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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I am also encouraged to use AI at work and also hate it. I agree with your points. I just had to learn to live with it. I’ve realized that I’m not going to make it go away. All I can do is recognize its limited strengths and significant weaknesses and only use it for limited tasks where it shines. I still avoid using it as much as possible. I also think “improved productivity” is a myth but fortunately that’s not a metric I have to worry about.

    My rules for myself, in case they help:

    • Use it as a tool only for appropriate tasks.
    • Learn its strengths and use it for those things and nothing else. You have to keep thinking and exploring and researching for yourself. Don’t let it “think” for you. It’s easy to let it make you a lazy thinker.
    • Quality check everything it gives you. It will often get things flat wrong and you will have to spend time correcting it.
    • Take lots of deep breaths.

    [Edit: punctuation]


  • I didn’t read the article so act accordingly, but here’s my personal experience.

    If I remember correctly, fine filters are a relatively new feature in dishwashers. In the 1970s a standard dishwasher (at least in the US) had a “macerator,” which was a water pump with a grinding function that tore food into tiny particles that could be flushed down the drain. This probably required a much more powerful pump motor than you get in a modern machine and a specially designed, heavier impeller than you’ll find in most consumer dishwashers today. Large items were blocked from entering the impeller by a coarse screen that was large enough to admit softer food bits but small enough to block things like flatware. As I recall, there was rarely a need to clean anything. The macerator cleaned itself.

    The new designs are probably cheaper to manufacture (better for the manufacturer’s bottom line) and use less energy (better for you), but do add the requirement to clean the fine filter. I don’t recall ever having an old dishwasher break, but it was the 70s and a lot of that stuff was much more solidly built than today’s plastic planned-obsolescence appliances.

    Hopefully this helps.


  • I wish I could use it but I can’t. The folks developing UT are awesome but they are a very small group of unpaid volunteers and this stuff is painfully difficult to do.

    One of the biggest problems is the lack of VoLTE support for making actual phone calls on most phones. Last I looked (which was admittedly more than a month ago) only a few models supported it, and it is the only supported mobile voice protocol in several countries. You can work around this with a SIP (Voice over IP) account and some geekery but it’s not ideal.

    Another issue is very limited software. There just aren’t that many developers creating software for the platform.

    I ended up on /e/.



  • I’ve done online education both as a student and as an instructor of adults. The truth is that it doesn’t come close to matching an in-person classroom experience.

    As an instructor it is really hard for me to create engaging lessons even in person. I get a lot of blank stares and zoning out. That may be partly on me but I think it’s because a lot of students are just there because they’re required to be there. They aren’t interested in what I am teaching even if I’m excited about it. At least in the classroom I can give them gentle nudges to engage and there is some live interaction to encourage them.

    If I have to teach the course online it is likely to be very hands-off. The general format is read some content, watch some videos, do some homework and maybe a quiz, and engage in some forced online interaction. At the place where I was learning, that interaction was one response to a prompt, posted on a student forum, and two responses to other students’ posts. Those posts had a mandatory minimum word count requirement to meet the grading requirement. There is sometimes interaction with the instructor on the forum if they are very motivated and aren’t too busy, but most instructors are adjuncts and probably have other work they are doing. Some are, like students, not motivated and are just there to do the minimum to get paid. Also, group projects are difficult to manage. There are no in-class labs, and in some situations an online simulation does not come even close to a hands-on learning experience.

    We have done live online classes where I teach but we have very small class sizes and it tends to work better since we can encourage interaction with each student. This isn’t possible with larger classes and again, there is no social incentive if students are all sitting alone staring at their phones/tablets/laptops.

    So from my experience online education tends to be isolating for students and not at all motivating. It is also a surprising amount of work for the instructors and does not tend to add value to the course.



  • That’s good to know and I’m happy you’ve had success moving users. Keep up the good work.

    I think converting users to Linux tends to face three major issues:

    • A historical reputation for being hard to configure and use, even though that is generally no longer the case with mainstream distros.

    • Fear of the command line.

    • Decision paralysis due to the sheer number of options available for things like distro and desktop environment, and the fact that there are as many opinions as there are users. I’m an obvious example of this.

    Technical people like me tend, I think, to appreciate the flexibility. Normals just want something that works immediately and without any fuss.




  • Ubuntu Linux is the most popular distribution but it uses the Gnome desktop by default, which many Windows users may find to be a stumbling block since it looks and acts nothing like the Windows desktop. The standard distribution of Linux Mint uses the Cinnamon desktop, which is much closer in look and feel to Windows, and it is based on Ubuntu so most users can benefit from the technical support of the Ubuntu community.

    [Edit: corrected “Linux” to “Ubuntu Linux.” thanks grue@lemmy.world.]



  • I’m something of foodie and I agree with this. Also use less sauce, spread the sauce thinner, or find a sauce that has less water in it. It’s the unevaporated liquid in the sauce that insulates the dough on top and keeps that surface from baking properly, making it mushy. Par-baking the crust starts that baking process before you put the ingredients on and helps to avoid this.

    Lots of thickly cut toppings with liquid in them such as tomatoes or improperly dried fresh mozzarella can also prevent the crust from baking properly so par-bake and then add the ingredients before finishing the baking to help with this. Good pizza takes work but you’re on your way to it.



  • I think it’s important to understand that if the whole Internet just shut off in an instant, life as we know it would cease to exist. I’m not talking about a cultural change. I mean millions of people starving and freezing to death because literally everything you take for granted today is ordered, scheduled, and delivered using the Internet. That means no food deliveries, no fuel deliveries, no imports or exports, no trains, trucks, or planes moving, no payments or money transfers. Nothing. Oh, and all the emergency services that you’re going to need will be unable to respond because no phones and no communication from dispatch centers. We don’t know how to do business without the Internet anymore, so if it goes away, there goes your way of life. Building that back to the “old way” will take way longer than you or your neighbors are likely survive competing for essentially nonexistent resources.

    But for those who manage to survive, I would say party like it’s 1899!