Yeah, the texture is not the best, but I found that cooking oats in water and adding frozen berries makes it really good taste-wise. And a colleague told me that adding milk to oats cooked in water is almost the same as cooking them in milk.

But man, adding semolina to your oats and cooking them with milk makes suuuuch a good breakfast because the semolina provides a tasty dense medium in which the oats are suspended.

arXiv doesn’t have peer review as far as I know

I’ve been using MetaGer for a long time and have been very satisfied with it. So sad to see it go. Time to look for a new search engine.

That is a big question which I am sadly not equiped enough to answer adequately, as I have not invested that much time into anarchist works. What I can give is an example from Kropotkin’s book “Mutual Aid”:

He mentions how in village societies every dispute was treated as a comunal affair. If no resolution could be found, the case was brought to a group of people (can’t remember specifically how they were chosen), and they would pass a verdict and resolution. The disputing parties could then either accept the verdict, or they would be excluded from the community. By excluded I mean that they would not enjoy the hospitality and aid of other members, and would thus have to leave the community. So if you are deemed a problematic member and won’t change accordingly, nobody would exert power over you, you would just cease to be a part of the community. Obviously if someone got violent, self-defence would be acceptible.

As for feminism, I know that there is a thing called “anarcha feminism”, but I don’t know any details.

And that’s very unfortunate that that’s the most common perception of anarchism, because all anarchist theory focuses on how cooperation beats competition. The “anarchy” in the name means that nobody has rule over someone else, but rather all members voluntarily help one another because it’s the most efficient and safest way of living.

You might be thinking of this:

https://youtu.be/ZPUk1yNVeEI?feature=shared

Where he mentioned that the desktop is unique in that it has to support thousands of different devices for all kinds of people, and that most people don’t really care what their computer is running as long as it works.

Most of southeastern Europe uses Viber as the “default messaging app”, so it does vary by region.

Interesting, in my degree we had one lesson in Java for OOP (the rest of the course was C++), Java for android programming, Python in another course, and everything else from year 1 to year 4 (that had programming) was in C/C++. Except for assembly in computer architecture.

English and my native Serbian.

Ich habe Deutsch in der Schule gelernt. Ich benutze es sehr seltsam, aber ich habe fast nichts vergessen, weil unsere Lehrerinen sehr sehr Böse war. Deutsch in der Schule hat meine Leben 10 jahren verkurtzt.

Έχω μάθει και τα Ελληνικά. Ένα από τα όνειρά μου είναι να διαβάζω τα κείμενα στα αρχαία ελληνικά, αλλά αυτό ήταν τρόπο δύσκολο. Γιατί αποφάσισε να μαθαίνω πρότω τα νέα Ελληνικα, καί σύντομα τα αρχαία είναι πολύ πιό εύκολα.

I can understand a fair amount of Russian, but I can’t necessarilly speak it as well.

I should clarify what I meant by “no violence”. I meant that, in the ideal scenario, communities build themselves up so that capitalists become less and less relevant, without exacting violence upon them. Of course, in the event that these communities get attacked by those same capitalists, defence is very reasonable.

The thing is when you tell people that we need a revolution, most picture storming various places, seizing assets and beating up some people in the process, which I think makes a lot of them distance themselves. Presenting a program which focuses on a peaceful development of society is I think much easier to get on board with.

There’s a low to zero chance that any transition away from capitalism will be peaceful and without resistance, but I think it would be better to tell people that the we want to work towards creating a normal life, and we will encounter violent resistence along the way, than to focus on revolutions and overthrowing the ruling class. The end goal is pretty much the same, and the process might inevitably involve the same things, but the former is I think more palatable to most.

One idea I really like is slowly circumventing the need for big corporations by having services provided locally. People in a given community developing skills and aiding each other to make themselves as self-sufficient as possible. Then groups of these communities can interact and potentially provide things the other one lacks.

Or something like medieval guilds where people from each profession act together to practice their craft where needed, modified unions or something like that.

Essentially people willingly cooperating to be able to stand up to the capitalists. They have power because we depend on them, both their services and on money which they hoard. Through cooperation and mutual aid, their power can be significantly reduced, without a high risk of violence erupting.

Is this too optimistic and naive? Maybe, but I’m of the opinion that we’d in any case benefit if we started moving in that direction.

In what way? I use it from time to time to get movies and series. Is there any downside compared to other methods?

Genuine question, I’m not too familiar with the pirate world beyond pirate bay.

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

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’ve decided the best and most feasible thing I can do right now is thoroughly decoupling myself from the corporate consumerism world

I honestly think this is a very valid approach. Most people are imagining revolutions and a sudden and violent end to the capitalist class, but I’m more inclined towards the idea where people just change their life habbits so that they don’t depend on massive corporations. Step one stop using crap you don’t need, step two try to get the things you do need locally. If enough people do this, you might start seeing small communities that take care of a lot of stuff by themselves, and the moment you get a big enough community where at least some can live comfortably with little to no dependency from big corporations, things might change…

“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

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.