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Feds Warn Alex Jones to Stop Hawking Coronavirus Scams
The FDA sent a letter to the infamous conspiracy theorist on Thursday saying he needed to stop pushing colloidal silver as a therapy for COVID-19

The Food and Drug Administration is demanding that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones stop advertising dubious dietary supplements as coronavirus treatments and threatening legal action if he doesn’t comply.

The FDA sent a letter to Jones and his website InfoWars on Thursday demanding that he stop telling the viewers of his popular internet broadcasts that they can ward off the virus with colloidal silver products sold on his website. Those videos, the FDA wrote, “misleadingly represent them as safe and/or effective for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19.”

A failure to remove those claims, the agency added, “may result in legal action seeking a Federal District Court injunction and an order may require that you pay back money to consumers.”

Jones, who is famous for fabricating conspiracy theories and marketing dubious health supplements, has been hawking supposed coronavirus-killing colloidal silver products in videos with titles like “Deep State Using Coronavirus Fear and Panic To Destroy Our Country.” In one video posted last month, he told viewers of his ”Nano Silver” supplements: “the Pentagon has come out and documented, and homeland security have said this stuff kills the whole SARS corona family, at point blank range.”

[ . . . . ] Despite Jones’ on-air claims to the contrary, language on InfoWars’ online marketplace explicitly states that its colloidal silver products are not designed to treat the virus. “The products on this site are not intended for use in the cure, treatment, prevention or mitigation of any disease, including the novel coronavirus,” the website warns. “Any suggestion to the contrary is false and is expressly disavowed.”

Jones and InfoWars were also targeted by authorities in New York last month over his claims about the products’ ability to ward off the coronavirus. The state’s attorney general sent InfoWars a cease and desist letter demanding it stop airing dubious claims about its products’ health benefits.

I seem to recall that Jim Bakker was similarly threatened, then arrested for similar claims about the same bogus cure. Unlike Alex Jokes, at least Bakker could say that spreading this kind of misinformation to his followers was the christian thing to do.

Another source: FDA warns Alex Jones over false coronavirus claims

So, because of EBOLAIDS, I have found myself with a large amount of free time, having lost my job.
The last week or so I was fiddling with various compiled languages, trying to see if any of them were actually a good replacement for C++. That list included Rust, Crystal, Zig, and Nim.

Don't get me wrong, I actually like C++, but I can't deny it's a bit verbose and that can be painful at times.
It's also enormous and impossible to keep all of it between the ears. None of that would be enough to really bother me enough to switch, but all the languages popping up trying to replace it, I wanted to see what those would look like. I decided I don't really adore any of them.

I think Crystal has promise, but ultimately abstracts away too far from the machine.

I like much of Rust, but it has the same "verboseness" problem as C++ and Java, etc.

Rust's move semantics are nice, but ultimately a headache, and the compiler whines at you for stuff that really, it has no justification for doing so, e.g. the styling of variable names. Crystal won't let you use CamelCase at all!

Zig is fugly to me, and Nim feels too abstracted, and also doesn't feel like a real language, since it just compiles to C, though that might be me just being anal.

My attention eventually shifted around to poking around the docs for stuff like LLVM and libgccjit, wondering how difficult it would be to make a language of my own.

I really think I can do this.

Now, for the most part, I don't expect anyone else to really like my language, my main motivation is so I myself have something cozy to work in that I really like, but I do have some design goals in mind, and I do want at least some people to like my creation.

Here's the plan, in no particular order:

• Keep it small. The language should be small enough to memorize all or most of it, like C.

• Memory safe defaults, but unrestricted and un-nagged use of pointers. The programmer is probably not completely brain dead. No "unsafe" blocks or any of that crap. I will use libgc for the garbage collector, like Crystal does.

• Fairly easy to parse, fast to compile, encourage 3rd party compilers by making them easier to build.

• Reduce required typing to achieve a task.

• Portable. From hosted environments like Linux and Windows, to garbage-collection-free environments like kernels. Backend will be libgccjit, because it supports more targets than LLVM and produces slightly better code.

• Small compiler. Easy to just tar up and take wherever you go, run it right from an extracted zip file, or install it if you like.

• All datatypes are "plain old data", e.g., you can safely memcpy one to another without worrying.

• Freeform language, use whatever indentation and variable naming schemes you like.

• No centralized "ecosystem", like Cargo for Rust, Shards for Crystal, nothing like that. It should be easy enough to just plug into CMake and use. It should be decentralized in nature and able to be used anywhere.

• Real, normal looking, single-inheritance based object oriented support.

• GNU-compatible compiler flag options, e.g. -march=native, -Ofast, etc.

• Automated C parsing utilities that emit bindings, IN BOTH DIRECTIONS. This means you will get C header files to interact with libraries written in the new language.

