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Kept in the dark again, HIPAA blamed
I called the nursing home where I and my father had visited my aunt a year ago, to ask if she was still there and how she was doing. They would tell me nothing. Claimed that HIPAA forbade that. But HIPAA says no such thing. They are wrong. I called back and tried to inform them that by HIPAA rules, it was okay to answer. They were rude. Tried to hog the floor, and when I would not go along with that, talked over me, then hung up. I called again.
They changed their story, said the privacy requirement was actually in the contract with their residents. Proudly claimed that they take their privacy seriously. I began to wonder if they were covering up something. I called the police and asked them to do a welfare check. The police did so, and told me my aunt was still there and seemed to be okay.
Are Men Ready To Start Wearing Leggings?
Are Men Ready To Start Wearing Leggings?
You ain't ready yet.
realDonaldTrump's Gift to Ethanol-Fueled
Trump administration prepares to release Central American migrants 'across the entire nation'
The Trump administration is preparing to send Central American migrants caught along the southern border to Border Patrol stations "across the entire nation," according to a senior Border Patrol official who confirmed the plans Friday.
With more than 4,500 people being caught each day crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, the agency has run out of room at its Border Patrol facilities in the four border states. The agency has started looking at its facilities around the country, which are mostly along the northern border with Canada and coastal states.
That means states from Oregon to North Dakota to Maine may begin receiving planeloads of migrant families in the weeks to come. On Tuesday, Customs and Border Protection sent its first plane full of migrants from Texas to San Diego.
clickbӓt
Taiwan's Legislature Approves Same-Sex Marriage Law
Samsung Samples 32 Gb DRAM Chips
Samsung Samples 32 Gb DDR4 Memory Chips
JEDEC’s DDR4 specification only describes 4 Gb, 8Gb, and 16 Gb memory devices. As a result, DRAM makers have to use advanced packaging techniques to build chips for high-capacity memory modules for servers or workstations. DDPs are not something particularly new, but 32 Gb DDR4-2666 DDPs are unique to Samsung.
[...] Samsung does not disclose pricing of its 32 Gb DDR4-2666 DDPs, but it is obvious that they will be sold at a premium given the fact that they are only available from Samsung and they are harder to build than SDPs.
The expensive way to double capacity.
By comparison: Samsung Shows Off 256 GB Server Memory Modules Using 16 Gb Chips
Makeup YouTuber #Cancelled
The canceling of James Charles: Beauty YouTuber loses 3 million subscribers in a weekend
One video led to YouTube’s biggest makeup vlogger losing millions of subscribers
That's apparently the largest/fastest loss of subscribers in YouTube history.
Funny memes aside, if you look into the circumstances more closely, James Charles got called out for promoting a company's gummy vitamin formulated for sleep (melatonin and other junk) instead of his friend Tati Westbrook's vitamin product. But Tati Westbrook doesn't sell any sleep vitamin products (they are intended for hair/nails and skin). So the whole feud is built on a misunderstanding or deliberate misrepresentation. As for catfishing/trying to turn guys gay, Tati Westbrook kept those allegations under wraps and only decided to bring them up after complaining about a stupid product promotion (or more accurately, her own stupid product not being promoted by her "friend").
That isn't to say that James Charles isn't necessarily a scumbag and scam artist selling overpriced junk and $500 fan meetup tickets. But the recent cancelling of YouTuber "ProJared" (NSFW) is much more clear cut.
The Media’s Sudden Disinterest in the Denver STEM School
When the shooting at the Highlands Ranch, CO, Stem school happened, the world reacted in shock and horror that yet another student used a firearm to hurt or kill other students in a place that is supposed to be one of the safest places for your child to be.
News agencies across the country immediately took action, and activist groups began planning events to promote gun control. One such event occurred at the very location the shooting occurred. Students were duped into attending, believing it was a vigil of some kind, but walked away when they found out that the atrocity they endured was being politicized.
Frustrated, crying and angry, #STEMschool shooting victims hold an impromptu vigil in the rain Wednesday after leaving a gun-control vigil they felt inappropriately politicized their trauma. (They asked that I not photograph their faces close up, and I respected their wishes.) pic.twitter.com/cksRXGtYQA
— Trevor Hughes (@TrevorHughes) May 9, 2019
Facebook posts from concerned people dotted the social media site and Twitter was ablaze with anti-gun rhetoric once again.
