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No surprise there.

The Trump "Legal Defense" Fund has raised more that $150,000,000 since election day, reports the failing Washington Post:

President Trump’s political operation has raised more than $150 million since Election Day, using a blizzard of misleading appeals about the election to shatter fundraising records set during the campaign, according to people with knowledge of the contributions.

The influx of political donations is one reason Trump and some allies are inclined to continue a legal onslaught and public affairs blitz focused on baseless claims of election fraud, even as their attempts have repeatedly failed in court and as key states continue to certify wins for President-elect Joe Biden.

Much of the money raised since the election is likely to go into an account for the president to use on political activities after he leaves office, while some of the contributions will go toward what’s left of the legal fight.
[...]
The surge of donations is largely from small-dollar donors, campaign officials say, tapping into the president’s base of loyal and fervent donors who tend to contribute the most when they feel the president is under siege or facing unfair political attacks. The campaign has sent about 500 post-election fundraising pitches to donors, often with hyperbolic language about voter fraud and the like.
[...]
The donations are purportedly being solicited for the Official Election Defense Fund, which is blazed in all red across the Trump campaign’s website, with an ominous picture of the president outside the White House.

There is no such account, however. The fundraising requests are being made by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising committee that raises money for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. As of Nov. 18, that committee also shares its funds with Save America, a new leadership PAC that Trump set up in early November and which he can use to fund his post-presidency activities.
[...]
According to the fine print in the latest fundraising appeals, 75 percent of each contribution to the joint fundraising committee would first go toward the Save America leadership PAC and the rest would be shared with the party committee, to help with the party’s operating expenses. This effectively means that the vast majority of low-dollar donations under the current agreement would go toward financing the president’s new leadership PAC, instead of efforts to support the party or to finance voting lawsuits.

“Small donors who give to Trump thinking they are financing an ‘official election defense fund’ are in fact helping pay down the Trump campaign’s debt or funding his post-presidential political operation,” said Brendan Fischer, who directs federal regulatory work at the Campaign Legal Center, which supports greater restrictions on the role of money in politics. “The average donor who gives in response to Trump’s appeal for funds to ‘stop the fraud’ likely doesn’t realize that their money is actually retiring Trump’s debt or funding his leadership PAC.”

Suckers. But then, Trump has always been about fleecing the gullible.

If it weren't so sad it would be funny.

Exhausted borderline serotonin-syndrome rant. From the heart, but probably hard to read.

Hi, conservatives, it's me, a random socialist liberal.

There's been a lot of hate lately, and I know many of you won't listen to this, but I figured I'd write it out.

I wanted to talk about what comes next, and the election, and I wanted to give you insight into the honest liberal mind at this moment in time.

I know you probably think Trump won the election and was defrauded. We don't see it that way, but we see it different than you probably expect us to.

We feel our victory this election was a narrow and hollow one. We don't think we *dominated* Trump, we think we barely managed to defeat him.
You actually gained a lot of power in Congress, which is something we're worried about.
That's a big part of why we're so dismissive of election fraud claims, because the only win we got out of it was Biden, and it wasn't even that much of a win.
Everything else was losses across the board.

Most of us actually want you to get the courts to look into Trump's fraud claims.
For one, it's peace of mind for everyone.

We're a bit nervous about the Supreme Court because we question the integrity and impartiality of the new justices,
but most of us won't try and stop you from getting the case in front of them, that wouldn't be fair.

Every liberal I've talked to has something else on their mind as well.

We're hurt that so many of you voted for Trump again. We're hurt that it was this much of a struggle to get him out.
We figured you'd have woken up by now and seen him for what he is.

We know he parrots your values, but he sure doesn't practice them.

Average Joe Liberal doesn't hate Trump just because he's conservative, despite what the media on both sides makes it seem like.
We hate him cuz we think he's a dishonest, degenerate, hypocritical turd, and yes, he's a bit racist. In short, we think he's a bad person and untrustworthy,
and insincere in his motivations, and we think he's using you and telling you what you want to hear.