• Public domain. Free to do whatever you wish with the compiler, with no restrictions.

The name of my glorious creation?

Gerbil.

I chose that name because it reminds me of a little gerbil running in a wheel, doing his best, and also because I'm a twisted bastard who likes Richard Gere jokes and has a couple other inside jokes about gerbils.

It has some quirks so far, and the syntax is *very* open to radical change, but here's a pastebin of the latest at the time of writing: https://pastebin.com/h5vYQiVq

Please give me your thoughts, opinions, and suggestions.

I'll put up a repo when I have something that compiles. I have a few hundred lines of header files right now setting up the compiler's internal type system.

Neural Voice Puppetry: Audio-driven Facial Reenactment (5m28s video)

This AI Makes "Audio Deepfakes" (5m37s video)

Demo (disabled)

arXiv

Previously: Deeper Fakes

{carry, result} <= operand1 + operand2 + carry;

The timing estimate says that the carry flag is a slow point in the design. Adding is really a serial operation, where the result from each pair of bits needs to propagate to the next. So it seems reasonable that the carry flag would take some time to arrive from the far end. But is the logic for this operation being synthesized in an optimal fashion? What if I change it to this?

{carry, result} <= ({operand1, 1'b1} + {operand2, carry}) >> 1;

Well look at that. Just dropped a few dozen LUTs and the carry flag isn't the slowest signal anymore. I guess it was adding twice. (Maybe the newer software is already smarter than this.)

Bernie Sanders Drops Out of 2020 Democratic Race for President (archive)

Mr. Sanders championed and popularized liberal policies like “Medicare for all” and free four-year public colleges aimed at lifting up America’s working class, but he faced opposition from many party leaders, elected officials and major donors, as well as large numbers of moderate voters who saw him as too far left.

Mr. Sanders never accepted that argument. In recent weeks he said repeatedly that he had won the ideological debate, asserting that a strong majority of Democrats supported his progressive agenda. But during a striking news conference in Burlington, Vt., last month, he also acknowledged that he was losing the electability battle to Mr. Biden, saying voters had made clear that they thought the former vice president was the best candidate to beat Mr. Trump.

He repeated that argument in his announcement on Wednesday.

“Focusing on that new vision for America is what our campaign has been about and what in fact we have accomplished,’’ he said. “Few would deny that over the course of the past five years our movement has won the ideological struggle.”

Alleged sex pest Joe Biden in.

70 Percent of Coronavirus Deaths in Louisiana Are African Americans, Despite Being 33 Percent of the Population

significant majority of coronavirus deaths in Louisiana were African Americans, although the demographic makes up only a third of the southern state's population.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, announced on Monday that more than 70 percent of the deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, were African Americans in his state. He said that this was "obviously" a "big disparity."

"Disturbingly, this information is going to show you that slightly more than 70 percent of the deaths in Louisiana are of African Americans," Edwards said during a press briefing. "So that deserves more attention and we're going to have to dig into that and see what we can do to slow that trend down," he added.

African Americans are estimated to make up just about 33 percent of the state's population, according to the most recent census data.

The Wall Street Journal analyzed data from New York City, reporting that neighborhoods in the Queens borough with the largest immigrant populations were the hardest hit by the coronavirus. The Charlotte Observer also reported that in Charlotte, North Carolina–which is just one-third black–about 44 percent of the confirmed coronavirus cases were African Americans.

Reporting by ProPublica showed that 80 percent of coronavirus deaths in Milwaukee, Wisconsin were African American, while the city is just 26 percent black. Similar stats have been observed in Illinois and Michigan.

https://www.newsweek.com/70-percent-coronavirus-deaths-louisiana-are-african-americans-despite-being-33-percent-1496570

The Radio Gawds had some comments on this, on my way home from work. They note that predominantly black neighborhoods aren't observing the social distancing thing. I really can't address that, my search skills aren't finding that sort of info.

Funny, when I searched for coronavirus demographics, this article is the only one that really addresses the question. Oh, there are pages and pages of hits, addressing age, but that's about it.

Makes me wonder if the claims are true or not, or whether it's just too early to start counting the bodies. Or, is it simply that nobody cares, including the black community?

Latest Zen 3 rumor further reiterates 10-15% IPC gains per thread and 32 MB of shared L3 cache per CCX, Zen 4 to feature 1 MB L2 cache and AVX 512 support

According to AdoredTV's sources, the IPC gains in Zen 3 will be on par with that of Zen 2, which is between 10-15% per thread. Multi-threaded workloads could still see larger IPC gains. Zen 3 will also introduce a new CCX design, which could be among those core architecture improvements Dr. Lisa Su had alluded to earlier. Zen 3 will have one CCX with eight cores with a single L3 cache at 32 MB per CCX. Larger caches such as 48 MB or 64 MB are not indicated. With the new cache design, more number of cores now have access to a common L3 cache on the same die. This will likely reduce latency and improve gaming performance. Zen 3 will continue to use SMT-2 and not SMT-4 as was rumored earlier.

