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Kanye West wants $1 billion from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg

He’s “this generation’s Disney” and technology leaders like Mark Zuckerberg would be doing the world a favor by investing a cool $1 billion in his musical ambitions.

That was the gist of an early Monday tweetstorm by rapper Kanye West, hours after he raised questions about his personal finances with this tweet that hinted he has $53 million worth of debt:

I write this to you my brothers while still 53 million dollars in personal debt... Please pray we overcome... This is my true heart...
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 14, 2016

In a fresh crop of posts, West made direct pleas to Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook Inc., and Larry Page, Alphabet Inc.’s CEO and the co-founder of Google, asking that they funnel some cash into his ideas:

Mark Zuckerberg invest 1 billion dollars into Kanye West ideas
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 14, 2016

Mark Zuckerberg I know it’s your bday but can you please call me by 2mrw…
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 15, 2016

World, please tweet, FaceTime, Facebook, instagram, whatever you gotta do to get Mark to support me…
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 15, 2016

Mark, I am publicly asking you for help…
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 15, 2016

hey Larry Page I’m down for your help too …
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 15, 2016

West insinuated that Silicon Valley was full of hypocrites — executives who want to look cool listening to rap, yet never did anything to further growth in the music industry:

All you dudes in San Fran play rap music in your homes but never help the real artists…
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 15, 2016

The rapper made a thinly veiled reference to Zuckerberg’s education philanthropy — he is part of an investment group that aims to bring cheap, private education to millions of children across Africa and Asia. Frankly, said West, the money could be better spent helping him with his creative efforts, as he claimed to be the “Jordan and Steph Curry of music, meaning I’m the best of 2 generations”

There is an abundance of media and content available online, and in meatspace. This website contributes, and everyone on this site is a part of that. There are 15 stories this site will publish today, none I have touched. We will likely see several hundred comments and dozens of discussions. Many comments will be insightful or interesting, others will be funny, some will be less well received. There will be a small handful of journals like this one.

I try to contribute positively to this site. Perhaps not as much as I could or should, but I would rather do it well and have a constructive experience. When editing stories, I genuinely try to keep a wide scope of interests considered and choose quality submissions. These may not be the most commented on, but my intention is to publish content that is informative or interesting regardless of my own perspective on the subject.

However, most of the content I see and consume is certainly more of the entertainment variety. This is very different from the attitude I have on this site.

I would love to create content that is entertaining, having been in various bands and musical projects for many years in my teens and early 20's. I don't have any concern really over the number of people that would or have seen and enjoyed the music or other content. Some of my favorite musicians have extremely small audiences and short 'careers', it's about the art and expression, creating something from the imagination. It's still sad to see quality music being ignored regardless.

This is the problem. I'd much rather make serious content, to borrow a phrase 'stuff that matters'. People can and do make art and entertaining content far better than I could.

The state of journalism in the entire world is a shambles. There are so many events that need reviewing, context is always missing, contradictory reports are ignored. Every outlet with any reach with full-time 'journalists' are under the control of commercial interests and/or an incoherent bureaucratic mess of government oversight, perhaps wrapped in the guise of independence from government. There are people, by themselves and working with others to improve the situation. The work of people like Tom Secker[1] and Pearse Redmond[2] are quite outstanding examples of independent research and journalism on very important events. The community here seems to be trying. We don't have a big community though, much like Tom and Pearse, the shared perspectives rarely travel beyond a small community.

Options are available to even make a living from writing, I could do it tomorrow. But, I would be writing press releases and other commercial content generation for 'mainstream' consumption. It's not impossible to get work reporting on and for the public sector or political institutions. I can interpret the data, word things however you want to misrepresent it, or direct emphasis to the irrelevant, but that doesn't mean it's a worthwhile or constructive way to spend time and other resources.

Thankfully i've found myself in the situation where my employment is quite flexible, it's very hard work often, but I am not beholden to an employer. I have my morals and ethics and do business a certain way, which is honesty, there is no game. Working for multinationals and smaller companies who are staffed by people with no moral compass, intentionally or by process, i've been there. It's something I can't tolerate or be involved in anymore. A cog in the machine is not the place for me.

There are so many people now, more than ever creating art and writing for a living or as a major part of their lives. Perhaps now just the human experience. I don't feel like I really need to be a part of it, i'd like to spend my energy on the more tangible. It could be amazing, doing something i'm passionate about on a more spiritual sense, being able to focus on the creativity or reporting on current events.

In an ideal world, i'd love to do it all. Entertain, inform and build, be productive. Now though, I don't feel like i'm doing any of that.

