Mastodawn

✧✦Catherine✦✧3d ago

i'm considering asking people to recommend me bad books

it's easy to get people to recommend you good books! however, good books make me feel things, often quite intensely. i think usually this is appreciated however i am living what is considered an "interesting life" already and i really don't need a book to put me on the edge in addition to all of the things that normally put me on the edge, like "stalkers" or "immigration" or "wondering if someone i know got shot", etc. similarly i have thought enough about the nature of identity that i'm quite done with it for a while.

most recently i have read Blindsight, which was a good book, but it made me conclude that if i have to choose between another good book and 10 hours straight of youtube shorts, the latter will passively benefit my life by not taking up more of it than i can spare

please recommend me your favorite bad book

✧✦Catherine✦✧

back when i was a child my bedtime reading was "Advanced Win32 Programming" by Jeffrey Richter and maybe i should do that again but make it the basics of DSP or something. this would probably benefit my mental health

@whitequark may i suggest https://raytracing.github.io/ and/or https://pbr-book.org/ ? (though only the latter has printed copies available i think)

Ray Tracing in One Weekend Series

✧✦Catherine✦✧3d ago

@unnick oh i can't really read paper books (something about the way paper feels on my fingertips is just viscerally upsetting)

Ken Butler 3d ago

@whitequark this appears to be some new meaning of "benefit" that I am totally unaware of.

✧✦Catherine✦✧3d ago

@nxskok I've actually considered using PASIAS as bedtime reading with similar reasoning, but concluded I'll need to engage more than that with the subject material to get what I want out of it

Ken Butler 3d ago

@whitequark haha!

(I should be careful what I put on grebedoc.dev!)

Ken Butler 3d ago

@whitequark this also means I need to write that textbook for my courses (that I've been meaning to write) so that you can get the background.

@whitequark have you read Ignition! yet (it's hard to get legitimately but I have an epub I can send you)

@whitequark a book about rocket fuel chemists in the 1960s being idiots

@whitequark also the last time I was in a mood like that I read the entire International Building Codes, so that's an option

✧✦Catherine✦✧3d ago

@bob years ago yeah

Emelia/Emi 3d ago

@whitequark That reminds me that I signed up for a DSP elective in college that got unexpectedly cancelled when they couldn't replace the prof before the semester started. (No idea why the prof disappeared)

Now I want to do some DSP learning to learn more of the fundamentals. About the only one I know is FFT, and that's just a surface-level understanding of what it does, not any of the math involved.

multioculate 3d ago

@whitequark may I suggest the PostScript Language Reference Manual? It's not a half bad read, actually.

@whitequark "basics of DSP" makes me think of https://dspguide.com/ ... i don't know if its a "bad book" or "good book" because i did not finish it but parts of it have been moderately useful for me

The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing

✧✦Catherine✦✧3d ago

@wermi literally that book

Richard Hendricks 2d ago

@whitequark @wermi Frankly this is the only *good* DSP book.

@whitequark check the documentation for the #PiZero?

Michael Ossmann 3d ago

@whitequark Bad books: The Dresden Files series follows a modern-day wizard/detective through various adventures. I found it good enough to be fun to read but bad enough that I wasn’t terribly invested.

Good DSP book: Practical Signal Processing by Mark Owen is my favorite introductory DSP book. It takes a conceptual approach and, I think, would make better bedtime reading than most texts on the subject.

Billy O'Neal 3d ago

@whitequark I guess that explains why when I was on a v-team with Jeffrey Richter why everyone was confused that I didn't know by reputation 😅

✧✦Catherine✦✧3d ago

@malwareminigun his writing was absolutely formative to me, it's what prepared me for OS development, kernel internals and such

Daniel Estévez 2d ago

@whitequark for the basics of SDR, pysdr.org might be a fun read. The last bad book I read in the sense you use it here was Kafka's Metamorphosis. I was left with the impression that it's much ado about nothing and I couldn't care less about what happens in the plot.