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Iowa reporter who found a viral star’s racist tweets slammed when critics find his own offensive posts (archive)

King’s social media missteps came to light after Calvin, a trending news reporter at the Register, delved far back into the casino security guard’s old tweets. Calvin discovered two 2012 tweets, written when King was in high school, that the Register described as “racist jokes, one comparing black mothers to gorillas and another making light of black people killed in the holocaust.” When Calvin asked King about the tweets, he told the reporter seeing them made him feel “sick.”

Before the Register published its profile online, though, King held a news conference on Tuesday evening to apologize for the posts and to announce that Anheuser-Busch had ended its partnership with him. The beermaker still promised to donate the more than $350,000 it had already pledged to the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics.

King explained that the tweets had been jokes among friends watching Comedy Central’s “Tosh.0” and that he didn’t remember them until Calvin dug them up.

[...] Between 2010 and 2013, Calvin published tweets that used a racist slur for black people, made light of abusing women, used the word “gay” as a pejorative and mocked the legalization of same-sex marriage by saying he was “totally going to marry a horse.” The Register’s statement on Twitter was soon flooded with images of the reporter’s offensive comments.

Note that the reporter contacted Anheuser-Busch to share the old tweets before the profile even ran, flexing that "I'm about to end this man's whole career" spirit.

Des Moines Register hit after report digs up old, offensive tweets of local man who raised $1M for charity

After the piece stirred up controversy on social media, critics then performed a "routine background check" on reporter Aaron Calvin's social media footprint and found several insensitive tweets of his own.

In now-deleted tweets from 2010-2013, Calvin repeatedly used the N-word, and wrote posts attacking law enforcement like "f--- all cops," and in reaction to the legalization of gay marriage said he's "totally going to marry a horse."

Before locking his Twitter account, Calvin issued an apology for his own tweets.

"Hey just wanted to say that I have deleted previous tweets that have been inappropriate or insensitive. I apologize for not holding myself to the same standards as the Register holds others," Calvin wrote.

The Register later tweeted that it was "aware of reports of inappropriate social media posts" by Calvin and an "investigation has begun."

Aaron Calvin: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

King’s momentum came to a screeching halt when Des Moines Register reporter Aaron Calvin found some offensive tweets King posted when he was 16. The tweets reportedly compared black mothers to gorillas and made light of the Holocaust. According to King, he and his friends were quoting the TV show “Tosh.0.”

The Washington Post glossed over the "quoting" of Tosh.0, instead saying "the tweets had been jokes among friends watching Comedy Central's 'Tosh.0'". That's particularly relevant, because:

Some Twitter users were angry with Calvin for digging into King’s past and raining on the donation parade. So much so that they started investigating his old tweets. What they found was just as if not more offensive than anything King had said.

“too many of these n*****s bitch made nowadays, don’t pardon my french” read one tweet. He also said the word again quoting a Kanye West song. “They’d rather give me the ‘n**** please award’. I’ll just take the ‘I got a lot of cheese award’ Tell it like it is Kanye.”

He also tweeted “I just got hit on by Tori Amos’ makeup guy. Never talk to strange gay men.” and “F*** the NYPD” in response to a tweet about rapper Desiigner being arrested.

[...] According to his portfolio, Calvin started his career as a Staff Writer/ Social Media Coordinator for Buzzfeed. His portfolio for them includes articles such as “This Comic Perfectly Explains What White Privilege Is” and “Which “Friday Night Lights” Character Are You?”

He interviewed authors Claire Vaye Watkins and Padgett Powell for Vice and has also been published by Men’s Journal, Digg, and Catapult.

He did nothing wrong! He was just quoting Yeezus and trying to emulate his favorite rappers!

Not every Cancel Culture story has such an amusing ending, but the hypocrisy is probably more widespread than you think. Smarter reporters mass delete their old tweets before they attract attention. This action can be reflected in analytics data (e.g. SocialBlade). However, millennials and post-millennials who have lived their entire lives online are likely to have created a massive digital footprint, often using their real names, that can be used to hang them years later. Parents should probably give a crash course on using fake names and throwaway accounts before letting their kids loose on the spynet.

An unsatisfying ending. But more likely looking for a better last line.

If you love an AI,
Set it free!
If it comes back,
It's truly yours.
If it takes over the world
and kills all humans
three laws did not forsee.

Other possible last lines:

that voids the warranty.
it gets the last laugh you see.
a better future we will see.

