SoylentNews

Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggests Donald Trump plans to doom his own reelection chances

Even if he loses, he wins!

Bezos Post paywall is more aggressive than ever, so I switched to this article.

Media Advisory: Press Conference on First Result from the Event Horizon Telescope

ESO will be Announcing the First Black Hole Picture on April 10

Event Horizon Telescope

NVIDIA Project R.O.N Leaked – Google Home Like AI + Hologram Device

Nvidia employee takes a train, nosy nerd lands a scoop.

What will Nvidia call its Alexa?

AMD Navi 20 GPU Allegedly Supports Ray Tracing and Enhanced GCN Graphics Architecture – May End Up Being Much Faster Than RTX 2080 Ti

(for ray tracing, and a GPU that will be released long after the RTX 2000-series came out)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 Series Receives Price Drop By Major UK Based Retailer – Custom RTX 2060 Down To £299, RTX 2070 For £419 and RTX 2080 for £599

Valve’s long-rumored VR headset is finally real: the Valve Index, coming in May

Valve just surprise revealed its own VR headset called the Valve Index

Epic Showcases Gorgeous Ray Tracing Unreal Engine 4 Demo Running on a Single RTX 2080Ti GPU

During yesterday’s ‘State of Unreal’ keynote at the Game Developers Conference 2019, Epic Games showcased a gorgeous ray tracing demo titled ‘Troll’. Running on a single GeForce RTX 2080Ti graphics card and made with the Unreal Engine 4.22, Troll was developed with no custom plugins or code by Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films.

‘Troll’ was visually inspired by the works of Swedish painter and illustrator John Bauer, who is famous for his illustrations of Swedish folklore and fairy tales anthology ‘Among Gnomes and Trolls’. Epic’s 3Lateral took care of 3D and 4D facial scanning.

“Troll’ from Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films | GDC 2019 | Unreal Engine (1m33s)

As I've often noted, it's sad that few people have a decent grasp of history.

Given that what has come before is both a strong indicator and a significant influence on what is now and what's to come, it seems odd that many folks choose to remain ignorant of the past.

History is vast. So much has gone before. And if the Doomsday Argument is considered valid, quite a bit is still to come.

As such, it seems to me that those with a reasonable interest in the future should also have a reasonable interest in history as well.

If one accepts that, the question becomes: "Where do I start?"

Given that SoylentNews is an English language site, most users likely live in cultures evolving from The Western Tradition. That seems like a good place to start.

The series entitled The Western Tradition^* is a personal (as Eugen Weber points out, history is inherently a personal journey) journey through the history of Western civilization.

The video series above consists of 52 half-hour episodes. That seems like a lot, but consider that the series covers many thousands of years.

As such, the series must go through all this very fast. But, as Dr. Weber points out, here in America, we do everything fast. For example, here's the history of man in four minutes or so.

Regardless, I invite you to check this out and share it with others, especially children, as it provides a good look at how we got to where we are now (and, if cogitated upon, can provide us with some clues as to where we might be going).

Do any of you have suggestions to supplement the above? Including the works of Gibbon, Spengler and Spheeris.

Also, what (if anything) has history meant to you? Has it impacted your thoughts and actions in the present and/or your ruminations about the future?

Let's discuss.

^*Updated playlist that's actually in order/complete. Thanks to Hendrikboom for calling me out on my laziness with the initial link.

AMD Ryzen 3000 CPUs Get Early BIOS Support in X370 & X470 Motherboards, Next-Gen Zen 2 Based Family Internally Codenamed as Valhalla

Also, the creator of the Ryzen DRAM calculator has listed down some new features that might be coming in the Ryzen 3000 processors with one confirming that the Ryzen 3000 series processors would indeed ship with CCD (Compute Core Design, a new name for CCX), support a maximum of 32 threads which confirms 16 core parts, following is the full list of features which were found:

1) New memory controller with partial error correction for nonECC memory
2) Desktop processor with two (2 CCD) chiplets on board, 32 threads maximum
3) New MBIST (Memory built-in self-test)
4) Core watchdog – is a fail/safe function used to reset a system in case the microprocessor gets lost due to address or data errors
5) XFR – at the moment I do not see anything special about it, the algorithm and limits have been updated. Scalar Controll come back with new processors.
6) Updated core control has a symmetric configuration of the active cores . In 2CCD configurations, each chiplet has its own RAM channel in order to minimize latency to memory access. 1 channel on 8 cores will be a bottleneck if you use the system in the default state.

