Collections might have been inherited over generations. For some of them, the current owners may not have much interest in what they have and therefore not be aware of some rare copies.

In proper libraries, we probably have the author and title in a database somewhere but not the content. In private collections, all bets are off.

I would assume that almost any old library or private collection that includes old handwritten books has at least a couple of manuscripts that nobody has read in decades if not centuries.

Oh, thanks for the heads up, I didn’t notice.

After playing around for a bit, this really looks like the best option. I will wait until federation support gets added to the self-hosted version though.

Not sure about the best overall but one of my favorite karaoke memories is a metalhead friend of mine performing Weird Al - White & Nerdy.

Since my other post got a bit wordy and maybe not quite ELI5, let me simplify as much as I can, with the risk of leaving out details:

Say you have a red car but want a car that’s identical in every except that it’s black.

In a procedural programming language, you may just paint the car black. Or you may build an exact copy of the old car but in black. Or you may take half the parts from the red car and put them into a new black outer shell. Or anything in between. Any change to your old car, your driveway or anything else in the world is called a “side effect”. The programming language doesn’t prevent you from writing something that has side effects that you didn’t actually want. It’s the programmers responsibility to make sure.

In a functional programming language, you’re not allowed to change the red car at all. You have to create a new black car. In fact, you can’t have any side effects. That way, you can’t accidentally damage your old car but makes some wishes harder to express.

At some point, using actual five year old words just makes communication harder rather than easier. OP mentioned that they’re at least somewhat familiar with some programming languages so I assumed they’d figure it out from context. But fine, I’ll change it.

And another example that shows off pattern matching:

Procedural:

int minimumElement(int[] array)
{
    if(array.size() == 0)
    {
        return 0;
    }

    int minimum = array[1];
    for(int i = 1; i < array.size(); i++)
    {
        if(array[i] < minimum)
        {
            minimum = array[i];
        }
    }
    return minimum;
}

Functional (still, no specific language, just an example of what it might look like):

int min(int a, int b) => a < b ? a : b;
int minimumElement(int[] array) =>
    array match {
        [firstElement, ...rest] => min(firstElement, getMinimumElement(rest));
        [singleElement] =>singleElement;
        [] => 0;
    }

If you made it through that lengthy post and are still interested, let me add that many concepts from functional programming languages have made it into other languages over the years. Personally, I’m most familiar with C# which has functions that take other functions as parameters, lambda functions (functions without a name that you can just define directly where you use them as a parameter), simple list operations that take functions (filtering, sorting, transforming…) and to some extent pattern matching. From what I’ve heard, newer versions of Java have much of that as well and some of those features have even made it into C++ (from C++11 onwards) though in that case the syntax is a bit hard to read.

Let me try getting this to ELI5 levels:

Most programming languages use a way of programming called “procedural programming” (or a variation of that, for example object-oriented programming). A series of instructions gets executed step by step to modify the program’s overall state. Imagine it like a cooking recipe. You have control structures like if, while and for that influence the order in which instructions are executed. There are functions (or methods in object-oriented programming) that let you reuse some instructions over and over but that’s not quite functional programming.

I’ll use a syntax similar to Java, C++ or C# as an example:

void squareAllElements(int[] array)
{
    for(int i = 0; i < array.size(); i++)
    {
        array[i] = array[i] * array[i];
    }
}

Functional programming is a bit more like what you know from maths class. There are still functions that take a list of inputs and produce an output but there is no state to be modified. Every operation must take everything it needs (apart from maybe constants) as parameters and produces new values/objects as an output. You say you know Java, so imagine that none of your methods returns void and every variable can only be assigned once. There are no loops but for example operations that let you separate the first element of a list from the rest or create a new list by applying an operation to all elements of an input. To make that easier, functions can take other functions as parameters.

So let me show the same example in a functional style. This is no specific language, just an example to help you imagine how it works.

int square(int x) => x * x;
int[] squareElements(int[] array) => applyToAllElements(array, square);

Functional programming has its own advantages and disadvantages. It can avoid a lot of bugs because functions can’t have unwanted side effects. They just take inputs, return outputs and leave the rest of the world (including their inputs) unmodified. On the other hand, that makes other use cases where you actually want to have some state that changes over time more difficult.

Hope that helps.

Edit: some cleanup and more precise explanations.

Edit: replaced “paradigm” with “way of programming” to make @[email protected] happy.

That doesn’t sound like a federated wiki but more like federated account management.

Very interesting history and culture, plastered over with bland authoritarian turbo-capitalism that disguises itself as communism.

Doesn’t seem to be in the latest open source release or at least I can’t find how to enable it.

Edit: according to https://activitypub.ghost.org/social-web-beta/, it’s indeed only in pro for now.

As a daily driver through most of university. Sadly the hardware got way too expensive for what it did, at least for a while. These days it might be better again but I won’t buy an MBP to replace a laptop that’s only a year old.

Cool. Can you help me solve mine so I don’t have them either?

Thanks for the long reply, lots of stuff to unpack here that I might have to come back to later. Might be helpful.

So for now, let me focus on your question about my photography workflow. I mostly do event photography (discos, concerts, conventions) but also occasionally studio and travel stuff.

When I come home from a shoot, I copy my photos to a network drive on my home server (running Ubuntu) which automatically gets backed up to an off-site NAS. As a first step, I use Bridge to label which photos I want to edit for myself, which for a potential client, which not at all. Nothing special, just running through all RAWs and marking them with star or color labels. For the editing step itself, I start out with Camera Raw. First an overall pass with lens correction, cropping/straightening, brightness adjustments (exposure, contrast, blacks/darks/lights/whites), white balance, dehaze, curves, whatever the photo needs. Then, depending on the subjact, a more in depth pass with spot removal and masked adjustments. Automatic subject masking has been a great time saver. If I need to go even more in depth (usually only for photos that go to an exhibition), I start editing in photoshop. As a last step, I use Photoshop Image processor to bulk export JPGs in the needed size and quality, optionally with a watermark.

(for those familiar with Adobe’s tools, you might be wondering why I don’t use Lightroom instead. In the past I’ve had problems with accessing the same library from different machines. This could probably be fixed but my current setup works fine so I never bothered)

For long term library management, I run immich on my home server which lets me tag and filter my photos as much as I want.

As for the Blender thing, I think I phrased that weirdly. It was not related to a specific problem or my photo editing process. It was just an example for a piece of software that started out with horrible developer-user UI and got a lot better when they completely redid the UI in 2.8.

Regarding Photoshop in Wine: unfortunately, missing GPU support is probably a no-go when dealing with 6000x4000 pixel, 14 bits per channel raw photos.

Also a tiny bit amusing that within 24 hours, it was rated it both “Garbage: It launches, that about it.” and “Silver: it pretty much works well with a few caveats.”

One of my first experiences with linux was gentoo back in ~2006 so patience is not an issue. Documentation that requires you to already know what you need to do is a problem though and the exact reason why I haven’t touched proper Arch so far.

The right choice doesn’t help me if I can’t get my literal job done and have to give up half of my hobbies.