You're probably worried about the future of this country. I can't stress this enough, but we're terrified for the USA.
We try not to talk about it, but we see things sliding down to a very bad path.

No, not where gun control is illegal or abortions are banned, we're worried about tyranny, income inequality, and economic devastation.

I know a lot of you think we don't care about freedom, or that we naively sign it away, but you're wrong.
Some of the weirdos in Congress and in the media are like that, sure, and some freaks on Tumblr,
but that's not the majority opinion.

I know a lot of you voted for Trump because the rural areas are being neglected and your economies are suffering.
We're in the same boat, but in a different way.
Here in the cities, we're being eaten alive by big corporations, stuck in dead-end retail jobs with draconian policies and no time or room for growth.
You're sheltered a bit from it, but in cities, the presence of corporate abuse is much more widely felt and seen.

We do want to raise taxes on the rich, but most of us don't want to raise taxes on *you*. We want the rich to shoulder the burden, but we don't want the poor to have their taxes go up.
I mean, the way we see it, the rich will still be rich.

The truth is, we're both worried about the economy and creeping authoritarianism.
You're more vocal on the free speech stuff, (which I personally agree with), and we're more vocal on the police stuff,
but the truth is, we're both worried about money and freedom.

Some of my friends are suspicious that Biden has appointed Republicans, we're afraid they'll sell out to corporations. I'll admit we tend to see Republican politicians as much more susceptible to bribes and corruption than Democrats, though we know Democrats do it often too.
But, what this should show you, is that Biden is making an honest attempt to extend an olive branch, at the detriment to the support of his base.

We'll work with you, but you have to show good faith, too. We remember the "liberal tears" thing, and in truth, the fact you supported it did affect us.
It made us angry and made us think worse of your character. We didn't really do anything like that to you, at least not on the same scale.

So, can you be kind and civil, if we are, too?

Can we work together, for the goals of freedom and economic viability?
Can we stop demonizing each other and realize we essentially want the same thing?

This gets back to what I said about us gradually becoming a two class society. You have one group of people that are utilizing the countless tools this society offers to enrich themselves and they are seeing rewards like never before. And then you have another class of people who sit around, play on the internet all day, complain they don't have as much as other people, and are increasingly overtly asking governments to take it from other people and give it to them.

Looks to me like the developed world has changed. It's not so much a society of haves and have nots, but rather a society of does and does not. What remains a mystery to me is why the "do nots" think the rest will bother to support their lifestyle -not whether they should (I think I understand the moral argument here such as it is), but rather will.

For example, in the course of my work, I routinely run into people who are in their twenties and have never worked a job in their lives. Not only are they unprepared for a job, they usually are unprepared for interacting with people different from themselves (particularly, guests). The good sign is that most can and do learn. Then there are people, sometimes very advanced in age (60s, for example) who have yet to do that.

I imagine a lot of the support for UBI comes from people who just want to keep avoiding that particular thing. It probably also explains some of the people here who have so much trouble with other peoples' viewpoints.

My take is that nowadays, the most advanced societies of the world are spending considerable effort to create adult babies. We'll see how that turns out, but my small view of that doesn't look pretty.

AMD Ryzen 7 5800U Flagship 8 Core Cezanne ‘Zen 3’ APU Benchmark Leaks Out, Up To 38% Faster Than 4800U in Single-Core Performance

One of the biggest changes in the Ryzen 7 5800U is the cache redesign which now packs 16 MB of L3 cache versus the 8 MB of L3 cache on Ryzen 7 4800U. The L2 cache will still be 4 MB or 512 KB per core. This would allow for reduced latency and faster inter-core interconnect bandwidth.

The doubling of L3 cache to 16 MB is interesting, and could have been necessary to reproduce Zen 3's benefits in Cezanne. From a Renoir review:

AMD’s Mobile Revival: Redefining the Notebook Business with the Ryzen 9 4900HS (A Review)

For Renoir, AMD decided to minimize the amount of L3 cache to 1 MB per core, compared to 4 MB per core on the desktop Ryzen variants and 4 MB per core for Threadripper and EPYC. The reduction in the size of the cache does three things: (a) makes the die smaller and easier to manufacture, (b) makes the die use less power when turned on, but (c) causes more cache misses and accesses to main memory, causing a slight performance per clock decrease.

