[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

If you don't mind sailing the high seas, you can download the audiobook from https://rargb.to/ for free.

[-] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

6=3+3, 7+3=10, 10+3=13

PS I had to edit this post because of typos.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

I think when it comes to exploitation by corporate interest, having ADHD makes you 10x more vulnerable.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Grew up in a home without an internet connection. A friend helped me crack our neighbour's WiFi password, at the time it was surprisingly easy if you had a copy of Kali Linux.

Edit: This post got me wondering how I could open up a free WiFi network without being liable for any potential illegal activity someone may do? I got a fairly good access point and the bandwidth to spare, but I am afraid to share it in case the police comes knocking on my door...

[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

I fear if I get fired I won't be able to sustain myself.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

Assuming you have read the book is the issue. Is it going to he Marx? Or maybe Judith Butler? What about other thinkers that write about race? What about anarchism, is Kropotkin out of scope? Should the quiz also cover market economies? What about Thomas Sowell?

My point is while I have barely scratched the surface, I have already mentioned a wide variety of authors which most people haven't read (some of them for good reasons).

[-] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

IMO such a quiz would be impossible for anyone but professionals. I have been following local and international news, but the amount of things happening on a daily basis is simply too much.

Also, constructing such a quiz would be impossible, picking questions would introduce political bias.

For example, Berney followers are likely to miss Trump quotes, even though arguably they are among the most politically educated groups in America.

To answer yoyr question, I believe I would score within the top 10% for most quizzes. But, there are a lot of quizzes I wouldn't get a single question right.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I don't think there is any way right now to come without negatively affecting the locals. Essentially, the tourists to locals ratio is out of hand. A few of the problems we are facing:

  1. Everything is overcrowded. Our public infrastructure is barely equipped to handle the population of 10M, on top of that add the 36M visitors we saw in 2023. It may be fun and exciting if you are here for a couple of days, but living through that all year long is exhausting.
  2. Everything is overpriced. Most people coming to Greece have expendable income we don't have, along with overcrowding, this sets prices we cannot afford. Airbnb has definitely exaggerated the housing crisis, but it's not the only issue. When you are eating, drinking, visiting historical sights, or doing any activity, you are contributing to that.
  3. Our economy is over-reliant on tourism. As someone else commented, no other type of industry can compete with tourism, every year more places lose their identity as they adapt to the ever-growing needs of the tourism industry.
  4. Our history is being erased. Visiting a historical sight may a wonderful experience for you, but every step you make, every photo you take, every trash you throw, impacts the place you are visiting, destroying little by little thousands of years of history.

As a personal note, my income is a few times the national average, and yet I cannot afford to go on vacations this year...

As a (not) fun challenge you can try to limit your budget to around 30 eur per day per person. You will fail, probably won't even find living accommodations within that budget, but it will give you an insight on our struggles.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Well, I can see your point of view, after all computer science has been used for a lot of sinister things in our time. However, science is a neutral thing on itself, how we use it makes the difference.

A great example are corporate social media vs the fediverse. While we can all see the good a social media platforms can offer, they way corporate social media have been shaped introduces a lot of problems. Given the circumstances I may argue they were a necessary step, but it's definitely time for change, and a lot of people (including us right now) are working hard for that change.

Social Computing as field would study this change, how people made decisions, and how it influenced both their lives and the society we live in. It involves asking questions like: How the fediverse came to be? How the transition could have been faster? Or, How it can be used for the greater good?

Of course, these questions can be shaped in an exploitative way like: How the evolution of the fediverse could stopped or slowed down? How the fediverse could be exploited for the gain of the few? etc...

In the end, I believe the question is who is more powerful, a few people with a lot of money, or a lot of people with little money? Right now the few seem to have the upper hand, but if the access to resources is the only difference, then I believe that we can be optimistic as science and technology have always been about doing more with less resources.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago

The 21st century has been mostly focused on finding new applications of existing technology. A lot of things are changing in pretty much every aspect of life, but nothing is entirely new.

The internet has really changed the shape of our world, but, even though it really kicked off after the year 2000, it was invented during the 20th century.

Something to keep in mind is that humanity is redifining what counts as an invention, a lot of ideas are created all the time, so the bar has been raised significantly.

Also, we need to keep in mind how big corps have been killing innovation in the name of profit. New products are being created all the time, but they are bought by bigger companies and burried. This is happenig because these innovations carry a certain risk that an established company with a good revenue flow is not willing to accept.

Personally, I am excited about the field of Social Computing, it is still at its infancy and has a lot of potential. The main idea is to create alogirthms based on human interactions that solve real world problems. A few questions one may ask include: How misinformation is being spread, and what is the optimal way to fight it? How do we fight corruption and authoriative power? These questions have been approached by a lot of fields, but creating algorithms and proving their effectiveness requires a deep understanding of computer science.

[-] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago

Don't come to Greece, over tourism is a huge problem here...

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Typing in python leaves a lot to be desired... Being looking at peps for quite some time, but it's really hard for the language to make progress without breaking compatibility.

Hopefully at some point MOJO becomes mature enough to use in a professional setting.

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submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

At some point I was searching for an open source car pooling service. I realized there weren't any so I started developing one on my free weekends.

While I haven't made much progress so far, I have been observing how much as a society we have been relying on route planning software. Also, I cannot overlook the effect of such services on the planet (see Amazon, Uber, and many more).

With all this as a context, I have been asking myself the following questions:

  1. What would be the impact on society (especially inequality) if there were open source alternatives to such services?
  2. What would a common core look like? (i.e. what is the WordPress equivalent for transportation/route planning, is OpenStreetMaps enough?)
  3. What domain specific knowledge would it require to build such a software? (while in university I researched about the travelling salesman problem, anything else?)
  4. What safety protocols would we need to develop when there is no corporation insuring users? (i.e. if I order something from Amazon and it's dead on arrival, I get either a refund or a replacement shipped to me for free)
  5. What's the proper terminology to describe what I am describing?

Feel free to add any questions of your own. I created this post because I am free this afternoon and I wondered what it would like to discuss this with strangers instead of pondering on my own.

Edit: My free afternoon was taken away by an incident I had to respond to, it's now late o'clock here, but I will do my best to reply to all you magnificent people.

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souperk

joined 10 months ago