The opportunities are numerous, but the downsides are immense. None of the opportunities, which would keep food on my plate, are actually positively contributing to society. Forgetting the aforementioned issues with 'writing' for a living. I can build more houses through subcontracting based on debt [public/private/foreign], for people to buy with more debt, to make sure house prices keep going up so the average home in London costs £1,000,000 by 2020 but the average wage stays around the £25,000 mark. Or it's build a broker/service company, with long winded service contracts and subcontractor agreements to extract as much money as possible from clients and contractors with as minimal obligation, none of it direct, all wrapped up in a nice advertising campaign of bullshit.

It's not about government regulation, it's about systemic corruption of government and the quarterly report obsessed private sector distorting any sense of fair trade and any semblance of actual investigative journalism or reporting. The regulations on smaller businesses don't actually matter as much. The access to discretionary enforcement of the regulations, minimal/zero risk access to multi-million funding, government grants and tailored projects for the 'big' everything. That's before we get onto the just straight up misinformation people in marketing and sales tell as part of their jobs. That's getting closer to the core of the problem.

Back a little more on topic before this hits a thousand words… Bearing all this in mind, I'm lost as to what to do. I'd love to contribute more to this site, it would be a dream to write every day. But really, shouldn't I be building homes for people, not houses for a bank? Shouldn't I be growing food for myself and my neighbors rather than installing some ambient lighting systems in a Michelin star restaurant?

The opportunity is there to make a positive contribution to society, but how can I find a direction?

[1] Tom Secker's work can be found at:
Spy Culture
Investigating the Terror
Boiling Frogs Post
[2] Pearse Redmond's work can be found at:
Porkins Policy Review

I just found out about Oracle's current generation of SPARC hardware and was wondering how much it cost. An entry level T7-1 server is about $40,000, and I couldn't stop wondering why they have such a terrible strategy with these machines.

I'm not saying that the hardware isn't absurdly difficult to manufacture or that they aren't selling "enterprise" products. What I do believe is that they really should be selling cut down or defective versions of their current SPARC chips for the workstation and small server market. I would fully expect that they are throwing away a very large number of chips that could be better used to grow their ecosystem and attract developers. That way, they wouldn't have to extort a dwindling number of interested buyers for their hardware and could have a stable income source for the future.

I've taken the liberty of setting up a folding@home team for Soylent News. In case you aren't familiar with folding@home, it's a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding in an attempt to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington's.

There is more information on the project here, which explains it much better than I could.

Clients are available for Linux, OSX, and even Windows (if you swing that way), so come join our botnet!

That Other Site's team is ranked at 1817, so we've got some catching up to do.

On a personal note, my Dad carries the gene markers for Huntington's disease, and will eventually succumb to it. Research like this is very helpful for understanding, and hopefully developing treatments for it.

tl;dr Our Soylent News team ID is 230319

Wait, what?

Alex Jones: Banning order for fan who tweeted he loved presenter

A fan who bombarded the BBC's Alex Jones with tweets declaring he was in love with her has been banned from any contact with the Welsh TV presenter.

Shane Goldsmith sent the 38-year-old One Show star a string of messages for 17 months and waited outside the BBC's headquarters to tell her he loved her.

A judge imposed a restraining order which also bars him from the BBC's New Broadcasting House in central London.

Mr Goldsmith, 44, was formally cleared of a single charge of harassment.

'Armani Communist' divides China

When Liu Bo attended a regional communist party event as the official ambassador of local students it wasn't his youthful demeanour which made the biggest impression.

Nor was it the remarks which the 14-year-old made to the Shenzhen People's Political Consultative Conference, calling for the greater use of non-exam based assessments in the Chinese education system.
What made people stare, and what rapidly become a major topic of conversation as photos of Liu spread across Chinese social media this week, was what he was wearing.

Around his neck was a red scarf of the type worn by Chairman Mao's Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution and now standard issue wear for the Communist Party Youth League. But Liu had paired that with what was taken to be an Armani suit, because of the lapel badge he was wearing with the distinctive logo of the Italian luxury brand.

In the eyes of many Chinese observers this was not so much a wardrobe malfunction as a clash of ideologies in a single outfit. Some on China's micro blogging platform Weibo dubbed Liu the "Armani Youngster" and attacked his choice of clothing.

PM left red nosed by censorship protest

When Malaysian police warned activist and graphic designer Fahmi Reza that his Twitter account was under surveillance after he posted an image of the prime minister, Najib Razak, as a clown, they probably hoped such behaviour would stop.

But then members of an art collective, Grupa posted even more clownish images of the premier to express their solidarity with him and to champion the ideal of free speech.

The pictures have spread across social media with the hashtag #KitaSemuaPenghasut which translates as "we are all seditious".