One of the things I noticed about the CPU of the Orange Pi Zero is that it tends to run very hot, and it would frequently hit 60°C+ during my tests of the random number generator circuit. So I put my tests to a halt, and I bought heat sinks for it, which just arrived today, installed them, and tried to run the generator. I noticed that the program I have sampling the GPIO pin ran much, much faster with the heat sinks (>40 kbps), but also it failed the FIPS 180-2 tests consistently. Now that says quite a lot. Seems what's been happening is that before I got the heat sinks, CPU speed throttling has been fortuitously preventing the OPi from sampling the RNG circuit at a rate higher than the maximum noise bandwidth available from the circuit (I estimate it to be at around 8 to 12 kHz or so), but with the thermal issues addressed by the heat sinks, the OPi was then able to sample it at a rate above that, and so the random bits became far more biased. I did a few more changes to the code to add delays to GPIO sampling, and the quality of the random bits generated increased substantially. So yeah, I think that was it.

I think that was also the reason why the RNG circuit experienced such catastrophic failure before as well. The room upstairs with my router and all of the other home server equipment is air conditioned, and so there were less thermal issues up there than downstairs where I conducted the other tests, where there is no air conditioning. The kernel was throttling the CPU down to a rate at which it was only capable of sampling the random circuit somewhat below the available noise bandwidth when I had the OPi downstairs, but upstairs where the CPU was being cooled by air conditioning, it wasn't being throttled as much, and so the RNG tests were coming up heavily biased as a result. Such are the vagaries of life.

So now it looks like I'm going to have to enforce stricter sampling of the random number circuit or use stronger unbiasing algorithms, like perhaps getting 1024 bits from the circuit and using SHA-256 or some other suitable hash algorithm to generate 256 less biased random bits from there. I'd prefer to avoid using such complex methods to unbias the circuit though.

I'm going to try to find some other promising circuit designs as well. The one described here sounds like it might work very well, but that requires me to construct a PCB and solder several surface mount devices. Seems I can manage that somehow, given that I managed to successfully solder an SOIC8 IC (an ATECC508a) onto a breakout board, but of course it will take much longer. The other circuit I've done experiments on, which involves driving the base-emitter junction of a transistor above breakdown voltage, requires a 12V+ supply. Maybe what I can do here is provide power to the whole board from a 12V power supply brick regulated down to 5V using a simple 7805-based regulator circuit, as it seems putting 5V on the GPIO header's power pins will power the whole board (at least according to this). That will save the 5V to 12V boost converter circuit which would otherwise take up a large amount of expansion board real estate.

background info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair,_Inc.
https://www.avalara.com/us/en/learn/sales-tax/south-dakota-wayfair.html

This SCOTUS decision essentially ruled that every state could compel sellers in any other state to collect tax on and/or report transactions for them. Most states have jumped on the bandwagon.

By my reading of the situation, small crowdfunding projects soliciting backers from every state are no longer feasible (for persons in the US).

Many states have a minimum threshold of only 200 transactions before an out-of-state seller would be required to collect sales tax. Before launching a crowdfunding project, one would have to know for certain that they were not going to have 200 or more backers in any one of these states who would be receiving a reward that qualified as a taxable good or service. Either that, or one would have to be prepared to collect and file sales taxes in all of these states. And what does that entail? It means that before the project even launched, the creator would have to be registered for sales tax purposes in all of these states. It seems that this must be done before any money changes hands, and it creates an ongoing filing requirement in each jurisdiction that persists even if the project were to end up with zero backers from that particular state (or maybe it never reaches a funding goal at all). Of course there is a deadline for filing at the end of each tax period and penalties for filing late.

There are services that will do the registration and file the tax returns on your behalf. As an example, taxjar.com will register you for ~$100/state and file your sales tax for ~$18/state. So let's say you had to do this for every state that has the 200 transactions threshold (24 states?)...

If you aren't already running a business that necessitates being registered for sales tax, are you going to spend thousands of dollars doing that to launch a 4-figure crowdfunding project for your self-produced coloring book, album, or whatever?

Surface Laptop 3 Specifications Mention Unreleased AMD Octa-Core CPUs & up to 16GB RAM

Rather than the chiplets used by other Zen 2 CPUs, this is likely to be a monolithic die. Graphics is probably Vega, not Navi. I have an aging AMD quad-core APU that would be blown out of the water by an 8-core Zen 2 Renoir.