With (c), normally doubling (2x) the size of the cache gives a square root of 2 decrease in cache misses. Therefore going down from 4 MB on the other designs to 1 MB on these designs should imply that there will be twice as many cache misses from L3, and thus twice as many memory accesses. However, because AMD uses a non-inclusive cache policy on the L3 that accepts L2 cache evictions only, there’s actually less scope here for performance loss. Where it might hurt performance most is actually in integrated graphics, however AMD says that as a whole the Zen2+Vega8 Renoir chip has a substantial uplift in performance compared to the Zen+Vega11 Picasso design that went into the Surface Laptop 3.

[...] It’s important to note that even though the chip has 8 MB of L3 total across the two CCX domains, each core can only access the L3 within its own CCX, and not the L3 of the other CCX domain. So while the chip is correct in saying there is 8 MB of L3 total, no core has access to all the L3. This applies to the desktop and enterprise chips as well (in case it wasn’t explicitly stated before).

It sounds like each core of an 8-core Cezanne APU should be able to access up to 16 MB, from 4 MB.

The Ryzen 7 5800U is reportedly equipped with an enhanced Vega GPU featuring 8 CUs or 512 cores, clocked in at 2000 MHz.

That's 14% more frequency than the 4800U's 8 Vega CUs. Probably on the same "7nm" node. AMD is currently delivering only modest graphics improvements on its top APUs, since many of them will be paired with discrete mobile graphics chips. AMD's lower-powered Van Gogh should have up to a Zen 2 quad-core paired with RDNA 2 graphics (faster graphics than Cezanne seems likely), and Cezanne's successor "Rembrandt" will have RDNA 2 graphics (or RDNA 2+).

AMD will apparently also be releasing a Renoir (Zen 2) refresh known as "Lucienne", using the same 5000-series naming. Nobody liked that.

The Ryzen 7 5700U (Zen 2/Lucienne) will outperform the Ryzen 7 4800U, using the same 8 cores and 16 threads with a slightly higher boost clock and better graphics clock speeds, and will probably be found at cheaper price points than the 4800U.

6-core Ryzen 5 5600U (Zen 3/Cezanne) will have 12 MB of L3 cache, still an improvement over Renoir. Ryzen 3 5400U (Zen 3/Cezanne) will have 8 MB of L3 cache, usable in full by 4 cores.

AMD’s Next-Gen Rembrandt Ryzen APUs To Feature Enhanced Zen 3 CPU & RDNA 2 GPU Cores on 6nm Process Node, DDR5-5200 Support

Rembrandt will have some significant improvements over Cezanne, landing in 2022. It looks like every APU with RDNA 2 graphics in it will have "CVML", which I take to mean machine learning acceleration using the graphics cores. Rembrandt will also have PCIe4 and LPDDR5, on TSMC's "6nm" process, which may only offer a density increase (no performance or efficiency improvements).

The same chart in that article points to all Zen 4 desktop CPUs having a graphics chiplet, which would be a nice change.

Saudi Arabia denies crown prince held 'secret meeting' with Israeli PM

Saudi Arabia's foreign minister has denied that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to the Gulf kingdom on Sunday to secretly meet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

"No such meeting occurred," Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud tweeted.

Mr Netanyahu has declined to comment on the Israeli reports that he was on board a private jet that travelled from Tel Aviv to the Red Sea city of Neom.

[...] Also on Monday, a delegation of senior Israeli officials travelled to Sudan on what would also be the first such visit to a formerly hostile country, an unnamed Israeli official confirmed. The countries are expected to map out areas of co-operation.