And then it all suddenly went silent.
Now, the media seems far less interested in the shooting. An odd turnaround for the media who take every opportunity to hammer home the idea that guns are the problem in this nation, not something else. Why? It’s because the identity of the shooters was released, and it doesn’t fall in line with any of the approved columns for a media-based attack.
They found that one of the shooters is gay and another is transgendered and biologically female, as NBC reported in the update about her. Even NBC buried these facts in their own report about it, choosing instead to call the gay shooter a “bully” instead of highlighting their identities and backgrounds first:
The suspected shooter, Devon Erickson, “would whisper, like get really close and kinda put his arm around you, and whisper in your ear, ‘don’t come to school tomorrow,'” said Kevin Cole, a former student of STEM School Highlands Ranch, during an interview on “Today.”
Erickson, 18, and a juvenile, who police identify as a girl but who prefers male pronouns, are accused of entering the K-12 school with handguns Tuesday. NBC News is not identifying the juvenile suspect.
One of the shooters also expressed his hatred for Christians according to Heavy, which is also unfitting for reports as Christians are always the bad guys in the story.
“You know what I hate? All these Christians who hate gays, yet in the bible, it says in Deuteronomy 17:12-13, if someone doesn’t do what their priest tells them to do, they are supposed to die. It has plenty of crazy stuff like that, but all they get out of it is ‘ewwwwww gays,’” wrote Erickson in a Facebook post.
There was even anti-Christian messaging spraypainted on the shooter’s car before the attack, and the words “F*** SOCIETY.”
Car towed from #stemshooting suspect's home apparently has "F*** SOCIETY" spray painted on the side. Also "666" and a what looks like a pentagram sprayed on the hood. pic.twitter.com/e6QX3lq4v3
— John Fenton (@higuysimjohn) May 8, 2019
Worst of all, the shooter appeared to be a Democrat who posted memes and messages from the hard-left Facebook group “Occupy Democrats.”
None of this falls in line with what the shooter is supposed to be according to what the media likes to tell us. For mainstream press, the shooter is supposed to be white, male, straight, extremely right-leaning, and bonus points if he’s supposedly Christian. However, both of these shooters fall into their most protected groups.
Judging by how the media coverage and subsequent fallout from school shootings have gone in the past, the media seems absolutely silent in comparison now, but it’s easy to see why. All of its usual strawmen have been stripped away and its left with nothing but the cold reality that there was something mentally wrong with the two shooters.
All the shooters throughout history, when put together, are a diverse lot. They range from white to Middle-Eastern, to black. They’re left, right, white-supremacists and anti-Christian, gay and straight, women and men. While some killers tend to share more similarities with other killers, the point is clear: It’s not just what your background is.
There was clearly something wrong in the heads of the people who engage in these murders. However, the media doesn’t seem to be interested in investigating the demonstrable fact. They’ve now, for the most part, walked away from the Denver Stem school story. The students don’t seem to be as into making a political spectacle as some of the Parkland students were, and the shooters don’t fit the narrative.
The media loves bloodshed, but not bloodshed it can’t use. It doesn’t care about how safe you are, and I’d venture to say that it waits with bated breath for the next opportunity. I wish I was being hyperbolic, but the media has clearly demonstrated that I’m not.
AMD Milan Rumor: ~80 Cores, Combined With GPUs + HBM
Milan - The Next Frontier? (22m28s)
Notes from SemiAccurate's CC with Susquehanna this morning
Various sources said things like "Milan will have 80 cores" or "Milan will have 15 chiplets".
The speculation, based on sources and other reasoning, is that the the 8-core chiplet will continue to be used going forward. They have great yields compared to bigger monolithic chips and AMD can simply make them smaller in size rather than boost core count of each to 10-12 cores. Zen 2 Epyc uses eight 8-core chiplets for up to 64 total cores, and a future version could use ten chiplets to get to 80 cores.
AMD and Cray will make a 1.5 exaflops supercomputer.
In fact while AMD has kept the details on the technology light, it sounds like this version of [Infinity Fabric] will be the most advanced version yet. AMD is specifically noting that it’s an “incredibly” coherent fabric, calling it the first fully optimized CPU + GPU design for supercomputing. AMD’s GPUs and CPUs will be arranged in a 4-to-1 ratio, with 4 GPUs for each EPYC CPU. It’s worth noting that AMD’s slide shows a mesh with every GPU connected to the CPU and two other GPUs, but I’m not reading too much into this quite yet, as AMD hasn’t disclosed any other details on the IF setup.