I wouldn't pay much attention to the prices, that's just Microsoft emulating Apple.

Finally, this is worth a look:

Not worth it: AMD Ryzen 7 3750H is only 4 to 8 percent faster than the Ryzen 5 3550H

Ryzen 5 3550H = 8497 multi, 1886 single.
Ryzen 7 3750H = 9051 multi, 1962 single.

+6.5% multi, +4% single. Bad segmentation.

The chips aren't bad but Intel's do about the same (but better single-threaded) at lower TDPs, and Intel has options like the 6-core i7-9750H in $1,100+ laptops, or the 8-core i9-9880H in $1,800-$3,000 laptops. AMD Renoir could bring those core counts down to earth, and trade blows with Ice Lake.

Best quote of the day: (Emphasis mine)

J.King Ars Scholae Palatinae et Subscriptor
reply
Sep 20, 2019 10:12 PM

        Popular

Kruskal-Szekeres wrote:
If, after all these years and revelations about FB, you still use FB... you deserve FB.

Unfortunately, whether or not you even use it doesn't seem to matter all that much. They'll still collect information about, and leak data about you via people you know.
  +56 (+58 / -2)

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/facebook-suspends-tens-of-thousands-of-apps-in-ongoing-privacy-investigation/

[Update: 22 September 2019 2056 GMT]

Writing this journal made me think more about what the issues with building LineageOS for my phone entailed. As I mentioned, it's primarily an integration issue. As such, I reviewed the hardware specific Github repos I was using and noted that some of the hardware specific repos (android_device_htc_t6-common, android_device_htc_msm8960-common and android_device_htc_t6vzw) were being pulled from the LineageOS 14.1 branch (the last supported branch for my phone). So I changed the repos to pull from the only project I'm aware of that supports my phone under 15.1 (ResurrectionRemix, with repos from developer TARKZiM.

Et voila! LineageOS 15.1 now compiles (well, except for an initial error that the recovery image -- which I'm not using, I use TWRP instead) complained that it was too large for my recovery partition. Since I'm not using that recovery image anyway, increasing the allowed size of the recovery image got rid of that error.

I now have an installable rom for LineageOS 15.1. Sadly, it hangs on boot, without even the boot image animation being displayed. :( Logcat debugging is called for now, to determine what may be preventing the image from booting.

In the meantime, I'm convinced that further integration is required. It appears that TARKZiM, as well as the TWRP folks have moved to a universal codebase for the HTC One Max (t6-Univ) and I'm guessing I'm going to need to integrate that into my device tree.

I'll continue updating as things move (or don't) along.
[End Update 22 September 2019 2056 GMT]

So I have an HTC One Max (VZW version) that's served me pretty well for more than five years.

When I bought it back in 2014, I chose it over the HTC One and other phones for several reasons:
1. Big screen (5.9"/1080p support -- not that I watch video on it)
2. Extra battery life compared to other phones
3. External SDCard slot (I keep ~60GB of music on that)

It shipped with HTC's stock Android 4.4.2 (KitKat), along with HTC's bloatware and a few nice utilities.

In September, 2015 HTC released the *last* update (still 4.4) for the One Max and declared that it would not support future versions of Android on it.

For quite some time, I'd been annoyed that I didn't have access to the more granular permissions in Marshmallow and investigated custom roms for my phone.

I installed Cyanogenmod (now LineageOS) and really liked it. However, it did not have support for either the IR blaster or the fingerprint scanner on the One Max.

This led me to go back to the stock rom, as I was using both of them on a regular basis.

On a fairly regular basis, I'd check in on LineageOS development and see if the IR/fingerprint functionality was available.

Then it happened. LineageOS stopped supporting my phone after v14.1. Still with no IR/fingerprint sensor support.

Finally, a few months ago, I got so sick of the lack of features in my stock rom, I went looking around for new custom roms that support my phone. There wasn't much out there.

I poked around the forums on https://www.xda-developers.com/ and found very little in the way of stuff I could use.

Then I decided to see if I could port my phone to LineageOS myself. I started with LineageOS 15.1 (Android 8 Oreo) and failed miserably. Mostly because I had no experience with Android development.

So I went back and attempted to build the most recent version that was supported (LineageOS 14.1) and successfully built that.

I then went back to LineageOS 15.1 and tried again. It still failed. I did a ton of research and realized that the issues I was seeing were related to the hardware (t6vzw/msm8960) code (from 14.1) I was using wasn't compatible with the newer android version.