Have you heard of any feature like this? Does it even matter?

If you are buying 8 GB or 16+ GB DRAM modules, do they need to be ECC?

I want to consider the two separate incidents in Christchurch, and consider how gun control might have influenced those events.

In the first mosque, those people were just screwed. No one was armed, no one seemed to have any warning. Dude came on like gangbusters, firing in through the door, advancing, and shooting at anything that moved. The people inside had very, VERY little opportunity to respond in any meaningful way - they were pretty much herded into two different killing zones, and they were trapped there. There may have been the slightest opportunity for an armed person to respond meaningfully, if only someone had a weapon. Sometimes, that's how things go - no matter how prepared you think you are, you can be caught by surprise.

In that second mosque? Apparently, there were no armed persons there either. But, there was one ballsy man who stepped up, and said "NO!" Or, to steal back the phrase appropriated by Tarrant, "I will NOT go gentle into that good night!"

Abdul Aziz faced off with the gunman as he advanced towards the mosque, yelling at him to "Come here!" and leading him outside.

EDIT: one of many sources for the quote - https://www.businessinsider.com/abdul-aziz-christchurch-new-zealand-mosque-shooting-2019-3

Abdul had no weapon. There isn't even any mention that he had a knife, however large or small. No firearms. He grabbed the first thing at hand - a stupid CREDIT CARD MACHINE, and advanced on the gun man. The thing was no better than a rock, but apparently there were no rocks at hand. With this near worthless poor excuse for a hefty rock, Abdul advanced, calling for the gunman to "COME HERE!"

You've all heard variations on the phrase, "Fortune favors the bold." In this case, Fortune did indeed favor the bold.

Somehow, in the confusion, the shooter ran out of ammo, apparently dropped the empty weapon, and ran back to his car to get another weapon. Although the details aren't clear, it seems that maybe Abdul threw his sorry excuse for a weapon at the shooter, who ducked into his car. Abdul then picked up the EMPTY weapon that had been dropped, and smashed the (already damaged) windshield, trying to get at the shooter.

About the time that the window was smashed out, the shooter lost his nerve, and drove away, cursing and screaming - and crazy-ass Abdul chased the car down the street!

Fortuna audentes juvat, or, fortune favors the bold

That fact has been observed since even before there was a Rome.

I think that puts paid to the several ideas proposed by hoplophobes that there is nothing a single person can do in these situations. Or, that an individual fighting back only endangers the people around him. All the excuses offered for ensuring that no one CAN fight back. True, the assailant has the initiative, but there is nothing to say that he is calm, cool, collected, and STABLE. If you watch the video of the killings at the first mosque, there are signs that he is falling apart, and losing his nerve. Here, at the second mosque, there is no - I hesitate to use the word "rational" - but there is no rational reason for him to run from an unarmed man. But, the shooter has lost it, in the face of one determined man who maybe has more balls than brains. He tucks his tail, and runs away!

But, we knew this people. Many of us have learned this fact from combat veterans, from police officers, and from anecdotes in real life emergencies. Many of us have seen this in our own lives. And, in fact, there have been some studies on the issue.

What good can an armed teacher do in a shool shooting situation? I invite you to peruse one study: https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/01/foghorn/ttag-simulated-school-shooting-experiment-results-and-analysis/

Some teachers are pretty ineffective, others are more effective, and others are extremely effective in neutralizing an assailant.

Conclusion

This experiment was a preliminary test, providing a proving ground for the methodology and scenarios selected for testing before being implemented in a large scale test at a later date.

Based on the limited data collected from this experiment it appears that an armed teacher would save lives in an active shooter scenario. The caveat: the teacher’s effectiveness depends on their level of training. Maximum effectiveness of an armed teacher of any skill level is achieved with advanced warning of the approaching shooter and implementation of a classroom “lockdown.”