[...] Also being confirmed is something that we had reported back in December 2019 — that the 5nm Zen 4 Ryzen 5000 will herald the beginning of a new socket. New information we have now is that Zen 4 will feature more cores, a 1 MB L2 cache, AVX 512 support, and will look to offer much improved IPC.

"Rumor" in this case means "anonymous sources who (supposedly) emailed a YouTuber".

It was previously reported that Zen 3 would have a modest ~10-12% increase in integer operation performance, but something like a 50% increase in floating point operations.

Zen 2 has 512 KiB of L2 cache per core. New denser nodes like TSMC's "5nm" can allow an increase in the amount without increasing latency. This could go up even more in the future if 3D stacking is used, but the only thing that AMD has talked about so far is the use of HBM stacks on an interposer.

Zen 4 should be pretty interesting. AVX-512 support would allow it to catch up to Intel in the few benchmarks and pieces of software that actually use AVX-512 instructions, and could lead it to become more widely used. I am guessing that Zen 4 will have up to 50% more cores, e.g. a 24-core Ryzen 9 5950X.

In July 2018 I bought an Acer Swift 3 laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 2700U CPU, with Vega 10 graphics. I've always avoided AMD GPUs after having bad experiences with them on Linux in the past, but I heard that the open source drivers were very good so I took a leap of faith.

When I bought the laptop, it was for taking on holiday, so that I'd be able to frob with code, and have fun on the plane. It came with Windows 10 so that needed removing and replacing with Slackware. I decided to be brave and install Slackware-current. The installation (from USB stick) was surprisingly easy. Alien Bob's mirror script worked a treat and I found some advice online about how to make a boot stick with elilo. I've used syslinux at work for doing CentOS kickstart scripts, so there wasn't much of a learning curve.

The kernel that came with Slackware-current wasn't new enough to support my lunatic fringe hardware (ie the AMD Vega GPU) so I went to www.kernel.org and got something suitable. The kernel source code nowadays is absolutely enormous and it took a month of Sundays going through all the configuration menus to get it set up. Eventually I got something working and I was able to get X going. On the trans-Atlantic flight I emptied the battery recompiling the kernel.

There have been problems with the 4.x kernels. Anything that touched the GPU caused lock-ups, and the only way to get the machine back was by holding down the power button for 5 seconds. There were intermittent lock-ups on boot when switching from the UEFI frame buffer driver to the amdgpu/drm ones (and all sorts of Oopses and stack traces at other times). I experimented with a few versions of the kernel and some were more reliable than others. I had a few to choose from in my elilo.conf menu. There were problems in user-land when playing videos in a web browser with some kernels: random lock-ups. Again, a cold boot was required. (I tried logging in over the network with ssh but no banana).

Anyway, it's been great for compiling code with make -j 8.

I've occasionally googled to see if the problems have been fixed. Initially, there were hardly any reports of problems (the hardware being so new) but over the months, the forums filled up with all sorts of bug reports. Recently, the advice became to upgrade to a 5.x kernel.

Last weekend I decided to reinstall the machine with the very latest Slackware-current to get a 5. kernel and all the other latest goodness. Having backed up everything to my external hard disk and using Alien Bob's mirror script to get the latest Slackware-current, it all went swimmingly.

The first thing to note was that there were no gratuitous Oopses and stack traces, and the kernel loaded and switched to amdgpu/drm with no fuss. I got straight into X with WindowMaker.

The first uncomfortable surprise was that someone has decided to use new, posh fonts in Xterm. My display is 1920 pixels across and when writing code I like to be able to have three Xterms side-by-side. With these new fonts, even on "Tiny," that was not possible. The solution was to replace /etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm with the one from Slackware 14.2.

Since SETI@Home has all but finished, and since COVID-19 came along, I decided to join up from some other grid computing projects, including ones targeted at COVID-19, but I also joined up to Einstein@Home.

Einstein@Home went to use the GPU and promptly locked up the system.

Today I've been googling the issue again, and I found two interesting pieces of advice. One is regarding CPU power management and the other is regarding virtualisation.

The first piece of advice was to append "processor.max_cstate=5" to the kernel command line to prevent it from going into the lowest power mode. No banana.

The second was to disable the AMD secure VM option in the UEFI BIOS. Banana! So far it has been up for nearly an hour and a quarter with Einstein@Home using the GPU and myself typing this.