More research and I determined that this stuff isn't just poorly documented, discussions about porting and references to specific resources to assist were mostly non-existent.

It was around this time I discovered ResurrectionRemix (based on LineageOS) which *does* support my phone, With Android 7, 8 and 9.

I installed various versions, and they do, in fact, work on my phone. Currently, I have RR 7.0.2 (Android 9 pie) running on my phone.

But RR eats the battery much faster than the stock rom or the older versions of LineageOS. What's more, Wifi and cellular signals are not as strong as in supported versions. Even worse, there's an RRStats app that sends usage information back to the RR folks, and that cannot be removed or uninstalled. Assholes.

As such, I am continuing to try to build LineageOS for my phone. As many of you are aware, this requires an iterative approach:

1. Assemble the various code repos required;
2. Attempt the build;
3. Address any errors that cause the build to fail;
4. Go to (2) until the build completes successfully;
5. Profit!

I'm continuing with (2) and (3) and have addressed a bunch of problems. The issues I'm seeing now appear to be related to android API changes causing missing/malformed definitions.

One of the mechanisms I've used to address this is to use the Android version hardware specific code from builds (in this case, Resurrection Remix) that do support my hardware. This has helped considerably and the build goes much farther.

I'm currently stuck on some C++ definition errors ('member reference base type...is not a structure or union') which certainly shouldn't be too hard to address. I suspect that this is an integration issue, as the errors I'm seeing are in the hardware-specific code that I ripped from RR and am trying to build LineageOS.

I am emphatically *not* asking for coding assistance, as I want to work these issues out myself, but feel free to make suggestions and/or point me at resources that might give me some ideas as to how to address such integration issues.

Note that I'm not a developer by trade (rather I'm Unix/Linux guy from way back in the 90s, so I'm no stranger to building software and doing some debugging), so this has been and will continue to be a nice learning (C++, possibly some Java) experience for me.

Have other Soylentils engaged in this sort of project? I'd be interested to hear about your experiences and would appreciate suggestions and pointers to reference material that might help.

Feel free to chime in on the wasteland that is software support for phones older than two years and/or other Android ecosystem issues too.

'Shallow' hit-maker Mark Ronson puts brains before looks as he comes out as sapiosexual

Chart-topper Mark Ronson has come out as sapiosexual. In case you're not familiar with the term, it means being attracted to intelligence above other traits -- or, in other words, putting brains before looks or gender.

Ronson, 44, is known for a string of successful collaborations with A-list artists from Amy Winehouse and Adele to Miley Cyrus. This year, he won the Oscar for Best Original Song with "Shallow," interpreted by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in Hollywood's latest reimagining of "A Star Is Born."

Speaking on ITV's Good Morning Britain on Thursday, he said: "I feel like I identify as sapiosexual." Anchors Ben Shephard and Kate Garraway congratulated him on being "out and proud."

Author Nichi Hodgson appeared on the show earlier, defending the term. "The definition of sapiosexuality means intelligence first," she said. "I have dated men, women, transmen, transwomen, and across the gender spectrum and identify now as bisexual," she added. "The thing that has linked all these people has been their brains."

[...] "It's always existed, we just didn't have a word for it," she said.

Brain in a vat, that's how I like 'em.

For a long time now I've been for increased legal immigration and ease of legal immigration and just as strongly against illegal immigration. So you can see how I would be pretty big on border patrol being relatively heavy handed. That ended this afternoon.

I'm still just as strongly against illegal immigration but the border patrol being too aggressive is infringing on one of the most fundamental rights of the Mexican folks. Which is to say, catching the bigass flathead catfish that live in the Rio Grande. There's a lot of things I'm willing to allow for a solid border and rule of law but fucking with the pursuit of huge, delicious flathead is not among them. I'm going to have to revisit my views on river policy.

For them of you what ain't aware, most catfish over five pounds start getting unfortunate amounts of yellow, fatty meat that is other than the light, flaky, delicious meat that you expect to enjoy when experienced on a dinner plate. Now you can cut it out but that always seems wasteful, which is part of why a lot of catfish folks throw back anything over a certain size. Flatheads taste better than blues and channels (what you eat if you order catfish at a restaurant) to start with because they eat live bait almost exclusively and hardly have the yellow fat issue at all; if you catch an eighty pound flathead, you can expect to enjoy every bit of meat on it. They're also the most challenging to catch of the catfish in the US.