Odd Lots
- 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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Jeff, your comment on AI image generator and new short story makes me wonder if we will soon see an AI that will enhance a short story, cutting out slow sections, detecting factual contradictions, character inconsistencies, or hundred of other things it could do.
Possible. Not likely. The nuances of character development will probably always be beyond a language model’s reach. It took me decades to master characterization, and I’m still looking for insights that might make my grasp of characterization better. I actually began “Volare” in 1985, and set it aside because I could not figure out how to portray the growing affection between its two main characters. It sat in a box for almost 40 years until I decided to pull it out, take a close look, and see where I could go with it. I’m sure it won’t be something I’ll ever be famous for, but I enjoyed finishing it off and bringing the first part from 1985 up to date. Like I said, I’ll have more to say about it here before or soon after I publish it on Kindle.
Interesting methane article – especially the part about how the complex interactions are not included in current climate models. I always wonder how well those models have been checked out vs historical data.
Climate models are mostly a joke. Their great failing AFAIC is their inability to model the effects of clouds. Not being able to model methane interactions won’t help, but without clouds, you basically don’t have a climate model at all.
I tried one of the lesser Orange Pi boards late last year, to replace a failed (and unobtainium Raspberry Pi 3 that was running a Pi Hole.
The first problem was the Orange Pi takes a weird-Harold power supply connector; I had to order one off eBay. The second was that its custom ARMbian Linux installed, but a lot of it didn’t work out of the box; lots of the desktop was nonfunctional. The third was that it’s really, really slow; slow enough that I wondered if it had locked up a few times, when it was just thinking about redrawing the screen.
I finally got the Pi Hole installed and running, which was complicated by the fourth, and most annoying problem: the Orange Pi has one USB port, and it didn’t recognize any of the half-dozen different USB hubs I plugged in to it. So, plug in the mouse, move the cursor, unplug and mouse and plug in the keyboard, repeat until demented.
It would be simpler to set up VNC, except I never could get VNC to work on it.
There’s not much online support in English; their primary stuff is all in Chinese, with a couple of guys translating Chinese bits for the English side. Most of the English stuff is that and a lot of people asking questions that are seldom answered.
Again, this was one of the low-end Orange Pis. It looks like the high end models are much better supported. But they’re a lot more expensive, too.
I joined an ARMbian forum. It’s moderately useful; oriented to single-board computers running ARM processors. Even though the Linux kernel supports ARM, the non-kernel bits aren’t as portable.
The T95 TV boxes are dirt cheap, a bit higher specification than a 3B+, and work just fine… other than the two I have both having weird USB problems and not recognizing hubs either. The Inovato distribution of ARMbian works flawlessly otherwise. I need to buy a T95 direct from Inovato; it’s possible the ones I picked up from Amazon have slightly different USB hardware.