Despite traveling to Vietnam a half dozen times to write about the cuisine, until now I had overlooked phở as a subject, perhaps because of its ubiquity on every Vietnamese restaurant menu. But one day while enjoying a bowl of it in New York City, I thought: Phở is the national dish of Vietnam, devoured from Ha Long Bay to the Mekong Delta. But where did it actually originate?

I knew its roots were in northern Vietnam. I also knew that phở bắc—northern phở—is different from the phở I’d been eating most of my life. In the U.S., we’re usually served the southern Vietnamese version, whose broth is sweeter and more herbaceous, and the dish comes with a side of sprouts, Thai basil, cilantro, hoisin sauce, sriracha, and jalapeño. In the north, the broth lacks the same sweetness, and the side accompaniments are usually pickled garlic and sliced red hot peppers. I’d fallen hard for northern-style phở.

When I asked friends in Vietnam about its origins, their responses varied. Some said phở—most easily pronounced fuh for English speakers—was first created in Hanoi. Others pointed to an outlying province. To complicate matters, theories differed about the influence of French colonialism and Chinese occupation. To trace the soup’s roots, not to mention find the best bowl of phở in Vietnam, I decided to make a pilgrimage to the capital, Hanoi.

Epicurus said: “Death has nothing to do with us, because as long as we exist, death has not yet come; and when death comes, we no longer exist.” Death, as a state, essentially means the passing of life and the time that follows. Mere ending does not harm a person. The reason death is frightening lies in the tricks of human imagination.

From what I have observed, there are three main reasons why humans fear death:

First, pain. This is easy to understand. Pain evolved as a reminder of the body’s condition. Death is the worst state the body can reach, so approaching death often brings unbearable suffering. Yet pain can be avoided. To avoid being blocked, I will not expand on this point here.

Second, the influence of ingrained ideas, expressed as regret. When facing death, people often think: I have not yet done certain things; I cannot let go of someone; I care about how others will judge me. But everyone must die. Not only is there nothing one can manage after death, even in life one cannot have everything as desired. To understand impermanence is to understand that regret is inevitable. Accepting impermanence removes this source of fear.

Third, the fabricated “afterlife” of religion. People fear going to hell. The afterlife is an extremely effective tool of socialization and power. To make people fear death is to make them love life. Further, reincarnation explains the shortcomings of this life and compels people to live cautiously, accumulating merit to secure a better next life. In this way, dissatisfaction is reduced and social stability maintained. In my view, reincarnation is the most cruel idea in human cultural history, with the afterlife close behind. Both prevent people from becoming themselves, wasting their only life within dogma.

Suppose humans could live forever—would death then cease to be feared? No. This is the same mistake as the claim that death gives life meaning. Both commit an error regarding time. Neither depends on death itself. The first grants humans endless time to experience everything without end, removing the urgency that death brings. The second treats death as a deadline, thus giving life “meaning.” Wrong. It merely makes people aware of limited time, motivating them to attempt what they otherwise would not. But that can still be meaningless. Meaning must always be created by humans.

I believe the latter is more worth learning from. At least it honestly faces the fact of life’s finitude and encourages people to do what they wish. The former is nothing more than the ultimate fantasy of those clinging to life or power, teaching people to live timidly, never daring to realize their desires, always waiting for “next time.” They become machines of endless experience, stripped of human selfhood, reduced to walking corpses.

My personal view of death is as follows:

Death belongs only to the individual’s subjective experience. No matter one’s identity, no one can experience another’s death.

Life gives death its meaning. We must first exist to experience anything; thus death, as the end of all experience, naturally carries fear.

To evade death only invites greater disaster. One should face death and accept it. Death is not reasonable, nor unjust. It is simply the end when time has run its course.

Finally, I leave you with Nietzsche’s words: “Every day on which one has not danced is a day betrayed to life.”

During the past month, we've been working rapidly on adding features to lemmy-ui. We also finished up the last major backend changes. This means we can soon go to the beta phase for 1.0, which will focus on testing, bug fixing and helping Lemmy clients to start updating for the new API. After that will be the release candidate phase when version 1.0 will be live tested on lemmy.ml.

You can see the changes in action on the test server voyager.lemmy.ml (which was recently wiped). Registration is open, you are welcome to try things out. To stay up to date with our progress look at the lemmy-ui 1.0 and lemmy 1.0 milestone issues.

