Gene Wolfe. Somehow resolves or explains every seemingly random occurrence throughout the story, even if the first person narrator is extremely unreliable and doesn’t make the connection
And he is literally an inverted Stephenson; it can be a slog getting through the middles of his books, where Stephenson really shines. It took me a half-dozen tries to make it through The Book of the New Sun.
I remember some books from his "Latro in the mist" series, where the last pages have at least as much action as the rest of the book. Very strange pacing, but it is memorable and it works.
“Book of the New Sun”, beginning with Shadow of the Torturer, is his major work but can be unapproachable at first. The narrator/protagonist is a terrific character, but a IMO difficult one to spend time with.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus is also a great entry point. It’s a set of three interconnected novellas that, for my part at least, were more immediately engaging than BotNS. It’s got all the Wolfe-isms you want: unreliable narrators, unconventional settings, and puzzle-box stories that slowly open themselves.
Despite what the parent comment said I'd still recommend Shadow of The Torturer, the first book in the Book of The New Sun series. If you like the idea of being immersed in a world that you don't fully understand, but gives you the impression that there is a richness of lore behind every minor detail, then you'll enjoy it.
I grew up there in near rain forest area (just slightly short of the technical rainfall requirement). There aren't really any poisonous snakes on the island, just one type that has mildly irritating saliva (I caught and got bit by lots of these as a kid, barely noticed). Depending on which micro-biome you are in, there can be lots of mosquitoes, or not many at all. Where I grew up, there were very few probably because of all the predators (and most of the water was moving not standing). Caught a few tarantulas growing up, never got bit. There were some pretty giant centipedes where I lived but I rarely saw them, never got bit. A few bee stings, but nothing too bad- but wasps... hate those f**ers.
what struck me about Hawaii on my last visits though is the juxtaposition against Puerto Rico (the lost opportunities). Very similar in a lot of ways- but hasn't nearly leveraged the richness of its culture (history, music, cuisine, etc.) as much as Hawaii has.
I also like to point out in a few similar contexts: even if you could measure all the things, and you could create a perfect/optimal cost function, there would still be no guarantee that you'd be able to find the optimal global solution. So relax.
I am a researcher in academia that handles most of my system admin needs myself. It’s way cheaper to do yourself than some of these comments here make it sound (if you have good server rack space available). I ordered two 60 drive JBODs that I racked by myself (I removed all the drives first to lighten them) for ~82k. I used Zfs and 10 drive raidz2 vdevs for a total capacity of ~960TB of useable file system space. Installing the servers and testing some setups and putting it into use took about 4-5 days. In four years I’ve put many PBs of reAfs and writes through these and had to replace 3 drives. I’d estimate I spend about 2% of my active work focus on maintaining and troubleshooting it. Scaling up to 10PB I’d probably switch to a supported SDS solution, which would be much more expensive, but still way way cheaper than cloud.
It's a bit on a non-sequitur, but I am also looking at using MinIO as a S3 interface to a ZFS filesystem. Would be interested to hear from others about this use case for MinIO and possible alternatives.
