• 4 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 6th, 2023

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  • 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 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 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 am definitely guilt for that, but I find this approach really productive. We use small bug fixes as an opportunity to improve the code quality. Bigger PRs often introduce new features and take a lot of time, you know the other person is tired and needs to move on, so we focus on the bigger picture, requesting changes only if there is a bug or an important structural issue.






  • 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.