Feel free to be economic with the truth by using aliases for organizations and products wherever it protects your privacy or your contracts. I’m mainly interested to hear about your unique experience.

Example follow-up questions: What was most rewarding, what was not? What was not a great use of your time but maybe still a learning experience? What were you interested when you were younger (for hobbies or otherwise) that may have helped guide you?

  • @simplymath
    35•4 months ago

    Be 18. Get scholarship. Study literature. Drop out. Run away. Join a protest movement. Be homeless at MIT for a while. Find job. Get hurt at said job. Get workers injury insurance payment after 2 years of recocery. Go back to school for math. Be good at math. Found tech related non profit. Spend 6 months in Kurdistan, setting up wifi. Finish math school. Fuck it, get masters because good at math. Get hired by foreign company oversees to work on self driving cars. Doesn’t work. Won’t work. Quit. Go to Greece, teach refugee kids how to us MS office. Watch neo Nazis burn down refugee school and computer lab. Suddenly it’s March of 2020 (COVID) and nothing to do because Nazis and no more computer lab. Oh fuck. Find PhD program in “trustworthy ai” to figure out why car not work. Prove car never work. Get PhD. Get paid to critique AI and play on super computers while working from home and having zero day to day oversight. Get paid to travel the world. Get paid to shit on Google, Facebook , Openai, and Tesla.

    I went from homeless to visiting my 40th country in 10 years, while having a PhD.

    No regrets.

    • Electric
      6•4 months ago

      Based as fuck. Shame about the Nazis though, those poor kids didn’t deserve to have their school burnt down for existing.

        • Electric
          1•4 months ago

          Nice. More of them to get a taste of their own medicine. The time line is awful, I didn’t know Greece had so much violence against immigrants. Second link was broken though.

          • @simplymath
            3•4 months ago

            must be your client. the link works fine for me. If you see the timeline, locals mostly weren’t involved and lots of local anti fascists organized and fought back. This island was nominated for the Nobel prize when the crisis started, but there’s only so much people can take when the refugees kept coming, the island couldn’t support thousands of extra people, and refugees were forced to cut down centuries old olive trees for cooking fuel. Greece is not a wealthy country and they felt betrayed by places like Sweden and Germany that have robust economies and a much smaller proportion of the refugee crisis.

            Something had to give. Moria camp is essentially an open air prison without running water or showers. Most people who arrive are children, or were before they walked to Turkey from the Congo or Afghanistan or whatever and boarded boats for a chance at a better life.

            I heard stories from teenagers who had escaped slavery or been forced to work in fast fashion factories in Turkey without pay or had their passports stolen in Iran or picked up by a militia in the Syrian civil war and handed a weapon. And the EU just leaves them there. They get like €200 a month, if and when their legal case ever concludes, but that’s not enough to actually live and they’re not allowed to work. Not like Greece has extra work anyway.

            Maybe the countries that make a fortune by selling arms to conflict zones (France, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Italy) should step up and take care of the crises they manufactured for profit. But nah, they just elect far right parties because brown people are scary.

            • Electric
              1•4 months ago

              Oh that’s nice it wasn’t a hugely shared sentiment. I skimmed a lot since I was trying to find the specific incident and all the details like deaths of babies and lynchings made it seem like the people of the island were for it since, like you mentioned, practically an open air prison. Unfair the island was burdened with so many but the conditions of the camp are awful.