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When this site started up, there was a twinkle in it's eyes, a brightness and naivety, a "Let's discuss and share" and DO NO EVIL aspect that was great. It drew us all in and made us happy.

The twinkle is gone and because nobody is flushing, the shit is building and building and becoming unbearable: we don't discuss anymore... we shit on each other: those of us who have been here from the start AND the new comers alike. Some are AC and some are not, but still the shit builds.

I'm here to say, What happened to the MDC in the site? The civility? The ability to discuss without reverting to shitting on the discussion and turning it into an outhouse?

I've rebooted into MDC-Gaaark2.0 and am trying hard to be civil with others: who will join me? Who will flush once in a while now that MDC is gone?

Make SNGA: join me in flushing.

Nowwwwwww......cue the shit we all know is coming.
Sigh.
Disabling Comments. This isn't something to discuss: this is something to think about and change within yourselves or not.

I'm hoping SN WILL be great again.

Okay, can't seem to disable comments and just publish this, so comments ARE open: cue the shit heads who shit on everything.

Well, I'm so relieved Biden has won. I genuinely didn't think there was a chance in hell that he would. It's very, very hard to get rid of an incumbent. And, we barely pulled it off. I'm always pleased though, on the rare occasions my cynicism is wrong.

I actually approved of some of Trump's policies, like being a pain in the ass to China, even if he wasn't too coherent. Just pissing them off and worrying them was better than nothing.
I worry about how Biden will be there. We need to deal with China. They're the Nazi Germany of our time.

That said, Trump has been a national embarrassment for the entirety of his term, and while I didn't care that much before the election, as soon as he started crying "cheaterzzz!!!" and held a completely bogus press conference that legitimately made me seriously worry about violence in the streets, I panicked. THAT could have been leading us for another four years. Can you imagine?

I check my sources, I read Reuters and BBC mostly, and occasionally foreign news sources that I run through google translate. All of the *real* news sources are calling Trump's claims outright lies. I am completely certain at this point that his claims are fraudulent. Consider the source: Only highly conservative media is siding with Trump. Neutral and foreign media is calling it outright fabrications, and pointing out all the conservative poll watchers who were present the whole time.

I approached it with an open mind, since I am well aware that Democrats often do horrifying things too, but the evidence is just not there.

That brings me to the next sticky situation: Conservative "News" sources that deliberately lie. Omitting stuff is one thing, even if it's to fit with their narrative (CNN does that a lot), but genuine lies are another entirely.

How do we bridge the gap and unify the country when half of the nation is listening to outright lies and propaganda? They won't trust fact-checking sites, they won't trust the neutral sites, they only listen to the liars, who tell them it's everyone else who's lying!

I have a friend, let's call her Carlene, she's in her late 60s. I much enjoy her company, but she, too, refuses to watch anything but Fox News and listens exclusively to conservative talk radio. I tell her to read ANYTHING else, just to try it, but she still won't.

Look, I get it, the elements on the left who are pushing for outright censorship, gun control, and even tobacco bans (the latter would infuriate me), are scary. But they're not the majority. They're just the ones that make the most noise, and the ones who the media focuses on the most.

Just like the left shouldn't characterize all Trumpers as neo-Nazis, the right shouldn't think of the left as all "don't use pronouns on your baby till he tells you what he wants to be" whackjobs. But, conservative media also does a good job of deliberately trying to make that appear to be the case. You can hear a handful of Republicans openly saying they were glad they succeeded in characterizing the left as such, even though they knew otherwise.

As far as where I stand, while I'm economically far left, I will always want a liberal democracy, and real personal freedom. I would fight hard to prevent us from becoming like Scotland, where if you teach your dog to do a Sieg Heil, you go to prison.

So, how the hell do we fix this? We can't censor Fox or others, that would be a danger to democracy and freedom itself.
But, something has to be done.

Open your eyes and see

The sooner you stop bickering over election results, the sooner you can start doing something about it.

We have had a number of discussions on SN, regarding the influence the tech industry exercises in politics. This story offers a little insight into that influence. No matter your opinion in this 2020 election, you should give this story some real thought.

It's a moderately long read, but I encourage one and all to click on the link, and read it through.

And - disclaimer: I found this story because the Green site published it first.

This data expert helped Trump win. Now he’s built a machine to take him down
Former Facebook employee James Barnes is part of a team that’s tapping big data to nudge critical voters to the polls—amid intense efforts to keep them home.

