From what I heard, salt is usually packaged with iodine or some substances that prevent clumping that expire over time. So after some time the salt won't have those anymore, but it should be safe to consume. Salt cannot spoil because bacteria cannot grow in salty places.

Don't know how plastic containers relate to that sadly.

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.

"There's an error message on my screen."

"What does it say?"

"I don't know."

This was painful to read. I'm a developer and have colleagues who can't read. "It failed! It says that I need to clear all changes before I can branch, how can I fix this?" "Well clear the changes and then branch". It's just learnes helplessness, people want to sit back and let someone else do the thinking.

I actually did this once. My USB was on /dev/sda instead of sdb and I didn't bother to check. It took me like 2 days to fix it because you can't just delete partitions and start over normally, it changes some flags on your drive that you need to manually reset for them to be usable again. Fun times.

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!

Very relatable. I started leaving food for some local magpies about a year ago, and now they wake me up every morning at 6.

I once had a problem when suddenly some tits arrived and started stealing all the food. A huge magpie would take like one hazelnut and be on its way, while these small fuckers would eat like pigs, and then hide what was left. They'd take the nuts and shove them somewhere between the flowers on my balcony. Tough the magpies too have often burried nuts in the soil below the flowers, only to dig them out again.

And it was so cool to watch some sparrow coming and going a dozen times to pull out some weeds that have been growing (I left the pots with the flowers outside over winter, the flowers died and weeds started to grow), and then carry them to a hole in a wall where a brick is missing which presumably is the nest.

But it was so so cool when I got woken up a few days in succession to a silhouette of a majestic crow standing on my balcony (my bed looks directly through the balcony window facing north-east). Crows are so cool, and magpies are really beatutiful, though extremely skittish.

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

If we can't get the entire population to stay at home and wear masks to protect themselves against a global pandemic, how the heck are we supposed to get them to stay at home and wear masks to protect themselves against climate change?

Good question. I know people who never had any problems trusting medication and vaccines, but then with COVID they suddenly parroted the idea that masks and vaccines don't work. A few days ago a friend said the famous line that "Ukraine was invented in the 20th century to damage Russia, they're actually Russians". I tried to tell him the story of how Kievan Rus' came to be from a Norse people to a primarily Slavic state, and how modern Russia isn't the same thing as medieval Rus', but he cut me off mid sentence and said that he knows that story and doesn't believe it.

You literally can't say anything to that. With every conspiracy theory, you can say, show and prove whatever you want, but you will always be defeated by the answer: "I don't believe that", and you can't argue belief away with facts. Also the same people who said that the Earth isn't getting warmer are now saying that it's due to natural cycles where the Earth is closer to the Sun.

What I'm trying to say is that a lot of people take these things (global warming, covid, war in Ukraine, the EU, NATO...) personally and emotionally, not on a factual basis. Hell, some people deny that we had an air pollution problem in Serbia when you could literally see and smell the disguisting air yourself.

How to get through to these people before it's too too late is beyond me, but an information campaign wouldn't do much because you could give me the biggest and best scientific report about human effects on the climate, signed by every scientist on the planet, and I could just say "I don't believe that" and that's it. The question we need to answer is: "Why do people get so angry about man made climate change?"

Except when I start a 10h build before going home only to find out in the morning that windows update restarted my computer in the middle of the night. Or when I can't edit a folder because a file "is being used", then I close absolutely every running program and it's still somehow "being used". Or when I can't turn off the PC because something is running in the background, even though I closed everything one by one. Or when my PC starts screaming because a VSCode subprocess is using all my resources, I kill it in task manager, and it somehow respawns as a process of its own. I can't end it, and closing VSCode doesn't do anything. My laptop became so hot I couldn't hold it.

I mean Linux causes problems too, ofc. I once spent like 2h trying to set up a keyboard to input Chinese characters on Fedora. But in my experience, Linux caused me less frustration by far. Or when a problem arises, I can fix it quickly.

This is not to bash on you for using windows, just thought I'd throw in that "just works" isn't universal.

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...

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.

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