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This one goes out to all the dogmatic "all regulation is bad hurr hurr" types we're infested with.

The single argument I see them falling back on when backed into a corner is something along the lines of "Yeah, well, X Y and Z regulations have been set up and perverted, so regulation itself is a threat and inherently bad!"

This is...I don't think there is a way to express in English how completely, utterly, boneheadedly, cynically, self-servingly, sneeringly, willfully wrong this is. No one with three sparking neurons would say this for its own sake. And what *that* means is that the people who *do* say this are using it as a flimsy dogmatic excuse to push their idiotic economic agendas.

Let me make this absolutely clear: this argument is the precise equivalent of saying "Well, cancer cells can turn off cell-cycle checkpoints like p53, so replication regulation mechanisms are bad for living things!" or "Yeah, well look what happens to human DNA when a retrovirus gets ahold of it. Cell division is anti-life!"

It is *exactly* the same argument, just made in context of the body politic rather than the body simpliciter. Anyone who makes this argument is a fool, a rube, a tool of the elite who no doubt don't even know they exist and would not thank them for their pathetic grovelling bootlicking.

In other words, KHallow (though we have others on this site infected with the disease). And yes, this is a call-out. Suck it up. I will never understand what drives people to kiss the boot that's stomping their skulls into a fine paste...though I fear it may be something as simple as "I suffer but $GROUP_I_HATE suffers more."

Entire Shrek movie in just 8MiB with AV1 and opus

128×72 resolution (the elusive "72p"), 4 FPS, 4.6 kbps video, 7.5 kbps audio, 1:30:04 runtime.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you shouldn't.

Here's What to Expect From CES 2020

The 8 Things We Expect to See at CES 2020 (archive)

5G... AI... MicroLED... AirPod clones... "micromobility" e-scooters/bikes... foldables... _privacy, and...

By now you might have heard the story: At last year’s CES, a robotic vibrator called the Ose was initially awarded an innovation prize, then was disqualified once the Consumer Technology Association (which puts on the big show) deemed the product “immoral” and “obscene.” Backlash followed, and last summer the CTA released a statement summarizing some policy changes, which included—surprise!—a trial run for sex toys at CES 2020.

All of that buzz (pun absolutely intended) seems to have generated momentum for the woman-led team behind the Ose vibrator. The company says it made more than $1 million within an hour of listing the product for pre-sale in November of 2019. But it also opened the doors for more sex toy and sexual health companies to exhibit at CES this year, whether those are bendable bullet vibrators, kegel exercisers, or “rear gear.” The caveat is that the products have to be “innovative and include new or emerging tech” to qualify. So, OK, we’re looking forward to seeing sex toys served up with AI smarts and a side of blockchain—but really, we mostly look forward to the erosion of taboos around sexual health and sexual pleasure, particularly for women.

CES 2020: Preview of tomorrow's tech on show in Las Vegas

Artificial intelligence, 5G, foldables, surveillance tech, 8K and robotics are set to be among this year's buzzwords.

But also expect Trump to feature. The President's clashes with China have led some of the communist country's biggest tech firms to cancel or reduce their involvement in the Las Vegas event. But the prospect of an imminent trade deal points towards tensions easing and greater access to Chinese consumers.

Ivanka Trump - the US leader's daughter - is also attending to give a "keynote" interview to CES chief Gary Shapiro.

He once called on Americans to oppose her father because of "his racism and inanity".

Now Mr Shapiro faces criticism himself for inviting Ivanka to discuss "the future of work". Critics claim she is benefiting from nepotism while better-qualified female tech champions are overlooked.

Personally, I'll be looking for AMD's announcements, which will include Zen 2 "Renoir" laptop APUs and likely a 64-core Threadripper (48-core for plebs?). AMD will have a streamed keynote on Monday, Jan. 6 at 2:00 p.m. PST. I'll also look at the 8K TVs and related junk. It looks like AV1 hardware decode will be featured in many devices this year.

Note: It looks like the VCN in Renoir will not support AV1 hardware decode. Also, "Dali" is likely going to be the Zen-based upgrade to last year's ultra low power Excavator APUs.