A few weeks ago I insisted on buying Mrs Turgid a new laptop. Mrs Turgid hates computers (actually she hates Microsoft software) but her old laptop was bought in 2011and runs Windows 7. It's a dual core 64-bit AMD @1.6GHz, but it still works. It's screen is quite low-res and Windows 7 is now unsupported, so I insisted on buying something new, since she was planning on doing some extra work from home again this spring (marking exams). There won't be any exams to mark now, but she is working from home due to the lockdown...

I bought an ASUS X512D running Windows 10 which has a pretty similar spec to my Acer. It has 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. The CPU is a Ryzen 5, though, with a Vega 8. I put SETI@Home on it and it reckons the new Ryzen 5 is a little bit faster than my old Ryzen 7. Also, the build quality is a bit better. The case is more solid and the keyboard a bit better (but it's still a laptop, so it's not brilliant). The screen is nice too. It's also 1920x1080. I ponied up for some commercial anti-malware software too. I haven't got time to waste on Windows so I'll just go with the flow.

She's very happy with the new laptop, and pleased we bought it now because of the lockdown.

Update: The banana went away after two hours. I had a browser, Einstein@Home and 16 instances of glxgears running.

RETIRED HUSBAND
After I retired, my wife insisted that I accompany her on her trips to WalMart. Unfortunately, like most men; I found shopping boring and preferred to get in and get out. Equally unfortunate, my wife is like most women - she loves to browse. Yesterday my dear wife received the following letter, from the local WalMart:
Dear Mrs. Harris:
Over the past six months, your husband has caused quite a commotion, in our store.
We cannot tolerate this behavior and have been forced to, ban both of you from the store.
Our complaints against your husband, Mr. Harris, are listed below and are documented by our video surveillance cameras:
1. June 15: He took 24 boxes of condoms and randomly put them in other people's carts when they weren't looking.
2. July 2: Set all the alarm clocks in Housewares to go off at 5-minute intervals.
3. July 7: He made a trail of tomato juice on the floor leading to the women's restroom.
4. July 19: Walked up to an employee and told her in an official voice, 'Code 3 in Housewares. Get on it right away'. This caused the employee to leave her assigned station and receive a reprimand from her Supervisor that in turn resulted with a union grievance, causing management to lose time and costing the company money. We don't have a Code 3.
5. August 4: Went to the Service Desk and tried to put a bag of M&Ms on layaway.
6. August 14: Moved a, 'CAUTION - WET FLOOR' sign to a carpeted area.
7. August 15: Set up a tent in the camping department and told the children shoppers he'd invite them in if they would bring pillows and blankets from the bedding department to which twenty children obliged.
8. August 23: When a clerk asked if they could help him he began crying and screamed, 'Why can't you people just leave me alone?' EMTs were called.
9. September 4: Looked right into the security camera and used it as a mirror while he picked his nose.
10. September 10: While handling guns in the hunting department, he asked the clerk where the antidepressants were.
11. October 3: Darted around the store suspiciously while, loudly humming the, 'Mission Impossible' theme.
12. October 6: In the auto department, he practiced his, 'Madonna Look' using different sizes of funnels.
13. October 18: Hid in a clothing rack and when people browsed through, yelled 'PICK ME! PICK ME!'
14. October 22: When an announcement came over the loud speaker, he assumed a fetal position and screamed;
'OH NO! IT'S THOSE VOICES AGAIN!'
15. Took a box of condoms to the checkout clerk and asked where is the fitting room?
And last, but not least:
16. October 23: Went into a fitting room, shut the door, waited awhile; then yelled very loudly, 'Hey! There's no toilet paper in here.' One of the clerks passed out.
If you don't send this to your dearest friends; You will be depriving them of some good humor.

Lifted boldly from a crazy retired woman's Facefook page.

_{^{Public Service Announcement. April 1, 2020}}
During this frightening time of COVID-19 it is important to keep stocked up on essential supplies. Especially ammunition for your firearms. As part of your preparedness you should ensure that you have a minimum of two firearms for each member of your household. Discount multi-packs of firearms and ammunition are being made available during this time to make it easier for you be prepared. Various companies with manufacturing capability will be mobilized to increase our national manufacturing capacity to ensure sufficient firearms can be made available to everyone.

Starter Guns will be available which are sized just right for the little ones. The NRA offers discounts to those who can show proof of mental impairment or illness.

Please use firearms responsibly both during and after drinking. Remember, there is nothing to fear. Keep a minimum of one handgun always within arms length and be ready to draw it and begin shooting. Social distancing makes it easier to aim. It is important to protect yourself from the insidious threat of COVID-19 during these dangerous times.

^{_<no-sarcasm>}
The Department of Homeland Security has deemed gun shops as essential businesses to remain open even though clothing for newborn babies is not essential.

New York and other authorities have deemed liquor stores to be essential services.
_{^{</no-sarcasm>}}