Lion ponderings

  26.5 mile walnut crusher at night continued to be abysmally slow.  Headlights went on at mile 4.25.  Battery change was at 15.7 miles to try to get more reserve for the headlights.  Battery 1 burned 267mAh/mile.  Battery 2 burned 330mAh/mile.   It was a flatter & shorter course than the previous walnut crusher.  Started in the high 70's & finished in the high 60's.  The turnaround was 71.  Noted better results by taking cliff bloks before every water after mile 13. Took 4 cliff bloks & 6x 18oz water bottles.  The lion kingdom seems to have a glucose problem & the problem arguably began at mile 11 with the 1st hints of cramping.  It would be worth taking glucose readings during a run & adding glucose to the protein drink. There definitely  continues to be a need for electrolytes as demonstrated by the dependence on weather.  Managed to avoid bowel movements by eating rice crispy treats for dinner, shor...

   Last molar recently escalated in sensitivity.  No obvious change from 2 years ago, but a crack might have widened.  There's no doubt it's the last molar.  It's the most sensitive this area has ever been.  Lions can't chew on that side anymore & had to stop eating bread. Dentist just ground a side of the chip flat & said she'll be right.  That was a lot of pain.  Can't imagine what male breadwinners with 5 crowns go through. Toothgate has definitely reduced appetite.  Intermittent fasting seems to have lost favor in recent years.  Lions ate 3 meals/day until grad school, then 2 until 2001, then 3 again when they were waking up early, then back to 2 shortly after 2001.  It's been manely 2 ever since the early 2000's. More awake time before lunch has required eating a 3rd meal.  Less awake time has resulted in a bigger dinner.  There's a case for always eating 3 & a smaller dinner.  Lions weighed less when...

Got encouraged enough from speech demos to try bringing up some more models.   Notes for installing f5-tts:  https://github.com/SWivid/F5-TTS The python environment was created based on the README: python3 -m venv f5tts source f5tts/bin/activate pip install torch==2.4.0+cu124 torchaudio==2.4.0+cu124 --extra-index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu124 pip install f5-tts That took 7GB. Helas, it requires CUDA 12.4.  CUDA 12.4 now requires apt to install itself & that has always been broken on the lion kingdom's 7 year old ubunt.   It has no hope of running on the old C library + kernal anyway.  The lion kingdom needs a way to dual boot without disrupting the day job.  CUDA won't drop the GTX 1050 until version 14.  The laptop's Ubunt 18 is no longer supported & its apt installation has slowly broken over time, but apt worked just enough to install the C library dependencies.  It seems if it doesn't have a matching CUDA version,...

 2 big things needing capital are camera tracking using UWB & an upgraded GPU for a generative AI workflow.  Helas, lions are still on the fence about bringing up more AI models.  It gets all the clicks now, but it's still nothing lions would download & watch in Cinelerra.  Previous work with limited money has yielded a bag of non deterministic junk.  Camera tracking systems have just been miserable compared to cheaper solutions.  Speech synthesis might be the only cost effective value add. The lion kingdom's attempt to follow basic Linux news more yielded this nugget.  Kind of sums up Linux's bloat era. Anything it used to do in 1.44MB it now needs 5 gigabytes to do.  To be sure, it's a lot less desirable than it was 30 years ago.  Lions were originally attracted to UNIX because of minimal overhead, portable compilation on higher end hardware, & not following the pack.  It's not that way anymore, but there really isn't any ...

     https://x.com/i/status/1936083228693352694   1 is AI.  The other is 3D modeling 7 years ago.  The AI version still has minor flaws like text, water level, non functional items.   Video compression is bad enough to hide the crimes.  Some other limitations now are the monthly plans having severe limitations in length, resolution, & number of clips. A year ago, this was priceless.  Now, it has no value.  Any cat pose can be created on demand by anyone. Helas, most of us are still locked out of AI content creation because it's very expensive.  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pondered some material to feed AI speech.  Helas, elevenlabs has a 20,000 character/month limit on the free plan.  This little diddy has 2074 characters, which would be limited to only 9 revisions.  It takes a lot of revisions to discover how text & the ...

 The lion kingdom finally watched its month old download of Poseidon Adventure 1972.  IMDB called the 2006 remake a turd & approved of the 1972 version, but the 1972 version was also a turd in lion minds.  The incompetent, hopeless, sandbagging refugee movies are just unbearable.  Over time, the internet has come to like them a lot more than 40 years ago, lions would say.  Maybe the population has just become more like the hopeless refugees over time. To old lion, the purpose of the movie was Gene Hackman's atonement, but it was never clear what he atoned for.  The merry band of survivors was so incompetent, it was kind of like he had to die in order for the rest of them to finally get it together.  They spent a lot of footage showing how the survivors just couldn't get it together in the final moments. Was there any other way for them to get out without the atonement?  They might have been able to fashion a tool to crank the door open or defl...

                    Lions were intrigued by China's latest concrete creation, the Huajiang gorge bridge.   2000ft above the river below, 500ft longer than the golden gate bridge, but only the center section is supported by cables.      These images were stretched vertically, but what struck lions is how the paths leading to the bridge pushed the limit of what can be done with pier supported structures.    The road deck was stick welded.  The thing about rural chinese roads is they're all empty, built far beyond the needed capacity, & they have no sidewalks while the city roads are snarled in traffic.   Such megastructures will never be built in US.  There's not enough money, they would never allow the landscape to be scarred by such wide, straight roads, & they could never get the land rights.  China can kick out the residents & level the land.  If rural roads i...