Tootfinder

Almost word for word how I have felt for at least the last decade. GC abandoned the high-end after the financial crisis in 2008, which is what really allowed companies like Reverb & CME to flourish.
In 2024 the only justification for brick and mortar is an experience that can't be had anywhere else.
“If you walk through a Guitar Center, you see an awful lot of $300 guitars. If I’m a serious musician, it doesn’t feel like the right place for me anymore”: GC’s new CEO
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“If you walk through a Guitar Center, you see an awful lot of $300 guitars. If I’m a serious musician, it doesn’t feel like the right place for me anymore”: Guitar Center’s new CEO explains why the firm’s future must prioritize premium guitars
Gabe Dalporto insists the firm needs to “evolve and execute better” in order to survive, and that it has forgotten who its core customer really is

My current laptop, a T470 (32G SSD, 4core i7) I love, but its almost 8 yrs old (?) and it runs VMs kinda badly. Everything else about it is great, so Im looking at replacement (referb) Thinkpads from 2021/2022. Any suggestions on things to look out for since I really can't say WHY vm's run kinda slow? I assume its CPU related, or thats what top tells me. I have a x230 that is awesomely portable, but even worse with VMs.Fedora SwayWM on both.

Geiger von Müller
"Blue Moon Frequency #5"
#acoustic

Substrate Scope Contrastive Learning: Repurposing Human Bias to Learn Atomic Representations
Wenhao Gao, Priyanka Raghavan, Ron Shprints, Connor W. Coley
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16882

Substrate Scope Contrastive Learning: Repurposing Human Bias to Learn Atomic Representations
Learning molecular representation is a critical step in molecular machine learning that significantly influences modeling success, particularly in data-scarce situations. The concept of broadly pre-training neural networks has advanced fields such as computer vision, natural language processing, and protein engineering. However, similar approaches for small organic molecules have not achieved comparable success. In this work, we introduce a novel pre-training strategy, substrate scope contrasti…