I met the infamous Q first online at K5 before meeting him in person over the July fourth weekend in 2003. He was a white guy between 25 and 35, driving a small black sedan, dressed in black and wearing a black hat, which covered his hair. I wrote about it in the book The Paxil Diaries.
        The “Deep State” nonsense started as a joke on K5. Since Trump started running for president an awful lot of people have started taking it seriously.
        The thing is, there really is a secret deep state, but George Soros has nothing at all to do with it, and it’s hiding in plain sight.
        The Deep State is the people who are decrying it—the very rich who seek to transform America into a Fascist nation. They legally bribe the politicians with “campaign contributions”, who are wholly dependent on them. A politician will do what the NRA, or the coal companies, or the telecommunications companies, any of the giant businesses want or they won’t be re-elected. Period.
        THAT is the deep state. If you don’t like the idea of America being run by it, stop voting for party, but pay attention to how your representatives vote. Oh, it helps to not be foolish enough to believe advertising and fraudsters. The Deep State has psychologists and sociologists on staff who know how to make you do anything they want you to.
        For example, President Trump pushed mining coal “for jobs” despite the fact that the coal industry is on its last legs; coal is just too dirty and expensive. HE is the deep state, lying like the deep state always does. Jobs? Those coal miners would be far healthier and financially better off say, building windmills or installing solar panels.
        And why do I peg Trump as Mister Deep State? Because rather than draining the swamp, he has staffed all the regulatory agencies with heads of or lobbyists for the very industries they’re supposed to be regulating.
        He hires foxes to guard America’s hen houses. And some of you will be foolish enough to vote for the Nazi again.
        And speaking of Nazis, you should be told that racism is a tool of the rich to keep the rest of us at each others’ throats so we won’t notice who it is who’s holding us down. It isn’t black people, or white people, or Asian people, or Jewish people, it’s rich people.
        The deep state got the rabid racist elected President. The deep state isn’t partisan; it got the hugely unpopular Hillary Clinton nominated, and Deep State agents infiltrating Russia worked to make her even more unpopular. Right before the election James Comey put the final nail in the coffin when, as Wikipedia put it, “Many Clinton supporters claim his decisions [to say she was innocent of wrongdoing without actually exonerating her] not long before the 2016 election might have cost her the presidency.”
        Face it, Trump is a fraudster and a liar. And you are the butt of the deep state joke that Q started.

evidence and reasoned argument > biased expert opinion > your uninformed feelings.

For example, we have this quip from turgid in his complaints about the Brexit thing and his life at present:

We are leaving the European Union, the world's most successful and advanced trading bloc, for no discernible reason, on 31st January. Remain has lost the battle.

Sure, I can see good reason for turgid to be sore about this. It's a drastic, muddled change founded on rather flimsy grounds. But does he really not know/discern what his fellow people think? It's not like they're being ninja-stealthy about this. And when I brought up some reasons that came to my mind, he had this to say:

Every single thing you have posted in that list has been refuted many times.

So not only has turgid discerned such reasons, he's familiar enough with them to know of counterarguments. This led to my observation:

The known reason has been "refuted", thus, it can no longer be "discerned". Who else thinks like this?

This is an endemic sickness at SN. Many people have done so. Barbara Hudson came up with this observation in the same thread:

Sometimes it's hard to distinguish between libtard libertarians and contard conservatives.

The repeated use of "tard" indicates she doesn't really care enough to look. Is something "hard", if you're not even trying? Then in the Rwanda opioid story, there were people telling us their feelings about what capitalism (and the US Libertarian Party) should mean.

[sjames:] Seems to me. I haven't heard anything from a Libertarian candidate about abolishing the FDA, prescription laws, controlled substances, etc other than marijuana in a long time. Some libertarians (small L), yes, but not the party.

Why are we to expect that sjames would hear of such things from the party. Does he comprehensively monitor their communications? As I noted, a near trivial web search would have fixed his ignorance on the matter.

A final example here is UnixNut's hypothetical viewpoint of the "far richer and more powerful" in order to rationalize Russian meddling in their part of the internet. Suddenly, we're supposed to care more about a viewpoint, clearly at odds with our own, merely because it supposedly belongs to a bunch of very powerful people?

My take on all this is that it is completely irrelevant how things seem to you, particularly when it devolves to talk about things you see, but claim not to see; or things you don't care about enough to see; or hypothetical viewpoints where you're speculating about what an imaginary entity sees. This is the worst sort of navel gazing and it all happened yesterday.

I'm seeing this all over the place, but I simply don't get it:

Me: Mom, I want to have random item!

Mom: No, we have random item at home.

Random item at home:

And yes, it stops at that point.

Can anyone explain to me what this is supposed to tell me?

This has been quite a year. I have successfully avoided any C++ for about six months, which is a big win since it makes me want to puke. I have settled into the relaxed world of Java while keeping my hand in at C. In my copious spare time, I'm working through my Clojure book. I also need to do some more work on my Secret Plan for World Domination(TM).

However, I am very angry and hurting.