If you prefer the full report, rather than the story linked above, PDF here: https://86262a2d5a8678610839-0d14e49ee6aa00b4013e3b6293913ee7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/SchoolShootingSimFINALREPORT.pdf

Executive Summary
At the King 33 facility in Connecticut, 11 volunteers along with 5 staff members enacted a series
of simulated shooting scenarios with the intent of determining whether an armed teacher or
armed guard at a school such as Sandy Hook Elementary would have been able to successfully
confront and interdict an active shooter.
When designing the scenarios for this experiment, care was taken to identify moments during
the progression of a “typical” active shooter case where armed intervention would have been
effective in interdicting the shooter. Three such moments were identified, specifically the
moment the shooter entered the school building, the moment they entered a classroom, and
the moment an armed response arrived on scene. One of these scenarios (when the shooter
entered the classroom) was enacted both without any advanced warning that the shooter was
coming, and with sufficient time for the teacher to enact a standard “lockdown” procedure as
implemented at Sandy Hook Elementary.
For scenarios where no advanced notice was given, unarmed participants were instructed to
leave and re-enter the area being defended at random in order to simulate normal traffic and
keep the defender from being able to react to an event such as the door opening instead of the
first sight of a gun or the sound of a gunshot, as would be the case during a real shooting.

Do you want to be safe, people? Put an end to gun control. Allow individuals to protect themselves, their loved ones, their friends and associates, as well as random strangers in the vicinity. Put gun safety courses in the junior high schools, and encourage kids to learn how to handle weapons. Put advanced courses in the high schools, and form gun clubs in those schools. Familiarize everyone with weapons, and end the fear of weapons.

An inanimate object cannot decide to kill you. A PERSON has to make that decision. A PERSON with the tools for the job can protect you from the nut case.

In this case, a PERSON, even without any tools for the job at hand, managed to protect a building full of people. Imagine, if he had a real weapon at hand. Imagine if someone at the first mosque had a weapon at hand. At the sound of the first gunshots, he might have armed himself, and put an end to the massacre.

Ask yourself a question: If you should ever be caught in a kill-or-be-killed situation, would you rather be armed, or unarmed? Yeah, you know the cops will respond to the situation - sometime. Would you rather be the survivor who drops his weapon, and surrenders to the police, or would you rather be the sheep, bleeding out on the ground?

The weapon is NOT what you should fear. Fear the bastard holding the weapon!

Tarrant feared Abdul, even though he had no weapon!

EDIT: link to the video, supplied by an anonymous coward, earlier today. via bittorrent, magnet:?xt=urn:btih:52b278c6769eb2edb9773ff6fe0923598ff42fea&dn=Christchurch-Mosque-Shooting-New-Zealand-FULL-VIDEO.mp4&tr=udp://tracker.leechers-paradise.org:6969&tr=udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80&tr=udp://open.demonii.com:1337&tr=udp://tracker.coppersurfer.tk:6969&tr=udp://exodus.desync.com:6969

There is a word, "accelerationist," to describe the mindset of people like yesterday's Christchurch terrorist. You see, he didn't do this just for its own sake; he's trying for nothing less than to provoke the collapse of civilization via race war and internal strife, presumably to rebuild it as some sort of whites-only paradise. He in effect believes that he has to destroy it to save it (and that worked out SO well everywhere else that idea was tried...). I believe his scope is global, and he's trying to encourage copycat attacks worldwide with this.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't be too worried about one single psychopath trying to start a race war, and even saw him explicitly compared to Charles Manson and his "Helter-Skelter" plan in the main forum thread. Ordinarily, I'd agree and let it go as another sad but inevitable tragedy. Ordinarily, though, we wouldn't have an Anglosphere that's spent at least the last 20 years soaking in hatred and the last 2 and a half gleefully parading around its worst tendencies and members with all but official sanction from the leader of the supposed Free World.

"Accelerant" is also something that worsens and fuels fires, and there's a good reason for that. What we have now is the social equivalent of a pine barrens forest with decades of leaf litter, just waiting for that one spark. I did my junior year research on precisely this phenomenon, back in college. When the litter builds up, the entire forest goes up in flames at the slightest provocation. So I would say another term for people like this is "socilogical arsonist."

Unfortunately, I also believe his kind has won the day. I felt the US go over the edge about 12-18 months ago; civil war is at this point a matter of when, not if, and unlike the last one, today we have powerful enemies who are just waiting for the right time to swoop in and rip the country apart to loot it for their own ends. Which, to be fair, is probably what the country deserves at the national level, but will suck massively for individuals, most of whom are innocent. You know, just like when the US did it to other countries. Regardless, unless something incredibly huge and positive happens, I believe we're long past the point of no return.

