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University tuition fees to increase in England for first time in eight years
  • Are they going to put up the maintenance loan up as well? Or at least moved the threshold for when ti starts cutting off to account for fiscal drag?

    I get that the student loan book is wildly out of control, but it just becomes ladder pulling if you don't address funding for those at or near the bottom of the ladder.

    The proper way to address the student loan books' massive gap between what will be paid and what won't be paid back is to significantly reduce student places. It's hugely unpopular, but this debt time bomb can't just be left to fester while they tinker round the edges.

  • Kemi Badenoch announced as new leader of Conservative Party
  • It's the fact that she weaponises it, often using herself as an example of why something isn't needed, such as DEI or maternity pay, ignoring that she ended up in an incredibly privileged position even before becoming a MP.

    Couple that with her bloodthirsty desire for revenge on anybody or anything that annoys her, such as her statement that a quarter of civil servants belong in jail means if she did ever get in we would have ideocial purges worthy of any of the most nutty dictators.

    I absolutely do not buy her defense that it was just a jolly jape, that's the defense of the far right when they fail to land enough support for whatever hateful shit they just spouted.

  • Drop your most "wtf that's not how the world works" from movies/tv shows.
  • A more mundane one, but people on reasonably normal incomes living in a house that's at least one order of magnitude more expensive than they could ever afford even if they purchased it twenty or thirty years ago. Its particularly bad in things set in expensive areas like London or New York or Tokyo. Like being able to afford a house in central London rather than renting a flat with three other people takes substantial money, you aren't going to be afford that if you work in a supermarket.

  • Coffee upgrade advice
  • Unless you are buying your beans from somewhere like Starbucks they should not be that oily that the grinder needs its burrs cleaning. If you are buying Starbucks (or similar) beans then the single biggest upgrade you can do is to start buying quality beans from a specialty roaster. Its not as hard as it was a few years ago to get dark roast from a proper specialty roaster when the fad was for almost under roasted beans, thankfully that trend is drawing to a close.

    Dark roast only I would only consider conical personally. The best flat burrs for dark roast just emulate the output you getting by default from most conical burrs, so why not just get the ones made for the job in the first place?

    I am not sure what your budget is but something like a Helor Flux would be similar pricing to the DF83 and the Flux comes with immense 73mm Mazzer burrs that are hard to beat for dark roast. Only downside is that its a hand grinder, and take about 45 seconds to grind an espresso sized set of beans. I hand grind both espresso and pour over when I am not at home and its manageable if you are not doing too many shots back to back.

    Otherwise the bigger conicals with a motor tend to be a lot more than the DF83. I would really stay away from the Niche Zero (and its bigger brother), they are overpriced and just not good value in today's market. I used to own a Zero and its frankly disappointing for its price point, I sold mine and made nearly enough money to buy my (secondhand) DF83 with the upgraded burrs.

    Something like a Femobook A68 would be around the same price as the DF83 and is motorized. I have not personally tried it, but it has decent reviews. I quite fancy getting one as another grinder (I have a Timemore 078 as well for pour over) for home for when I want dark roast as my setup is very much tailored to light/medium-light.

  • Coffee upgrade advice
  • So what grinder you choose should be shaped by what brewing method and then what roast level you mostly brew with. For you thats espresso and what, medium to dark roast?

    I have a DF83, one of the early ones, but with the SSP High Uniformity burrs that are an expensive but worth while upgrade for light to medium light roast beans. I would not recommend these burrs if you prefer a darker roast, as those flat burrs I have are the exact opposite.

    The DF83 produces great results but the early DF83s do need constant care over retention as they can get blocked if you don't. The DF83V solves a lot of the problem with my one, while still enabling a large number of suitable replacement burrs.

    I would consider a similar price point conical burr grinder if you prefer mouth feel/more soupier coffee and plan on sticking with darker roasts.

  • What desktop enviroment do you use and why?
  • I have gnome installed and setup as a backup, plus I use its greeter, but I am another who does not really want a full DE and instead using Sway as my WM day to day.

    I have two 32"@4k monitors so normal manual floating window management just annoys me, I greatly prefer tiling window management to auto sort my windows for me. Its extremely rare that I need to full screen anything on monitors this large to fit everything I want in width wise so I want multiple apps per monitor.

    If all of this is managed dynamically for me, and I am not manually sizing or overlapping stuff, all the better. Couple that with easy use of multiple workspaces for different tasks (I typically use three per monitor), rarely do I have a need to manually resize anything. I have it setup to open my common apps on the right workspace for me, and each workspace set to the right layout for that set of apps, so much less faffing.

    My (40%) keyboard(s) run QMK and are setup to enable most of my common combos, such as switching workspace, moving apps around are never more than two keys. The more I can do without moving my hands from the keyboard, the better for me.

    Final thing is that Sway is wayland and for me extremely stable.

  • The Amazon Echo graveyard
  • I just use my Google Home Max for timers, it'll display three timers at once on the screen and I can get the status of any or all with voice at any point. Plus it'll do all the usual assistant stuff of conversions, cooking temperatures, and has a big enough screen for me to read recipes or follow along with a recipe video. Bonus feature is that its a reasonable loud speaker as well so I do not need a separate radio in the kitchen.

    Sure its not as pretty as the clock but its a whole lot more useful for cooking.