I find myself far less engaged in matters of technology since my country is going down the toilet. I want a boat. I want to live by the sea and go sailing and to do a bit of fishing. I wish I had my own company. I'm tired of working for people with no vision who are still trying to figure out whether to adopt ideas that were demonstrated to be successful two decades ago. We are leaving the European Union, the world's most successful and advanced trading bloc, for no discernible reason, on 31st January. Remain has lost the battle.

Now the focus is on Scottish Independence to escape the Alt-Wrong Brexit which will turn us into some kind of backward Dickensian sweatshop. This member of the Liberal Elite is hurting now, and that's all that matters apparently. I definitely have work until about April.

For the record, my ancestors were poor Scottish subsistence farmers, but thanks to the post-WWII Welfare State and universal free education, my family pulled itself up into central heating and double glazing. We also benefited from the free-at-the-point-of-use National Health Service, for which I pay many hundreds of pounds per month in Income Tax and National Insurance. Apparently this qualifies me as a member of the Liberal Metropolitan Elite, despite the fact that I do not and have never lived in London, and I have a modest education and a reasonable job. I'm a very modest man with much to be modest about.

The plan is to relocate "home" to Scotland as and when independence happens. Hopefully the 2020 vote will be positive. In the meantime, I can try to get sent abroad to work. We're running out of good things to do here thanks to Brexit, and the future "opportunities" are both unpleasant and subject to funding from unreliable sources. And I might be getting my first ever pay cut, which will hurt my extended family because I spend about 500 pounds per month helping them out.

In other parts of the UK, many people don't appreciate the difference between the political consensus in Scotland and eg. England. For example, in Scotland, people voted to have higher Income Tax (1%) to have better public services. England just voted by a landslide for massive deregulation (workers' rights, environmental protection, food standards, NHS/USA trade deal).

Regarding the US takeover of our NHS, there is a petition. In "trade deals" everything is on the table,

We've had nearly a decade of Austerity: cuts to the Welfare State, Education, National Health Service, Police, Armed Forces, Social Care, the legal system etc. and yet the Great British Public (actually the English public) voted for this on steroids by a landslide for at least another five years, including a hard Brexit. The re-elected people such as Iain Duncan Smith, a very wealthy man (thanks to his wife) who is getting a knighthood for his reforms to the welfare state (harsh cutbacks and draconian medical tests) which have brought misery to hundreds of thousands of people.

They also re-elected disgraced MP and Home Secretary Priti Patel, a proponent of the Death Penalty amongst other things, and who has a very hard-line attitude to immigrants and refugees, despite being the daughter of refugees to the UK herself.

Of course, we must not forget, the Prime Minister himself, Boris Johnson, twice sacked from his day job (with right-wing newspapers) for lying who is also a brazen racist and homophobic bigot, amongst other things.

Apparently I do not understand why this has happened. I do not understand why my own behaviour has made this happen. Apparently, despite my attempts to help the less fortunate that myself, I "sneer" and "show contempt" for them. Apparently paying tax to fund a civilised society is not appreciated.

Other than sneering, whinging and generally being a pining Remoaner, what have I done?

First of all, I have been making donations to my local food bank and other food charities, and to obviously distressed people begging in the street After the Second World War, my grandparents' generation voted, by a landslide, to establish a comprehensive Welfare State, from cradle to the grave, to ensure that there was a basic safety net for their fellow human beings such that this sort of suffering would not have to be endured, and they (and I) were happy to pay for it. We're all in this life thing together, after all, and we never know when our luck might change.

I have also made several donations to Hope Not Hate in order to fund campaigns against fascist bullies and bigots such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) and Nigel Farage.

I have continued to support The People's Challenge and to Gina Miller's various causes.

We lost. It's now time to start "getting over it." I'm bitter, angry, tired and despondent but it's time to plan for the future and to move on.

England has chosen the far-right USA model of extreme deregulation and pursuit of profit. Scotland has aligned itself politically and economically with countries such as Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. I prefer the Scottish model.

There is one fly in the ointment: the UK Parliament (Westminster), currently dominated by the English far-right, has to "approve" a Scottish Independence referendum (Section 30) to make it legally binding. They say they'll deny it. Why? They say Scotland is a drain on UK finances. You'd think that this brave new patriotic England would be delighted to be relieved of yet another burden?

2020 looks to be a very interesting year politically, particularly for the UK. Happy new year.

Shit exactly like this.

It’s that time of year again. The time of year when everyone and their dog waxes nostalgic about all the shit nobody cares about from the year past, and stupidly predicts the next year in the grim knowledge that when the next New Year comes along, nobody will remember that the dumbass predicted a bunch of foolish shit that turned out to be complete and utter balderdash. I might as well, too. Just like I did last year (yes, a lot of this was pasted from last year’s final chapter).

