• 1 Post
  • 42 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 6th, 2023

help-circle
  • Hi, I am a building a platform with the goal of supporting apps like this, and I would be interested to develop a plugin for your use-case as an experiment (no fee).

    I am working alone on this and this is not my first priority, so I cannot make any guarantees about the timeline, or the scope of the plugin. But, if you are interested we can have a chat on matrix.

    The project is not open source yet, but I am planning on doing so once (a) I figure out how to properly apply licensing, and (b) remove any potentially critical information (credentials) from the repository.




  • I can provide some context from Greece.

    First of all, the unemployment rate is high. The official figure is currently at 12.5% but has been steadily decreasing from its peak of 27.7% in 2013. The real numbers are probably higher since people that haven’t been employed within the last few years are not accounted.

    As a result, labour rights are non-existent, overtime is rarely paid, wages have been stagnant since 2008, it is really common to work in unsafe conditions, and worker abuse occurs so often noone bats an eye.

    While we do have unions more often than not they are powerless. For example, last year we had a major train accident (57 people died), the goverment blamed the train workers, their response was pretty much “our strikes for the safety issues that lead to the accident were deemed illegal, while our attempts to raise the issues were dismissed by the ministry of transportation”.

    We have had major nationwide protests with more than a million of people taking to the streets, but noone feels like that ever lead to anywhere.

    IMO one of the greatest problems is the lack of information. Mainstream media are corrupt, and independent media are sabotaged or persecuted by the government. People do not know their rights, we have been trying to survive for so long that we cannot imagine a better future, and that allows employers to freely profit from laborers.

    One interesting development is that lately more collectives are popping here and there, from coffee shops to softwafe development houses, more and more people are fed up and try to take matters on their own hands (even if in absolute numbers they are still very few).


  • In it, Walz argues that the lessons of the “Jewish Holocaust” should be taught “in the greater context of human rights abuses,” rather than as a unique historical anomaly or as part of a larger unit on World War II. “To exclude other acts of genocide severely limited students’ ability to synthesize the lessons of the Holocaust and the ability to apply them elsewhere,” he wrote.

    What an antisemite, he wants people to learn so such acts of horror never happen again.

    Edit: Obviously, I am being sarcastic, I totally agree with Walz.


  • It depends on the field you are studying. I was into CS, using Linux was recommended because the machines they used to test our code were also running linux.

    Most fields are going to be okay with linux, the only exception being fields that rely on specialized software like architects, engineers, and audio/video editing. Also, some software like MatLab are possible to run on Linux but it’s a pain to set them up.









  • 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.


  • 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.


  • 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.