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When the shooting at the Highlands Ranch, CO, Stem school happened, the world reacted in shock and horror that yet another student used a firearm to hurt or kill other students in a place that is supposed to be one of the safest places for your child to be.

News agencies across the country immediately took action, and activist groups began planning events to promote gun control. One such event occurred at the very location the shooting occurred. Students were duped into attending, believing it was a vigil of some kind, but walked away when they found out that the atrocity they endured was being politicized.

Frustrated, crying and angry, #STEMschool shooting victims hold an impromptu vigil in the rain Wednesday after leaving a gun-control vigil they felt inappropriately politicized their trauma. (They asked that I not photograph their faces close up, and I respected their wishes.) pic.twitter.com/cksRXGtYQA

        — Trevor Hughes (@TrevorHughes) May 9, 2019

Facebook posts from concerned people dotted the social media site and Twitter was ablaze with anti-gun rhetoric once again.

And then it all suddenly went silent.

Now, the media seems far less interested in the shooting. An odd turnaround for the media who take every opportunity to hammer home the idea that guns are the problem in this nation, not something else. Why? It’s because the identity of the shooters was released, and it doesn’t fall in line with any of the approved columns for a media-based attack.

They found that one of the shooters is gay and another is transgendered and biologically female, as NBC reported in the update about her. Even NBC buried these facts in their own report about it, choosing instead to call the gay shooter a “bully” instead of highlighting their identities and backgrounds first:

The suspected shooter, Devon Erickson, “would whisper, like get really close and kinda put his arm around you, and whisper in your ear, ‘don’t come to school tomorrow,'” said Kevin Cole, a former student of STEM School Highlands Ranch, during an interview on “Today.”

        Erickson, 18, and a juvenile, who police identify as a girl but who prefers male pronouns, are accused of entering the K-12 school with handguns Tuesday. NBC News is not identifying the juvenile suspect.

One of the shooters also expressed his hatred for Christians according to Heavy, which is also unfitting for reports as Christians are always the bad guys in the story.

“You know what I hate? All these Christians who hate gays, yet in the bible, it says in Deuteronomy 17:12-13, if someone doesn’t do what their priest tells them to do, they are supposed to die. It has plenty of crazy stuff like that, but all they get out of it is ‘ewwwwww gays,’” wrote Erickson in a Facebook post.

There was even anti-Christian messaging spraypainted on the shooter’s car before the attack, and the words “F*** SOCIETY.”

Car towed from #stemshooting suspect's home apparently has "F*** SOCIETY" spray painted on the side. Also "666" and a what looks like a pentagram sprayed on the hood. pic.twitter.com/e6QX3lq4v3

        — John Fenton (@higuysimjohn) May 8, 2019

Worst of all, the shooter appeared to be a Democrat who posted memes and messages from the hard-left Facebook group “Occupy Democrats.”

None of this falls in line with what the shooter is supposed to be according to what the media likes to tell us. For mainstream press, the shooter is supposed to be white, male, straight, extremely right-leaning, and bonus points if he’s supposedly Christian. However, both of these shooters fall into their most protected groups.

Judging by how the media coverage and subsequent fallout from school shootings have gone in the past, the media seems absolutely silent in comparison now, but it’s easy to see why. All of its usual strawmen have been stripped away and its left with nothing but the cold reality that there was something mentally wrong with the two shooters.

All the shooters throughout history, when put together, are a diverse lot. They range from white to Middle-Eastern, to black. They’re left, right, white-supremacists and anti-Christian, gay and straight, women and men. While some killers tend to share more similarities with other killers, the point is clear: It’s not just what your background is.

There was clearly something wrong in the heads of the people who engage in these murders. However, the media doesn’t seem to be interested in investigating the demonstrable fact. They’ve now, for the most part, walked away from the Denver Stem school story. The students don’t seem to be as into making a political spectacle as some of the Parkland students were, and the shooters don’t fit the narrative.

The media loves bloodshed, but not bloodshed it can’t use. It doesn’t care about how safe you are, and I’d venture to say that it waits with bated breath for the next opportunity. I wish I was being hyperbolic, but the media has clearly demonstrated that I’m not.

https://www.redstate.com/brandon_morse/2019/05/11/medias-sudden-disinterest-denver-stem-school-shooting-proves-greater-interests-agendas/

Milan - The Next Frontier? (22m28s)

Notes from SemiAccurate's CC with Susquehanna this morning

Various sources said things like "Milan will have 80 cores" or "Milan will have 15 chiplets".

The speculation, based on sources and other reasoning, is that the the 8-core chiplet will continue to be used going forward. They have great yields compared to bigger monolithic chips and AMD can simply make them smaller in size rather than boost core count of each to 10-12 cores. Zen 2 Epyc uses eight 8-core chiplets for up to 64 total cores, and a future version could use ten chiplets to get to 80 cores.

AMD and Cray will make a 1.5 exaflops supercomputer.

