/stews, warm them just enough so that he could break through the ice, and he’d eat that. It was disgusting.

Well random cheap mice could die after a while (happened to my brother), or need battery replacements often (happens to a colleague). Logi MX vertical has the benefit that you can charge it, and it lasts quite a long time before you need to recharge it.

Though honestly I’d never spend €100+ on a mouse. My company offered money to buy office things, I didn’t need anything so I took the mx vertical haha.

About two years ago I stared into the void. I didn’t have any real problems in life, but my job was boring as hell and my colleagues were always constantly negative, depressing and whined about everything, which affected my mindset after months upon months of that.

Freshly out of university, the job (which I couldn’t leave due to contacts) sucked out my every hope and dream of having a fulfilling career where I’d have an impact on the world. I felt so useless. To make matters worse I fell in love at that time.

One day I vaguely felt bad, got home, sat down and started crying like crazy. Life felt so meaningless. Not my life specifically, but life as a concept. I could change my life, but to what purpose? I sincerely felt regret for ever having been born and existence felt like a cruel joke, it was all vanity, pain, and at the end you die without even feeling the relief of it being over since you would be gone. It was a feeling of meaninglessness where even doing something about it was as meaningless as doing nothing.

The next day I had another crying session, didn’t eat anything the whole day as well. And in the evening I remembered how Seneca wrote that nothing bad happens to good people since those “bad” moments are the only time we get to show our virtues. Didn’t really fix the basic problem of meaninglessness, but it did reinvigorate me. Reading Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus” also got me to handle the absurd better. But the moment I got out of the whole ordeal altogether was about 8 months later when I realized that I was very much pushed to such a state by my colleagues, and that I yearned for some sort of warmth and comfort from others. But nobody has really ever shined for me, I realized that I had to be my own light and that I should not do things to earn other’s approval, but for me (this does not mean being selfish, according to Platonic and Aristotelian ethics, doing morally good deeds is for the benefit of the doer). I’ve been fine since then.

Anarchism is a lack of hierarchy where nobody has power over another. If you get a job, you need to tell the state. You need to pay taxes to the state. If you buy something, the seller must have a bill to register the transaction with the state. If you want to give your property (like a house) to someone, you must tell the state. Every significant transaction between two induviduals needs to go through the state, otherwise that very state will use force (police) to punish you. We don’t live in a state of anarchy as thought of by political anarchism.

Even if the “state” is a cooperative project, it still lies above you in the hierarchy and has power over you, that’s why we don’t live in a state of anarchy.

While reading Epectitus definitely helped (externals - out of your control; reactions - your choice, things don’t bother you, you bother yourself), and telling myself that I gain nothing out of anger (mostly lose from it), I ran out of fucks to give. Someone’s blocking the way? Just wait until I can pass them. My delivery is running late? Whatever, it’ll get there. I left the window open during heavy rain and everything is wet? Close the window and mop it.

In a world where nothing really matters, giving your undying attention to stupid things like these is just absurd. Who’s watching your reactions so that you have to put on a show?

But as someone said, it takes practice. Being mindful, present, realizing that you’re getting angry, and then consciously thinking “ah whatever” and accepting it. Difficult at first, but as with any skill, the more you do it, the easier it gets.

I listened through all of the songs by Seven Spires and Sascha Paeth’s Masters of Ceremony, but Naglfar - Way of the Rope is in my head often these days

We had to do a presentation on whatever in computer class in the first year of secondary school, and I chose Linux for no apparent reason. I just kinda knew that it existed and thought what the hell.

My ‘researching’ led me to see what Linux offered, to learn about FOSS, listen to Stallman, and I loved tinkering so I made a dual boot (and thus learned about partitions, boot flags and such) and never looked back. Even when I installed linux on my newly acquired PC a few days ago and found out that since the kernel version 5.13 some motherboards receive failure on all USB 3.0 ports and I have to fuck around with that why can’t you just fucking work right away for once

In his two dialogues that deal directly with love, he excludes sexual relations either implicitly or explicitly. In “Sympsium” love (eros) allows you to reach an understanding of the form of the ‘Beautiful’, and love creates goodness, and people can only ‘give birth’ (besides physically, also mentally by creating things) in goodness, so that’s why they seek it, to create and achieve some immortality through their creations.

In “Phaedrus” he explicitly tells how one of the three parts of the soul (mind) is a wild horse that pulls the soul in lust, and reason (the charioteer) then proceeds to pull back with all its might as the emotional part of the soul goes towards sex, as love is there to remind the soul of beauty, which is the souls nourishment, not to “mount [others] like an animal”. That’s basically the tl;dr of his writings on love in those two dialogoues.

Platonic solids are solids Plato mentioned in “Timaeus”.

Also Dark Souls. I was confused at first as I mostly ignored the story part since it's not given to you on a plate and just stopped. Then years later I did a proper run and I'll never forget it.

I have the opposite situation, I had to willingly stop myself from typing :w while using Word. And I installed the vim extension in vscode, which leads to me typing :w when using someone else's setup.