This might just be the thing that makes me learn Rust

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.

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.

Sure, adults have the right to smoke if they want

Even if it forces everyone in the vicinity to inhale that crap? Smoking has one distinct feature in that it harms not just the user, but everyone around as well.

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

Nowhere in your link is it said that “knowledge and efficiency” was lost by getting rid of the farmers deemed “kulaks”. What is mentioned though is that grain was being massively taken out of Ukraine, and the borders being sealed so that starving Ukranians wouldn’t leave, and that even after the famine started, the USSR kept exporting grain rather than use it to feed the people.

The holodomor was a targeted weakening of Ukranians that could’ve been prevented if Stalin wanted it. Painting it as a story of commies taking away from the people that became rich because they were the best at what they do and that caused a collapse is sickening, and I really hope you try and reconsider whether the source where you got that is worth your attention and what were the motives behind twisting something as horrific as the holodomor into a cartoon story about evil commies and honest efficient workers.

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.

Same. Instant in the morning and a normal one with grounding beans in the afternoon.

Posts from this community popping up from time to time was actually what pushed me to start watching a few weeks ago. So, a big thank you to you all!

It’s long been thought the only reason there’s been no WWIII is because countries that don’t necessarily like each other have created mutually beneficial trade deals together.

And then Russia decided to go to war regardless. I’m not sure whether this has shown us that war prevention based on mutual trade is an illusion, or that Russian economic difficulties prove that it works. Maybe time will tell, but in any case I’m not sure the dead will be happy that Russia’s economy will suffer.

I mean, it makes perfect sense that you’re not going to start a war for economic reasons if it’s worse than just trade, but what happens when someone decides that they want war for reasons other than economic. For example, country A has a lot of people with their main nationality in the bordering countries, and someone stirrs up nationalist sentiments and they want their country to ecompass all regions where their nationals live, regardless of economic benefits/drawbacks.

Or take the best of both worlds and listen to symphonic metal!

But yeah, playing in a symphonic orchestra does sound cool.

If you want to say that you don’t care about something (as in: “I don’t give a fuck”), in Serbian you would say: “My dick hurts”. And that’s an expression you’ll hear almost daily. A less used variant of that, but still legit is: “My balls are beeping”.

While not insulting, I’ll throw in our way to say: “I’m/You’re fucked”. It’s: “Jebao sam/si ježa u leđa”, which means: “I/You fucked a hedgehog in the back”

I’m on slrpnk.net

I wanted originally to join one of the big ones, but figured that I should distribute the load by going for a smaller instance. I was scrolling through a list of instances and saw the logo and the name. I was already vaguely familiar with solarpunk, so I chose it because it appeals to me (environmental awareness, anarchism, optimism, DIY, upcycling, pragmatism and so on). To be completely honest, I had no idea what “choosing a home instance” entailed at the time.

Pretty happy with the decision though, it’s a themed instance so locally I get stuff you’d expect, and when browsing all I mostly see stuff from lemmy.world and lemmy.ml and the rest.

Not a particularly interesting story, but nevertheless here it is.

Democracy is very weak and that’s why it takes so much to keep it at place. One autocratic leader is enough to break it. We saw it in Germany before the war

It wasn’t “one autocratic leader” who broke democracy in Weimar Germany. Most of the judges, civil servants, parties and people were not happy with the transition from the German empire. Democracy breaks when nobody cares about it anymore. For Germany, this was most evident in the Prussian coup, when the state illegaly replaced the Prussian government, and nothing happened in response. This was taken to court and Prussia did have some success with it, but generally the deed was done. Imagine that during the next US elections it gets decided that California voted for the Republicans, and that goes through without much fuss. That is what causes democracies to fall, apathetic people and institutions, especially the latter. It’s the institutions that stand guard, like in 2019 when the Supreme Court declared Boris Johnson’s suspension of the parliament unlawful.

That’s not to say that democracy isn’t weakening globally, it’s just that this idea that Germany became a dictatorship because this one charismatic leader came and broke democracy is wrong. The Nazis, while not irrelevant in any sense, were not the main driving force behind Weimar Germany before 1933. The very reason Hitler became a chancellor was because the unelected conservative government thought that they could easily control him. The erosion of democracies happens in the institutions and people’s will, the autocratic leader just strikes the final blow.

“On the Shortness of Life” by Seneca, if we can call it a book. The claim that “life isn’t short, we just waste most of it” was not by itself that impactful until he started listing examples, among them Caesar Augustus. You can think what you will about him, but nobody can say that he was a lazy man sitting around doing nothing. And yet Seneca shows that Augustus in his “productive” life spent a lot of time complaining how he wished he had more free time, and so he didn’t really “live” all the time, just like someone who wastes their days drinking and gambling and whatnot. And the idea that a man who immortalized himself in history for all times “wasted” most of his life was really not something that ever occurred to me. I recommend it to everyone, it’s short and written in simple language.

It’s all being done by HAARP. When confronted by sentences like that, all words escape me.

“G stands for graphics, so it’s gif with a hard g”

The only thing more meaningless than arguing about how to pronounce gif is using that as an argument, and yet it always gets repeated.

I don’t really see a problem with saying things like “my female friends” or “my female colleagues”, when it’s used as an adjective.

Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle and The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić. I always go over two books at the same time where one has heavier material (philosophy/history) and the other lighter that I can read when I’m tired.