  • Why we need different rules - or why Max' penalties are still ridiculous
  • I think there is a third factor here with why others do not do it so often, and when they do, do it, they often look clumsier by default and thus more likely to get a penalty. Max is a massive trail braker, riding the brake well into the corner to adjust rotation. This trail braking allows him to fine tune just how far and fast hes going into the apex for a corner, and then his setup is for progressive power under steer, which further allows him to adjust position on the exit while not having to decrease the steering angle from full lock

    I haven't disagreed with the stewards wording, so I did not comment on their ruling, just what happened as a basis to expand on why we need different rules and the area that's currently being exploited as what we have is clearly going to result in a nasty accident some time soon.

    Every time they change the rules, such as moving under braking, Max immediately stops doing that. I think that's pretty telling use of the dark arts as an intentional grey area. If Max wants to complain about additional rule complexity then he needs to stop living in that grey area, he cannot have it both ways.

  • Why we need different rules - or why Max' penalties are still ridiculous
  • I think that while the opening move is similar, parts of that are very different.

    Firstly Lewis is never as far along side, this makes it clearer in terms of the rules as written today who is at fault, Max managed to get along side/slightly ahead depending where you measure it for that second incident with Lando.

    Secondly Lando cooperates with Max and keeps his distance as he is pushed off avoiding a nasty crash. Max does not do this with Lewis and instead turns in, while Lewis does not turn in as much as possible but equally he does not deliberately under steer to the point hes half off the circuit to drive Max off the circuit.

    Dive bomb attacks require the other guy to cooperate not make the situation worse and I think this is were the drivers discussion needs to be focused. Are we going to allow dive bombs as valid and then sort it out with swapping back if it goes wrong? Or are we going to ban them because there are more than a few circuits with nowhere near safe run off to escape to without ruining your race?

  • Why we need different rules - or why Max' penalties are still ridiculous
  • I would be very surprised if Max hadn't work shopped the rules with RB to understand exactly what he could and couldn't do. I do not think hes alone in that, any good Sporting Director like Wheatley should be pushing to do this to avoid race losing penalties by setting boundaries for their drivers. Where I do think he differs is that hes the only one whose repeatedly gone for this grey area and that this grey boundary has been work shopped as an actual stratergy.

    As we have seen when it was close with Lewis in 21 Max will do anything to keep his title rival behind him once he is ahead in the championship. This constant living in the grey area during title battles leads to a feeling of unfairness and I believe it is this desire to make things fair is why we see things like Sundays penalties as a desire to even things up. Fairness has nothing to do with actual racing rules, but here we are and now we need much more complicated rules defining and enforcing that will likely have loop holes like the last revision and the one before that.

    I think its impossible to watch the alternate angles (https://youtu.be/zb7okJILTfQ?si=MPi6lTItfErIRJv0) or look at the telemetry to understand that first Lando used Maxs own spells against him, but also that Horner was also massively pissed that Lando pulled a Max to the point he made himself look foolish not realizing Landos top speed was higher due to DRS on the first time. Its also worth nothing that Lando was very much within control of the car on T4, stopping to the almost zero they did to actually get around the corner at the same time. This is the complete opposite for T8 where Max is very not not in control and uses the throttle to induce understeer pushing them both off the track.

    Stolen from Planetf1:

  • Jeremy Hunt calls on government not to release OBR review into his spending plans
  • He got caught by his own trap of lowering NI twice to create this black hole for labour to sort. Once he set that trap, as amateur hour as it is, he was committed to this path.

    He's the sort of person who gets both his legs stuck in the same trouser leg.

  • What is your favorite inconsequential fan theory?
  • So Blade Runner, Alien, and Predator franchises are linked, but I also a believer that the Terminator franchise is linked into the same, shared universe. Obviously Terminator has many different endings depending at which film you look due to timey wimey shenanigans, but if you pick one of the ones that the war is averted (I pick T2 as the sequels are not my favorite), it kinda makes sense. In this universe Dutch is the special forces ace that is picked (probably unknowingly) to be the model for the T800.

  • Sway 1.10 Released
  • I've been using it for a while now, its been robust and extensible. I think its only real downside is that its too extensible as out of the the box not much comes as standard that you might expect if you coming from something like gnome, such as a control panel, auto tiling, a lock screen, or screen capture (although this release seems to fix setting that up now). This should be expected as its a WM not a DE.

  • www.theguardian.com Scientists claim to have discovered secret to perfect espresso

    Researchers say dash of water added to beans before they are ground creates more consistent, tastier coffee

    Scientists claim to have discovered secret to perfect espresso

    Spoiler, its RDT

    In case people do nto know what RDT is, which they really should if they have been into coffee for a little while as it makes a big difference:

    RDT is Ross Droplet Technique, which is very much adding water to beans. Named after David Ross who came up with it back in 2005

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    New (to me) Grinder Monday

    The postman delivered a new to me DF83 Gen 1 with SSP HU burrs. Just had fun dialing it in over lunch for espresso. It is a huge step up from the Niche Zero it replaces for espresso.

    16
    Wug2 83a Grinder

    Very interesting grinder for those that like to experiment with different burrs as it supports both conical and flat burrs. I think only the niche zero with a 3rd party kit did that so far?

    Can't say it would replace multiple grinders with just one for me as it still takes too long to switch over but I could definitely see myself switching burrs when I change over bags once or twice a month.

    7
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)TA
    tankplanker @lemmy.world
    Posts 3
    Comments 493