In fact while AMD has kept the details on the technology light, it sounds like this version of [Infinity Fabric] will be the most advanced version yet. AMD is specifically noting that it’s an “incredibly” coherent fabric, calling it the first fully optimized CPU + GPU design for supercomputing. AMD’s GPUs and CPUs will be arranged in a 4-to-1 ratio, with 4 GPUs for each EPYC CPU. It’s worth noting that AMD’s slide shows a mesh with every GPU connected to the CPU and two other GPUs, but I’m not reading too much into this quite yet, as AMD hasn’t disclosed any other details on the IF setup.

Design and Analysis of an APU for Exascale Computing

AMD may try to do something like create a server/HPC APU that consists of ten 8-core CPU chiplets, four GPU chiplets(?), and the I/O chiplet, with DRAM/HBM stacked on top of the I/O die which emits less heat.

If the GPU thing is a red herring but Milan does have 14 CPU chiplets + 1 I/O chiplet, that's a whopping 112 cores. Even if clock speeds regressed a bit, it could offer more multithreaded performance per dollar than predecessors.

Right now, I'm surfing the Soylent waters using this procedure:

1. Go to my user preferences / comments page
2. Assign an automod of -6 to foes
3. Assign an automod of -6 to anonymous posters
4. Save my user preferences
5. Set the viewing threshold to 0 and [✓] Save and then click change in a story's comments
6. Assign trolls as a "foe" by clicking the little face by one of their posts
   • Repeat #6 as needed

So what the above should do is bury comments (stop them from being expanded in a comment listing) posted by the trolls I have placed in my foes list, and also all anonymous posters, which also should keep the trolls who use anonymous posts to get past the foes list automod (and those who are simply trolling anonymously) buried as well.

The annoying downside of this approach is that anonymous posts from non-foes also get buried, because the Soylent code doesn't know who the anonymous poster is, so it cannot determine if the anonymous poster is on my foes list.

That lack of knowledge could be addressed for logged-in users, as the Soylent code does know who it is when logged-in users [✓] Post Anonymously, but short of requiring log-in to post, that isn't possible.

Having actually tried the above -6,-6 setup now, I have found the general burying of anonymous posts to be less painful than accidentally reading the various troll garbage (I read very fast, gulping down whole paragraphs at a glance... so to even glance at a post is to peruse a good chunk of it, no matter how troll-ish and/or awful it is.)

Further, I know that anonymous posters could just as securely create a unique pseudonym and post as logged-in users with no loss of anonymity, other than that people would know both post A and post B are both from the same author (a total win, frankly.) Considering this, I see no decent excuse for posting without logging in anyway, and so feel quite justified in brushing off those who can't be arsed to log in.

I could live with the above -6,-6 setup, except... it doesn't actually work.

The Top-Level Comment Bug

Soylent's "Apply automod" feature does not obey its settings when a comment is at the outer, or "top" level of a story's comments. Not if the commenter is anon; and not if they're in my foes list. Top-level comments appear no matter what the automod is set to. Ouch. Garbage out, ...garbage in.

But it's even worse than that. If you click on a comment link (for instance, one that has replies on your user page, or on the replies notification page), then first-level replies in the resulting comment subset also don't obey the automod(s.) It doesn't matter if the comments aren't actually top-level in the entire comment stream; if they're first-order comments to the comment one is now looking at, then the bug manifests again.

I humbly submit that this should receive dev attention ASAP; the whole point of automods is made moot by these behaviors.

--
I'd agree with you, but then
we would both be wrong.

I'm not sure we actually have any mothers here... I can only think of one cis-female (Azuma) and one noncis-female(can't remember the name... not sure if they even post here anymore). Oh, and cafebabe. I don't think that any of them are mothers yet though.

Nonetheless, maybe there is a lurker mom. Azuma might be a cat mom, but if so, her cats wont get her anything because cats are selfish like that.

I do want to make a special call out to Mrs Gaaaaark, because she is a fucking saint.

And to all you ungrateful sons who still have moms with us, CALL YOUR MOM this Sunday. She would love to hear from you!

Any good children have special plans for you mom? If so share them below so all of us late planners can steal your idea.

As for me, my lack of planning was able to successfully delay Mother's day until next weekend. My siblings are taking mom out Sat and Sun, so she is fully booked this weekend. My plan is to take her and my daughter to a local petting zoo. My mom can parade her around like a proud grandma. Maybe I'll make some sandwiches for a picnic there... We'll see.

Not sure what to do for my wife. I might make my daughter make a card for her tonight so we can present it on Sunday.

Anyways, post your plans below so I can steal them if they are better than my ideas!

Right now, the only way to effectively block a logged in time waster is to::

1. Make them a "foe" by clicking the little face by one of their posts
2. Assign an automod of -6 to foes and save the prefs
3. Set the viewing threshold to 0 and ✓save and then click change in a story's comments

Now, no foes show up (except at the top level of comments, because top level comments are broken, apparently on purpose, but that's a different complaint, I guess.)