I want to apologize for my absence from S/N for the last six months or so; I’ve been busy offline. I’ve penned a few SF stories I’m shopping to the magazines, and took out a mortgage and bought the house I’ve been renting for ten years.

I’ve also written a few articles that really should have been at S/N but I only posted at mcgrew.info. I apologize for that, too. I did write more articles than last year, even if they didn’t all go to S/N.

I’ve kind of always been like that; I was away from slashdot from about 2000 to around 2005. I haven’t been there for a few years now. I'll try to be here a lot more next year.

Some of these links go to /. (these would be old stuff), S/N, mcgrewbooks.com, or mcgrew.info.

As usual, first: the yearly index:

Journals:

Random Scribblings

the Paxil Diaries

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

Articles:

Stupid Web Tricks

A Piece of Asimov Pi

When Will Christ Return?

Fiber!!!

CSS

A Useful Computer Program Using Only HTML

The Federalist Impeachment

As mentioned above, I’m shopping the SF. You’ll see it sooner or later.

Last years’ stupid predictions (and more):

I predicted that I wouldn’t have a book ready in 2019. I got it right!

I’ll also hang on to most of last year’s predictions;

Someone will die. Maybe you, maybe me. Not necessarily anybody I know... we can only hope. I did lose a friend and some acquaintances this year.

SETI will find no sign of intelligent life. Not even on Earth.

The Pirate Party won’t make inroads in the US. I hope I’m wrong about that one.

US politicians will continue to be wholly owned by the corporations.

I’ll still be a nerd.

Technophobic fashionista jocks will troll slashdot (but not S/N). I have no idea if that one or the following held up, anybody been there lately?

Slashdot will be rife with dupes.

Many Slashdot FPs will be poorly edited.

Microsoft will continue sucking. Windows 10 really sucks, it sucks that they’re stopping support for 7 next month, and it sucks that I’m not sure if my new Dell convertible laptop will run Linux.

There will be elections in the US

Happy New Year! Ready for another trip around the sun?

The Worst CPU & GPU Purchases of 2019

Intel Core i9-9900KF / i9-9900KS

Essentially what Intel has done here is create hype around a new product that’s not new at all. They’re charging users more money to cherry pick the best silicon, while reducing the overall quality of the 9900K range by limiting it to parts that can’t easily run at 5 GHz or beyond.

As a result, a few months out from the 9900KS release people started to notice how poorly new 9900K processors were overclocking and binning specialist ‘Silicon Lottery,’ had to drop the 9900K altogether. Typically as a CPU ages the manufacturing process that it’s based on will mature and this leads to a higher chance of ending up with better quality silicon, so typically you’d see parts like the 9900K that usually overclocked to 5 GHz, start to do it more frequently as times goes by.

Our concern with the 9900KS is that Intel now has the option to release a new CPU series and send reviewers the best silicon available at the time while also selling it to early adopters initially. After which point they activate an aggressive binning process, saving top tier silicon for an upcoming special edition series and sell it at a premium.

The chance of purchasing a lower quality silicon chip is always a possibility, but with this change your chance of winning the silicon lottery goes from say ~30%, to zero.

While we’re not wrapped with the idea of the 9900KS, there is also the 9900KF model. What we have here is a 9900K that overclocks no better, the integrated graphics are disabled, and it costs no less. Asking to pay full price for a defective 9900K is no joke.

Intel is so tight on 14nm supply right now that they’re selling everything, parts once destined for the bin are now binned as special versions without iGPUs. In our opinion, they’d be better off selling them to overclockers without the [integrated heat spreader], Intel could save a few bucks there, and overclockers would appreciate having to avoid the delidding step.

When you look at benchmarks for CPUs on sites like cpubenchmark.net, you're hopefully seeing an average score based on hundreds of tested samples, with the score fairly representing expected performance. But cooling and thermal differences, RAM speed, the number of RAM channels in use, and other factors could create large performance variations between the same chips. For example, the Intel Celeron N4000 in some 13-inch laptop should perform significantly better than in a thermally constrained device such as Walmart's landfill quality 10-inch EVOO tablet.

Now, not only do you have to be wary of benchmark conditions and reviewers getting sent excellently binned chips, but you should also keep in mind that early benchmarks could be artificially higher if a company's binning shenanigans includes selling lower quality chips with the same name later.

Related: That's Ryzen AF: Some Old AMD Chips Might Be Getting a 12nm Makeover