AccountMaker @ AccountMaker @slrpnk.net

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Joined

2 yr. ago

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.

I still remember when I tried to run a binary on a different architecture and got the message: "Bad elf magic"

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"

And how do they install Windows? I had to install it for a friend a few months ago and the way I did it was by downloading a bootable windows image and made a bootable usb with it.

Σύντομα θα είναι 4 χρόνια

Yeah, but what I meant is that for English you don't need to look for it. You'll see English on every social media. At least in Serbia, most, if not all popular foreign songs are in english, and most younger people listen to music with english lyrics, on TV you'll find mostly american series, movies and shows, technology uses english by default, and everyone learns english in school here since year 1 of primary school.

My point is that Anlophones who want to learn, say, French, have to actively seek it out and motivate themselves for the sole purpose of being able to engage in French culture, while here (but I imagine it's very similar in the rest of europe) people are bombarded with english everywhere they look, whether they want to or not.

And this reach really makes it insanely easy to learn english. I've been listening to so much Swedish metal that I've learned a handful of words, and if I had immediate access to Swedish like I do to English, I'd probably be talaring svenska by now, but I do not, so I don't. So to make a fair comparisson, I'd say it would be better to see how many people speak 3+ languages, and compare that to the number of bilingual Anglophones.

Two texts by Seneca: "On the shortness of life" and "On Providence". The first one made me rethink the idea of "productivity" and the second one made me better at handling bad situations. But at the time I still felt crushed below the weight of a meaningless world, and then I read "The myth of Sisyphus" by Camus and my mind was blown. It was such an inovative way to deal with a world that doesn't answer back.

Also "Discourses" of Epictetus. If there ever was a book that was simple, elegant, and usable right away for a better life, this is it. I'd recommend this to everyone.

It's hard to single out specific works of Plato to stand on their own, I find the most value to be gained by having an overview of his whole philosophy, but "Protagoras" is my favourite dialogue, as it introduces some essential questions as to why are we so careless when taking care of our minds, and how nobody does bad things willingly (which is often repeated by Epictetus). Also the "Apology" is essential because it shows the basic thoughts that guided the greatest philosopher in the west.

The basic idea behind it blew my mind when I heard about it at school the first time, but my god did I struggle to read it. I went statement by statement and only moved to the next if I felt comfortable with the previous one, and gave up eventually. Now that I think about it, it might be helpful to just read through the whole thing and then read it again in chunks, and then again in statements.

To cut Anglophones some slack, quite a lot of people are bilingual by knowing their native language + english because it's pretty much the de facto international language, especially in Europe. For Anglophones it just happens that their native language is english, so they don't bother with learning a new one since realistically they don't need to, whereas for others knowing english is often mandatory for jobs.

Besides that it's much easier to learn english than any other language because media and culture in english is unavoidable unless you live without internet and TV.

Δεν είμαι Έλληνας, αλλά μαθαίνω τα ελληνικά! Ήθελα να διαβάζω κείμενα στα αρχαία ελληνικά, αλλά βρήκα αυτό πολύ δύσκολο. Λοιπόν, αποφάσισα να πρώτα μάθω τα νέα ελληνικά, καί μετά να προσπαθήσω ξανά τα αρχαία.

Why put effort into anything when in 100/1000/10000 years everything I love and care about will be dead, gone, and forgotten?

I had a slightly different question: what's the point of doing anything if it'll end? In other words: anything achievable is not worth doing.

I haven't really found an answer to this, it just stopped bothering me, though one potential answer was: happiness and wisdom. Wisdom is unachievable because there's always more to understand, and happiness is not a stable state since we're hardwired not to be perpetually happy because we wouldn't do anything if we were. Thus those two things can be chased always, they don't end, and then you die. After that you have no more problems.

(Mid 20s, don't like driving)

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.

When my dad and grandpa were teaching me how to play chess, they told me that the knight moves in a "G" pattern. I could not for the life of me figure out how a G maps to what they showed me, so I figured out that it goes one diagonal, and then eitger one up if the diagonal was up, one down if it was down and the same reasoning for left and right. That's still how I visualize it.

Years later I realized that they meant the cyrillic G, which looks like this: Γ...

I used https://bandcamp.com/ a couple of times. You can buy albums and get a link to download mp3 files.

And yet our professors at university translated "free software" using our word meaning "free of charge", my ears bled. It should have been libre software from the beginning.

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.

This might interest you. Tl;dr, engines recommended besides DDG, Brave and SearX are:

MetaGer, Mojeek, Swisscows, Qwant and YaCy

What's wrong with Jerboa? Genuinely asking, I've been using it since I discovered Lemmy 1.5 months ago, and only had a problem once when the instances were down due to a critical vulnerability bug or something that happened last month, when I had to manually log out and log back in to fix it.

You can find the answer in the second book of Virgil's Aeneid. But tldr:

The Trojans thought that the greeks have left, they went to their camps and found a huge wooden horse. Some wanted to bring the horse into the city, others wanted to burn it, others still wanted to open the stomach and see what was inside, since they thought that it was a trap. A man called Lacoön rushed and yelled at them that the greeks would never gift them anything (that's where the famous saying "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts" comes from), and he threw a spear at the horse, and they heard that something was inside.

But then, some Trojans brought forth a Greek captive named Sinon. He told them that the Greeks wanted to leave for ages, but the winds wouldn't let them. To appease the gods for good winds, they have chosen to sacrifice him, but he somehow got away. The horse was built to atone for the sins commited by Diomedes and Odysseus (they stole a statue of Athena), and it was built higher than the Trojan walls to prevent the Trojans from bringing the horse into the city, for if they bring it in, Troy will conquer Greece.

Then two giant snakes appeared, killed Lacoön and his kids, and then they slithered away to hide behind a statue of Athena. The Trojans understood this as a punishment for Lacoön since he threw a spear at the horse, and that they needed to bring the horse back to the temple of Athena. They then demolished parts of their gate to make room for the horse, heard metal ringing from the inside as they were pulling it, but didn't think much of it. They celebrated the end of the war, went to sleep at nightfall and the rest is history mythology.