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…

As someone whose country reelected a party that outright ignores EU regulation, I wish you a better luck…

The wilipedia article was an interesting read. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre

On 2 June, Deng Xiaoping and several party elders met with the three PSC members—Li Peng, Qiao Shi, and Yao Yilin—who remained after Zhao Ziyang and Hu Qili had been ousted. The committee members agreed to clear the square so “the riot can be halted and order be restored to the Capital”. They also agreed that the square needed to be cleared as peacefully as possible; but if protesters did not cooperate, the troops would be authorized to use force to complete the job.

According to Ezra Vogel, Deng at 2:50pm told General Chi Haotian that his troops could use all possible methods to clear the square.

On 9 June, Deng Xiaoping, appearing in public for the first time since the protests began, delivered a speech praising the “martyrs” (PLA soldiers who had died). Deng stated that the goal of the student movement was to overthrow the party and the state. Of the protesters, Deng said: “Their goal is to establish a totally Western-dependent bourgeois republic.” Deng argued that protesters had complained about corruption to cover their real motive, replacing the socialist system. He said that “the entire imperialist Western world plans to make all socialist countries discard the socialist road and then bring them under the monopoly of international capital and onto the capitalist road.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping (Chinese: 邓小平[a]; 22 August 1904 – 19 February 1997) was a Chinese revolutionary and statesman who served as the paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from December 1978 to November 1989. After Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, Deng rose to power and led China through its process of Reform and Opening Up and the development of the country’s socialist market economy. Deng developed a reputation as the “Architect of Modern China” and his ideological contributions to socialism with Chinese characteristics are described as Deng Xiaoping Theory.

PS Not OP, I just searched “Deng political leader” and found the above wikipedia article, the age matches so I think this is the person OP is referring to, but I may be wrong.

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?

I hear the UK makes an honest effort for accessibility

So that’s the legal equivalent of the guy committing 10k changes the day before leaving the company…

I am trying it out, got a subscription a couple of weeks ago. I went to unlimited searches right away since on a work day I heavily rely on search engines.

To be honest, I have nothing to say about it, which feels like a good thing considering that lately I have been complaining a lot about Google.

IMO Lemmy is a social media, it allows people to socialize over shared interests. It doesn’t need to facilitate IRL connections, even though they are likely to happen.

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 need a bit of clarification, are you suggesting that every candidate that gets even a single vote gets to be a representative? or is there some selection mechanism? (minimum votes, fixed number of seats, etc…)