Tootfinder

"Thus the CMB temperature fluctuations look like Chladni patterns resulting from a complicated three-dimensional drumhead that vibrated for 380 000 years."
- Jean-Pierre Luminet, physicist
https://arxiv.org/abs/0704.3374

The Complicated Ethics of Rare-Book Collecting - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/05/rare-book-private-collection-ethics/678254/

RIP to John Barth, who was my favorite author when I was a kid (in a tight race with Joseph Heller). I loved “Giles Goat-Boy” and “The Sotweed Factor” — I read both multiple times in high school — and “Chimera,” which came out when I was in college. He was a really fun and inventive writer who left us a tall pile of good reading.
https://…

NPR :press: (@NPR@press.coop)
John Barth, innovative postmodernist novelist, dies at 93 John Barth, the playfully erudite author whose darkly comic and complicated novels revolved around the art of literature and launched countless debates over the art of fiction, died Tuesday. #press https://www.npr.org/2024/04/03/1242508803/john-barth-novelist-author-obituary?utm_medium=JSONFeed&utm_campaign=news&utm_source=press.coop

Companies buy #NVIDIA GPUs like candy to train bullshit #ai models, even though a current Intel or AMD CPU would often easily suffice. But why keep it simple when you can make it complicated and expensive?

I feel this strongly, as a dilettante #FOSS coder.
Modern mature software can be inherently complicated. PostgreSQL is a deep RDBMS that has been under development since the 80s. Writing new code for that is hard, especially in C. The only FOSS projects I‘m in at all active in are all Perl (i.e. ‘dilletante’) but they are also big and arcane. E.g. there are parts of

@…
Certainly, PulseAudio did work out-of-the-box. Then:
– putting a box to sleep was unreasonably complicated.
Failure to sleep was infuriating; I never enjoyed pressing and holding the power button to force an ungraceful stop of the computer.
A widely accepted workaround involved disabling PulseAudio.
No longer! 🥳
Joy! 692c…

Calibre is ugly af and needlessly complicated.
But, oh boy, if it is a powerful, magnificent, helpful piece of software.
(yep, this is my periodic Calibre praise post I do every time it saves me a ton of time)

"Thus the CMB temperature fluctuations look like Chladni patterns resulting from a complicated three-dimensional drumhead that vibrated for 380 000 years."
- Jean-Pierre Luminet, physicist
https://arxiv.org/abs/0704.3374

I feel this strongly, as a dilettante #FOSS coder.
Modern mature software can be inherently complicated. PostgreSQL is a deep RDBMS that has been under development since the 80s. Writing new code for that is hard, especially in C. The only FOSS projects I‘m in at all active in are all Perl (i.e. ‘dilletante’) but they are also big and arcane. E.g. there are parts of