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).

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).

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!

It sounds a bit too soon to use release names, especially given that Lemmy is still in alpha.

When a major release comes out, I suggest using colony names (fictional or real), like the pirate republic.

In general, I like names that highlight the decentralised aspect of the fediverse.

or chapters from “Das Capital”

I used the refund money to buy Bose qc35 earbuds

I guess newer models are still good

Nope. The WF1000-XM4 have battery drain issues, and there is at least one explosion recorded…

Edit: To everyone saying they have XM4 or XM5 and see no issues, congratulations you are one of the lucky few. Just google “XM4 battery drain” and you will learn the Sony had to issue so many refunds they introduced new processes…

PS Boycott Sony until they address the issues. It’s not okay for major producer to release a product with such a major flow and then look the other way.

1. Noise cancelling headphones and earbuds. By far the best quality of life improvement I have ever gotten from a single product.
2. Whet stones for sharpening knives. It’s a fun process and my knives are in perfect condition.
3. Mobile phones.

For anyone interested, Wikipedia provides some arguments against meritocracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy

Meritocracy is argued to be a myth because, despite being promoted as an open and accessible method of achieving upward class mobility under neoliberal or free market capitalism, wealth disparity and limited class mobility remain widespread, regardless of individual work ethic.

I totally agree.

IMO the notion of merit is an illusion. It hides the assumption that people can be ranked and compared, but do we truly want to live in such a society?

Also, is that even feasible?

It’s impossible to objectively compare humans of similar “skill level”. For example, think of Plato and Aristotle, they have been dead for thousands of years and their work has been studied but millions of not billions of people, yet people still argue who was the best philosopher of the two. How can we have a meritocracy if we cannot evaluate merit? You may be able to distinguish experts from beginners for a certain skill, but, when considering roles of influence/power, there are multiple skills and attributes to be considered, and the same principle applies.

It’s easier to cheat a merit metric than to evaluate it. Any algorithm that makes a decision based on merit will need to either evaluate or compare it. Both are going to depend on the presence of absence of features that once known to a cheater they will be able to fake them. That makes evaluation and cheating a competing game, where the evaluator and the cheater contiously adapt to one another, with the cheater being much able to adapt much faster.

Any meritocracy will have to be open about it’s evaluation process. If it’s not participants with merit cannot know how to demonstrate it and the process is prune to corruption.

Personally, I believe making decisions based on trust is much better. It’s hard to build trust and it cannot be cheated. Of course, cheater may try to influence decision makers with bribes or blackmail. But, once this is found trust is destroyed and they get rejected.

Start a religion, I guess?

That got me good, thanks for the laugh!

To be fair, I’ve seen some Linux desktop configs that were pretty fucked.

That’s the reason I named it the “rule 34 of linux desktop configs”. In the past 2 years, I have observed a friend’s journey to a fully automated setup. It started with a bash script, which was then converted to an ansible playbook, then a python script, and now a ublue config.

The depths some people will go to fuck (figuratively) with their machines is inspiring!

Maybe, you get to choose the point. What were the moments that made it all worth it?