Citing unnamed Israeli sources, Israeli public broadcaster Kan and other media earlier reported that Mr Netanyahu and the head of the Mossad intelligence service, Yossi Cohen, attended talks in Saudi Arabia on Sunday evening with Crown Prince Mohammed and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu visits Saudi Arabia, official says

The jews make maple syrup so expensive. The lizard people are forcing you to throw out your milk to control your mind. George Soros brainwashes teenage boys into becoming homos. Nancy Pelosi drinks the blood of little children. It's all so obvious, if you know where to look!

The essay below discusses similar ridiculousness. Time to take sides, Soylentils! Do you support the idea that there's a global Zionist conspiracy of lizard people and adrenochrome addicts, or do you have a functioning frontal lobe?

Conspiracy theories come in all shapes and sizes, but perhaps the most common form is the Global Cabal theory. A recent survey of 26,000 people in 25 countries asked respondents whether they believe there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.”

Thirty seven percent of Americans replied that this is “definitely or probably true.” So did 45 percent of Italians, 55 percent of Spaniards and 78 percent of Nigerians.

Conspiracy theories, of course, weren’t invented by QAnon; they’ve been around for thousands of years. Some of them have even had a huge impact on history. Take Nazism, for example. We normally don’t think about Nazism as a conspiracy theory. Since it managed to take over an entire country and launch World War II, we usually consider Nazism an “ideology,” albeit an evil one.

But at its heart, Nazism was a Global Cabal theory based on this anti-Semitic lie: “A cabal of Jewish financiers secretly dominates the world and are plotting to destroy the Aryan race. They engineered the Bolshevik Revolution, run Western democracies, and control the media and the banks. Only Hitler has managed to see through all their nefarious tricks — and only he can stop them and save humanity.”

Understanding the common structure of such Global Cabal theories can explain both their attractiveness — and their inherent falsehood.

The Structure

Global Cabal theories argue that underneath the myriad events we see on the surface of the world lurks a single sinister group. The identity of this group may change: Some believe the world is secretly ruled by Freemasons, witches or Satanists; others think it’s aliens, reptilian lizard-people or sundry other cliques.

But the basic structure remains the same: The group controls almost everything that happens, while simultaneously concealing this control.

Global Cabal theories take particular delight in uniting opposites. Thus the Nazi conspiracy theory said that on the surface, communism and capitalism look like irreconcilable enemies, right? Wrong! That’s exactly what the Jewish cabal wants you to think! And you might think that the Bush family and the Clinton family are sworn rivals, but they’re just putting on a show — behind closed doors, they all go to the same Tupperware parties.

From these premises, a working theory of the world emerges. Events in the news are a cunningly designed smoke screen aimed at deceiving us, and the famous leaders that distract our attention are mere puppets in the hands of the real rulers.

The Lure

Global Cabal theories are able to attract large followings in part because they offer a single, straightforward explanation to countless complicated processes. Our lives are repeatedly rocked by wars, revolutions, crises and pandemics. But if I believe some kind of Global Cabal theory, I enjoy the comforting feeling that I do understand everything.

The war in Syria? I don’t need to study Middle Eastern history to comprehend what’s happening there. It’s part of the big conspiracy. The development of 5G technology? I don’t need to do any research on the physics of radio waves. It’s the conspiracy. The Covid-19 pandemic? It has nothing to do with ecosystems, bats and viruses. It’s obviously part of the conspiracy.

The skeleton key of Global Cabal theory unlocks all the world’s mysteries and offers me entree into an exclusive circle — the group of people who understand. It makes me smarter and wiser than the average person and even elevates me above the intellectual elite and the ruling class: professors, journalists, politicians. I see what they overlook — or what they try to conceal.

The Flaw

Global Cabal theories suffer from the same basic flaw: They assume that history is very simple. The key premise of Global Cabal theories is that it is relatively easy to manipulate the world. A small group of people can understand, predict and control everything, from wars to technological revolutions to pandemics.

Particularly remarkable is this group’s ability to see 10 moves ahead on the global board game. When they release a virus somewhere, they can predict not only how it will spread through the world, but also how it will affect the global economy a year later. When they unleash a political revolution, they can control its course. When they start a war, they know how it will end.