Design and Analysis of an APU for Exascale Computing
AMD may try to do something like create a server/HPC APU that consists of ten 8-core CPU chiplets, four GPU chiplets(?), and the I/O chiplet, with DRAM/HBM stacked on top of the I/O die which emits less heat.
If the GPU thing is a red herring but Milan does have 14 CPU chiplets + 1 I/O chiplet, that's a whopping 112 cores. Even if clock speeds regressed a bit, it could offer more multithreaded performance per dollar than predecessors.
Top-level comment bug: even worse
Right now, I'm surfing the Soylent waters using this procedure:
- Go to my user preferences / comments page
- Assign an automod of -6 to foes
- Assign an automod of -6 to anonymous posters
- Save my user preferences
- Set the viewing threshold to 0 and [✓] Save and then click change in a story's comments
- Assign trolls as a "foe" by clicking the little face by one of their posts
- Repeat #6 as needed
So what the above should do is bury comments (stop them from being expanded in a comment listing) posted by the trolls I have placed in my foes list, and also all anonymous posters, which also should keep the trolls who use anonymous posts to get past the foes list automod (and those who are simply trolling anonymously) buried as well.
The annoying downside of this approach is that anonymous posts from non-foes also get buried, because the Soylent code doesn't know who the anonymous poster is, so it cannot determine if the anonymous poster is on my foes list.
That lack of knowledge could be addressed for logged-in users, as the Soylent code does know who it is when logged-in users [✓] Post Anonymously, but short of requiring log-in to post, that isn't possible.
Having actually tried the above -6,-6 setup now, I have found the general burying of anonymous posts to be less painful than accidentally reading the various troll garbage (I read very fast, gulping down whole paragraphs at a glance... so to even glance at a post is to peruse a good chunk of it, no matter how troll-ish and/or awful it is.)
Further, I know that anonymous posters could just as securely create a unique pseudonym and post as logged-in users with no loss of anonymity, other than that people would know both post A and post B are both from the same author (a total win, frankly.) Considering this, I see no decent excuse for posting without logging in anyway, and so feel quite justified in brushing off those who can't be arsed to log in.
I could live with the above -6,-6 setup, except... it doesn't actually work.
The Top-Level Comment Bug
Soylent's "Apply automod" feature does not obey its settings when a comment is at the outer, or "top" level of a story's comments. Not if the commenter is anon; and not if they're in my foes list. Top-level comments appear no matter what the automod is set to. Ouch. Garbage out, ...garbage in.
But it's even worse than that. If you click on a comment link (for instance, one that has replies on your user page, or on the replies notification page), then first-level replies in the resulting comment subset also don't obey the automod(s.) It doesn't matter if the comments aren't actually top-level in the entire comment stream; if they're first-order comments to the comment one is now looking at, then the bug manifests again.
I humbly submit that this should receive dev attention ASAP; the whole point of automods is made moot by these behaviors.
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I'd agree with you, but then
we would both be wrong.
Obvious Sockpuppets
They're not all that bright, either; the classic tell is consecutive or near-consecutive UIDs, as is the case with John Miller (UID 6613) and "real" Donald Trump (UID 6614). Less well-known, but all the more obvious, are NPC-$BIGNUM (UUID 7144) and NPC-$BIGNUM+1 (UID 7147).
I don't think these are the same person--that is, I don't think rDT/John Miller and the two NPCs are all the same person--but it's fairly obvious each of them has the corresponding pair of socks. And rDT/JM also apparently are "highly correlated with a bunch" of ACs, most of which have been judiciously Spam modded out of existence from the sound of it.
So...what's the point? At the very least, this is using the SN posting system in bad faith. The NPC twins appear to be trying to play a satirical good cop/bad cop game (and failing rather badly...), rDT and JM are poor satire (though they've been improving a bit lately) and who knows WTF the AC socks are really on about. This is needlessly deceptive, if you ask me: if your opinions cannot stand up to the test of collision with reality on a one to one basis with other accounts, extra sockpuppet accounts are not going to change that.
The NPC twins in particular are very obviously here for the sole purpose of stirring shit and causing chaos. Admins: what, if anything, is going to be done about this? You're showing yourselves to be rather weak-willed and careless in the face of sinister forces....
