April 21st, 2023:
- Here’s a fascinating take on Substack, which I’ve been watching for a while and read frequently when I identify someone there worth reading. Independent (i.e., non-partisan) news journalists have been gathering there, and it could become a new source of (mostly; entirely is impossible) unbiased news reporting.
- Stability AI, the firm behind the Stable Diffusion image generator, is burning through lots of cash and struggling to find a tenable business model. I may try using it to make book covers; I hope it survives.
- This is an excellent article about Intel’s monumental failure with their iAPX-432 CPU (introduced in 1981) which was so slow and expensive nobody built machines around it, leading to its cancellation in 1986. Intel’s engineers learned a lot from its failure. (This is a good example of a Substack post, BTW.)
- Ok, this is weird: Some guys cultured woolly mammoth meat in a lab and made a mammoth (though not woolly) meatball with mammoth DNA and elephant DNA. They won’t eat it because they don’t know how our immune systems might respond to mammoth DNA. Duhh.
- Raspberry Pi competitors are popping up all over the place. Here’s the Orange Pi 5, which has 8 ARM Cortex-A76 cores and up to 32 GB RAM—with a Mali G510 GPU thrown in for good measure. The 16GB board costs $138USD. It comes with a Linux distro specific to the Orange Pi, and can run other ARM-based Linux distros.
- I just finished and am polishing my first piece of short fiction since 2008. It’s called “Volare” and clocks in at 10,600 words. That’s too short for a paperback, and I’m still considering how and when to publish it. I’ve got a little more polishing to do still, and may take the op[portunity to use an AI image generator to make a cover. We’ll see. I’ll post details on Contra when I get a few things straightened out.
- Methane’s behavior as a greenhouse gas isn’t near as simple as the alarmists make it out to be. Read the whole thing; it’s too complex to summarize here.
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