Starting in August 2019, you may have seen an ad in your Facebook news feed asking you to take a news quiz. If you didn’t know who controlled the Senate, for instance—about 30% of people didn’t—you would be classified as most persuadable, and you would become part of one of the largest and most sophisticated experiments of its kind.

On the internet, we’re subject to hidden A/B tests all the time, but this one was also part of a political weapon: a multimillion-dollar tool kit built by a team of Facebook vets, data nerds, and computational social scientists determined to defeat Donald Trump. The goal is to use microtargeted ads, follow-up surveys, and an unparalleled data set to win over key electorates in a few critical states: the low-education voters who unexpectedly came out in droves or stayed home last time, the voters who could decide another monumental election.

By this spring, the project, code named Barometer, appeared to be paying off. During a two-month period, the data scientists found that showing certain Facebook ads to certain possible Trump voters lowered their approval of the president by 3.6%. For the frantic final laps, they’ve set their sights on motivating another key group of swing-state voters—young Democratic-leaning voters, mostly women and people of color—who could push Joe Biden to victory.

“We’ve been able to really understand how to communicate with folks who have lower levels of political knowledge, who tend to be ignored by the political process,” says James Barnes, a data and ads expert at the all-digital progressive nonprofit Acronym, who helped build Barometer. This is familiar territory: Barnes spent years on Facebook’s ads team, and in 2016 was the “embed” who helped the Trump campaign take Facebook by storm. Last year, he left Facebook and resolved to use his battle-tested tactics to take down his former client.

“We have found ways to find the right news to put in front of them, and we found ways to understand what works and doesn’t,” Barnes says. “And if you combine all those things together, you get a really effective approach, and that’s what we’re doing.”

I think it is important to note what has been revealed here, as well as noting what is not claimed.

The research identified low-information potential voters, then experimented with changing the opinions of those low-information voters. What is not claimed, is that factual data was presented to these low-information voters. The only claim being made here is, they can identify potential low-information voters, then manipulate their opinions.

A multitude of outside anti-Trump groups such as Acronym have spent millions more to fill in the gaps. Earlier this year, Priorities USA and Color of Change launched a $24 million digital advertising campaign aimed at exciting Black voters in swing states. American Bridge and Unite the Country, two of the other largest progressive PACs, have tapped Mike Bloomberg’s political ad tech startup, Hawkfish to wage their own data-rich digital onslaughts through Election Day. Acronym was first out of the gate, and is thought to be the Democrats’ most advanced digital advertising project. By the election it promises to have spent $75 million on Facebook, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, Hulu, Roku, Viacom, Pandora, and anywhere else valuable voters might be found.

For a year that money went toward targeting low-information voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and North Carolina, but by the end of the summer, the Barometer team saw its persuasion powers diminishing; they guessed that they couldn’t budge the president’s approval rating any lower. So Acronym redirected that cash to motivate another critical audience of low-information voters: new or unlikely Democratic-leaning people thought to be unexcited about Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris. Barometer’s scientists have identified 1.8 million such voters in six states—mostly women of color younger than 35 across Acronym’s original five target states, plus Georgia.

With more than $1 million per week in Facebook ads during the homestretch, “we’re trying to boost their enthusiasm,” says Kyle Tharp, Acronym’s VP of communications.

Despite upbeat polls and record early turnout numbers, Acronym’s battle was never going to be easy. These voters are thought to be some of the least-excited, and while Acronym has identified them as the easiest to persuade, they are also highly susceptible to the sort of BS that can keep voters home. Research has shown that low-information voters are not only less likely to vote but more likely to believe falsehoods; sometimes they’re called “misinformation voters.” And deterring voters with falsehoods and fear may be easier than motivating them with facts and hope. A false claim about voting, for instance, is much easier to spread on Twitter—or by anonymous text message—than it is to correct.

Again, we see specific demographics targeted, and swayed, with targeted advertising, meant to sway that specific demographic. And, we see that it works.

OK - a whole bunch of people voted for Biden, and the lower information people are going to cheer for this campaign.

The question is - how will you feel if/when you find yourself on the wrong side of a similar campaign?

Forget about the 2020 election for a few moments. I have a long track record of being opposed to the very concept of targeted advertising. I positively HATE the idea that any corporation can track you, or me, with fine detail. It sucks that your data or mine is available, and for sale to the highest bidder. And, here, we have a corporation openly admitting that they can, they have, manipulated voters into casting their vote for the corporation's chosen candidate.