The major changes during October were:
- Speeding up migrations for 1.0 and reducing database size
- Notify users about moderation actions
- Default data for new instances (welcome post and popular communities)
- Card views for post listing
- Showing community sidebar on create post page
- Blurhash for images

::: spoiler Full list of changes by user

matc-pub

• Pick date-fns based on translation description (fixes #3483)

dullbananas

• Shrink things that are rewritten in slow migrations

SleeplessOne1917

• Re-export PersonResponse from lemmy-api-common

MV-GH

• Reduce recompositions in the comments

dessalines

• Remove special BanFromCommunityResponse in favor of PersonResponse.
• Multi-community-feeds should be at /m/ , not /c/
• Fixing a few issues with federation-view exports.
• Fix release builds by remove space in platforms.
• Add comment for is_upvote API fields.
• Make sure creator_banned uses item_creator for ReportCombinedView
• Make all the serde tagged types snake_case
• Adding read bool to mark_many_as_read API.
• Make sure create_multi_community_entry returns the community.
• Fixing admin instance block expires_at to use a unix timestamp, with a check.
• Making multi-community follow and edit return a MultiCommunityResponse.
• Add wait after delete user to fix federation CI tests.
• Changing NotePerson response from SuccessResponse to PersonView
• Adding follow_state to MultiCommunityView
• Adding creator and community indexes for post_aggregates.
• Clean up post and comment actions bars
• Adding enable_animated_images, and hide_media setting.
• Adding support for stay_logged_in to login and signup fields
• Adding community description to form and community sidebar.
• Add blurhash image using unlazy.
• Adding collapse_bot_comments setting, and doing that action.
• Upgrading for new API updates
• Adding card and small card views
• In instance settings move admin list to users tab
• Fixup instance_blocks.tsx
• Add more settings
• Fix link-dark issues
• Remove tables in favor of bootstrap columns
• Use btn-sm for post and comment actions buttons.

Nutomic

• Remove some unused code
• Small compile speed optimizations
• Revert changes to crud trait which slowed down compilation (ref #5874)
• Retry tests in ci on failure (ref #5925)
• Handle plain identifiers in markdown
• Setup default data for new instance
• Fix wrong federation error and simplify code (fixes #4363)
• Implemente federated instances view (fixes #6063)
• Expire logins after one week by default, add param stay_logged_in
• Create plugin hook for new notifications and reports (fixes #1027, fixes #5349)
• Fix for NodeBB compat and updated test assets
• Include caller information in error logs
• Include id for CommunityHasNoFollowers
• Auto-follow community when enabling notifications (fixes #6081)
• Serialize enum variants in snake_case (fixes #6062)
• Dont send duplicate notification in case of reply with mention
• Include keyword blocks and discussion languages in backup (fixes #5811)
• Use proper title for replies and mentions in RSS feed (fixes #5357)
• Private community fixes
• Add build.rs to update db migrations macro (fixes #6005)
• Allow users to view comments of deleted posts (fixes #6044)
• Multi-community fixes
• Proper error message for image upload (fixes #6042)
• Case insensitive comparison for read_from_apub_id (fixes #6037)
• Move some errors to not be translated
• ReportCombined: add missing column creator_ban_expires_at
• Allow mods to resolve removed posts (fixes #6018)
• Split apub code into multiple crates, other changes for faster building
• Notify mod actions
• Remove env var LEMMY_UI_HTTPS (fixes #3573)
• Check for untranslated error messages (fixes #3478)
• Use localhost as testhost
• Private community
• Use upstream status code for error responses (fixes #3085)
• Change format for inserted person/community links (fixes #1743)
• Consistent size for action buttons (ref #3503)
• Disable comment form if post is removed or deleted
• Revert "Add button to expand all images"
• Enable some lint rules for jsx
• Block community from context menu (fixes #3306)
• In comment search results show post and community (fixes #1959)
• Open link for markdown help in new tab (fixes #2129)
• Add rel=nofollow to markdown links (fixes #542)
• Show sidebar on create post page (fixes #1522)
• Add audio player for direct links to audio files (fixes #2529)
• Fix "show context" (fixes #3496)
• Indicate removed/deleted comments (fixes #1144)
• Use lint to disallow console.log
• Filter community selection for posting (fixes #2604)

:::

Or see the full list of changes at the links below:

• Backend
• Frontend
• Jerboa

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. The only available option are user donations.

To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate