It’s a lab thing. In a regular kitchen, it hardly matters.

However, in a lab, it definitely does when you have a lot of slurry to filter and you can’t wait all day. Many filtrations tend to take forever anyway, so speeding things up is always appreciated.

If you wet the filter before starting the filtration, you’re removing air from the pores of the paper. This way, there’s an open channel for water to go through, and it’s possible to utilise a larger part of the available surface area. Filtration is limited by surface area, so bigger is better and more is more. A wet filter simply guarantees that you’ll get as much surface area as possible.

I wonder if the pen could also be at an angle. You know, because calligraphy.

For many years, I’ve used a HTPC with a few different distributions. At the moment, it’s running Debian with Gnome. For me, this is good enough, since the UI allows me to easily do all sorts of computer stuff like having multiple virtual desktops, many browsers, lots of tabs, spreadsheets and a system monitor. Obviously, you need a wireless keyboard + touchpad combo to use this HTPC.

If you’re aiming for a more simplified UX, I would go with something like LibreELEC

If you have your own company, you would naturally use the.boss@theBestCompanyEver.lol email for these kinds of purposes. Shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. On the other hand, nobody prohibits you from getting a domain and hosting your own email even if you don’t have a company. Sure, they probably have a long list of gmail users already, but the other people will have all sorts of random email addresses, so I don’t see what’s the problem. There are lots of valid reasons to use some other service besides gmail.

When experimenting, you shouldn’t use your finest beans. When I’m getting to know a new method, I usually start with the cheapest light roast I can find in a supermarket. It’s nowhere near a specialty coffee, but it’s still a lot nicer than any medium roast I’ve ever found. As it costs about 18 €/kg, making mistakes doesn’t get too expensive. This method is ok if you’re testing a new method and you’re brewing coffee for a large crowd at the same time. Alternatively, you could brew for yourself, but you would need to drink more than a few cups.

Another option would be to use decaf, which comes with different compromises. It’s about twice the price, but you can drink a lot of it. When I was getting to know my cheap espresso machine, I went with decaf. I ended up making six double shots in a day, and that amount of regular espresso would have been way too much for me. With decaf though, I was fine. If I had used regular coffee, I would have needed to spread these experiments over several days, but with decaf I was able to do all of it during a single day.

You need to brew very gently. Moka pots are finicky and they don’t forgive your mistakes.

If you’re ok with any random coffee, it’s really easy, and that’s why they are so popular. If you want to make good coffee, you really need to know what you’re doing.

See also: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BfDLoIvb0w4&ra=m

Why do you ask? Did you find something interesting?

This is a tricky argument to make. Living under capitalism means you don’t really have much of a choice in the matter. If you could easily choose not to participate, it would become an ethical decision.

Currently, LLMs don’t really occupy that position, but soon they will. Eventually, choosing not to use an LLM will be like choosing not to use electricity today. You may not like how your electricity was made, but can you realistically choose not to use it? Most people can’t be expected to make such radical decisions based on ethical questions, because doing so would require significant sacrifices. Same with capitalism today.

Today, you can still choose to avoid LLMs, and it won’t involve massive sacrifices on your part. I wonder how long that still holds true. Regardless, I still approve of your argument, because of the trajectory we’re currently on.

Sounds like this could be a blog post. I would really like to read about those experiences. If you have the time, please elaborate.

If we assume that Claude has free rein, the quality of rsync will fall. Now the real question is: Can we realistically assume that?

What if there is a human in the loop who has decades of experience, is more than qualified to evaluate the quality of the code, spends time reviewing it, finds stupid nonsense and fixes it. You could either fix it manually or tell Claude to fix it, which results in a few more coding and review iterations until the code is good enough. If the human in the loop is a responsible person, I think it’s fair to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Is that too much to ask? Not every application is developed and maintained by a lazy idiot with the programming skills and attention span of a toddler. There are serious and skilled people out there who use LLMs responsibly.

Oh, but a USB condom really is a thing though. It just passes through power but no data, as those pins are missing.

Yeah, that post was getting way too long, so I made some cuts here and there. The issue was in the way SE2 detects hardware… or more like doesn’t detect my GPU at all, throws an error about it and refuses to start. Under Bazzite it starts the game first 🎉, then complains that my hardware might not be good enough to run this game 🤯, but the beautiful graphics say otherwise. It’s still in early access, so I guess this kind of strange behavior will be ironed out sooner or later.

I got tired of researching this issue in Debian, so once I got it up and running in Bazzite, I stopped reading about it. Honestly, I have no idea what’s the key difference here. Is it the driver version, Proton-GE or something else? Who knows.

Anyway, I would recommend trying Bazzite. It has some pre-configured tricks that seem to handle weird cases like this.

It was Space Engineers 2. Even made a post about the journey.

All the other games were just fine though. If you don’t stumble upon one of these edge cases, there’s no reason to switch.

That’s the same philosophy I’ve applied for a long time. Recently, I found out that gaming is an exception to the rule, though. While older versions are just fine for the most part, there are edge cases where that no longer applies. I also found out that I care about one of them. Until you hit that brick wall, there’s no reason to switch. Just keep on using Debian for everything.

Took me a while to realise that I was spending way too much time figuring out workarounds instead of actually gaming. I ended up using Bazzite in my gaming rig because it works so well for that purpose.

I’d rather put in the effort for an OS that knows what consent is and respects me as a user.

This is the primary reason why I prefer to use Linux. With most FOSS projects, it’s clear that the user is respected, and that’s the way it should be.

I’ve been running Fedora on one of my computers fore years. It’s pretty good and stable, but there are lots of updates. I haven’t really bothered to tweak or update that much, which seems to be a bad combination for Fedora. I think this distro requires more maintenance than I’m willing to give it.

For example, updates used to work for a while, until one day they just didn’t any more. I fixed that, and things were ok for a little while, until another update broke the GUI again. Eventually, I just got tired of troubleshooting a basic thing like the update GUI, and stopped fixing it every year. I just ignored the GUI, and installed updates through the terminal instead. I just can’t be bothered to fix the GUI more often than maybe once every 5 years.

Eventually, I realized I don’t have the time or energy to do that much admin work for a computer that doesn’t matter that much. Had it been my primary computer, that wouldn’t have been a problem, but in this case it was. Recently, I switched to Debian. Let’s see how well that system handles the level of neglect I’ll be subjecting it to.

Besides, that computer doesn’t even require the latest versions, so why bother with Fedora. Debian should be new enough for my needs, and installing updates like few times a year should be fine.

Congratulations! How’s KDE running on Wayland?

When I got my current laptop, I chose Gnome because Wayland support was decent at the time and virtually no other desktop supported it. Later, a few others began supporting Wayland but I haven’t tried them.

I used KDE long ago with X11 and I loved it. I think I should give it another go, so that’s why I’m wondering. Is Wayland support ready yet?

Professional use is a whole different story, and I left it out because the previous message was getting a bit too long. 😃

If your work relies on a specific piece of Windows software, Linux probably won’t be good enough. Even if you can technically use that application through Wine or Proton, the work environment usually requires every feature to work as intended. If there’s weird behaviour that interferes with your work, it’s pretty clear that you can’t tolerate that. This can easily happen when your work involves using a computer to control a machine or to pull data from it. You may also need your computer to talk to other systems that expect you to use a client running on top of Windows.

However, many people need apps that were designed to run on a browser. That’s when you really begin to have options. Even MS Word and Excel kind of sort of work through a browser as long as you don’t intend to do anything even remotely advanced with them. Many people just need basic office applications, and in that context, Linux has been a viable option for many years already. Even though the docx->odt conversion is far from perfect, it’s usually good enough.

Many people also require specific functionality, but don’t really care which application actually provides it as long as the job gets done well enough. If that’s the case, Linux can usually provide an alternative. Don’t know about professional video production, but hobby videos can definitely be edited on Kdenlive. Same logic applies to Gimp, Krita, and Inkscape.

The role of desktops has changed over the decades, because nowadays so many people use mobile devices instead. What we meant by the phrase “year of the Linux desktop” in 2010s was very different from what it means today.

At home, people use the desktop for gaming, while most computing activities can now be done on any mobile device. In the past, the desktop was the only computer in the house, and it was used for communication, browsing, photos, videos, and everything else.

I think we should start using a different term. How about something like “year of the Linux gaming PC”, because that would really tell you what’s happening right now. The rest of the things you can do on a Linux desktop aren’t really that important to most people anymore.

Personally, I still prefer a laptop over a tablet, and I think many people on Lemmy would agree. However, most people outside this bubble clearly don’t see that much value in an x86 desktop OS.

I can see they were aiming for shorter commands. Makes sense if you have to type them using a mobile phone.