The main problem with this is that many AC posts get unfairly modded to -1. Those will also disappear. That's a loss.

Further, if a registered user decides they're going to post anon to get around this, you could assign a -1 mod to anons... which will work, but also cut off the anons completely unless someone mods them up. And of course, some of our trolls are using sock puppet accounts to mod themselves up. So that's not foolproof either. But it at least requires them to work harder.

So what to do? It would be much, much, much better if we could say "foes are -10" and threshold is -1, the lowest a post can normally go with a hand mod — that's assuming the points system is still used to do this. That would really go a long way towards solving the problem, because anons would not be penalized by this, we could keep our reading threshold at -1 without a problem, because foes would be automatically submerged below -1.

Might not be that easy. TMB could throw an oar in here, codewise.

Or, just "if in foes list, collapse the post", which would be much better — and at some level, the system's already doing most of that, because presence in the foes list is the only way it knows to assign the automod.

The troll anon posts would still be there, but remember, there's always that little [-] button in the subject bar of each comment. You can nuke those exceptions pretty easily.

But I still don't want to ever see some of these registered users. Any time at all they take is a waste.

So anyway: the site would be much improved if we could mute at least the registered user trolls. Of which we definitely have a few. So for now, foes are -6 and my threshold is 0, which almost works, barring the loss of mis-modded anons (sad face) and the top level comment hiding being broken.

South Korea's booming 'webtoons' put Japan's print manga on notice

Should Japanese manga publishers, who have for years invested first and foremost in developing print content, jump on the webtoon bandwagon to strengthen their outreach to a foreign, tech-savvy audience?

Opinions among industry insiders and experts are mixed, but at least for Hideki Egami, a former editor at leading publisher Shogakukan, the answer is a definitive yes.

“Sales for comic magazines in Japan have long been trending downward — we don’t know how much further the domestic market for print manga will shrink,” Egami said.

“Japanese publishers are now at a stage where they can’t overlook the need for going digital and overseas. … Webtoons, I think, are the most reasonable way forward.”

Vertically optimized

Unlike Japanese manga, which in most cases are first marketed for a print audience and only subsequently promoted online via apps, webtoons cater to digital device users from the get-go: Their format has already been optimized for personal computers or smartphones.

Webtoons typically scroll vertically and are in full color, as opposed to traditional manga, which are often black and white and read horizontally. Once they spread on popular manga apps in Japan, the digital South Korean comics immediately attracted a youth following here.

There are many reasons. Who owns who is unclear.

Some people in a rural area say they keep a cat because: "it keeps the vermin down".

What does that mean exactly?

1. the cat reduces the population of vermin?

2. the cat has a remarkable ability to not vomit up the vermin?

The google definition of vermin, and especially the google images page for vermin, would suggest that meaning 2 is what is intended by that "keeps the vermin down" phrase.

Third-Gen Ryzen Threadripper Zen 2 CPUs Mysteriously Vanish From AMD's 2019 Roadmap + Tom's

Delaying Threadripper 3 might make a lot of sense. If Ryzen 3 doubles the max core count to 16, and Epyc 2 doubles it to 64, Threadripper 2 will continue to have up to 32 cores. It is unknown what core count Threadripper 3 will have. They could use 4-8 chiplets to provide 32-64 cores. Most high-end users probably don't need it right now, Threadripper 2 is still a better value than Intel, and AMD could just cut Threadripper 2 prices to get rid of the inventory.

AMD Navi GPU Rumors: Navi 20 Based Radeon Instinct Delayed To Q1 2020, 7nm Navi Can’t Reach 7nm Vega Clocks, Alleged Radeon RX Navi Specifications

What is known is that Navi will still be based on AMD's Graphics Core Next (GCN) design which is showing its age. It effectively has a 4,096 stream processor limit.

PS5 will include a Navi GPU, and the GPU or SoC will apparently include hardware acceleration for ray tracing. It's not known if desktop Navi GPUs will have this capability.

From the article:

Navi is meant to be the last GCN based GPU design by AMD and as such, should be the most optimized version of the architecture we have seen to date with multiple improvements being delivered. However, the report says that early Navi samples are not even able to match Vega 20 clock speeds and the Navi GPUs which can meet the frequency targets are reportedly facing major thermal and power consumption issues. We heard similar rumors for the Vega 10 and Vega 20 parts before they launched and those rumors turned out to be very close to the real image when the cards finally landed into consumer’s hands.

It may be possible that AMD is trying to uplift the performance by increasing frequency while sacrificing thermals and power efficiency. That is pretty much what Radeon VII was but it’s still much early to say if that’s the truth as the cards won’t be available until next year.

Worst case scenario: Navi is lackluster due to being GCN-based and power consumption issues, and its first non-GCN successor ends up lackluster due to a lack of optimizations.

A leaked/alleged lineup is given in the article showing Radeon VII or better performance starting at $430, and RTX 2070 performance at $330. If that holds true, Navi could be a price/performance win over Nvidia, just not as good as it could have been.