Are you high? 🤣 Jokes aside, I would be interested to know why you are asking these questions.

1. Yes, I am intelligent, a lot of people have been impressed by the speed I digest a new piece of information.
2. I have wisdom to know that intelligence plays a very insignificant part in shaping my identity. As for putting my intelligence into good use, I am not sure I can answer yes. I am too idealistic for my own good.
3. IMO humans are unique and similar at the same time. Though, we got to be careful when trying to identify our similarities (see biopolitics, especially M. Foucault).

Is anyone interested in starting a book club? Right now I am reading “Implementing Domain-Driven Design” by Vaugn Vernon.

Hit me up!

I would give myself a solid 4.2/5 on python.

• I have in deepth knowledge of more than a few popular libraries including flask, django, marshmallow, typer, sqlalchemy, pandas, numpy, and many more.
• I have authored a few libraries.
• I have been keeping up with PEPs, and sometimes offered my feedback.
• I have knowledge of the internals of development tooling, including mypy, pylint, black, and a pycharm plugin I have created.

I wouldn’t give myself a 5/5 since I would consider that an attainable level of expertise, with maybe a few expections around the globe. IMO the fun part of being really good at something is that you understand there still is to learn ❤️

I’ve had a very tough time finding my first position as a junior dev

The hiring landscape for software engineers/developers is a mess for the past year or so. You shouldn’t internalize the experience, most likely you are just unlucky.

A few things to consider for finding a job:

1. Utilize your connections, a lot of hiring still happens through connections. If you have attended a university/college/bootcamp reach out to your professors and check if they can refer you to any positions.
2. Make sure your CV can be parsed by tools. Try uploading your CV on open resume, if it’s not parsed correctly you might want to update it.
3. Create a portfolii website, it’s a great way to illustrate your skills. Also, others here can check it out and offer advice.
4. Update your LinkedIn profile, make sure to check that open for recruiters thingy.

If you want to learn more about react I am happy to have a chat with you (no fee), feel free to DM me.

I have setup a rustdesk server with docker, it was surprisingly easy to get started. It was for a friend who is managing the IT services of a small factory, the completely switched from TeamViewer and they are satisfied. More importantly their users, who are worse than your average windows user, found the transition relatively painless.

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).

Pretty interesting study!! They found that introverts that used texting to express themselves demonstrated higher levels of self-confidence than those that used texting to escape. However, for extroverts it was the opposite, those that used texting to escape demonstrated higher levels of self-confidence.

As an AuDHD person, aka someone that has made a skipping rope out of the extrovert/introvert line, I have observed that on good days my extroverted side is on outreach mode while my introverted side is on deep connection mode.

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.

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…

While I agree with most of what you say, I have a personal anecdote that highlights the importance of performance as a feature.

I have a friend that studies economics and uses python for his day to day. Since computer science is not his domain, he finds it difficult to optimize his code, and learning a new language (C in this case) is not really an option.

Some of his experiments take days to run, and this is becoming a major bottleneck in his workflow. Being able to write faster code without relying on C is going to have a significant impact on his research.

Of course, there are other ways to achieve similar results, for example another friend is working on DIAS a framework that optimizes pandas in the runtime. But, the point still stands, there are a tonne of researchers relying on python to get quick and dirty results, and performance plays a significant in that when the load of data is huge.

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!