But of course, the world is much more complicated. Consider the American invasion of Iraq, for example. In 2003, the world’s sole superpower invaded a medium-sized Middle Eastern country, claiming it wanted to eliminate the country’s weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam Hussein’s regime. Some suspected that it also wouldn’t have minded the chance to gain hegemony over the region and dominate the vital Iraqi oil fields. In pursuit of its goals, the United States deployed the best army in the world and spent trillions of dollars.

Fast forward a few years, and what were the results of this tremendous effort? A complete debacle. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and the country was plunged into chaos. The big winner of the war was actually Iran, which became the dominant power in the region.

So should we conclude that George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld were actually undercover Iranian moles, executing a devilishly clever Iranian plot? Not at all. Instead, the conclusion is that it is incredibly difficult to predict and control human affairs.

You don’t need to invade a Middle-Eastern country to learn this lesson. Whether you’ve served on a school board or local council, or merely tried to organize a surprise birthday party for your mom, you probably know how difficult it is to control humans. You make a plan, and it backfires. You try to keep something a secret, and the next day everybody is talking about it. You conspire with a trusted friend, and at the crucial moment they stab you in the back.

Global Cabal theories ask us to believe that while it is very difficult to predict and control the actions of 1,000 or even 100 humans, it is surprisingly easy to puppet master nearly eight billion.

The Reality

There are, of course, many real conspiracies in the world. Individuals, corporations, organizations, churches, factions and governments are constantly hatching and pursuing various plots. But that is precisely what makes it so hard to predict and control the world in its entirety.

In the 1930s, the Soviet Union really was conspiring to ignite communist revolutions throughout the world; capitalist banks were employing all kinds of dodgy strategies; the Roosevelt administration was planning to re-engineer American society in the New Deal; and the Zionist movement pursued its plan to establish a homeland in Palestine. But these and countless other schemes often collided, and there wasn’t a single group of people running the whole show.

Today, too, you are probably the target of many conspiracies. Your co-workers may be plotting to turn the boss against you. A big pharmaceutical corporation may be bribing your doctor to give you harmful opioids. Another big corporation may be pressuring politicians to block environmental regulations and allow it to pollute the air you breathe. Some tech-giant may be busy hacking your private data. A political party may be gerrymandering election districts in your state. A foreign government may be trying to foment extremism in your country. These could all be real conspiracies, but they are not part of a single global plot.

Sometimes a corporation, a political party or a dictator does manage to gather a significant part of all the world’s power into its hands. But when such a thing happens, it’s almost impossible to keep it hush-hush. With great power comes great publicity.

Indeed, in many cases great publicity is a prerequisite for gaining great power. Lenin, for example, would never have won power in Russia by avoiding the public gaze. And Stalin at first was much fonder of scheming behind closed-doors, but by the time he monopolized power in the Soviet Union, his portrait was hanging in every office, school and home from the Baltic to the Pacific. Stalin’s power depended on this personality cult. The idea that Lenin and Stalin were just a front for the real behind-the-scenes rulers contradicts all historical evidence.

Realizing that no single cabal can secretly control the entire world is not just accurate — it is also empowering. It means that you can identify the competing factions in our world, and ally yourself with some groups against others. That’s what real politics is all about.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/opinion/global-cabal-conspiracy-theories.html

A friend told me. I had to google it to believe it.

Apparently, Trump attorneys now say long-dead Hugo Chavez (2013) conspired to rig the 2020 election against Trump.

I mean, geez, I can't even make up stuff that crazy . . . and it's not like I don't try sometimes.

Rigging the election is serious business and Hugo Chavez should get life in prison.

Giuliani claims ‘Chavez approved’ Venezuelan election technology was used to rig election

Donald Trump’s election fraud lawyers – who describe themselves as an “elite strike force team” – have alleged that the vote was hacked and ballots switched from the president to Joe Biden, thanks to technology developed in Venezuela.

Rudy Giuliani, Mr Trump’s personal lawyer, leading the team, said that the election had been rigged by “a company owned by affiliates of Chavez and Maduro”.

