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…

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

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).

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.

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.

Don’t come to Greece, over tourism is a huge problem here…

Here is a list of note-taking apps:

https://github.com/tehtbl/awesome-note-taking

By the way, I am building my own Journaling system, it’s still early stages and I am looking for ideas!

Has anyone gone through the documents? Any interesting findings? Is it time to create a website?

Me neither buddy, me neither…

Falsehoods About Time: … Time always moves forwards.

I had to learn this the hard way… I was working at a platform that pulled measurements from sensors. The sensors did not declare the timezone for the timestamps of the measurement and the platform broke down twice after daylight saving. The first time there were duplicated records which caused conflicts and the second one we weren’t handling impossible timestamps.

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.

I am not using Jenkins anymore but this seems like a lifesaver, thanks for sharing

Unless you are using groovy (jenkins), then you are running the pipeline to find syntax errors.

Jack Dorsey, good or bad?

(bonus points if you get the community reference)

Stremio with the local files extension? Not exactly a video player, but if you want to watch movies and TV shows, it will get the job done.

I have been thinking about this for quite some time, feel free to add me on matrix (link in bio) if you are interested to collaborate/discuss.

It’s interesting to consider a few potential use-cases, as you can see below the technical requirements for each use-case can be vastly different.

Notice, I am assuming that accounts are connected, aka if someone creates a post, that post can reach users of other instances. See the “Connecting Instances” section below.

Use Case: Organizing an Event

Let’s say Alice wants to organize a trivia night at the coffee shop she works at. After all the preparations, Alice needs to invite people, so she makes a post with the location, the date, and the announcement of the event.

People following Alice’s (or the coffee shop’s) account, will be notified of the event and choose to either attend or not. Some may even “boost” the event, so it’s reaches more people.

Discovery is not optimal. It’s possible, people that live nearby the coffee shop, and would have otherwise attended the event, weren’t following the account, as a result weren’t notified and missed the event.

Instead, if a location based feed was available, it would have allowed people to find Alice’s post and attend the event. The UX for such a feed can be complex, but the backend requirements are pretty straightforward, we need to filter (and/or sort) using the location, date and tags of an event.

All in all, the volume of data is small (not a lot of events happen at the same time and the same area), and the application is not time-critical (if a post takes several of minutes to reach other users it’s not an issue as the event is posted days in advance).

Use Case: Short-Term/Live Monitoring

Let’s say a group wants to organize a protest march, they know that the police tends to get violent on such occasions, so they need to monitor the police’s activity and alert the people accordingly.

So, they create a system where some people are responsible for monitoring the area and regularly upload posts with the exact location of the police. This allows the group to create a map that shows the locations of police blocks and adjust their route accordingly.

While the example is terrible, I believe the use-case is clear. A lot of people, need to monitor “something” that is happening “right now”.

Again, probably most of the complexity lies on the UX design, but a few backend requirements are added:

1. There is a large volume of data, and everything is time-critical.
2. There is a need for control on who is able to posts, otherwise ill-willed users will be able to create noise and render the system useless.
3. There is a need for control on who is able to access the information.

Keep in mind that (2) and (3) do not mean that a decentralized platform would be better suited.

Use Case: Long Term Monitoring

Let’s say, during the spring, a population of ducks passes through the city. Tourists and locals alike want to watch the ducks, so they start recording sightings.

This information not only allows users that are nearby to rush to watch the ducks when there is a sighting, but also can be used to create a heatmap of the most probable locations to find ducks for a given time of day.

Technical requirements:

1. Small volume of data, but information can be time-critical.
2. Need to generate notifications for users interested to respond to the sighting.

Use Case: Information Sharing

Let’s say Bob learns an interesting trivia about the statue on the town square. He creates a post about the trivia and stamps it with the location of the statue.

Here, time is irrelevant to the post, people are going to be interested in Bob’s trivia years down the line. However, people need to be able to discover Bob’s trivia, and a map is probably the best tool for the job.

Technical requirements:

1. Volume of data depends on population of an area, city centers are going to have more posts that small towns.
2. Nothing is time-critical.

Connecting Instances

Utilising this, we could create a list of Habitat instances that are relevant to a user’s current location, and then query only those instances.

I don’t think this would work, habbitat.world would still have users around the globe, as a result it would be queried every time someone refreshes their feed. You may make a case that there shouldn’t be such an instance, but keep in mind (a) pretty much every Fediverse platform has a few huge instances, and (b) that would exclude users located in places without a local instance (or local instances with unethical admins/mods).

I believe the existing follow-based federation mechanisms would provide a better solution. Keep in mind that fedizens don’t want to see “everything” within their feeds, but a curated list of posts/events based on their choices and/or the choices of people with similar background (same instance).

I have serious sleep issues so I heavily really on my alarm app, I need features like:

1. wake-up captcha
2. wake-up time randomising
3. the ability to load a playlist, or play a podcast episode
4. sleep tracking

It may sound boring, but I would appreciate a good open source alarm app for android.

why is signal not an option?