Whether you be an R, a D, Independent, third party, or whatever - you should get involved with the investigations into the tech industries. Contact your senator and congress person, and demand that social media and hi-tech corporations be brought to heel.

The US needs something comparable to the EU GDPR, and we need it soon. We need to seriously restrict the harvesting of data, and we need to seriously restrict how that data is used.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90570689/acronym-james-barnes-facebook-2020-campaign-advertising

Please, read the full article. It should be a sobering read, if it doesn't outright scare you.

We're having a clear-out for moving house in a few weeks time. I was going through all my old computer stuff.

In one of my boxes I have a heap of old cards. I thought they were all PCI, but I have discovered an ISA SoundBlaster, a 10Mbit Ethernet card (coax and TP) and an EISA Adapted SCSI card.

There are quite a few PCI SCSI cards and some graphics cards including a 4MB S3 Virge and an nVidia GeForce 2 MX.

I think it's time they went.

I also found some backups on CD-R from 2004. I put one in my Blu-ray drive and it worked! I might run ddrescue on it to see if the whole disk in still readable.

Last Thursday I went to a client's house to look at his computer. I was there for about 20 minutes, in very close quarters inside the small room where it's kept. I wasn't wearing a mask and didn't use any hand sanitizer, even though I touched his keyboard and mouse. I sold the computer to him about 10 years ago so we agreed on a new desktop and I left.

Sunday morning he called me and said he and his wife both tested positive for Covid. This threw a huge monkey wrench into my week (this past week) b/c another mechanic at the shop where I work was under quarantine and I was supposed to work all week.

So on Monday morning I went to one of those free testing centers my county health department was conducting. It was a drive-through type affair, and took about 30 seconds. They gave me a piece of paper w/ an ID number and instructions for logging into a Website to get my results. The first paragraph on the letter reads:

Per CDC guidlines, those individuals who have symptoms of COVID-19 at the time of testing are to enter quarantine until your test results are returned. Per CDC guidlines, those individuals who do not have symptoms of COVID-19 at time of testing are not required to go into quarantine waiting on test results.

I was exhibiting no symptoms, so I worked all week. I was in-and-out of dozens of customer vehicles, and in very close quarters w/ my co-workers. If I was infected, you would think the potential of spreading it to many other people was very high.

Every night when I got home I went to the Website to get my results but each time it said, "Your test is being transported to our facility," or some such nonsense. It was supposed to take 4 days maximum so this morning I called the health department to find out what was up. The guy I talked to said they've had so many complaints about the Website not functioning correctly he's considering taking the instructions for logging in and getting results off the paper they distribute. He said it's just easier to have people call in.

My results were negative, I'm not infected. But for something that's supposed to be so important to prevent spreading that we have to shut down major parts of the economy and put scores of people on the unemployment line, plus all the mask wearing nonsense and everyone smells like they took a shower in hand sanitizer, you'd think they'd have a more straightforward procedure for getting results back to the public, and in a much more timely fashion. Lots of people are asymptomatic and I could have been one of them, and the number of people I came into contact w/ this week is uncountable.

For 20 minutes I was in the same room as someone who's infected, took no precautions, touched everything they've touched, and somehow I didn't contract the virus. This whole thing is just screwy.