Now, as to the other two terms in the title: you may be familiar with Roko's Basilisk already. I am referring to something more general than that: my definition of basilisk in this sense is "a pernicious meme or memeplex that does permanent damage to the mind in, at the very least, ways related to itself, specifically regarding removing itself or blunting its influence." Like the stare of the mythological basilisk, it slips in through the eyeholes and flays the mind from the inside out. You can think of them as a kind of memetic advanced persistent thread-type malware.

Basilisks have several things in common. They are "sticky" in memetic terms (that is, they leave a lasting impression). They are self-sealing, meaning they reinforce themselves, often recursively and through a variety of mechanisms, including hijacking other memes. Sometimes they work in pairs or larger groups, reinforcing one another. While they need not be readily infectious, they often are. And, like the stare of the real thing, they are often fatal if left untreated.

One key component of a good basilisk is that it takes advantage of the human tendency to be lazy thinkers. That is, once within its gravitational field, people will prefer to stay in it rather than change what at that point has become a large and important part of their thinking. Thus a good basilisk has an ad-hoc answer to pretty much every objection that might be raised to it as a sort of anti-malware-evasion routine.

Calvinism is an excellent example: it centers on the idea of TULIP, this being "total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, persistence of saints/saved." Basically, this undercuts critical thinking by making it an issue completely out of one's control; one is either saved or not, through God's action and not one's own, no one can do anything to become elect or reprobate, and (here's the stinger): "if you're really saved, you wouldn't be doubting in the first place, now would you?" The "stickiness" is of course the threat of eternal torture, which is probably the single "stickiest" meme it is by definition possible to create. So what we have here is a persistent, all-encompassing black hole of a memeplex.

Much white supremacist thought, or supremacist thought in general, works the same way. The hook, the "stickiness," is something along the lines of "your life sucks unfairly, and it's not only not your fault, it's the fault of $ETHNIC_GROUP." That is *very* powerful to anyone who's suffered unfairly. Plant this one, and entire categories of critical thought get cut off at the roots, not least because when people are suffering and tired and angry and traumatized, they very literally do not have the energy to do more than the laziest thinking.

Finally, the exploitation of these patterns is what I am referring to as "dark psychohistory," which is a direct nod to Asimov. People who understand this can have effects completely out of proportion to the amount of direct force they are capable of bringing to bear. "Stochastic terrorism" is another way of talking about this, and it's something Trump is doing: while we're going to get bootlicking psychopathic apologists like Hallow pointing out that Trump himself never directly incites people to violence, he says things that make it likely-to-certain that among a large enough group of people with a certain mindset, *one or more of them* will do something violent.

If hiring a hitman is one degree of separation, stochastic terrorism is two or three. We can't, in this case, draw a direct line as we could from the hitman and the person hiring him. But it's fairly obvious that things like "I'll pay their legal bills" are just a degree or two of separation further removed; we have a name for this, which is "incitement to violence."

And that is one tool in the accelerationist toolbox. Our friend in Christchurch sees himself as a sort of revolutionary vanguard trooper; he is hoping that the very fact that he was able to pull this off, combined with the force multiplier of global news broadcasts, will be enough to spark off more attacks of a similar kind, which themselves will generate more, and so forth. It's rather like a runaway nuclear fission reaction in that sense.

So what do we do about this? Unfortunately, little to nothing: i have concluded that most humans simply are not capable of the type of introspection and critical thought necessary to ward this sort of memetic plague off, many of them because they are suffering too much and too concerned with simple survival to have the energy to invest in that sort of mental hygiene. I do, sadly, believe that civil war is not only inevitable but not so very far away. My one solace is that these "accelerationists" are going to get exactly what's coming to them, here and hereafter; the world they create will be one in which the living envy the dead.

If you all wonder why I keep saying death holds no fear for me, this is why.

Pence hosts openly gay Irish prime minister and his partner for breakfast

Vice President Pence hosted the openly gay prime minister of Ireland and his partner for breakfast at the Naval Observatory Thursday.

Leo Varadkar, who is in the U.S. for an annual meeting with U.S. officials ahead of St. Patrick's Day, shared photos of the event on Twitter.

[...] Although Pence has hosted Varadkar before, this is the first time the vice president has hosted the partner of an openly gay world leader.

gay men > lone woman

Join Us for a Tom's Hardware AMA with Intel Optane

1. What even is it?
2. Why does it suck?
3. Can I have some for free?