[ . . . ] “This is real. It is not made up. There is no one here who engages in fantasy. I know crimes – I can smell them.”

Trump’s New Vote Fraud Theory Is So Much Crazier Than You Realize

[ . . . ] Like so many of his outrages, this has numbed the public and caused the absurdity to recede into the background of events. It is therefore easy to miss the fact that the conspiracy theory Trump has begun circulating over the last several days is vastly crazier than the ones he used to promote. It’s as if, Spaceship Trump, last seen leaving Earth for the moon, it has now reached distant galaxies.

Dear Joe Biden: are you kidding me?
Perfluorooctanoic acid

Vatican asks Instagram how pope's account liked photo of Brazilian model

Mike Pompeo makes unprecedented visit to Israeli settlements

It's called a career because I career from disaster to disaster. I'm seriously thinking about changing jobs again. I've been in the current one for several years.

What's happened? Well, I'm quite lucky in that I've had plenty of opportunities to play with cool toys, to meet very clever people and to write code.

However, I have skills, learned previously that are under-utilised, if used at all, and I'm frightened of losing them.

I'm also suffering from PHB. I know the term is pejorative, and the guy who's the PHB is actually a nice guy. I get on with him. There's not a bad bone in his body, but he's acting as my project leader.

The thing is, I'm training him, but he doesn't know what he doesn't know, and I'm doing a bad job of explaining to him. So he keeps asking the same questions and making the same suggestions.

I have been asked to write a device driver. It's not the first one I've worked on, but it is the most complex, and I need to make sure it works properly. So, in order to understand the behaviour that needs to be implemented I have identified some FOSS that I can build on - to stand on the shoulders of giants - and I have implemented a test harness with unit tests and some model code in user-land to understand the behaviour before putting it in the kernel. I also have a nice automated build in a VM to mitigate against crashes.

There are a number of problems. This is a waterfall company. That means weeks and months of writing documents and drawing diagrams and leaving coding to the last minute, finding out it doesn't work and frantically rewriting it several times, doubling the schedule and blowing the budget. The fact that I have already found and fixed several flaws in various plans (including a buggy API, provided by good friends, that didn't even compile) doesn't register.

Second, drawing the pictures commits you to implementing the picture in code, even if you find out later that something was misunderstood or missing. Then you have to argue with a team and go round in circles to get it changed.

Third, and this takes the biscuit, "So is a driver a kernel module?"

In this context, yes. Yes it certainly is. This is not FUSE where there is a bare minimum kernel module with call-backs into user space.

Fourth, "I want you to use ${C++LIBRARY} in it."

It's kernel code. It's in C. And the functionality that your ${C++LIBRARY} provides in user space is something that the kernel already provides itself. We should be using what the kernel provides. "But..."

And we're supposed to be doing these new projects faster, cheaper and better than before.

20 years to go until I can retire. Argh!

A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon - Playing with reality (20min+ read. A bit lengthy, but it worth)

In brief - apophenia. Just a tad more elaborated - induced/guided aphonenia.

What's fascinating is the buttons of human psyche that are pushed to sink people deep into the rabbit holes:
- Follow The Breadcrumbs - don't tell, just select the dots that are to be connected
- The Eureka Effect - the rush of the Aha! moments and the feeling of being rewarded
- Lamestream Media - passivate against the reality that's not supportive to the agenda
- Community - sense of belonging, behavior reinforcement; a population large and motivated enough to adopt an evolutionary strategy in selecting the best CT-es

All the above are exemplified - and these examples is how I got to get WTF Beyoncé has to do with QAnon.

So, if all it's an Alternate Reality Game, there's no harm, right? Not so fast, the US Military Academy ran the The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making? article in its "Combating Terrorism Center" journal, stating

QAnon represents a public security threat with the potential in the future to become a more impactful domestic terror threat. This is true especially given that conspiracy theories have a track record of propelling terrorist violence elsewhere in the West as well as QAnon’s more recent influence on mainstream political discourse.