I’ve wanted a robot vacuum cleaner ever since they were first developed, but like all new technologies, they were way too expensive. But the price of technology always falls with time, and I picked one up on Amazon Prime day for about a hundred bucks.
        It came a day early, which was incredibly lucky, because I had to be a hundred miles away the next day.
        I unboxed it and was immediately annoyed, for the same reason I’m almost always annoyed when I buy new tech: no fucking manual. A one page “quick start guide” was the only documentation. I had no clue how to use the damned thing.
        I did find a manual on the internet, with very little information. A ten dollar smoke alarm I bought two weeks ago had more lengthy and informative documentation. The dust bin seemed to be glued in and I didn’t want to force it, not wanting to break my new electronic broom. The manual, with very little writing, was written pigeon English. It said to email support@iliferobot.com, so I wrote asking how to get the dust bin out, and expressed my displeasure with the lack of decent documentation.
        Three days later and I hadn’t heard back, so I decided to try just pulling hard on the dust bin and if it broke I’d just return it. Lack of documentation is a terrible design flaw.
        It turned out that it just fit tightly. Once I figured it all out, which I shouldn’t have had to as there should be a clear, informative manual, it was surprisingly simple to use.
        It has two horizontally rotating brushes, the left one clockwise and the right brush counter clockwise, sweeping the dirt to the opening in the center, where it's sucked in. It came with two spare brushes, so I assume I'll have to buy replacements down the line.
        There are also two spare HEPA filters, obviously more future replacements..
        It has bumpers that detect objects, like walls and furniture, and a “cliff detector” to keep it from falling down a flight of steps.
        I've been using it for a week, and my floors are cleaner than they've been since I hired a girl to mop a few years ago. Of course, I usually only sweep every month or two. Since sweeping the whole house now takes me about three minutes, that to empty the dirt bucket, it's daily.
        This broom is also a mop, although I haven't tried the mop function. As small as the water tank is, for anything more than a small area spot mop, a manual mop is certainly needed.
        The remote, pictured, has a “home” button in the center, at the bottom, that sends it back to its charging base. It returns to its base by itself when it’s finished sweeping or the battery gets low.
        There’s a button for spot cleaning (surely the only way to use the mop function), a key for edge cleaning, and one for just cleaning. The arrow keys change its direction of movement.
        It works well on hardwood floors, but I seriously doubt it would clean a carpet. You’ll need a far more expensive robot for that.
        There's a timer so you can set it to automatically start sweeping at a set time of day. I haven't used it and probably won't; a single button press starts it, and you need to empty it every two or three days, anyway.
        It isn’t without its drawbacks. The biggest is its lack of documentation; that came close to getting me to return it. Its dust bun is small and needs to be emptied too often. It also gets tangled up in socks, rug fringes, plastic bags, and so forth.
        All in all I give it a thumbs up, three out of five. In a few years I plan on getting one of the new, expensive ones that empties its dust bin into a large plastic bag by itself, and all you do is throw the bag in the trash.
        But this one will do until prices drop farther.

I finally got around to buying The C++ Programming Language, 4th Edition.

Depressingly, it's even thicker than the 3rd Edition. I haven't tried to read it yet.

I've managed to avoid any serious C++ coding for a couple of years or more, and the last dialect I used was C++98 (corporate waterfall projects and all that). To add insult to injury, it was very badly written, effectively FORTRAN written in C written in C++ with all the disadvantages of FORTRAN and all the complexities of C++.

I mean, who wouldn't want brittle code with hundreds of compiler warnings and very long compile times? And running a debugger is 90% of the fun of programming. Well, it's 90% of what you spend your time doing since none of it works. 9% of your time is spent compiling. 1% is actually writing code and fixing other people's bugs. The other 90% of your time is in the meetings. Lots and lots of long meetings. Then people can work long hours, acting the hero, and complain about being over-worked.

So I bought the book because I'm working on a new project. At the moment I'm writing C and will be writing a kernel module. The C will form a test harness for the kernel module and I will be able to cannibalise parts of it for the kernel module.

In a few months, I expect to have to write some higher-level stuff in C++. Fortunately the company has figured out that C++98 won't do any more because most of the Open Source libraries have moved on.

My question is, other than the Stroustrup book, what's the best way for me to get up to speed on the modern enhancements to C++? What should I read?

For reasons, I ended up watching CBSN on election night. For much of the night, I was impressed with CBSN. Their liberal bias was there, easily seen, but they contained themselves pretty well.

All the chatter seemed factual, and on target. The numbers seemed reasonable, even accurate.

Then - Trump made an appearance on television. FFS, it was, quite bluntly, childish whining. "We've won this election, and the evil Dems are withholding my coronation!"

At that point, the pundits fell back to repeating dem talking points, yada yada yada.

I've said it many times - if Trump could just STFU sometimes, the world would be a better place.

As for the numbers? Georgia is getting close, but Fulton county has problems and is unable to finish counting tonight. North Carolina is really close to an R victory, but they still have a lot of mail-in ballots that aren't counted. Penna boils down to Philly, and those aren't going to be counted tonight.

Michigan and Wisconsin aren't even close to being safely called yet. There are roughly 5 million uncounted votes remaining among those five states. That is more than enough to swing an election!

Arizona could possibly go R yet, but it seems highly unlikely.

Boys and girls, I do believe Trump is going to win. Once again, it's going to be a close thing, and Biden may or may not actually win the popular vote. But, I think Trump will get the Electoral College again.

I'll have more later, I just wanted to get my initial impression of Trumps whining out there before I forget how pissed off I am.