Fahmi's mockery of the prime minister was part of a wider reaction to news last week, when the country's attorney-general cleared Mr Najib of any corruption relating to a long-running financial scandal.

too-lazy-to-sub dept.

James Reinders: Parallelism Has Crossed a Threshold

Is the parallel everything era here? What happens when you can assume parallel cores? In the second half of our in-depth interview, Intel’s James Reinders discusses the fading out of single-core machines and the ramifications of the democratization of parallel computing, remarking “we don’t need to worry about single-core processors anymore and that’s pretty significant in the world of programming for this next decade.” Other topics covered include the intentions behind OpenHPC and trends to watch in 2016.

First half: A Conversation with James Reinders

So, looks like the 16.02 site upgrade is mostly going to be a features upgrade rather than a bugfix upgrade, though there's some of that as well. There's one thing going in that there's an outside chance may annoy some people though: the new mobile layout. To be very clear on this, the mobile layout will be served to anyone with a horizontal screen (not browser window) resolution of 800 pixels or less. The only way you'll see it on your desktop is if you're still running 800x600 or lower resolution, in which case you really should get with the whole 21st century technology thing.

We're going to be doing the site upgrade the first weekend of February but if you want to give it a look early head over to https://dev.soylentnews.org/ and have a look around. Bear in mind we ain't foisting beta code on you lot with this, we're foisting pre-alpha code that took all of maybe half an hour to do up on you. This is not what the finished product will look like, it's just something to make life easier on mobile users while we write up something that doesn't suck. If it sucks too hard and you all bitch that you want the old layout back though, it's a matter of minutes to fix and revert until we have something worth calling a proper mobile interface.

Let me know what you think here.

Sensors, not CPUs, are the tech that swings the smartphone market

Flash back a quarter of a century: I’m sourcing components for a consumer virtual reality system. An accelerometer is an absolute necessity in a head-mounted display, because it senses the motion of the head. Accelerometers exist in silicon, but priced at US$25 apiece, their only customer is the automotive industry - sensors used to trigger deployment of the airbags in a crash.

In the end, I invented my own sensor, because silicon accelerometers cost too much.

A few hundred million smartphones later, accelerometers and gyroscopes have become cheap as chips. Literally. From twenty-five dollars to less than twenty-five cents, the conjunction of Moore’s Law and Steve Jobs made these sensors cheap and abundant.

With many smartphones using high-quality accelerometer/gyroscope sensors, the groundwork had been laid for Google’s Cardboard - really no more than a cheap set of plastic lenses set at the right distance from a smartphone screen. Everything else about the Cardboard experience happened inside the smartphone - because the smartphone suddenly had the right suite of sensors to generate a head-tracking display.

Theoretically, Google’s Cardboard should give you the same smooth virtual reality experience as Samsung’s Gear VR. But it’s like chalk and cheese: Cardboard does the job, but it always feels as though you’re fighting the hardware, where Gear VR feels as comfortable as an old shoe.

The reason for that lies with the sensors built into Gear VR. Oculus CTO John Carmack worked with Samsung to specify an accelerometer/gyroscope sensor suite that could feed Samsung's flagship Galaxy S6 smartmobe with a thousand updates a second. The average sensors, on a typical smartphone - even the very powerful Galaxy S6 - won’t come anywhere near that.

Head tracking can only be as good as the sensors used to track the head. The proof of this is the difference between Galaxy S6 in Cardboard, and Galaxy S6 in Gear VR - try both and see for yourself.

This is one bleeding edge in the smartphone sensor arms race. Within the next eighteen months, every high-end smartphone will specify incredibly sensitive and fast accelerometers and gyroscopes. Smartphones work well both in the palm of your hand and when mounted over your eyes. Every major manufacturer will have their own Gear VR-like plastic case for wearing their latest top-of-the-line handset. Except at the very high end - the province of serious gamers and information designers - smartphones and VR will become entirely interchangeable.

[...] Back during the Cold War, the Soviets were caught out shining laser beams onto the windows at the White House, reading voices out of the reflections. The White House responded by pointing speakers at their windows, playing music just loud enough to drown out any other signal. We may need a new app for our smartphones, one that keeps just enough music piping out its speaker to confound anyone using our newly sensitive accelerometers against us.

To improve accuracy instead of just overall speed, and to create more tension (and, as it turns out, swearing) during gameplay, I've made a version of my typing game where one single mistake ends the game and you have to start the level again.

http://typerise.com/sudden_death.php

You start by having to type 50 consecutive characters correctly before 60 seconds runs out, then on the next level it's a hundred characters within 60 seconds, then 150 characters on level 3, and so on.

Let me know what you think (and if you like it, what level you complete). I once beat level 8 but I think it was a fluke.